would find people busy in fields and household chores. The mail train in the morning wakes up the people, alerts the Mullah to give a call of Morning Prayer and the Mullah’s call in turn gives a hint for the priest in the Sikh Temple to come out of the bed. The routine is regulated with the arrival and departure of the trains.
This village is about half a mile from the Sutlej, cut off from even the neighbouring cities and their culture. Mano Majra is a tiny village, untouched by the questions and controversies and struggles which beset the cities. Thus, this deity is the uniting force in the village.
It is a local deity worshipped by all the villagers, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and psuedo-Christians. It is three-foot slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekar tree beside a pond. There are a few families of sweepers whose religion was not known.īut there is one object that all Mano Majarans, including Lala Ram Lal sed. It is a small village consisting of about 70 families, one of which is a Hindu family of Lala Ram Lal who is a money-lender. The others, the Sikhs and the Muslims were in equal number, but the Sikhs are the land owners while the Muslims are the tenants. Thus, he begins this novel with a veritable report on the political situation of the country.īut this report does not form the beginning because the novel is not about the country but about a small village, Mano Majra situated on the border of the two countries. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs who lived in Frontier Province for centuries fled to the safer areas, Khushwant Singh being a veteran journalist knew the situation and described it with a sense of responsibility. The fire spread to Nookhali in Bengal where Muslims messacred Hindus and to Bihar where Hindus massacred Muslims. The riots had broken out in Calcutta which took a toll of several thousand lives. The political condition was unstable and explosive. The novelist tells us in the very first sentence that it was the summer of 1947 which was hotter than usual and drier and dustier because it had not rained. Train To Pakistan is about the holocaust that took place in 1947 when India was divided into two countries India and Pakistan. The story of a novel may be fictitious, yet it is not far from the truth, since it depicts a true picture of social, economic and political conditions prevailing at the time.
#TRAIN TO PAKISTAN BY KHUSHWANT SINGH PDF SERIES#
Novel writing is an art, requiring knowledge of life-style of the people of the age with which the story is related, imagination to create episodes and to link them with one another, to arrange them in a series having a beginning, a middle and an end.
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