‘A memoir is also about the process of ‘becoming’ who you are’: Author Malavika Rajkotia

There is no one way to remember the Partition of India. The politics of remembering is anyway riddled with the most fundamental of concerns of storytelling: Who gets to tell a story, and what all must it include? On the other hand, it’s also true that so many people who were directly impacted by the senseless drawing of the borders chose not to recall it, as many studies show. This finding is further complicated by the fact that in their twilight years, many people did open up with their grandchildren, unburdening them of the heavy weight of the traumas of the past they carried all their lives. To that end, Partition is also an event that has been passed on from one generation to the other and has managed to compel people to look back in search of their identities.

However, in the course of their journeys – of finding their roots – several people, especially women, have inevitably documented the past that’s hitherto inaccessible to the current generations. In the face of events that are unfolding all across South Asia, hatred on the basis of one’s identity is gaining currency. So, it’s almost one’s role as a writer – and as a storyteller – to revisit history, including a deeply personal one, to exhume the ghosts of the Partition and to tell a story of compassion, companionship, and shared culture.

Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story by Malavika Rajkotia is one such book. But it isn’t a run-of-the-mill memoir about the Partition, its impacts on South Asian history, nation-building, and the role it played in successive processes of restoration of a semblance of normalcy pitted against a personal loss. Alongside her, her father’s and mother’s life stories, the Sikh faith and heritage form an integral part of this book. And so do occult stories. It furthermore analyses and reflects on the hatred that was developed between different communities which resulted in the anti-Sikh pogrom in 1984 or Godhra, 2002. Sample this: “There is no one explanation for Partition. Separate factors gathered into an overwhelming wave that submerged all before it. Why did the idealism of freedom not encompass freedom from communal hatred and violence? The answer may help process poisonous legacy out of us.”

The book, however, begins with Sardar Jitinder Singh – or “Jindo”, lawyer and author Malavika Rajkotia’s father, and his resignation towards life. It’s baffling to imagine why would someone just lie down and do nothing but that’s how Jindo coped with being uprooted from his home in Pakistan. Her Chippy, as he called Rajkotia, however, understood him, and listened to his “inner noise”, which is why she so heart-warmingly is able to not only remember him but also his relationship with others, especially his wife – Darshan – and everyone whom he was surrounded by in his old age.

Rajkotia also indicates how within one’s own nuclear family, two people can have different views of the freedom of India. She writes, “Darshan’s family celebrated Independence, while Jindo’s family, though far better off, felt no joy.” Something that reminds one of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Dawn of Freedom.

In a conversation with Scroll, Rajkotia shares why Jindo responded the way he did, the book’s title, Punjabiyat and more. Excerpts from the interview:

During the launch of your book, you mentioned that the title of this book was offered by a friend of yours. Would you like to share what you intended to title this and what possibilities the title – Unpartitioned Time – signalled to you and the kind of resonance it had with your memoir?
I wrote [the book] and gave it to a friend [Jasjit Purewal], and she pinned it with the title, and I loved it. The book is about continuity despite partition, and hence the title. For a while, I wanted to break free because it is not that much about Partition but then the follow-up of time is there. And this is in the aftermath of that deep tectonic shift. Then the book became more, it is true; but “Unpartitioned Time” continued to resonate as a theme.

Would you agree that the “lying down” of your father after coming to Karnal was a protest against the kind of rootless existence he envisioned experiencing after leaving his home in Pakistan? Furthermore, do you think the kind of animosity that immediately cemented after the Partition of the country and between the two religions – Hinduism and Islam – left him hopeless, convincing him that he should resign further?
My father was not hopeless but his default setting, if you like, was not happy in the conventional way. But because he was a believer in a larger “something” he had an equanimity that was unique. He never raged. Protest is from rage. But lying down was part of that equanimity.

His life was quite ascetic. He did not have a job or run a business, nor did he go to the farm that often, as the manager would report to him in the house. When he got tuberculosis of the spine, everything caught up with him and he literally, as in the case of Oblomov, moved to reclining as his natural state, which was the preferred posture anyhow, but it was also a calm readiness for the next phase – death. He would never feel hopeless, and he continued to retain deep dispassionate affection for everyone. Like I said, almost ascetic.

