TRAIN TO HISTORY

[Introduction to reprint of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (Penguin Random House, New Delhi , March 2026). 

 ‘Khushwant Singh’s final journey was by train, to Pakistan. He did not require documents to cross the border. Ashes do not need visas.’ I wrote that in 2014, after bringing Khushwant’s ashes from New Delhi for internment in Hadali in District Khushab (Pakistan).  He had asked me to perform this final homage to his birth place. Hadali, he said, ‘is where my roots are. I have nourished them with tears of nostalgia.’   

As a writer, Khushwant Singh was no prodigy. His first attempts were rejected by the editors of Ravi,  the magazine of his alma mater Government College, Lahore. His authoritative History of the Sikhs (1953) achieved recognition belatedly. His  first novel Train to Pakistan  (initially titled Mano Majra) appeared in 1956, when Khushwant was in his mid-forties. Its success afforded him the plaudits he deserved, and enjoyed until his death.

The tragedy inherent in Train to Pakistan – i.e., the bloody partition of Punjab in August 1947 – is apparent even today, through the recollections of those who survived it, or have written about it.  A million stories though have disappeared into oblivion – the eye-witness accounts of the sectarian murders, the rapes, the abductions, the carnage, the open abattoirs where vultures gorged on human carcases until they became too heavy to fly.  

From Cyril Radcliffe’s unfeeling pen, blood flowed in lieu of ink. Even after seven decades, that blood has still not coagulated. Nor should it be allowed to, which is why Khushwant’s novel deserves renewed recognition. He recalled: ‘After ten million people had been rendered homeless and one million slain, I had to purge myself of the guilt I bore by writing about it.’ 

To do so, Khushwant used a technique that today would be dubbed ‘creative faction’ – the seamless blend of recalled fact and imagined fiction. He describes the searing month of August 1947 when his imaginary village of Mano Majra, populated predominantly by Muslims and Sikhs, is divided ‘into two halves as neatly as a knife cuts through a pat of butter.’

His dramatis personae includes the lovelorn couple – the irresistible lout Juggal Singh and Nooran (his Muslim femme de nuit) as they make love ‘under the censorious stare of the myriads of stars’. Another character is Iqbal Singh, burdened by a Muslim name and a covert Sikh heritage. He is arrested falsely but remains under suspicion, languishes in his suffocating cell, his febrile mind ‘like a delicate spring of a watch, which quivers for several hours after it has been touched’.  Others are the occasionally sensitive magistrate Hukum Chand and his nubile young Muslim prostitute Haseena. In the end, she escapes to Pakistan by boarding the final train out of Mano Majra.

The central character in Khushwant Singh’s book – its leit motif - is not human but the ‘whistling and puffing’ train that regulates the life of the little village where express trains did not deign to stop. Only two slow passenger trains did – once from Delhi to Lahore in the morning and the other from Lahore to Delhi in the evening. Approaching Mano Majra, the train driver blows two long blasts of the whistle. In an instant Mano Majra comes awake. The  evening train is its lullaby, leaving the village children to sleep and the adults to be lulled into slumber.

‘It had always been so, until the summer of 1947’. What broke that rustic idyll was the first train from Lahore in September, the silent ‘ghostly’ train that contained the contorted bodies of passengers. By nightfall, all the wood and kerosene available in the village had been commandeered. Khushwant’s description of the mass cremation is brilliantly understated: ‘The village was stilled in a deathly silence. No one asked anyone else what the odour was. They all knew. They had known it all the time. The answer was implicit in the fact that the train had come from Pakistan’.

Later, when another train reaches Mano Majra, there is no wood left nor kerosene. Instead, a bulldozer appears. It digs a trench soon filled with bodies. The bulldozer then begins its grisly task: ‘It opened its jaws and ate up the earth it had thrown out before and vomited it into the trench’. Khushwant could have been describing the bulldozer burials at the Nazi concentration camp of Belsen-Bergen.

In all this trauma and mayhem, Khushwant’s irreverent self could not resist a characteristic twist. Towards the end of his book, he causes Iqbal Singh to muse: ‘Where on earth except in India would man’s life depend on whether or not his foreskin had been removed?’ Suddenly serious, Iqbal wonders as if addressing a future subcontinent, ‘why ethics, which should be the kernel of a religious code, has been carefully removed?’

Khushwant’s book concludes with his hero clinging to and then falling on to the rails, feeding the last train to Pakistan. Throughout his long Iife, Khushwant Singh clung to his belief in inter-faith coexistence. It would have pained him to see Hadali and Lahore alienated from his adopted mistress Delhi. The re-publication of his novel Train to Pakistan may not sever the gordian cord that threatened to stop that train in 1947 and today blocks trains to the border between India and Pakistan.

That act of selfless bravery awaits another Juggal Singh, another Khushwant Singh.

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN