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. Focusing on the lives of ordinary citizens as they were torn from their homes, Train to Pakistan brings a human. Set during the 1947 partition of India that created the nations of Pakistan and India, it focuses on the way partition impacted the people on the ground. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. Train to Pakistan is a 1956 historical novel by Indian novelist Khushwant Singh. Read it in English or read it in Hindi, for that matter read it in any language you like but do read this heart-rending story of a forgotten time.“In the summer of 1947, when the creation of the new state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people-Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs-were in flight, 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. I felt that they were not given as much importance as the character of Hukum Chand and thus lacked a little depth.īut that being said, there is nothing in the book which should be missed and thus I recommend it to every Indian who is interested in reading. There is just one thing which I think was lacking and that is the depth in the characters of Jugga and Iqbal. I would liken the book to Anne Frank’s “ The Diary of a Young Girl” because, even though is a fictional tale, it narrates a similar tale of courage and nerve in times of great human suffering.
The beautiful description of life in a village is also worth a mention. I liked the way the book was able to take me back in time and help me visualize Mano Majra and its people.
The simplicity of the plot and the characters is the book’s another positive in addition to the heart-rending end. I am not sure whether other readers will get the same feelings or not, but I am sure it will leave them unsettled and melancholy. The ending is the best part of the book because, when I finished reading, I was in tears. The story of Train to Pakistan is slow in the beginning but picks on gradually as the events unfold. Will the Mano Majra Muslims get the same fate as the Hindus of Pakistan got? Will communal riots take over the once peaceful village?
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On the other hand, the police officers and government officials are tensed when a train arrives at the small station of Mano Majra – it is a ghost train full of dead corpse of Hindus from Pakistan. But as soon as he finds rest, he is arrested for the murder of the moneylender too. The next morning, a “Mona Sardar” and social worker, Iqbal, arrives in the village to prevent any riots in the area. On one such night, when he is out of the village and the local moneylender gets killed by some dacoits, he is blamed for the murder and arrested. He is in love with a Muslim weaver’s daughter with whom he often rendezvouses in the dark of the night. Jugga is a thug, infamous for his bad character. The village is very remote and hence ignorant of the happenings in the country. Mano Majra, as previously suggested, is a small village on the Indo-Pak border graced by a few inhabitants – both Sikhs and Muslims, in equal majority, along with a few important places like a railway station, an officer’s bungalow, a mosque and a temple.
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It is in this backdrop that the story of a small village, on the border of India and Pakistan, unfolds along with the story of its inhabitants. -Buy Train to Pakistan book online at best prices in India on Bookish Santa and enjoy Free Shipping. Its a narrative of the gruesome events that burned northern India in 1947. It is a documentary of Punjab, its people, its culture. The time was a tumultuous one where, as an outcome of communal riots, many people were killed, their properties looted, women raped and children tortured. The first work by an Indian author that I ever read, Train to Pakistan is a superb book on many levels. It is set in 1947 when the partition of India was taking place and swarms of people – both Hindus and Muslims were migrating in large numbers. Train to Pakistan is the highly acclaimed novel written by Khushwant Singh.
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