Religion is personal; not a sword but the glow on your forehead, says Gulzar

The past is present. More than 70 years later, Partition remains a subterranean voice, lurking, seething, periodically surfacing in spaces of quiet horror. There’s no truth or reconciliation. This is what Gulzar feels as he travels back to the time a boy called Sampooran Singh crossed the border. It has taken him a long time to write about those memories. Writing created resolution.Gulzar spoke to Namita Devidayal about his recently published books on Partition — Footprints on Zero Line, and Two, his first novel
How do you connect seemingly unrelated moments in history?
Whenever there is a communal riot, I feel it is a splinter from that one historic cut that happened in 1947. As a child I saw things, I heard stories, I saw a boy being dragged out of my school and the man returning with blood on his sword. The feelings that surge inside me remind me of those days. They come back every time there is communal tension — not only in India, but even on the borders. When the Rohingya crisis happened, the feelings started again. I sympathise with those who have to leave their homes. The children who came from Tibet with the Dalai Lama have had their own children here but their bonds and roots remain there. Yet, they’ve never seen the skies and the earth of their country. My country is India but my motherland remains Pakistan.
In your story titled ‘Fear’, you write a searing account about a man in the 1992 Mumbai riots. Please talk about this emotion and its relationship with violence.
It is out of fear that you kill the other person thinking that, by doing that, he will not kill you. This is the psyche that develops if you see people killing, especially in your childhood. That fear is defensive. He may not even attack you. Fear comes from your past observations. That fear settles inside you. It becomes your psyche. Something triggers it and it fuels that subconscious. There is no logic to it.
Are netas fuelling the communal problem?
India was one place on the globe which always had a culture of philosophers and thinkers. Long back, culturally speaking, people here had already absorbed Islam. There were conversions, yes, but they became Indian. In fact, Maharana Pratap had Afghan commanders fighting against the Mughals. So it was never a fight of religion. It was the British who defined religion to divide and rule. That is what created the heat. That is what created the cut. Partition happened because of the rulers, fuelled by a few powerful families on both sides who stood to gain. It is the politicians that keep everyone fighting. At the ground level, people still meet with the same warmth. There is a line in the novel: This arrogant, conceited history strives ahead with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realise how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet.
You have written your first novel at 80. What is the secret of your creative stamina?
When you shake mercury it keeps trembling until it reaches a point when it stops. When you get me started on Partition, that is how I am. It goes back and keeps shaking me up, on and on. When this novel came to play, I felt I could pour in all my experiences. Wherever I met people, and found connections with Partition, even if they were living in England, I would put them all into the book. Writing this novel was a giant purge.
What language do you feel most comfortable writing in? Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, or English?
It is Urdu, my mother tongue. My schooling was in Urdu. My diaries are written in Urdu. In those days, all Punjabis, especially males, learned Urdu. Urdu and Persian were the language of business. Women learned either Hindi or Gurmukhi because religious books were written in those languages and that is all they were expected to read. So the husband used to write letters to the wife in Urdu and she would have to get it read by someone in the village! It was an interesting divide.
What, according to you, gets lost in translation when you write about a particular world and then change the language?
When others had attempted to translate the novel, they weren’t able to capture the nuances of the dialect. For example, in Punjabi, Hamid becomes Mida when you call out to him, and when you refer to him it remains Hamid. Or, Painti-Chhatti, 3536, is the owner of a truck with that number. My discussion with the original translators was that this book cannot be for English people. It is for Indians. Culturally they will understand. It sounds totally different when you write bearing that in mind. That is why I finally translated it myself. A writer thinks with his pen.
Do you believe that Hindus and Muslims can coexist peacefully?
If they can live together anywhere else — in America or England — why not here? Your religion is your personal belief. It is not a sword, it is the glow on your forehead. I find the question redundant.