Tales of Two Cities

by Kuldip Nayar, Asif Noorani

In Tales of Two Cities, two eminent journalists - Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani - give their personal accounts of the Partition of India, the killings and massive migrations which it provoked and their subsequent impact on Indo-Pakistan relations. As a young law graduate, Kuldip Nayar witnessed at first hand the collapse of trust between communities in Sialkot and was forced to migrate with his family to Delhi across the blood-stained plains of Punjab. He vividly describes his own perilous journey and his first job as a young journalist in an Urdu newspaper reporting on Gandhi's assassination. Asif Noorani, while still a schoolboy in Bombay, set off with his family by steamer across the Arabian Sea for the promised land of Pakistan, ultimately settling in Karachi. He gives his own compelling account of the difficulties faced by the new arrivals and the slow emergence of today's megacity with its dominant Mohajir culture. Both authors write with authority about their ancestral homes and their adopted cities, which have played so large a role in bilateral relations. This is a book about a trauma which transformed the subcontinent and still exerts a powerful influence today. These are personal narratives bringing to life a lost world of harmonious relations which each author in his own way is still to recreate.

126 pages, HardBack

First published September 18, 2008

Reviews

[P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two accounts of very privileged survivors of Partition. Kuldip Nayar's family of Punjabi Hindus leaves the city of Sialkot for Delhi. They think that it will be a temporary excursion; the mother doesn't take her best shawl in order not to ruin it, Nayar takes a paperback of his shelf that he won't mind throwing away in India. Nayar's honest assessment of the selfishness of each of his family members is quite chilling: the parents are informed by two men as they board the train that they should disembark since everyone in the train will be slaughtered within 15 minutes of its leaving the station. The parents do disembark but inform none of the other passengers who all travel towards their deaths. They catch another train, assured of the protection of their Muslim friends. The author is driven from Sialkot to Delhi in an army truck, protected by a gun-toting army official and the official's family. En route Nayar is accosted by desperate men and women who try to hand their babies to him so that at least their children might survive the arduous journey on foot in which untold numbers of people perished due to exposure, fatigue or the depredations of armed raiders. Nayar admits that on the journey he becomes inured to stories of gang rape, murder and brutality. He makes it safely to Delhi and helps no one on the way. His brothers catch a train and end up in a refugee camp where their medical training enables them to rapidly move up the list of refugees granted entry to India. On the train to the refugee camp one brother sees men pulling Hindu women off the train under the cover of night. He does nothing to intervene but nurses a resentment against Muslims for their violence against Hindu women. Later, in the refugee camp, a Muslim girl runs up to Nayar's brother and asks him to help her; she is being pursued by a man who hangs back, watching the exchange. Nayar's brother, who did nothing for the Hindu women being pulled off the train then summons his outrage at that earlier episode as a self-justification for ignoring the Muslim's girl's pleas for his help. The man pursuing her, now aware that Nayar's brother will not intercede, drags her off.

These are the very families--fortified in their privilege and indifference, boastful of their misogyny and honour killings as the ultimate proof of their masculinity--that came to Delhi and changed the face of that city forever.

Asif Noorani's flight from Bombay to Pakistan strikes a similar privileged chord. The family takes a steamer from Bombay, thus avoiding all the danger of the so-called "ghost train" that would arrive in the stations of both sides of the border bearing only corpses. His account is replete with promises broken by Pakistanis to newly arrived mohajirs (refugees). The most interesting part of his narrative is when he describes crossing borders and how the restrictions on Pakistanis entering India became gradually more and more convoluted to the point that he was stranded in Bombay for a month. Naushad, the music composer, refused to meet him as Indian Muslims were being vilified in the press for associating with Pakistani but Dilip Kumar granted him an interview. Noorani's encounters reveal his old world graces; he misses his own connecting train in order to help an elderly stranger (contrast this with Nayar's wish to shunt off a coughing old man who was a fixture in the offices of the Urdu newspaper in Old Delhi where Nayar worked; he only relented when he found out that the old man in question, Hasrat Mohini, was a famous poet). Having charmed the Indian official in charge of granting exit visas to Pakistanis, Noorani learned that he could leave if he produced his passport. Unfortunately he had given his passport to another office where it had been mailed to Delhi. Distraught he visited the earlier office and in the process of asking for a light for his cigarette, espied his own passport within the desk of the secretary. Inertia and incompetence had ensured that the secretary had not mailed off Noorani's passport, he grabbed it and threatened to expose the secretary's incompetence to his superior. In this case his chutzpah serves him well. He returns to the other Bombay--the cosmopolitan city of Karachi that Noorani and his family have adopted and grown to love.

[Zunaira Ghaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is full of nostalgic accounts of people who were there at the time of Partition of the sub-continent. It also tells you about Hindu-Muslims' relations before Partition, and how the lives of both the communities were so beautifully entangled. And how those very relations took a drastic change in 1947 and the years to come by.
Asif Noorani couldnt have ended the book with much better words for Karachi, and its resilient people. Its a good book for a change..

[Shrishty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, one can say its the eventfull story of two people who with their family migrated from united India to divided India like many many other people. They were among the priviledge one who got to live throughout the bloodshed, but the complete events have left them effected for their lifetime. They tell their tale, their feelings and their views on this India pakistan partition. This contains things not only about partition and about the bloodshed and riots but about day to day life in that time, how after all that was going on people still tried to get living, get moving ahead and making their home. How moving of so many people from one city to another effes the current situations etc. Nayar's interview with Redcliff about doing the partion is very thought provoking.

Thank you @amitraj for sharing the book withe me, it is one of the finest work I have read. I fell in love with the way kuldip Nayar has written, with so much ease and reflecting his true emotions and feelings.

All those who have kept this book in their to be read shelf, read it.

[Anem Syed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two perspectives of how the mass migration of 1947 molded new cultures and birthed new stories reminding us of human resilience.