ABSTRACT

Written through memories of the Partition trauma ten brief years after the event, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan is set in a small village, Mano Majra, near the India–Pakistan border during the summer of 1947. Through two primary figures, the narrative represents two aspects of the Sikh nation during the Partition. Juggat Singh, or Jugga, the local “badmash” from the rural area, symbolizes the feminine principle in Sikhism, namely seva (service) and sangat (congregation), traditionally associated with the female gender, to which Jugga gives new meaning through his self-sacrificing act. Iqbal, the modern, foreign-return, western-educated, circumcised, Euro-interpellated, clean-shaven, shorthaired mona Sikh, symbolizes the altered ethos of the Sikh nation. In this chapter I argue that Sikhs, gendered and feminized, are represented as either self-sacrificing, self-righteous, or inactive while Sikh women, once again, are absent from the narrative and thus erased from dominant historiography and ideology, and repressed from memory.