This book unhomes you—from binary divisions, from boundaries, from regular history, from home itself. Uneasy it travels with you or rather you travel with each chapter.
Homing on cross-generational oral histories of refugees of India’s Partition, the author, Dr. Devika Chawla, a second-generation refugee herself, contemplates on the various notions of home/unhome/belonging/displacement in the narratives. What emerges is not only a reading of a specific history, but a reading of memory and a reading that allows the reader to recognize their own displacements and problematics of home.
Mainstream stories of partition often revolve around displacement of what was once “home,” of acts of violence during the passage to India that continue to shroud the psyche. Along with such stories, this book blends in other narratives that are lost, left behind, displaced, erased and creates a word memorial to batwara that is as uneasy as Partition itself.
Like, was that, wahan, a “home” for every refugee? Or did some find home only after partition? Like Kiranji who comes into her being post partition, completes her Masters, eventually heads a school head, designs a radical curriculum and creates, in a sense, a home outside home. As Kiranji narrates,
“Home is the mother, the real mother is where you are born. . . . It is like losing a limb . . . like you’ve lost a life that you would love to live over again. . . . But, would I be where I am or be what I am, had I not lost this home? I don’t know the answer to that.”
What about women for whom displacement is a given? Women are first displaced from their natal home to the marital home, and then if disasters strike, from that home into another, and thereafter, the Partition displaces them further. How do we read their stories? What if a woman was displaced from her natal home in India to her marital home in Pakistan, and thereafter, due to Partition displaced back to India—how do we understand her story?
When Partition stories are told in families, how are women’s stories and women themselves positioned? Are their contributions to the safe passage to India recognized? And if they are, in what way? When Hindu women were told to consume poison and commit suicide rather than be assaulted by Muslims, what roles were their bodies assigned to by the community?
What about those who remained forever displaced—never ever finding home again? How do their families—the second and third generation members remember the past? How are those stories conflated to accommodate both present needs with selective past images? How is post-memory created?
The book meditates on these yearnings and loss, on displacement within displacement, of home and unhoming, allowing them to tell a story that doesn’t have to fit a pre-existing frame.
The book also moves beyond easy binary divisions—Muslim/Hindu, Violence/Peace, India/Pakistan and instead presents multiple narratives that intersect, build and disturb. For example, Labbi Devi was kidnapped twice by Muslim rioteers as she and her family attempted to cross into India. She has a gash in her head from when she was attacked. Then you also hear Labbi Devi was born after the death of six siblings, and breastfed by a Musalmani because her mother believed her breast milk was the reason for the siblings’ death. Or Saralaji who spoke of a friendship with a Muslim neighbour even as rioting spliced the communities apart. Neither saccharine-rich tales of harmony nor an overpowering stench of violence, the book manages to present stories of displacement without being displaced to an already existing storyline.
This book walks through the said, unsaid, the in-between the lines, the erased with an uncanny detachment and a willingness to host the reader in the narratives. Before you realize, you have walked in with the author through many living rooms, the chai and snacks, sat by the dining table, sometimes traveled with her in taxis searching for a home. You are as exhausted as the author as she makes many attempts to listen to qawwals at Nizamuddin and as surprised when she encounters the qawwals at a Sufi evening to celebrate the tenth wedding anniversary of a relative. You are with her as she steps in and out of stories, watching her reactions and allowing her subjects the space to be themselves. And in that process she dissolves and you become the listener of the oral histories.
The book is immensely accessible and readable for readers from various backgrounds. You can stick to the narratives and a portion of the analysis or if you like, engage in the deep discussions of various scholars in this area of study. Some chapters are heavy on analysis and labored. That makes reading bumpy. But on reflection, the unease is because the author refuses to sit with easy and convenient analysis. She pushes to uncover the layers within and presents them before us. You have to dig with her. As the author says,
“Stories are bits and pieces and wholes and fragments—experiences and remnants of experiences that we enter into at a pace determined by those who were already there. We may find a footing and stay in some versions, and we may depart from others. Only in such wanderings can hidden plots be unearthed.”
I was put off by the continuous usage of the word “home” in various permutations and combinations in every other para. It felt pretentious and unnecessary. But like the author, I studied my reactions to the word. The book displaces the reader from the usual dominant understanding of home. Each time you come across this word, you no longer know what it means. The sentence sits uneasy, you are not sure if you understood and yet you are unable to leave the book behind. Something changes within you. And it isn’t comfortable. I think a good book should do that—welcome readers onto a journey within themselves.
There are many sections in this book that I am eager to quote from. But let me leave you with this piece:
“What happened to the physical landscape? Where did it go? I read, re-read, and in fact over-read my field stories, finding nothing. I read my own writing about them and find that landscape is peripheral, a tinge of scenery here and there—I/we just roam in memories. My homes, our homes, Papa’s homes are as bereft of physical landscapes as these person’s lives here are immersed in them. I consider the terrain only because the people here continue to remind me that their hills are guardians that stand around them, keeping trespassers at bay. Home, for them, extends outside of home—in a different way—into the veins, the roots, the undergrowth, and even the natural gasses that hold together these mountain ranges. Home is here, present. It lives, it breathes, it is an extension of the self into the physical world.
For the subjects of Home, Uprooted, for Papa, for me, home is not here, it will always be someplace else—a border that cannot be crossed as easily as the one between Ohio and West Virginia, over a toll bridge. Home is a field of memories. Of stories told and those that I tell here. Home is an attempt to write a loss of landscapes. Consider these words one such attempt. Here.”
Click here to buy the book from Amazon.
Click here to buy it from Barnes and Noble.
For other reviews, read here and here.
[ Note: the book will be available in India from June 25 onwards]
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