As part of the
consume aim of this blog, I am combining both my personal experience (and photographs) of my mid-semester retreat to Amristar with a book review of
Train to Pakistan. This was definitely one of the most powerful experiences I have had yet in India. I would love to hear what you think. Am I the only one who had never heard of the
Partition of India, this event that killed nearly a million people- Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims? What are they teaching us in school?
Train to Pakistan by
Khushwant Singh
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
This book, particularly this version with photographs from Margaret Bourke-White (a pioneer in photojournalism) was fantastic. It is short but a powerful story about the Partition of India in 1947—an event I am sorry to say I had not known much about until coming on this field study to India. I began it on my own train ride to Pakistan.
Okay, so maybe not Pakistan, but a train to Amritsar and the Pakistan border. That has to count for something, right?
Reading this during that experience both impacted my experience and my reading. The Indian train system itself is something to marvel at. When this still functioning colonial train first pulled up to the station I just stared. People hanging out of windows, out of the open door frames, crammed to the roof. I think that Khushwant Singh’s description was remarkably parallel to my journey. Compartments made for fifty with “almost two hundred people, sitting on the floor, on seats, on luggage racks, on trunks, on bed rolls, and on each other,” the oppressive “heat and smell… tempers frayed [because] someone had spread himself out too much or had trod on another’s foot on the way to the lavatory” (59). All of the above happened on the short two hour crawl to Amritsar.
