Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the “ghost train” arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. Well, about Kushwant Singh, many relate to him, sadly though, to women,jokes and sex !!, they don’t know that he wrote commentary on the Baghavad Gita Shriram: a biography Japjee, Hymns of Guru Nanak etc., His more recent novel ‘Delhi’ is hailed as a landmark in Indian English.“In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people-Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs-were in flight. IT MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN !!!.Let there be peace in our sub-continent. Perhaps, this film which humanizes the horrors inflicted by India’s two major religious groups on each other ,can help Indian audiences come two terms with Partition and even rise above it.īe it the novel or the film, Remember ,it all happened. Combining slick humor and powerful drama, Rooks skillfully chronicles the most climatic period in Indian history. The Calcutta born film director, Pamela Rooks finds herself on a home wicket having a Hindu father and a sikh mother. He makes us feel the sadness and the permanent loss to all the participants on all sides of this tragic conflict. Singh, dramatically foreshadows the violence which has continued in this area to the present day.
Most remarkably, Singh holds himself above the ethnic and religious fray, reflecting his equal abhorrence of the Muslim atrocities and the Sikh response, “For each Hindu or Sikh they kill, kill two Mussulmans.” However, the best of the story lies in acts of honor, brotherhood shown by individual characters both Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus who show courage in adversity, by coming to help of their old neighbors, even in testing times.
A train to pakistan movie movie#
That is in brief the plot of the Novel on which the movie is based. Jagga lays down his life trying to rescue her and redeems himself by saving many lives.
A train to pakistan movie full#
Bad for both of them, when murderous suspicion falls upon Jagga, and the already mounting tension grows between Sikhs and Muslims.ĪND, the partition occurs, Nimmo is forced to leave to Pakistan on a train full of dead Sikhs which stirs up a battlefield. The story set in a small village in Punjab, centres around a notorious outlaw named Jagga who is a Sikh and is in love with a Muslim girl, Nimmo. Set in 1947, it depicts the aftermath the trauma and massacres that accompanied partition. This novel is undoubtedly a bold move for its time. I read it quite a few years back and vividly remember the high-points of the novel, I read it again recently when Pamela Rooks film based on this novel was filmed in London. His Novel “Train to Pakistan” is rated as one of the Indian classics.
Khushwant Singh, India’s well known Journalist is a critic of life, sex, scotch & scholarship.
“Train to Pakistan,” a short but searing 1956 novel by Khushwant Singh, was the single major literary work on Partition for a full quarter-century. The religious tensions that drove it are too easily revived, the memories too painful, the relationship between India and Pakistan too fragile.Īlthough hundreds of academic tomes and polemical treatises have explored the effects of Partition, most popular writers and artists have either shied away from the topic or cloaked it in safe, autobiographical or fictional treatment. It is part of our legacy, but the younger generation doesn’t remember it, the older generation isn’t reconciled to it.įor years, partition has been a semi-taboo subject here. Partition is India’s legacy of shame, a wound that never heals, an event so scarring that it will never truly be expurgated until every Hindu and Muslim who lived through it is no longer alive. The result was chaos-a massive crisscrossing exodus of Hindus fleeing south and Muslims north, of homes and friendships broken forever, of atrocity avenging atrocity. In 1947, Northern India was abruptly and arbitrarily carved up by its departing British rulers to create the new Muslim state of Pakistan.