Exploring Partition in the Library

Foreword by the Editors

For those of us who went to conventional schools that had library spaces, we may (often )think of the library as a place that perhaps smelt of old books, where the main activities involved being quiet, returning or borrowing a book and occasionally, if we were lucky, listening to a story read aloud. We feature this article in this issue for a few special reasons. Not only does it make us question our assumptions of what a school library should be like and what it should do, it also surprises us with its definition of a different kind of school. This study documents an intensive exploration of a difficult theme- that of India’s Partition- by a Goa-based  library educator working with a small group of home-schooling/schooled students. It is a compelling account of what a library educator with purpose and intent can do to bring other worlds into the collective life of a group of students.  It shows that a library isn’t quite alive if it merely exists – offering children access to great books. What is perhaps more important than good books in a library is an educator who believes books can be mirrors, windows or sliding doors to the world (out there). And just when we begin thinking that books may have all the answers, the author of this essay reminds us about the power of all kinds of ‘texts’ that a library can hold – pictures, photographs, films, (everything) filtered through the prism of our own experiences and memories. How can libraries enable children to tread past the constricting boundaries of the regular curriculum? What role does dialogue play in fostering bridges to and between texts and what are the challenges that emerge in these kinds of negotiations? Reading this essay will, we hope, encourage you to dream up and imagine your very own units of study – armed with intent and good books – the possibilities are so many! 

This was first published on the Bookworm Blog on September 29, 2019 . We reproduce it here with some changes for this issue of Torchlight.

“Partition with a capital P signifies that this was a big event, “ said L, all of 13 years, who was one of my participants in a Unit Study at Bookworm that was focusing on – The Partition.

Ten children between 12 and 14 years gathered together every Wednesday for two hours over three months to begin to understand what this big event was all about. The children have varying school experiences and home school experiences and also many personal interests and desires. All ten in this group come from privileged backgrounds, where privilege does not only mean economic stability but also high degrees of cultural capital and a keen desire to enlarge and enrich worlds with learning. Understanding more about an event that happened more than 70 years ago to people ‘over there’ was not on their agenda.

I have been working with some of the children in this group over the past two-three years picking themes from Literature that I hoped will draw them to reading texts in deeper ways. I have learnt much from these interactions over the past few years and one truth is that before our Units of Study end I am plotting the next, largely because they show me a way to read and understand the world that is uniquely theirs and they trust me.

However, this Unit theme was driven by another demon. An unnamed one that has taken root in me over the past eight years or so. I have never imagined I would live in a time when lynching because of beef – eating was casually reported and regular in its recording, when any alignment with a Muslim likely meant you were a political ally of another ‘enemy’ country, when children in the library innocently ask every time we hear a fighter jet fly overhead if we are going to war with Pakistan, when our daily struggles for life in Goa are heaped on the ‘outsider’ who has taken our jobs, ruined our roads, live in our houses and should now return to their own lands, when raising questions about standing up for an anthem or not become acts of patriotism, and when hate is the only way we are making sense of the world. I wondered if the children I work with,-young adults actually- also see the world forming in this way and if we could gather to think back on a big event that we hear so little about in our quest for building a nation.

My preparation for these classes was a serious study of existing texts. I am proud of the rigorous reading and thinking and dreaming I did. I began with listing and reading what we had in the library and what I had at home. I augmented this over two months by writing to a bunch of friends and educators who led me to precious more. My resources were not limited to print but I include a listing at the end of this note. I watched films to extract anecdotes that would move our conversation in new directions and was sufficiently overwhelmed by the podcasts and the recordings of Partition victims now archived over the internet. All this multi-modal reading left me with a sense of heaviness. I was aware at all times that I had to be the filter between my reading experience and the coming to know for the group.

