Jhootha Sach: Yashpal's Lahore and Mine

The twin activity of writing this essay, Jhootha Sach: Yashpal's Lahore and Mine, and the creation of the accompanying digital art entitled "Lahore becomes my own / It was only a matter of changing my position of gazing," is my aesthetically-informed interpretation of the Partition of 1947, which Yashpal has narrated through the pre-1947 city of Lahore, in his award-winning novel Jhootha Sach. With the backdrop of the data comprising of the memories of the characters in Jhootha Sach, I use the Theory of Emotionally Durable Design (EDD) to analyze the historically conflicting constructs, namely the "One-Nation" or "Two-Nations," which continue to frame the Indian and Pakistani arguments in favor and against the Partition. The resulting interdisciplinary inquiry is a literary and artistic oeuvre, which together constitute an empathy-inducing and mind-transforming multimedia installation I call the MindfulApp.

Jhootha Sach: A Mind-Transforming Context

Situated in Lahore — the city fondly gushed at as Lohr Lohr ai (Lahore is Lahore) — Jhootha Sach is a discourse-shaping account of the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. As I process the mayhem of Partition exclusively through the prism of Jhootha Sach, the pre-1947 Lahoris' experience of Partition emerges as a self-transforming context: the impeccable and nonpartisan manner in which Yashpal handles this volatile topic of Partition nudged me from my single-window position of viewing my hometown Lahore and the 1947 Partition. The alternative position has placed me in a transformational relationship with the pre-1947 the then-Lahore and the Lahoris that Yashpal introduces through the different sites and characters in Jhootha Sach.

In Jhootha Sach, the city of Lahore becomes a metaphor for the loss of home and identity for the 1947 Partition refugees. The contemporary developments in regional politics show that the existential angst generated by Partition, even after seventy-four years, has not abated. The tragic event like the 1947 Partition should have produced literary works that create opportunities for healing and catharsis. Jhootha Sach is one such creative endeavor towards the amelioration of injured selves of refugees. It comes across as an appeal to overcome the political and emotional split between India and Pakistan: By not demonizing one or the other side (India or Pakistan), it placates the warring actors on both sides of the border and serves as a nonpartisan interlocutor. It gives the attentive readers a point of departure to see the conflicting views that Pakistanis and Indians harbor about Partition with equal empathy.

The MindfulApp: A Cathartic Podium

The MindfulApp portrays the adversarial points of view Pakistanis and Indians hold about the 1947 Partition. By giving equal credence to both, the MindfulApp, as a cathartic podium, with its written and visual segments, is conceived as mind-changing navigation between the two Lahores: Yashpal's and mine — the pre-1947 and the post-1947 Lahore. It is where the post-Partition Indians and Pakistanis, the Other to each other, are invited to commit to a re-examination of their existing motivations and beliefs that appear to nurture their anger about Partition and to review the unsettled question: if they are One-Nation or Two-Nations? It encourages them to talk. However, the question is how to talk?

In Kegan and Lahey's How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, I found the "mental machine" which has helped me in conceiving the MindfulApp as an aesthetically charged mind-transforming contraption. The "mental machine" is used for "activating internal" and "productive conversations" with oneself; and so do their prescribed "three on-the-deck exercise": In the same spirit, the MindfulApp is meant to coax the warring sides to step back: 1. from their respective vantage points; 2. from their take on the conflict; 3. from their take on the Other's side. These three "deconstructive" tested steps of the exercise, Kegan and Lahey assure, alter long-held rigid perceptions, and set free the mindsets that are imprisoned in the grip of debilitating mental assumptions. It is amazing, that these developmental paces also uncover that "immunity to change," which disables individuals and groups to accomplish even the most sincerely sought after changes.

