Review of Malavika Rajkotia’s Unpartitioned Time — A Daughter’s Story: Quiver full of arrows

Malavika Rajkotia tells her father’s story through the prism of Partition and other tales that merge into myth and history

In tracing the arc of time at the moment of her father Sardar Jitinder Singh or Jindo’s death, Malavika Rajkotia unleashes a quiver full of arrows. They fall upon the earth in a blaze of light across the hidden corners of the Indian subcontinent with stories that merge into myth and history.

As Rajkotia tightens her bow, bracing her personal grief against the tide of sorrows that she knows is waiting to drown her vision of what has been called a Punjabiyat, her arrows fall on the dry soil of post-Partition India. Once again, it’s a story of betrayal and loss. Her father Jindo’s life straddles both sides of the great divide; the past left behind at Gujranwala where the family of wealthy landowners lived in Rajkot, (hence their name), and post 1947, in a greatly diminished piece of land just outside of Karnal which is named in remembrance, Rajkot House.

Mosaic of lives

The arrows illuminate the mosaic of lives of the different people she has known or imagined as part of her ancestry, with the delicacy of an oil lamp floating down a dark river that might be of blood. She quotes the famous Sufi mystics who have brought alive the soil of the Punjab in the Mitti poems, where the soil becomes, the earth, dust, mud, churned all too often, with tears and blood. She quotes the verses of several poets and teachers in Punjabi, particularly when it comes to enumerating the deeds of the ten Gurus who are the sentinels of the Sikh faith.

The reader is reminded of Bulleh Shah, the Punjabi poet who describes the eternal churning of our earth much as the farmer tills the soil, “The soil is in ferment, O friend/ Behold the diversity/The soil is the horse, as is the rider/The soil chases the soil, and we hear the clanging of the soil.”

For the most part, the cavalcade of her heroes gallops through the tumultuous history of the Sikhs in all their mystical and heroic grandeur. In different time zones the Sikh contingent are shown as the bulwarks against the marauding hordes sweeping down upon their chosen land watered by the five rivers of the Punjab. Until finally there comes a time during the colonial era when they stand as the loyal soldiers of the Raj.

Rajkotia is able to leaven her tales of valour with an equal ear for mimicry and humour including the ‘desi’ pronunciation of English terms in brackets. As she writes of the new rich: “The joke of the five Ks of the modern Sikh can be understood then: kothi, kudi, kar, kash, kutta (house, woman, car, cash, dog).”

A time for healing

If the arrows in the first half of the narrative sing with the cadences of the Gurbani, the recitation of the sacred verses of the Sikh holy book, the second half is more personal. Or as in some cases they bestow a shower of fragrant petals like those of the orange-tinted flowers of the tree, planted in her grandmother’s garden that falls every morning on a dew flecked cloth of muslin as her grand-daughter sits on it. Later in life we are told, Rajkotia uses the flower petals to dye these cloths a pale blue.

Or as Rajkotia, who is a lawyer and civil rights activist, observes: “A life that was both rebellion and resignation is how we lived in Rajkot House, Karnal.” Her recitation is both a symbol of defiance and healing that she shares with the infinite love that Jindo first bestowed upon her.

Unpartitioned Time: A Daughter’s Story; Malavika Rajkotia, Speaking Tiger, ₹599.

The reviewer is a Chennai-based critic.

Published - October 25, 2024 09:00 am IST