While I intended at first to use a personal frame as an entry point into the Partition experience, I realised the children had only a very vague sense of the event itself and there are so many historical anecdotes that would intrigue and compel them to join the dots. So we began with a history – in – a – hurry approach. We looked at the players and the plots at the time. The formation of political parties and the impact of WW II on the British view of India. We approached much of these events from archived news reports and documentary texts. We looked at Pre-Partition maps of the subcontinent and absorbed the fact that India had Princely kingdoms even at the time of Partition. As I look back on the past three months, I am struck by the fact that learning about Cyril Radcliffe provoked our first real opportunity at perspective-taking. We tried to understand his actions from different points of view and had many conversations on what it must have been to draw a line across a geography in such a short time. The children showed me how by moving the date for the formal exit out of the region, the British made Radcliffe’s task more urgent and much more complex. I was reminded again of how much potential there is for us to learn from the children. To my mind, because they are not yet carrying any burdens of collective guilt, or even knowledge about the horrors of Partition at this point, it was easy for them to see the acts in a more balanced frame. They were able to have conversations that were not necessarily fraught with anxiety and trauma, not yet.

As we completed some of the texts around Direct No Action Day and the Simla Conference including Wavell’s Plan, I was unsure about how to get into personal narratives and oral history. A library is such a treasure at times like this. We have this wonderful graphic anthology called ‘This Side That Side’ and I selected stories for each child to enter into the narrative, but I asked them to pick symbols in the images that help them see that the individual stories do belong to Partition narratives as a whole. This meant some of them had to talk to their parents at home and make connections from what we had experienced in the earlier classes and bring that back to our discussion.

Much flowed from this simple exercise, because the Partition story became personal in our circle. S, L and N, three of the ten children had family members who were affected by the Partition, A had a family member who was connected to a political figure who was one of our players in the Partition narrative and stories emerged. Questions were asked, confusion reigned, disbelief at what happened crept in and I had the best opportunity to put in texts for independent reading and group reading and paired discussion to open up further threads.

We were very lucky to have a fine teacher – friend visiting Goa at the time and he opened up a section from Tamas, by Bhisham Sahni for the children. The effect of which lasted until the very end when we referred to experience from there.

However not all my selections were received with excitement and awakening! I realised that a multi-modal approach to literature works splendidly for a group like this who spend time between screens and real life. They were always attentive and thoughtful during documentaries and fictional videos and if I paired this well with a text and a conversation, we had some good learning. If I chose to only use text, the fluent readers in the circle rose splendidly to the discussion and provocation while the ones who treated it like homework reading ( which meant browsed or zigzagged reading whilst on the way to the library ) semi zoned out.

I also learnt that the form does matter.So old films, slow texts produced mild protests and comments like, “please Sujata, not that!”, while more contemporarily produced narratives had them engaged. However, a classic like Manto’s Toba Tek Singh endured brilliantly. There was a deep interest in the story, fascination with the craft and good realisation of how symbolism is used in this text. I was struck by how well they engaged with some narratives and not so well with others.

The other struggle I was facing was how to bring in the perspective and position of women and children. Recourse came to me from a friend who shared a short story by Shashi Deshpande titled ‘Independence Day’. We read this in the week preceding 15th August and I was excited as ever. The children, however, struggled through this story. The voices confused them and I was not very adept in framing the arguments for them to grip this story. Being very thoughtful and sensitive children, they stayed with the text as we discussed many aspects from it and I was able to pull in the dimension of the state of women and the ‘recovery’ program that both Governments instituted at the time because the story led us there.

Sexuality and aspects of ‘honour’ were quite far removed from any of their thoughts and imagination and I made a decision to only briefly share this dimension and allowed texts from Urvashi Butalia’s work from The Other Side of Silence and others, to do the telling. It is a privilege to work in the library where texts do what humans cannot on their own.

Some smaller activities that worked and located our Unit were building a timeline in small groups and comparing events and actions. We did, Walk The Line, where children line up on either side of a line and as I read a statement, they stepped up to the line if they agreed or not with the statement. This allowed them to think from multiple points of view and also talk to each other about why they felt the way they did and others did not. The number game was a revelation for all. I simply generated a list of numerics and narratives into two bits of paper that mattered during the time, like the approximate distance people walked during Partition, to the approximate number of dead bodies on a train, to the number of times Pakistan was mentioned by Lord Mountbatten ( 0) and such and the children had to match the two. They spent a fair bit of time reflecting on this data and contemplating the horrific experience of it all. If I had not stimulated them enough, I drew on the images of Margaret White Bourke’s work and had the children caption photographs of the time as well as notice and raise questions on each image. Each class had an activity that allowed for children like G, K, A to deepen their experience and learning in a non-textual way in the hope that constructivism was at work.