The practical and conceptual mechanism inherent in the postmodern psychological framework of this "mental machine" reminds me of Martin Buber's Ich und Du and Rabindranath Tagore's concept of genuine connections. Both the constructs echo, beautifully, the 13th century sage Jalal-ad-Din Rumi's grand philosophy of I and Thou or the ideal of shared humanity. In the scheme of the desired transformation and expansion of consciousness, the MindfulApp draws further stimulus from the hazards of what Kegan and Lahey call the language of "blaming" and "complaining." In the context of Partition, the venomous language has kept alive the toxic memory of traumatic migration; the one that led to the violent and forced up-rootedness of persons and personhoods. The MindfulApp is meant to assist both Indians and Pakistanis to come to a conscious decision of confronting the emotions of disillusionment and mutual distrust by switching over to the "language of commitment" and the "language of personal responsibility"; yes, to confront, and not to mystify the historical One-Nation or Two-Nations conflict in question.

Lahore, the Central Unit of Analysis

Placing Yashpal's Lahore as the central unit of analysis, I use the MindfulApp to track and appropriate artistically Yashpal's view of Partition and the One-Nation or Two-Nations dilemma, which he has immortalized in Jhootha Sach:

First glimpsed in its humdrum and cheerfully quotidian aspect at the beginning of the novel, it soon develops splinters and is then devastated out of recognition as its inhabitants flee helter-skelter to save their lives. (Yashpal, Introduction).

Reading the highly emotive contents of Jhootha Sach, it occurred to me that without making sense of Yashpal in Lahore and his longing for Lahore, we would not know the real Lahore, and not knowing real Lahore is to not know what Partition did to the people of the Indian Subcontinent. Not to see what Yashpal sees in Lahore, as Lahore, his Lahore, is akin to a fundamental distortion in understanding the identity of this historically phenomenal city of the Indian subcontinent, the city from which the pre- and post-Partition residents of Lahore draw their Lahori identity.

Yashpal's family was not from Lahore. Due to his poor health, his mother moved him from their village in Kangra hills, and the family settled in Lahore. In the following years, between 1917 and 1945, he kept moving in and out of Lahore. However, the years he spent in Lahore were academically and politically the most formative and tumultuous. As a college student, and as a member of The Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), Yashpal, in the company of other freedom loyalists like Bhagat Singh, honed his political ideology and nurtured a network of close like-minded compatriots, in Lahore. The bomb factory, where he and his friends spent dramatic times putting together bombs and planning armed struggle against the British was in the heartland of Lahore. It was again in Lahore that Yashpal met Prakashvati, his future wife. Inspired by his political work, Prakashvati had left the security of her home and opted instead for the difficult life of a revolutionary's partner. His comrade-in-arms, she was from the Old Walled City, the nucleus of Lahore. It was the same neighborhood that forms the core of Jhootha Sach.

In his memoirs, "Yashpal Looks Back," Yashpal explains that though his life was spent in different parts of India, he turned to Lahore in times of emotional and physical distress. He admits that the "only friends I could trust were my friends in Lahore." Yashpal's amorous pining for Lahore, which comes across powerfully in his memoirs and Jhootha Sach, could have intensified due to his forced exile from there. In 1932, his six-year-long imprisonment on charges of sedition kept him away. Even after he was set free in 1938, he could not return to Lahore because there was a ban on his entering the Punjab region. Almost a decade before Partition, he reluctantly settled in Lucknow. So, he was not in Lahore when Partition was announced in 1947. He did not personally witness the violent riots that forced the non-Muslim population to leave Lahore forever. Ironically, he visited the city in 1955, where, even after nine years of pernicious Partition disturbances, the remnants of anarchy were evident. Devastated to see Lahore, he wondered:

Is it the same Lahore that I had last seen in 1945 for a couple of days and whose grandeur still lived in my imagination? Instead of a fair-ground, it seemed to be a graveyard… My Punjab and Lahore were gone; could not one preserve even a memory of them? And the anguish of collective memory due to communal ill-will? (Yashpal, Introduction).

