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BOOKS
AUTHORSPEAK
CHAMAN NAHAL
Freedom Song
Chaman Nahal was
19 when PartitioN took place. When the most unrelenting sight on both
sides of the Radcliffe Line was of roads dotted with refugees trudging
to freedom. Azadi-published in India and the United States in 1975 by
Orient Longman and Houghton Mifflin respectively and re-issued by Penguin
in June-is Nahal's saga of one such family. Of Lala Kanshi Ram who "enjoyed
the safety of the British Raj and hugged it lovingly"; of his wife
Prabha Rani who kept several tonal versions of Hai Ram! in mind to use
at the appropriate moment; of their son Arun who lost his first love to
religion and his second to freedom; and of their daughter Madhu Bala,
modelled on Nahal's sister Kartar Devi who was murdered on a train from
Pakistan. "Above all," says Nahal, 75, "it's about destitute
people who made good."
 A
former professor of English at Delhi University and a fellow, Churchill
college, Cambridge, Nahal has authored nine novels. But Azadi, a seminal
account of Partition, acquires renewed importance with the upsurge of
interest in Midnight's tales given the Indo-Pakistani summit from July
14 to 16. The novel, which won Nahal a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1997,
has been translated into 10 languages and is the last of the Gandhi Quartet,
a fictionalised account of events from 1915 to 1948. Fifty-four years
later Azadi still continues to answer questions and question answers long
forgotten. "The chronicles of the world are studded with luminaries
... what about millions of us who happen to be just ordinary ... who will
remember us?" In 1947, Nahal's family fled Sialkot in west Punjab
for Delhi. After three months of circuitous travel they reached "home"
homeless, the relatives no one wanted. The lack of national preparation
for Partition was humiliating, he says.
In the immediate aftermath, Nahal often attended
Mahatma Gandhi's prayer meetings at Birla House. "Every day people
would ask him why the country had to be partitioned," Nahal recalls.
"Each time he would say 'I am equally unhappy'." "And still,"
he says, shaking his head, "we aren't giving that period of our history
the attention it deserves."
—Sonia Faleiro
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