critical analysis of train to pakistan by khushwant singh

According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame.

“Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. He also makes it clear that the blame for the violence cannot be placed on any one group – all were responsible. His method brings to life villages such as Mano Majra, caught in the eye of the storm during that terrible time.

He eschews elegy, preferring to offer a clean, precise narrative akin to reportage. Singh’s writing style is similarly punchy. The book is relatively short, but all the more powerful because of it, condensing a series of literary gut-punches into less than 200 pages. This perspective gives the story a harrowing, visceral believability – we are never in any doubt that the horrific events that he depicts are a representation of actual incidents. Instead, we see an understanding of human motivations, the murkiness of decisions made when fear, rumour and peer pressure combine, and a moral commentary that deftly infuses the work. There is little in the way of political grandstanding. What sets Kushwant Singh’s novel above earlier attempts to depict the horror of Partition is his focus on the individual. But then Sikh agitators arrive, demanding that the remaining villagers pick up their swords and come with them to seek vengeance… They are housed in a refugee camp overnight awaiting a train to Pakistan. This becomes the catalyst for the local police to force Muslims to leave for Pakistan – ostensibly for their own safety.

In due course, a train arrives from Pakistan, loaded with corpses. The villagers of Mano Majra, a close-knit community, are largely uninformed of what is happening around them in the country at large but when rumours begin to trickle in of atrocities being committed in neighbouring villages the seeds of trouble are sown. Singh introduces us to a small cast of characters, most prominently Juggut Singh, a violent scoundrel Iqbal Singh, a weak-willed social activist newly arrived in the village to proselytise on behalf of his political masters and Hukkum Chand, a local magistrate. The village is populated by Muslims and Sikhs, who have lived together peacefully for generations. The novel is set in the fictional village of Mano Majra, on the border between Pakistan and India. Train to Pakistan shines a spotlight on one of the most harrowing periods in the subcontinent’s history, when the cataclysmic effects of Partition reverberated throughout communities around the country, setting Muslim against Hindu and Sikh, pitting neighbour against neighbour in an orgy of violence that left over a million dead.

Critical analysis of train to pakistan by khushwant singh