It was Yashpal's ardent attachment and gnawing nostalgia that he chose Lahore to document the ordeal of Partition in his masterpiece novel Jhootha Sach. The first part of the novel is entitled 'Vatan aur Desh', and Yashpal, with "an artistic masterstroke…identifies 'vatan' above all with just one narrow street in Lahore, Bhola Pandhe ki Gali, near the Shahalami Gate…" Perhaps Yashpal's dedicated attachment to Lahore derives its energy from the unique disposition Lahore has always commanded: Among the cities of the Indian Subcontinent, Lahore is the one city that has a uniquely indulging claim to an equally indulging unique historical and cultural profile. The place's persona is so enticing that people across the Indo-Pak borders are still, after seventy-four years, captive of the real and imagined ideal of Lahore, including those post-partition generations who have never lived or been to Lahore.

Lohr Lohr ai

Why is Lahore Lahore? Yashpal's Jhootha Sach offers one most crucial and foundational clue to this question, one that has not been fully probed before, and which I believe is at the heart of the truism, Lohr Lohr ai! The hint to this question is presented so powerfully in Jhootha Sach that it also offers me an opportunity to recast my near fixed Lahori status, which the reading of Jhootha Sach appears to have obliterated for good: that despite having a home in Lahore, and access to the paraphernalia of attachments to the city, I have begun to miss the habit of being Lahori. What seems to have slipped from my grasp is perhaps this habit, not the actual Lahore.

Jhootha Sach and Yashpal

It was an afternoon in the fall of 2017, when the postman handed me a partially wrapped Urdu book, entitled Jhootha Sach. The name of the author, Yashpal, was unknown to me. "Some Hindi writer?" I wondered. However, the sheer volume of this new novel appealed to my penchant for thick novels. Secondly, the book was about Partition, one of the topics that I find close to my heart. Although I belong to the post-Partition generation, I identify passionately with the pain my parents and grandparents felt for their homes and neighborhoods, which they had to leave in what became India in 1947.

Standing in the front courtyard of my home in Lahore, with this newly delivered volume in my hand, I recalled Yashpal, the grand revolutionary. Coupled with the narratives of Subhash Chandra Bose, Lala Lajpat Rai, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh and other famous Indian freedom leaders, the stories about Yashpal were narrated to me by my mother in her endless stories of the freedom fighters of united India. It was only after reading his memoirs, Yashpal Looks Back (YLB), I discovered that Yashpal the freedom fighter and Yashpal the author of Jhootha Sach, the magnum opus of Partition literature, were the same.

Translations from Hindi, the Urdu and English versions, by Munira Surti and Anand respectively, of the novel, Jhootha Sach, are absolute masterstrokes. They seem to radiate the passion and the literary standards of the original Hindi narrative.

Jhootha Sach compels the reader to experience an immersive form of an ethnographic tour of the pre-1947 Lahore. It beckons the reader to the intricacies of the descriptive and rhythmic cadences of the private and public lives of the people who lived in Lahore. These Yashpal has documented with a flourish — from the lives lived within and extending far and beyond the narrow lanes of the old Walled City of Lahore, to the comparatively new upper middle-class neighborhoods of Gwalmandi, Krishan Nagar and Sanda, all the way to the very modern and elite suburbs of Model Town.

Once past the first few chapters, when one begins to develop an attachment to Yashpal's Lahore, the reader's rapt attention, like the grounded and peaceful lives of the residents of Lahore, is rudely unhinged. The unexpected and rapid eruptions of the sectarian violence that engulf the entire length and breadth of the city put the city and the people in a stupor. With the successive shocks, first of the killings, loot and arson, the abductions of women, which culminate into the most unpredictable forced evictions of non-Muslims from their ancestral homes, followed by their incarcerations into the refugee camps in Lahore, the beautiful story of Lahore and the Lahoris that Jhootha Sach is, turns into the portrayal of a long and numbing nightmare.

Yashpal's Lahore

In the one-thousand and more pages of Jhootha Sach, Yashpal creates the collective longing that is emblematic of the homesickness of the refugee state of mind. His compulsive homesickness for Lahore, which he chronicles in the novel, has that abiding whiff of permanence as if he wishes to embrace the gnawing yearning forever, to never get rid of its pain.

The first 450 pages of Jhootha Sach are focused completely on the pre-1947 Lahore and the people of the then-Lahore. And when one reads through the remaining pages, comprising the post-Partition narrative, one finds them sprinkled with mentions of "Lahore." In all of the 1017 pages, lingering memories of the home or gali sneak in until the very last chapters, to the very last lines.

