How 6 writers – from Amrita Pritam to Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Indian Express

a day ago

As India prepares to mark another Independence Day, the Tricolour will fly high, and speeches will recall the triumph of 1947. But the dawn of freedom was shadowed by the Partition, one of history's largest and bloodiest migrations. Millions were uprooted, thousands killed, and countless lives scarred forever. For many who lived through it, the memory never faded and for those who came later its echoes still shape identity, politics, and belonging. Through fiction, poetry, and memoir, writers have given voice to that pain and confusion.
Five voices remind us that independence came with both pride and unhealed wounds from the Partition of India:
'Some of the things I saw in Bhiwandi were so similar to what I had experienced in Rawalpindi that I started writing. …I also felt that the conditions that had caused riots in 1947 were still present. The Partition of the country should have put an end to the riots, but it didn't. I started writing. When I began, I had no clearly conceived objective in mind. Perhaps I merely wanted to recollect and relive my past.'
– Bhisham Sahni told Alok Bhalla in a conversation in June 1996
Sahni linked the riots in industrial Bhiwandi in the 1970s to the trauma of Partition. For him, the same combustible mix of prejudice, politics, and mistrust still lingered decades after Independence. His words cut through the official narrative of national unity to expose the persistence of old fault lines.
'The Partition of the country and the changes that followed left feelings of revolt in me…when I sat down to write I found my thoughts scattered. Though I tried hard I could not separate India from Pakistan and Pakistan from India…my mind could not resolve the question: what country did we belong to now, India or Pakistan?'
– Saadat Hasan Manto, 1950
Manto saw the Partition as an unresolvable rupture in identity. Having moved from Bombay to Lahore, he lived with the ache of separation and the impossibility of mentally dividing two lands bound by shared history, language, and culture.
'You don't know nothing, Mary, the air comes from the north now, and it's full of dying. This independence is for the rich only; the poor are being made to kill each other like flies. In Punjab, in Bengal. Riots riots, poor against poor. It's in the wind.'
– Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (through the character of Joe D'Costa)
Rushdie lays bare a brutal truth that while leaders toasted freedom, ordinary people were manipulated into slaughtering each other. The voice of Joe D'Costa speaks for the forgotten victims, those whose hopes for independence were drowned in bloodshed.
Waris Shah mainu aaj vi ton qabar ton bol (Waris Shah, I call out to you today to rise from your grave)Te ik navi kitaab-e-mohabbat da panna khol (Rise and open a new page of the immortal book of love)
Ik dhii Punjab di royi si, tu likheya si kai vaar (A daughter of Punjab had wept and you wrote many a dirge)
Ajj lakh dhiyan rondiyan, tenu Waris Shah nu pukaar (A million daughters weep today and look at you for solace)
Uth o pyaar de dardmand, te aakh apne Punjab nu (Rise, O beloved of the aggrieved, and just look at your Punjab)
Ajj laashan vich jungle hansde, te Chenab khoon naal bhar gaya
(Today corpses haunt the woods, Chenab overflows with blood)
Kise ne Punjab de panj dariyaan vich zahar ghul ditta (Someone has blended poison in the five rivers of Punjab)
– Amrita Pritam, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu
Written in 1948, Pritam's lament is one of the most searing poetic responses to Partition. By invoking Waris Shah, the chronicler of Punjab's tragic romance Heer-Ranjha, she transforms a single love story into the mourning song of an entire land.
'Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians—or the Pakistanis.'
– Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (1956)
Singh captures the cynicism and resignation of rural voices left out of the promises of Independence. For many in India's villages, the shift from British to Indian rule was less a revolution than a change of masters, leaving deep questions about whose freedom was truly won.
Ye daagh-daagh ujala, ye shab-gazida seher (This light, smeared and spotted, this night-bitten dawn)
Woh intezaar tha jiska, ye woh seher to nahin (This isn't surely the dawn we waited for so eagerly)
Ye woh seher to nahin, jis ki aarzoo lekar (This isn't surely the dawn with whose desire cradled in our hearts)
Chale the yaar ki mil jaayegi kahin na kahin (We had set out, friends all, hoping we should somewhere find it)
Abhi garaani-e-shab mein kami nahin aayi (The weight of the night hasn't lifted yet)
Najat-e-deeda-o-dil ki ghadi nahin aayi (The moment for the emancipation of the eyes and the heart hasn't come yet)
Chale chalo ki woh manzil abhi nahin aayi (Let's go on — we haven't reached the destination yet)
Faiz's words voice a searing disappointment. The 'dawn' so long awaited had arrived, but stained, incomplete, and far from the dream that had carried millions through the struggle.