A Divided Legacy:
"At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to look at the land they were leaving" --
Saadat Hasan Manto – Torn between two nations
Well known story writer of the Urdu language.
In 1950 he said:
“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?”
In ‘The Assignment'; Saadat Hasan Manto famously wrote:
“The sky was covered in smoke and on distant roofs one could see people looking upwards. Were they trying to catch sight of the new moon or were they catching the fire”?
In the context of 2025:
On May 23, 2019, Narendra Modi led the BJP to storm back to power for another five-year term after a landslide general election victory. It was given to understand among political circles and amongst intellectuals and Left Liberals that with Modi and BJP now securely affirming their place, the Indian political history could easily shed its status quo.
At the centre of BJP stands Narendra Modi, the man who made a right synthesis of Hindu ideology, a strong leadership vis-à-vis an ‘Indian vision’ and development. Modi effectively made use of national security vis-a-vis Pakistan and made the theme a successful vote-catcher phenomenon -- something never seen in elections in Indian history.
In a sense, many thought Modi's second successive landslide win echoed Ronald Reagan's abiding popularity.
Reagan was called a "Teflon" president whose mistakes never stuck to him.
Narendra Modi enjoys a similar reputation.
".....it means that like Teflon, the nonstick-coating, bad things don’t stick to you. Indeed, Modi is India’s Teflon man," wrote Michael Kugelman in 'The Cairo Review of Global Affairs' in 2018.
The BJP won as many as 303 seats - a significant leap from the 2014 tally and certainly a mega turn of events since December 2018 when it had lost power in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
But BJP’s number came down to 240 in 2024.
Modi's 'survival' post-Covid 19 and BJP's political growth are certainly linked to a surge of nationalism which reached great heights after the Prime Minister hardened his stance against arch-rival Pakistan in February 2019.
In 2025 May, we had Operation Sindoor. This is only seen as living up to the Prime Minister Modi’s image of 'muscular brand of nationalism'.
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| Amrita Pritam |
In retrospective mood, the train that carried Bhisham Sahni away from Rawalpindi just before the Partition of India would return in his work, transformed into literature. ('Indian Express')
In 1996, he had said -
“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.”
Written in 1948, Amrita Pritam’s lament is one of the most searing poetic responses to Partition.
Amrit Kaur alias Amrita Pritam was born in Gujranwala of Pakistan on August 31, 1919.
"Waris Shah mainu aaj vi ton qabar ton bol
Te ik navi kitaab-e-mohabbat da panna khol
(Waris Shah, I call out to you today to rise from your grave....
Rise and open a new page of the immortal book of love)
Salman Rushdie’s 'Midnight’s Children' is a must read on Partition.
Salman Rushdie lays bare a brutal truth that while leaders toasted freedom, ordinary people were manipulated into slaughtering each other.
“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)
Notably -- A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” (The New Yorker)
Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded. He refused to be terrorized.
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| Nehru, Mountbatten, Jinnah and others |
ends
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