Journeying through a storm: Review of 'Train to India'

The book opens in the lush fields of East Bengal, laced with the footsteps of zamindars and royats, and ends in the bloodied streets of Calcutta, trodden by refugees escaping from razakars.

The narrative is an honest recollection of an extraordinary life.

As Dhar says in his Author’s Note:

Memorization of history often leads to the historicization of memory. The former is bland reality without any imagination; the latter process mixes up memory with remote history, mythological tidbits, prejudices and love and anger. The memories of the last sixty-five years are a part of current history, and of my life, but I have never allowed them to be historicized with borrowed ingredients of social, ethnic, cultural or religious bias.

In the same note, he warns that the past can be romanticised and allows that he hasn’t quite skirted the trap. But while his wistfulness for the home he was born into and grew up in is apparent, one can’t make out much romanticisation. The gangs of children carrying messages between revolutionaries and river pirates, the school students spying on British soldiers and the little girl being kicked brutally before she is sentenced to solitary confinement put paid to that.

Read an exclusive interview with the author

There are snippets of memory – an escapade to the neighbouring village to watch a movie, celebrating Christmas with an Anglo-Indian family and a Muslim retainer, the judgments pronounced at a family court – that recreate vignettes the author has treasured through a turbulent life.

But for the most part, the stark reality of the pre-independence and post-independence riots is recorded in a vivid narrative that brings home the tremendous loss to lives and spirit…a loss those of us born after Independence cannot empathise with. Reading the episodes Dhar has etched out, though, one feels one was witness to those sufferings. Some incidents are so real, one feels one has experienced them.

The writing style lends itself to this illusion too. Maloy Krishna Dhar allows the tale to supersede the telling, so that the account reads almost like a diary. The events, laid bare, acquire an immediacy that might not be there if they were couched in fine literary touches. There are sentences where words are repeated, sometimes out of frustration, sometimes because a replacement would not adequately convey the emotion. For instance, he speaks of the “brave new world of the new India”.

Dhar’s fondness for similes and metaphors carries an old world charm. At times, he uses them to create an immediate contrast with the ugliness of an incident.

I did not hear the distant thunder of rolling disaster approaching our home in the form of an armed crowd headed by Dudu and Dhala.

The same device of reality crushing fantasy is used when Dhar illustrates how the children of his village had to grow up quickly. All of us grew up dreaming of playing important roles in the functioning of our country and the world, all of us dreamt of rescuing people with our wit and strength…but here, one comes across a band of five-to-ten-year-olds actually doing these things.

There are moments when the unintended wisdom of these children puts the situation in perspective, and makes one revisit one’s system of values.

‘War is a religious duty,’ proclaimed Haripada, the son of our family priest. ‘My father says that Lord Krishna had ordained so to Arjuna.’

‘Phoo!’ Lutfa spat out a tamarind seed. ‘That can’t be true. How can God ask people to fight and kill? Isn’t Krishna a God?’

‘I presume he is. But all the epics are full of war stories.’

‘That’s because men have written those books, not women,’ Lutfa announced with a laugh.

‘What’s the difference?’ I asked peevishly.

‘Shut up,’ Lutfa suckled at a lollypop loudly. ‘Women have better things to do.’

The author’s regard for women, and the oft-forgotten role they played in the struggle for Independence – try recalling the name of a single female freedom fighter – is apparent. The people he hero-worships, with the exception of his father, are women.  From a child who refuses to reveal the whereabouts of a band of freedom-fighters despite being assaulted, to a girl who runs to confront a mob that is bent on killing a bonded labourer, to a mother who feeds her infant even as she herself is dying, to a wife who understands her husband’s need to put his ideals ahead of his family, we see resolute women who display immense strength of will. (Dhar has written more detailed accounts of these and other women he has met and admired in the book Shakti.)

Read book extracts from 'Train to India'

The crux of Dhar’s story is in this paragraph:

14 August 1947, the fateful day India was sliced into three pieces. My part of the country, my soil and I were packaged in a wrapper of fundamentalism, sealed and waxed with rotten human flesh and blood and gifted to the destitute people of East Bengal. They called it East Pakistan.

While he acknowledges that “we were indeed doomed eternally, divided from the middle of our souls”, Dhar also recounts attempts to bridge this divide. He speaks of how his father and a Muslim friend of his stopped a riot, of how an Anglo-Indian girl stopped a crazed armed group from killing a man, of how a poor Muslim man led a band of fleeing Hindus to the safety of a train at risk to his own life. In them, he sees the many “small Gandhis” whose contribution to the freedom struggle has not been chronicled.

His admiration for the people who shaped his early years comes out through often poignant anecdotes. His last conversation with his father, his encounter with a tabla maestro after rescuing a student and the patient answers his mother provides to his angry questions stand out.

In his narrative, Dhar does not shy away from labels. He doesn’t sugar-coat terms or euphemise fanaticism. He might not be politically correct. But the only bias he shows is against the apathy of the people in power.

As he says:

Freedom came not riding the palanquin of fortune; it was thrown on us from the skies. We had no count of how many perished and how many survived. We were the fringe Indians, and those who brokered for power had no plan for us and there was none to chronicle the story for us.

Until he decided to. The story is told through two metaphors – that of a cyclone and that of a train. Through his agonising journey, Dhar speaks of how he struggled to get off the “train to India” – the train of memory, of longing, of helplessness, of violence, of loss of faith…

Perhaps the last leg of the attempt to get off the train is to write a book that lays out that journey. Through reliving the joy and pain of growing up in the forties and fifties, Dhar seems to find closure in his quest for a new life, a settled life, with nothing and no one to fear.

It is, perhaps, this journey that motivated him to take up other quests before writing Train to India. In his Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled and We the People of India: A Story of Gangland Democracy, Dhar courted controversy and even severe retribution by taking the establishment on. But clearly, telling the truth and exposing deception are dearer to him than life itself. And in that, one sees shadows of his father, as Maloy Krishna Dhar describes him.

Dhar has spoken of why the story must be told. Here’s why it must be read – those of us who haven’t seen the actual horror of partition don’t treasure the Independence that was won for us at such grave cost. Perhaps, by sharing the pain of those who sacrificed so much, voluntarily or perforce, we will learn the history that continues to shape our present, and understand how much artificial divisions can change our natures. So that when the time comes, we will be able to stand up against those forces.