Last year, as the crisis of sexual violence in India continued to make the news, I picked up an eleven-hundred-page-long novel called “This Is Not That Dawn” by Yashpal, who died in 1976. The book was written in Hindi and originally published in two installments, in 1958 and 1960. It is considered a masterpiece of partition literature, but it did not appear in English until 2010, when it was translated by Yashpal’s son Anand. The book follows a brother and sister coming of age in Lahore before the 1947 partition of Punjab into Indian and Pakistani halves. The brother, Jaidev Puri, who wishes to become a famous writer, flees Lahore for the Indian towns of Nainital and then Jalandhar. The sister, Tara, a college student, is kidnapped and raped by Muslim men.
It is perhaps the greatest long novel about India, but it was neglected because it was arduous to translate. Anand’s translation is overly plain in places, but it preserves the Hindi rhythms of Yashpal’s prose. This is how the novel begins:
There is a bare-bones humor here, a mockery of ritual, but also something particular to Hindi about the swiftness with which death is expressed. When I was growing up, in Delhi, my grandmother, a refugee from Pakistan, would announce the deaths of relatives in a similar way: “He had gone to the railway station. There, he was finished.” There was no prologue, no pity—just a statement that packed in centuries of Punjabi existentialism. Yashpal’s language does this, too. And that seething neutrality becomes useful when writing about a subject as easy to get wrong—to portray shallowly, unconvincingly, even sentimentally—as rape.
When Yashpal was writing, the ever-present problem of rape had a specific historical dimension: ten years before he published the first installment of the book, seventy-five thousand women were raped (the rapists came from both Hindu and Muslim communities) in the sick confrontation of partition. Ten million people were displaced and one million killed during that tragedy, but those losses were well known and not contested; the bereaved did not deny them. The rapes, however—some of which continued in the form of forced marriages and abductions—were covered up, blanketed in silence. Yashpal’s goal, in his epic novel, was to dispel the macho jubilation of independence by talking directly about the experiences of women.
He did this, in part, through rigorous research. “This Is Not That Dawn”—which, in the original Hindi, was titled “Jootha Sach,” or “False Truth”—has the feel of a documentary, of a work concerned with getting social details right in order to illuminate dark and complicated subjects. Consider the case of Tara’s first rapist. It would be easy for a novelist to portray him as a faceless thug. But Yashpal, having done his research, shows us that he is a bully in other contexts as well: in his practice of Islam, in his marriage. Similarly, when Tara is rescued by an older Muslim man who is eager to convert her, Yashpal describes him “blowing out his prayer-rich breath on Tara, and giving her a blessing,” and handing her books published by Jamaat-e-Islami with titles such as “The Life of God” and “The Scientific Religion of Islam.” Yet the man is not a zealot: magnanimous and high-minded, he wishes for Tara to see a doctor
When Tara is locked up with other abducted women in a courtyard, Yashpal depicts not only their wounds, but their tics and their vanities. One woman with a cloudy eye covers it up “as if the bitterest of all the sufferings visited upon her was the shame of having an ugly eye.” Tara doesn’t want to bathe in front of the other women, “but prudishness at this time would have been an insult to the others,” she thinks, and goes ahead. “What bad karma is tormenting us?” one of the women asks. “Who knows? But we’ll come back in our next life as maggots in a sewer, if we kill ourselves.” The pain of the scene is nearly unbearable, but Yashpal uses such details to intensify our sense of its reality, until we cannot help but feel: this is how it happened. This is how we let it happen.
Yashpal, who wrote from the nineteen-forties up to the nineteen-seventies, is a fascinating figure. A feminist and socialist, he had a history of violence. As a young student, in Punjab, he joined the revolutionary Hindustan Republican Socialist Army, which stunned the British with bombings and assassinations. In 1932, after trying to blow up the Viceroy’s train—an act that shattered the dining car but only threw the Viceroy out of bed—he was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years in jail, a sentence that was eventually commuted to six years with the condition that he never return to Punjab. He didn't go back to Lahore, where he grew up, except for an illegal, furtive visit in the nineteen-forties and a brief stopover in 1955. But in his writing he recreated the city he’d lost—its rituals, its superstitions, its political movements, its people.
“This Is Not That Dawn” is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women’s lives—and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence. Tara’s brother, Jaidev, espouses one sexual standard for himself and another for his sister: when she asks him to help her get out of a forced engagement to a Hindu hooligan so that she can date a Muslim communist, Jaidev refuses, and his refusal triggers Tara’s downfall. Meanwhile, Jaidev furiously courts a woman of his own choosing. Later, when Jaidev learns that Tara has arrived in India—after her long ordeal in what is now Pakistan—he does not try to save her. A raped woman is a tainted woman.
Yashpal is appropriately vicious about Hindu families that won’t take rape victims back into their homes out of fear of besmirching the family name. In one scene, a raped woman, having arrived in Delhi from a sordid refugee camp, comes across her family and her lost child after days of searching. Her mother-in-law kicks her in the head and sends her reeling back to the camp.
Such violence continues today in Punjabi cities such as Delhi. As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family’s past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality. In “India’s Daughter,” a new documentary about the gang rape and murder of the medical student Jyoti Singh—a movie that has been banned in India—one of the men responsible says simply, “A girl is far more responsible for rape than a boy.” Many Indian men would grotesquely nod in agreement.
Yashpal, writing in the nineteen-fifties, sought to indict this culture of men, Hindus and Muslims alike, who value their freedom and power over the rights and lives of women. He did so by being direct and brave in a conservative society that would prefer to not discuss the subject, that maintains a core of silence even at its most gregarious moments. Fifty years later, this book, which can teach us a great deal about our own time, has nearly been forgotten. It has been translated into English but has been published only in India. It should be read everywhere.