Puri was roused gently from the delicious languor of his morning sleep. The sweet strains of Khushal Singh singing the morning chant [bhajan] wafted through the window. (Yashpal 97)

The novel's main characters, Jaidev Puri and his sister Tara, live with their parents, Master Ramlubhaya and Bhagwanti, and the two siblings, Usha and Hari, in the lower-middle class Hindu neighborhood. Ensconced inside the labyrinth of narrow lanes, their one-room house is on the Bhola Pandhe ki Gali. Right behind the constricted market place known as Machi-Hatta-ka bazaar (where Yashpal last lived in Lahore), the Bhola Pandhe ki Gali is in the Shahalami Darwaza inside the Walled City of Lahore. At the other end, a long, narrow passage connects it to Mochi Darwaza, which is an overwhelmingly Muslim mohalla.

The Bhola Pandhe ki Gali residents, Puri and Tara, are shown navigating the intricate network of the narrow galis daily, the adjoining cluster of the wide roads forking in and around the Circular Road that runs around the wall of old Lahore. Through the movements of these characters, roaming around, venturing in and out of domestic and public spaces, Yashpal provides readers almost a guided tour of the Lahore of before 1947. Whereas Puri, Tara and their extended family and neighbors portray the minutiae of the old city and its conventional life, Kanak, Puri's sweetheart, shows us how the professional elite live.

I find Lahore taking on a life of its own, its identity, when Jhootha Sach's main characters Puri, Tara, Kanak, and their friends, in their daily routine of going to college, to work, to meet friends, acquaintances, lovers, nemesis, reveal the existence of a close-knit network of an amorphous community: they are all not Hindus. Yes! Not all Hindus! And at the time of their agitation against the British government of the time, the Hindu, Sikh, Muslim inhabitants of Lahore come together with undisguised camaraderie.

Through the communal identities of the friends, Puri and Tara interact — Yashpal brings the readers to the ideologically and religiously flexible communal life his Lahore relies on. He highlights, endorses, and makes extraordinary efforts to show that Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims of Lahore intermingle socially. They are friends. They nurture romantic liaisons. They loiter around Lahore and attend the political rallies Lahore is known for. They share food, just as they share the ideological and political aspirations for an India without British colonial rule.

Yashpal gives this inter-communal Lahori milieu a near tangible presence when Puri is shown climbing down his Anarkali office stairs and shouting at the chanting crowd, he says: "What's this nonsense! You are marching to support the demand for Pakistan?" Asad, Puri's Muslim friend, cajoles Puri: "We won't allow any slogans asking for the break-up of the country…" He assures Puri that the Muslims too oppose the Partition of India. He tries to explain that "the demand for Pakistan is" only that there would be a Congress Ministry in one province of Hindustan and of the League in another province. This is a demand for self-determination!

Puri, somewhat relieved, requests Asad to "look after Tara…" and "see her home." This is the Lahore where Puri could tell his Muslim friend, Asad, to escort his sister Tara home — this is the home Yashpal seems to crave to return to, and which he wants to be preserved. The one Lahore where it was not the past, but himself in the past imagining the future. The future in the past, where he saw the communal distinctions lose their distinction in well-meaning slogans raised by the members of the Student Federation: "Reinstate civil liberties! Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs unite! Long Live Congress-League unity."

Lost in Lahore

I was thrilled to find myself making perfect sense of the Lahore in Jhootha Sach. My exhilaration grew when I was able to track down on Google map the route Puri and other characters take. I located the pre-1947 photos of Lahore too: Purani Anarkali police station, where Puri is interned; "Uchi Gali" where Ram Jivaya, Puri's and Tara's Tayaji, has a three-story house; the "Machche Hatta ka Bazaar," from where Tara takes a turn every day to Bhola Pandhe ki Gali on the way back from Dyal Singh College; Dyal Singh College itself.

