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Book Name:What the Body Remembers Publisher: Rupa Price: Rs. 195

A SELF DIVIDED

This is a novel written by a second-generation Canadian living in Milwaukee. The odd thing is that it's a book set in the India of the Raj, in an area of the subcontinent that is now Pakistan and it's about a Sikh girl whose husband wants to add a second wife to his family. Of course, not so odd when you realise that the second generation Canadian is actually Sikh.

The heroine, if you may call her that, Roop is 16 and beautiful and when she is married to a man 25 years her senior in 1937, she already knows he has a barren first wife, Satya. The marriage is arranged. Roop, though naïve, realises that her father needs money and the only way to get it is for her to marry well. She is also confident that she will over her husband, Sardarji's, first wife, Satya. The two of them will become sisters.

What the Body Remembers begins with the first meeting between Roop and Satya. Satya decides that Roop will bear her husband the child that she, Satya could not. Then the novel flashes back to Roop's childhood and takes you to her wedding, then follows Roop's agony as her children are given to Satya. And underlines Satya's jealousy of her younger co-wife.

1947 comes along and as the subcontinent gains its Independence from the British, India is divided into India, West Pakistan, and East Pakistan. (The line that became the initial border of the two countries was drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, an Englishman who'd never set foot in the Punjab. When the British left India, they formed West Pakistan--now called Pakistan--from the division of Punjab, where the novel takes place, and East Pakistan from the division of Bengal. East Pakistan broke away from Pakistan with another war in 1971 to become Bangladesh.)

While Partition is a subject much written about and filmed in India, the English novels on the subject are few and far between. What the Body Remembers is the first Sikh novel on the subject. When the British pulled out of India, the Sikh community in Punjab was caught in struggle for land between the two majority communities, the Hindus and Muslims. Four and a half million Sikhs used to live in the part of Punjab region that is now Pakistan. Today, there are only 1000. Both sides were equally violent in their struggle to survive. Both equally fanatical and determined to pursue a course of what is now called 'ethnic cleansing'.

The historians in India and Pakistan have their own statistics and even dates for Partition and the events that followed. English historians place the number of people killed during Partition at 2 million. Indian and Pakistani historians place it closer to 5 million. Each community has different heroes: Indians do not see Mountbatten as the knight in shining armour who liberated them, and contrary to the Hindu point of view, Gandhi is not a great hero to the Sikhs because he gave their land away. To Pakistani historians, Jinnah is not the obstinate man who unleashed violence, but a saint who was forced to make a terrible choice between the 40 million Muslims left in India and the 90 million whom he could make a homeland for in Pakistan. "And so the first step to understanding Partition is to realize that Satya (Truth) is a fictional character," writes Shauna Singh Baldwin in her essay on her novel.

The Partition in the novel is between Beauty (Roop) and Truth (Satya). Though they are the names of a man's two wives, the novel is, in fact, a story about division rather than a story about marriage. What is scrutinized in this story is not a marriage between a man and a woman, but between a feudal and a modern way of life. The novel explores the self-division that exists in India in which feudal and secular values try to make a place for each other, much as Satya and Roop do in their husband's house. It is a self-division that leads not only to the problems in the marriage, but culminates in the political violence of the country's partition.

Satya, the first wife, is jealous of Roop. Her barrenness is not the only reason why her relationship with her Oxford-educated husband has soured - she cannot hold her tongue, and occasionally does sound like a post-colonial Indian teaching in America, as if the author had forgotten what Sikh women were like in the 1940's. However, it is Satya, with her bitter refusal to compromise who represents modern India, rather than Sardarji, the husband with the exposure to England. Satya is the one who rebels and the one who has to die before the novel ends. Before Satya dies, however, she does everything she can to disrupt Sardarji's second marriage. First, she insists on taking over Roop's children the moment they are born and Sardarji is powerless to resist her because he knows what he owes her. Roop's beauty, to put it metaphorically, lacks the power to stand up to the beauty of truth

The final chapters deal with the partition of India and the characters finding themselves in a part of Punjab that has suddenly become Pakistan. Baldwin makes the two women and their family her main focus, rather than the history of events leading to partition and independence. A tale of fathers estranged from daughters, mothers from sons, husbands from wives, becomes a metaphor for history, without having to refer to that history directly. The story of what marriage means to a conventional Indian woman is, here, told as a story of both exile and being uprooted -- Roop leaves one "home" to go to another. For both Roop and Satya, the meaning of "home" is a constantly evolving and changing, so that the familiar becomes the strange and the strange the familiar.

This, too, mirrors the other theme in the novel the need to belong somewhere whether in exile or in one's husband's home. When history does enter the novel, Baldwin introduces it through the conversations that Sardarji has with his politically inclined English colleagues; or in descriptions of the colonial arena in which Sardarji lives, works and moves, and which Roop finds so extraordinary when she compares it to the narrow confines of her village, Pari Darwaza or Doorway of Fairies. The book climaxes with the actual Partition - the upheaval is admirably controlled and manages to avoid the excesses familiar to Bollywood blockbusters, or even to echo The Jewel in the Crown.. This is a novel whose themes and characters have been orchestrated with great confidence and without sacrificing complexity.

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