It was at this time that we read about Article 370 and wove that into our conversations surprising ourselves with the relevance understanding current politics may now have on our thoughts in light of what we learnt. A brought up the then ongoing debacle in Hong Kong and R was alert to the trouble in other parts of the world where identity and region were being questioned and bloodied over. In our little room in the library, the world was being discussed by rather young adults who were slowly making sense of things that a couple of months back had very little to do with their daily lives.

Our Unit was limited by the perspective from East Pakistan. This was due to my inability to include significant readings from that part of the Sub-Continent in time to include it in our study, although we did try and draw on  Papiya Ghosh’s work on the migration of the Bihari Muslims, I am not sure it left any impact. Our geographic focus was the Sindh, West Pakistan focusing on Punjab and therefore more concentrated stories from those regions.

Just when I thought we had enough of material in the library, another friend gifted me on Teacher’s Day, Manisha Baswani’s ‘Postcards from Home’ – a set of 47 postcards that were focused on artist’s voices around Partition, many of them currently staying in Pakistan and speaking poignantly about India. Our learning was lifted up by these visual sharings.

The children were full of thanks on our last class, part of it because the Unit was ending but I was moved by a thank you card from all and a wee poem J wrote for us on the last hour. What I know is that the experience of reading and listening and talking about the big event was no small event in our journey of understanding that the world could do with more love, rather than hate!

It is quite stressful
All the hate
And the hitting
But we shall
love on

Afterword (Jan 2020) by the author

This is one of the more powerful teaching – learning experiences of my life. I still hear in snippets from the children. This is what I got four days back,

“Two days ago I came across an old couple who were telling us how the Partition affected (he used the word destroy) his family. The husband has a lot of papers and documents of that he is willing to share. Both of them are willing to share their stories with us. You had said in the Partition module, that you were planning to have a program at Bookworm with the theme of the ‘Partition’, so maybe they can be a part of that?”

I feel reassured that we did something precious together. I hope it inspires someone else to try this approach.

Bibliography:

Picture Books

Chacha Ji’s Cup – Uma Krishnaswami
Mukand and Riaz – Nina Sabnani
One Day in August – Bharati Jagannathan
Stitching Stories – Nina Sabnani

Middle School Texts ( Independent reading)

Ahimsa -Supriya Kelkar
Coming Round the Mountain – Ruskin Bond
Dear Mrs Naidu – Mathangi Subramanyan
Night Run – Bali Rai
The Narayanpur Incident – Shashi Deshpande
The Night Diary – Veera Hirandani
The Wheel of Surya – Jamila Gavin
Victory Song – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Adult Texts ( excerpted for independent/ paired reading)

Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
Independence Day – Shashi Deshpande ( short story)
Midnights’Children – Salman Rushdie
Tamas -Bhisham Sahni
This Side That Side Restoring Partition First Hand Graphic Narratives in India –
Train to Pakistan – Khushwant Singh
Toba Tek Singh – Manto ( short story)

Non-Fiction ( excerpted for group discussions)

A Children’s History of India – Subhadra Sen Gupta
Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition – Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin
Choosing to Stay: Memoirs of an Indian Muslim – Nasim Ansari. Translated by Ralph Russell
Divided by Partition United by Resilience – Mallika Ahluwalia
Footprints of Partition – Anam Zakariah
Remnants of Partition Remnants of a Separation – Aanchal Malhotra
The Other Side of Violence Voices from the Partition of India – Urvashi Butalia
The Indian Partition Literature – Eds Imrul Kayes Alam Sarkar
Torn from the Roots a Partition Memoir – Kamla Patel