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707 pages

English

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Jhootha Sach is arguably the most outstanding piece of Hindi literature written about the Partiton. Reviving life in Lahore as it was before 1947, the book opens on a nostalgic note, with vivid descriptions of the people that lived in the city s streets and lanes like Bhola Pandhe Ki Gali: Tara, who wanted an education above marriage; Puri, whose ideology and principles often came in the way of his impoverished circumstances; Asad, who was ready to sacrifice his love for the sake of communal harmony. Their lives and those of other memorable characters are forever altered as the carnage that ensues on the eve of Independence shatters the beauty and peace of the land, killing millions of Hindus and Muslims, and forcing others to leave their homes forever. Published in English translation for the first time, Yashpal s controversial novel is a politically charged, powerful tale of human suffering.

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Humanities

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	05 juillet 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184758009
Langue	English

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YASHPAL
This Is Not That Dawn
Translated from the Hindi by Anand
Introduction by Harish Trivedi

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
Part 1 Homeland and Nation
Part 2 The Future of the Nation
Translator s Note
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THIS IS NOT THAT DAWN
YASHPAL (1903-76) began to write while serving a life sentence for his participation as a comrade of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, in the armed struggle for India s independence. What he wrote formed his first collection of short stories, Pinjare ki Udan , published in 1938. After his release Yashpal dazzled Hindi readers with the political journal Viplava , which he founded and published with the help of Prakashvati, a revolutionary whom he had married in prison. He wrote more than fifty books including collections of short stories, novels, essays, a play and memoirs of his revolutionary days.
Yashpal died in 1976 while writing the fourth volume of his reminiscences.
ANAND, a former print and broadcast journalist, has translated Divya , Yashpal s other major novel, into English, as well as his short stories into English and French. He was the editor of the fourteen-volume Collected Works of Yashpal , published in 2008. He has also translated Canadian writers Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler and Hugh MacLennon into Hindi.
HARISH TRIVEDI is professor of English at the University of Delhi and has been visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He has co-edited Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice and has translated from Hindi into English a wide range of poetry and short fiction as well as a biography, Premchand: A Life .
To the memory of my mother Prakashvati who, more than any other, wanted to see this work by my father, in English translation
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged light This is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom, we had set out in sheer longing
- Dawn of Freedom , Faiz Ahmed Faiz
(Translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)
Introduction
I. Life and Works
FOR HALF A CENTURY NOW, HINDI READERS HAVE BEEN OF THE VIEW THAT THIS novel is the greatest Partition novel ever written. Yashpal s Jhootha Sach (2 vols, 1958, 1960; literally, The False Truth), beginning in the early 1940s in Lahore and carrying its populous cast of characters forward up to 1957 in Delhi, has an epic sweep, a degree of verisimilitude, and a range of human concerns that no other novel on this cataclysmic theme in any language can begin to match. The vast Anglophone discourse on Partition and its literary representations, which got a new fillip in 1997 when it was the fifty years not so much of Independence as of Partition that emerged as the focus of attention at least in intellectual and academic discussions, will need to be substantially recast now that this novel becomes available in English. So far, it may even seem, it has all been a bit like talking about Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
A Revolutionary Life
Yashpal led the kind of dynamic and dramatic life that could itself be the stuff of fiction. Born on 3 December 1903 in Ferozepore Cantt in Punjab where his mother worked in an orphanage, he was educated initially, from age seven to fourteen, at the Gurukul Kangri, an Arya Samaj institution where he imbibed reformist Hindu values as well as an intense hatred for foreign rule. After further schooling in Lahore, he went for his BA to the National College there where he met Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bhagvati Charan, and became with them a prominent member and then leader of what later came to be called the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association/Army (HSRA) which worked for liberating India through revolutionary armed struggle. After his more famous comrades had shot dead the British police officer Saunders in Lahore on 17 December 1928 and thrown bombs in the Central Assembly in Delhi on 8 April 1929, Yashpal himself on 23 December 1929 detonated the bomb which blew up the dining car of the Viceroy s special train while Lord Irwin, two carriages away, was thrown out of his bed to the floor.
