Train to Pakistan is Khushwant Singh’s classic novel of an isolated village in Punjab that is plunged into an abyss of religious hatred and communal violence on the eve of partition of India into India and Pakistan. With its enduring themes of love, loyalty and the horrors of civil war, this remains Singh’s most important work. This paper focuses upon how the novel brings out simply yet effectively the price paid in terms of lost lives, loss of property, displacement etc by Indians for their independence. The village of Mano Majra allegorically stands for India. The multiple responses of people reveal the responses of people in general. Singh tries to discover the true Indian response. Partition, though a historical and a political reality, Singh probes deep into the enormity of the situation and lends to it a human dimension. This novel gives vivid accounts of the massacres of Hindus and Muslims, especially on the border towns of India. Train loads of dead bodies used to arrive from Pakistan to border station of Atari. They were filled with corpses of men, women, children and oldies. On the bogies of those trains filled with corpses Pakistanis wrote – Gift to India from Pakistan. These events lead to mass killings of muslims in India. People were killed without mercy. Men were killed with swords and spears while their women and sisters and mothers and daughters were ruthlessly gang-raped and then their breasts were slashed with spears while their children were killed in front of them and women left to bleed to death. Similar was the fate of Hindus who were coming from Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in this insanity that followed in the communal riots of 1947. This novel is based on that dark staunch naked barbaric bitter and dirty truth of Indian independence, which we call DIVISION. After all, not everyone got what they wanted.
Research Scholar, Dept. of English Magadh University, Bodh-Gaya