It was an energizing prospect to go track Yashpal's Lahore. I had come to know after checking from different sources that the Shahalami Darwaza, and the network of lanes and the sites inside the Shahalami were intact. So was the street that connected the Bhola Pandhe Ki Gali vicinity with the Muslim locality of Mochi Darwaza; the Mori Darwaza where Puri goes to meet the publisher, Ghaus Baksh. But alas! Bhola Pandhe ki Gali is a fictitious street. Another acquaintance told of a publishing house, in Krishna Gali. So, could it be the location of Pandit Girdharilal's Naya Hind Publications? I was so excited at the possibility that the Sadho Ram ki Gali where Yashpal has situated Pandit ji's house and the press may not be completely fictional.

Just when I was eagerly planning my trip to the Walled City, it dawned on me that though the Google map did give clues to the lanes in Lahore, I had never been there. So, what first clouded my initial enthusiasm about Lahore in Jhootha Sach was this heightened self-consciousness: I realized that although I live in Lahore, have lived in Lahore all my life, I still had never properly seen it. I could have visited the then-Lahore, got to know and love it more; I should have, but never did. I could have met people, who were contemporaries of Puri, Tara and Kanak, and embraced them, but did not. Was it that I lacked the essential organic intimacy with the town? The one the indigenous keepers of Lahore in Jhootha Sach possess?

Lahore is Lost

I was lost. I very clearly recall the moment of transition, when Lahore began to drift from me: I had been deeply involved in reading, taking notes on the copy of Jhootha Sach. Devouring especially the descriptions manifested in the intimate, family-like interactions of the residents of Bhola Pandhe ki Gali. Drawing parallels when Tara's bridegroom stays the first night after the wedding at the bride's home, with the accounts of the weddings of elders in my family.

I decided I would go to Shahalami. To study and follow the route that Puri, Tara, and Kanak took. However, just as I was beginning to carve a personal Lahori niche for myself alongside Kanak, Tara, and Puri, Jhootha Sach yanked me out of my Lahori self. It happened when I hit upon the name Banni Hata — the locality where Tara's in-laws live. In that rush of excitement of trooping to Yashpal's Lahore, I had forgotten that Banni Hata is the same neighborhood from where Tara escapes near death, from burning in the fire set by Muslim gangs. From where she is abducted, raped, forced to convert to Islam. My fervor dampened. All those sites are there. I could visit and take photos. However, this unexpected insight, spurned by Tara's plight at Banni Hata, proved dispiriting. The romance of Yashpal's Lahore seemed to dissipate.

Lahore 1947

It is late June 1947, and Lahore is crunching under the unbearable weight of the suspense: is Lahore going to India or Pakistan? No longer able to suffer the anxiety, many gave in to the desire to stay in Lahore, whether Indian or Pakistani. Nayyar exclaims in relief:

Look, I've been saying all along that there'd be no reason why Hindus wouldn't be able to stay in Lahore. Look at these statements by the League and Congress — that the minorities in both countries will have the same civil rights as the majority, as well as full freedom to practice their culture and religion. (Yashpal 333)

After reading from the Statesman and Tribune, Nayyar is hopeful of a normal future in Lahore. It was the gravity of the combined Lahori self that the majority of non-Muslims decided, like Nayyar, to continue to live in Pakistani Lahore. When the Pakistani flags were unfurled on the eighteenth of August, many Hindus and Sikhs too hoisted the green and white flags on their houses. The rising incidents of violence were forcing people to move into the security of their respective Hindu and Muslim neighborhoods, but still, many had not lost the hope of continuing to live together in Lahore.

However, in the most unexpected move, close to August 1947, the Hindu and Sikh populations of Lahore were rounded up from their homes and shifted to refugee camps. A pall of gloom falls over Tara when Asad, in the DAV college refugee camp, confides in her: "Your family must have left Lahore. Hindus have either left or been forced to leave. The rest are being moved out now. That's the government policy…You won't be able to live in Lahore if you call yourself a Hindu…"

How the forced displacement from Lahore became the foundational metaphor in the lives of Lahoris who left Lahore I gathered from Jhootha Sach. And discovered why those who came to replace them, like my family, could not recover the original ambience of the city that made Lahore Lahore. Yashpal documents this with passion, the reality about the bulk of Lahori Hindus and Sikhs, who were forced to leave Lahore. The home of their ancestors — it was when most of them had decided to stay back in the Lahore of Pakistan.