After Chandrashekhar Azad died in a shoot-out with the police on 27 February 1931, the HSRA regrouped with Yashpal being elected as its commander-in-chief. On being ambushed by the police in the house in Allahabad of an Irish woman sympathizer who had taken the name Savitri, Yashpal ran out of ammunition and was arrested on 23 January 1932. He was subjected to ideological interrogation and attempts at persuasion by the British police officer with whom he had before being arrested exchanged bullets and by a loyal Indian police officer with whom he traded verses from the Bhagavad Gita, each of them citing shlokas which supported their own respective beliefs. Defended in court by his lawyer Shyam Kumari Nehru, a niece of Jawaharlal, Yashpal was sentenced to fourteen years rigorous imprisonment.
Meanwhile, for some years before his arrest, he had developed a relationship with another member of his revolutionary group, Prakashvati, and now from jail he wrote to her offering to release her from all bonds so that she could lead her own free life. In response, she petitioned the authorities to be permitted to marry Yashpal, and as nothing could be found in the jail regulations to deny such an unprecedented request, they were married in jail in a brief civil ceremony conducted by the Deputy Commissioner on 7 August 1936, following which Yashpal returned to the barracks and Prakashvati to study dentistry in Karachi. As a result of the elections held under the newly passed Government of India Act, a Congress Government came to power in the United Provinces in 1937 and one of its first acts was to order the release of all political prisoners, including, after some initial objections from the British Governor, a violent militant such as Yashpal. The HSRA was by now virtually disbanded and defunct, and his release on 2 March 1938 marked the end of Yashpal s life as a revolutionary.
Literary Career
Barred from entering Punjab, Yashpal now decided to make Lucknow his home, and he took to writing as his new calling, wishing to use it as a medium for the same political ends. He founded a Hindi journal titled Viplava (i.e., revolution, or more accurately, cataclysm, with the same etymological connotation of a deluge that drowns out the old order), which he described as the avant garde of the Indian National Movement . His wife set up a publishing house called Viplava Karyalaya in 1941 and a printing press-Sathi Press-in 1944. Prakashvati stood by him not as a romantic muse but rather as a more sturdy and pragmatic partner who helped Yashpal find the creative and intellectual space for going on to write seventeen collections of short stories, twelve novels, and over twenty other books of essays, political analysis and travelogue.
Probably wisely from an artistic point of view, he did not, except in his first novel, turn his experiences as a revolutionary into fiction; instead, he wrote them up as a detailed factual account or personal testimony under the title Simhavalokan (3 vols, 1951, 1952, 1955; literally, A Lion s Eye-View but idiomatically and more modestly, A Backward Glance); this is available in selected extracts in English translation together with a linking commentary by Corinne Friend under the title Yashpal Looks Back (1981). (For further bibliographical information on English translations of Yashpal s works and for a selection of his photographs, see www.viplava.com ).
On the postage stamp that was issued in his honour, Yashpal is described as writer and patriot -except that the parallel Hindi text, krantikari va lekhak (revolutionary and writer) seems rather more accurate both in terms of chronology and political category. It is a rare conjunction, matched in Hindi perhaps only by Satchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan Agyeya (1911-87) whom Yashpal mentions as a younger and technically expert member of the HSRA, who wrote an autobiographical novel he had first sketched out in jail, Shekhar: Ek Jivani (2 vols, 1942, 1944; Shekhar: A Life), and whose reputation as a novelist and poet in Hindi, I think, stands even higher than Yashpal s. One wonders what would have happened to revolution on the one hand and literature on the other had some other revolutionaries with a marked literary inclination and talent lived on, such as Bhagat Singh or Ramprasad Bismil , author of Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil men hai (We have now decided to put a price on our heads), perhaps the most defiant and moving of all the revolutionary poems in Hindi/Urdu.
Yashpal s first published book was Pinjre ki Udan (1938; The Flight of the Cage), comprising short stories written in jail. As with many Indian (as distinct from Western) writers, his numerous short stories are regarded as constituting quite as important a part of his oeuvre as his longer fiction. Of his twelve novels, five are regarded as short novels (but only relatively, for they are still on average over 200 pages in length) while the others are more extensive in scope. His other works include collections of essays and accounts of his travels to several Western countries including several times to the Soviet Union, to several other communist countries of the Eastern Bloc, and to Mauritius.
Most of Yashpal s fiction show a committed and urgent engagement with contemporary issues and reality. The three predominant themes that can be said to run throughout his work are revolution, romance and gender equality, and they all come blended together in most of his major fiction, though not always in artistic harmony or with thematic cogency. Four of his early novels are all concerned with the evolving political situation in the country while they also explore the complexity of man-woman relationships including the place of sex in them. Dada Comrade (1941) depicts under thin disguise some aspects of Yashpal s own experiences as a r