Book review: A journey of self-exploration

Author Anam Zakaria shares what compelled her to write a book on the subcontinent’s Partition

In 2009, Muhammad Rauf visited his home town of Puthligar for the first time since ’62. And even then, as Rauf stood within the city he had been born in, he could not step off the bus and on to the streets that seemed so familiar. Puthligar is in India and being a Pakistani citizen, Rauf required a visa to venture off the bus and into his hometown. While Rauf passed away a few years ago, his story along with others can be found in Anam Zakaria’s new book The Footprints of Partition which traces the journey of four different generations since the subcontinent’s Partition.



Taking the narratives of 14 different people, Zakaria’s book explores the emotions of those who left a little part of themselves behind on the other side of the border. These individuals share their memories from before the Partition and Zakaria wanted them to remember a time before the blood, gore and violence and talk about the relationships that existed.

Like many others in the country, Zakaria has also grown up listening to stories of Partition. For her, the source was her maternal grandmother. “I don’t know if these were the only stories she told me or these were the ones that stuck throughout. I believe it was a bit of both. It was memories like these that became predominant with her and over time, also stuck with me,” says Zakaria, talking about how she witnessed Partition through the eyes of her grandmother, who volunteered at the refugee camps in Walton, Lahore. “So, when I thought about Partition, I thought about blood and I thought about corpses and refugees and heat and humidity. I didn’t really think about friends. The first time I asked my grandmother about her friends was when I started thinking about writing the book,” she adds.

This is true for most of us who have read or heard stories of Partition. With that slight hint of nostalgia, there is always tragedy — a family that was left behind, killed or maimed. We are all familiar with stories of trains arriving filled with dead people; of women being kidnapped and raped; of people leaving behind friends, homes, property and wealth, to flee the violence and settle in the area that was now theirs. Zakaria believes stories of struggle are a way for the older generation to make us realise the importance of Pakistan. “It’s kind of like a history lesson for children,” she says.



The book, though, has been a way for her to move past those lessons and explore a different aspect of Partition. “I had heard Partition stories because growing up in Pakistan everyone is familiar with them,” she says, but adds this is not where her curiosity to discover “the other” started. That came much later when she started working with The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP). “When I started writing the book, I had been with CAP for some time, and I had been conducting oral interviews for its oral history project.” It was while hearing the different experiences of people that she realised that these stories needed to be told. But it was ultimately the story of Rauf that touched her enough to actually start working on the book.

“He was really old, in his 70s. Partition came up during the interview and he told us the story about how he had been to India but had not been able to visit his home,” narrates Zakaria, recalling the moment she finally decided to sit down and write.

From then on, she not only decided to collect stories she wanted to tell but also started asking more questions about her own family and where they came from. “Before this, I remember the only time I felt a bit curious about the whole thing was when I was filling in a visa application and my father’s birthplace was stated as India.” She says that despite all her research there are still things that she does not know about her own family.

Zakaria’s book provides a very subjective view of these Partition stories. This reflects in the way she has picked the individuals for her book. “I chose stories that touched me the most,” she says candidly. She is very clear about the fact that her book showcases her own journey of learning and, at times, unlearning.

Apart from stories of Partition survivors, Zakaria also traces how these stories have been conveyed through generations. Her’s is a generation that she can relate to more. She talks about her friend Owais who spends hours looking for his ancestral home in India, but the interest is merely on his father’s behalf. He himself does not seem very nostalgic about it. She also reflects on her situation: despite visiting India multiple times, she never made an effort to visit Batala, the city her father had migrated from.



Her book also discusses the animosity that seems to be entrenched into the minds of the younger generation. While heading the Student Exchange Program with India as part of CAP’s Exchange for Change Programme, she faced the hostile attitude first-hand. The project involved exchanging letters with students in India. “Some of the students flat-out refused, but eventually we talked to them and convinced them,” she said. During the months that followed, Zakaria says she saw the attitudes change with only one or two letter exchanges. “The children seemed to realise that the others across the border were very similar to them.”

It because of this experience that when I ask her what a good way of lessening the hatred between the newer generations is, she promptly replies, “It’s people to people interaction, as clichéd as it may sound.”

Throughout our discussion we’ve skirted around the politics of the issue; Pakistan’s relations with India, the way history is taught in schools and the propaganda within both countries, a large part of which is based on rhetoric of injustices and atrocities committed against the other. It stands there as large as ever, shadowing every discussion. And so I asked her the best way to move forward: would it be to stop discussing the Partition? Should we stop remembering everything that happened and start afresh, if it were a possibility?

“It’s a sensitive issue right now,” she says. Zakaria believes forgetting history is not the answer, “but we definitely [need] to change some of the things we teach and how we discuss the events.”

This is something her book does very well. It does not negate the violence that happened or the struggle that people went through to create Pakistan. In fact, she adds perspective to it and contextualises from a more humanistic angle — talking about the families that were forced to separate, the homes lost and the friends left behind and forgotten. Through her lens, Partition appears to be a more than just a violent tragedy. She paints a picture that depicts society before the tumultuous events of 1947.

Amel Ghani is a Lahore-based reporter for The Express Tribune. She tweets @AmelGhanii 

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, August 2^nd, 2015.