Towards the middle, your memoir slowly turns more towards not only the Sikh religion and Punjabiyat – which is not limited by the borders but is more celebratory in the sense it’s a shared culture between India and Pakistan – but also the kind of interconnectedness between the history and personal significances of places one inhabits. Often memoirs tend not to tread that terrain. Could you help describe what made you deep dive into explaining historical contexts and narrativising in a personal story?
I think my approach to writing is interdisciplinary as a contrast to the narrow focus. I am constrained to have a legal argument. I find wider canvases more satisfying to work with creatively and that’s my default mode of thinking. So, in this book, there were many aspects interwoven that created the fabric of the narrative. I enjoy that process. It is slow but absorbing.

I think a memoir is not just a sum of many things that happen but also what those things do to you and the process of “becoming” [who] you are. I have tried to explore that, and the people, [who were] shaped by their history, culture, wealth, and loss of it, [had] a faith that still allowed them to move on and a love for us, the next generation, who they did not want to burden. But I cannot explain them without their context: just as I am formed by their context and the freedom to add my own elements to what defines me. Now it would be that daughter but also this woman, this lawyer and author and this mother and sister.

Putting a book together like this must have involved negotiating what to keep and leave out. Could you help explain if there were things that couldn’t make it into this book, and what sort of methodology must a memoirist develop to make such decisions? In a sense, how one decides whose stories should one be telling because in this book readers also witness you and your sister’s growing up years in post-Partition India, your father’s struggles with alcoholism, and the relationship between your parents.
The manuscript is received history and a child’s understanding of what is happening around her; it is a gathering of memories and experiences to string them together to show a family life of this type. [Which is why] my first draft was more than double the size of the final manuscript. Then came the chiselling and self-editing which is far more painstaking than writing the first draft. After the first draft and the editing, the writing developed its own momentum, and I learnt to submit to the organic process of the writing itself.

During an interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen on his memoir A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial, I asked him about how this triangulation works out in his book. He said that his memoir is a memorial of sorts too because civilians’ lives like that of his Vietnamese parents never get the recognition they deserve, hence he wanted to memorialise them. Was there such an intention or attempt from your end with your memoir, too?
This is very nice; thank you. I must read this because it makes the point very well.

My parents were not famous. Theirs was an ordinary life that I have written about, and I am proud of their story. I learnt a lot from them [in the sense that] they were not distracted by trying to become anything but themselves. That is a difficult exercise when you think of it. To reject creating artificial constructs to your persona and be steadfastly authentic which also means minimalist.

There are a lot of literary works mentioned in this book, including a slight comparison of your father’s resignation towards life to the natural state of “lying down” of Oblomov (The Immortal Hero of Laziness), and in relation to the Partition, a short story Toba Tek Singh by Sadat Hasan Manto and Madhav Godbole’s The Holocaust of Indian Partition: An Inquest. And of course, Guru Nanak’s teachings are peppered throughout the book, too. I was wondering what kind of literature you grew up reading and in what languages. Further, what sort of books you were influenced by or ones that informed the structure of your memoir – as it’s a unique cross between Didion-like meditations on grief, alongside historical underpinnings that are reflected in a very different manner (falconry) in H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald?
I grew up reading. It was my constant activity. I remember being transported by books to various worlds. Books gave me succour in a place that otherwise could have been very dull for a young person. The joy of a promising book and the silence in the house when one read and the satisfaction that there was nothing better to do was immense.

Most people of my generation will have that memory because social media, films and television like there is now did not exist then. It was the silent communion with a book. My reading was of popular genre because access to books was limited and there was no one to guide my reading except for my Taiji, who was a great and wide reader – she read in Gurmukhi, English, and Hindi with the same ease.

I can read Gurmukhi and Hindi too, but the speed and comfort is in English. I have promised [myself] to work on Hindi and Gurmukhi reading now.

[Coming to] the structure of Unpartitioned Time: it was difficult for me; and this back-and-forth weaving has been disliked by some, but others have liked it.

Didion, Macdonald I have read, but I don’t think I was thinking of them when I was writing. For me, the greatest writer of memoirs in exquisite detail is [Marcel] Proust but that sheer volume of writing was for that era.

Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story, Malavika Rajkotia, Speaking Tiger Books.