Train Massacre as a Metaphor for Genocidal Partition Violence: Reading Bhisam Sahni’s “The Train Has Reached Amritsar” and Khuswant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan

Abstract

Violence, which has been elided in the textbook history, receives central attention in revisionist historiography. The textbook history, besides overlooking violence, boosts up modern India’s image as a secular, modern and democratic nation. The historiographic sanitizingof Partition violencehas crept into much of the fiction on the Partition of 1947. Khushwant Singh andBhisham Sahni have also endeavoured to strengthen the same serene image of India, but thesanitizedimage comes at the cost of contemptuous and barbarous image of the Muslims and the Pakistanis. This work seeks to show how their fictitious ‘trains’ are instrumental in depicting theMuslimsand Pakistanis as fiends, who torture the simple- minded Indians. The obstreperous behaviour of the Muslims might seem real to credulous Indians, but to the incredulous few, especially those who are aware of the politics of the aesthetics of violence, thebiasedrepresentation of the Muslims in the fictional works of Singh (Train to Pakistan) and Sahni (“The Train has Reached Amritsar”) stick to their gizzard. When reviewed from the viewpoint of the revisionist historiography, which brings to the forethe politics of the representation of violence, both thesecanonizedworks merely participate in partisan politics: Indian emerge as civilized whereas the Pakistani Muslims get valorised as barbarians.