It has an important message to us all about the reality of cross-cultural harmony being destroyed by desperate and ignorant ideologues. Hopefully, this film will gather a wider audience later in its life than it had upon release when it was all but ignored, in India and abroad. There were many people killed, and others suffered a massive loss at the time of the partition of India. The author felt the pain of the grieved families.
Rooks takes Singh's social realist narrative and faithfully transcribes it to the screen, with the allegory of India's tragic fate still bitterly intact. The central theme of the book Train To Pakistan Pdf is the migration of 1947. Singh's novel of the same title came out in 1956, and was probably the first English language novel to deal with this traumatic historical event, which saw nearly 10 million people rendered homeless, and perhaps 1 million murdered, raped, and kidnapped. It tells the story of a small town on the border of India/Pakistan just as partition is ripping the cultures apart. If anything, they are on the rise.I finally got around to seeing this film the other day, and it was worth the wait. Khushwant Singh may be no more, but Train to Pakistan is as relevant now as it was when published, for racism, religious intolerance and violence have not abated. His main concern is for Nooran to reach Pakistan safely. When he hears of the plan hatched by a batch of Sikh goondas to derail a train carrying Muslims from Mano Majra and a neighbouring village, he decides to take action. He has an affair with the village maulvi’s daughter, Nooran. The other accused is the budmash of the village, Juggat Singh. He is a hardened socialist, opposed to killings and insists that the seeds of hatred were sown by the British. Of the two people whom Hukum Chand had imprisoned on charges of murdering the moneylender, and later released, one is Iqbal (he never revealed whether he was Iqbal Singh or Iqbal Ahmed). Then there is Meet Singh, the priest in the gurdwara, who time and again tries to convince the agitated Sikhs to protect the innocent Muslims in the village. There is Hukum Chand, the corrupt district magistrate, whose callous indifference to the happenings is alarming. The characters in the novel have been neatly chiselled by Singh. Those who reached alive added to the prejudice against the Muslims. The peaceful atmosphere turned venomous when a train, overloaded with dead bodies of Hindus and Sikhs, steamed onto the Mano Majra station from Pakistan. For the Muslims, it was the last hurdle to be crossed to reach the land that was to offer them security, and for the Hindus and Sikhs it marked the entry to a safe haven.
The bridge over the river had a road and a single railway track from where the refugees crossed over. It was also the last railway station before the trains to Pakistan crossed the Sutlej, which served as a border. Mano Majra was the last frontier of what became the Indian Punjab. The other two communities lived in mud houses, and co-existed in peace. It is set in the fictional village of Mano Majra, located near the border, with Sikhs and Muslims in almost equal numbers, and just one Hindu, the moneylender. It was against this background that Singh wrote what was to remain inarguably his most memorable work of fiction and though written in English, the novel gives an authentic feel of the Punjab. Even friends and neighbours, in many cases, proved treacherous while at times strangers came to the rescue. About a million, mostly in the two Punjabs, were killed or died of cholera in refugee camps, with thousands of women abducted, raped, mutilated and left to die. With over 10 million people uprooted, the paths of migrants were punctuated with pools of blood. Never before in history has there been a cross migration on such a stupendous scale. The generation that followed heard vivid eyewitness accounts, which have remained etched in their memories. Those who witnessed the tragedies, not to speak of the ones who were victims of rioters and rapists, are hardly there now.
It was authored when horrifying riots in the wake of Partition were fresh in the memory of people on both sides of the Great Divide. I READ historian-and-novelist (he wasn’t a popular columnist then) Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan for the first time in 1959, three years after it appeared in print.