This Is Not That Dawn: Jhootha Sach Read Free

and lost forever. The emotional impact of the novel seems to be in direct proportion to the imaginative completeness with which Yashpal created this core location, for the rest of the novel seems to follow naturally and inevitably from it. It is possible to map the lanes, roads and various neighbourhoods of Lahore accurately enough from this novel, as it is in the case of Joyce’s Dublin which was also recreated from memory in exile, with the difference that in this case, the geographical verisimilitude exists not only for its own sake (or indeed for art’s sake) but also serves to undergird the imaginative authenticity of the historical tumult.
    Such scrupulous specificity of space is fully matched by Yashpal’s plotting of fictional time. The main characters are quickly introduced and then, all of them are shown to live under an air of tense apprehension as more and more dire news follow in rapid succession. The hero Jaidev Puri is himself a writer and an engaged journalist who serves as an antenna for political developments on the fiercely contested national stage. The year 1946, resonant with urgent political sounds of all kinds of import, gives way to 1947, and now each day seems to dawn with some new foreboding. Over the last few months in the run-up to Independence, from May 1947 onwards, almost each successive development is flagged with a precise date by Yashpal: 4 May, 11 May, various dates in June when the deadline for transfer of power is still believed to be June 1948 as announced by Attlee, and then from late July almost every alternate day is marked by unforeseen events that gather pace to sweep the characters literally off their feet. It is as if the whole cast of the novel were holding their breath and listening to the ticking away of a time-bomb.
    In contrast, the second volume of the novel, covering a whole decadefrom 1947 to 1957 and set in Delhi, Jalandhar and Lucknow with many spatial intersections, unfolds at a markedly slower pace, to convey mimetically the effect that while lives can be uprooted and devastated in virtually a moment, before one knows what has happened, it takes forever to pick up the pieces that are left and to rearrange them in some residual pattern of survival. In the novel’s compositional harmony and rhythm, the sweeping
drut
of the disaster is followed by a long
vilambit
of rescue and recuperation. The novel carries on until 1957 for one other strategic reason, which is that Yashpal wishes to show a corrupt Congress minister losing in the general elections held that year!
Men and Women
    The novel begins with the death of an old woman and though the laid-down rituals of mourning that follow are somewhat comically treated, the death and the change in domestic order is a premonition of many more deaths and the change in the political order that will swiftly follow. It is significant that it is a woman who dies and not some old patriarch, which is the figure more familiarly deployed in fiction to signal the change of an era. Throughout his fiction but most notably in this novel, Yashpal creates a whole range of strong women characters, with Tara, Kanak, Sheelo, Urmila and Banti the foremost among them, who are nearly all distinctly attractive in traditional feminine ways but who turn out to be far more than that. Being women, they are, predictably, the main victims of the catastrophic events and they suffer the most, but then, unusually, they also pick themselves up and with sheer grit and determination and a sturdy independence of mind and action, they build a new life for themselves—except Banti who dies protesting against hypocritical male norms of family honour.
    In a large number of cases, such reconstruction of their lives involves not only overcoming adverse public circumstances but also taking a decision to liberate themselves from the men thrust upon them by arranged marriages, and boldly marching out in defiance of all convention to forge new bonds with other men these