Lohr Lohr NahiN Ai — Lahore is Not Lahore

In that moment of sadness and remorse, I realized that we, the progenies of the post-1947 settlers, could only be borrowers, and not the owners of the Lahore of Yashpal. Puri perhaps wrongfully felt that Lahore had abandoned him. Because wherever he is, his eternal Lahori self will remain, irrevocably, aligned to his Lahore.

I felt strangely alienated imagining the Lahore, where the pre-Partition Lahoris like Zubeida could shout "Hindu-Muslim Bhai Bhai." Equally alien was the thought that Asad, who is invited to an exclusively Sikh ceremony, finds an occasion to eat prashad, in Lahore. Because not once in Lahore have I come across a Lahori Hindu or Sikh to experience and nurture the casual, Asad-like intimate interaction with them.

It is ironic that these powerful cultural tropes, which first stirred a curiously strong attachment to Yashpal's Lahore, have placed me in the awkward position of an outsider in my own, the now-Lahore.

Yashpal's Lahore Becomes Mine

As I see it, Jhootha Sach gradually ushered me in an unexpected transformed state of realization about the city of Lahore. Just as Jhootha Sach was an enlightening moment about the Other's loss, I realize that it was a destabilizing moment due to another loss — the loss of the segment of my own long-settled identity as a Lahori. A moment, which without any warning had usurped my smug ownership of the elemental beauty and the gusto at the heart of the popular truism Lohr Lohr ai. Jhootha Sach has led me, supposedly a Lahori, to an alternative panorama of this storied city of the Indian Subcontinent, where I find the characters of Jhootha Sach bringing forth the Lahore, their Lahore, one I did not know, and coax me to gaze at it, accept it and not gaze through it, and ignore their Lahore.

The pre-Partition Lahoris made me overly conscious that it was the imagined, unlived Lohr Lohr ai identity that I, and others like me, the post-1947 now-Lahoris, have imbued without ever getting to know the Lahore, where a flexible communal living endowed it with its much admired and unique historic identity. Caught between my loss and the loss of the pre-Partition Lahoris, I came face-to-face with how the 1947 partition vanquished Lahore and the Lahoris and deprived Lahore of its organic identity.

Yashpal is on Both Sides

Still, in this ultra-communal, but one India, Yashpal rejected the communal politics. Indeed, Lahore was lost to Pakistan. And Partition had already taken place, yet the luster of his nonpartisan stance comes across transparently when he writes with equal conviction the atrocities perpetrated by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. His depiction of cruelty and suffering is convincing because he is on both sides. By suggesting the concept of collective consciousness and responsibility, he leaves this huge scope of congenial coexistence for posterity.

Throughout he shows this rare psychological capacity of seeing both the perspectives that only adults with higher forms of moral self are able to exercise with pristine unselfconsciousness. In Jhootha Sach there is an astounding amount of data, which when analyzed through the lens of human development parlance, Yashpal's posture, on the historic tragedy of 1947 Partition, comes across as a form of psychological and moral high art; he is not protective of own turf, he shuns what is termed as "group appetite." Tirelessly, he invites everyone, through the persona of the pre-1947 Lahore, to take a kind of residence in the Other's universe, so that the people remain united even after Partition.

I am overcoming the homesickness, the kind Yashpal experiences for Lahore. I am developing a yearning for a new type of reunion with Lahore, in a way that the Lahore of Yashpal becomes my own. And mine his. That is if I take residence in the Universe that is inhabited by Puris, Taras, Kanaks, Dr. Naths, then Lahore may not disclaim me. Lahore is mine if I know that it is also his — Yashpal's. It is simple: I just have to shift my position: from gazing through Lahore to gazing at Lahore. It is only a matter of changing one's position of gazing! In other words, like Yashpal I see the alternative reality of the Self-as-Other or the Other-as-I.