How does one survive the pain and challenges of one’s grandparents’ lives? It is often thought that it is impossible for those who were there to write about horrible, historic events. The Partition of India is remembered as the splitting of the sub-continent into two nations: Pakistan, a new country formed as a homeland for Muslim Indians; and India, a home primarily for Hindus. There are still Muslims in India, but fewer. This is what many Americans may think of as the Partition, if they think of it at all, but this account leaves out the Punjab, the state of the Sikhs.
This is the assignment Preeti Kaur Rajpal has taken on in her remarkable book, membery. It is about memories that take over the present; any reader will long remember this book.
When the British Raj was finally aware they must leave India, the idea of a partition stirred deep emotions and political struggles. The Muslim League demanded to create Pakistan after the Lahore Resolution in March 1940. The failure of the Congress Party, India, and the Muslim League to find a way to live together destroyed the Sikh leadership’s desire for a multicultural, multi-religion province. The British could only see splitting the enormous territory and population into two.
The Sikhs then demanded a separate state. This was also denied. Violence overwhelmed the lives of millions. Every community suffered massacres of ordinary people. Trains carrying 3,000 to 4,000 refugees, arrived at stations with 2,000 to 3,000 dead bodies as marauding gangs climbed on and killed as many as they could. The violence led to vast migrations. The author thinks of her father’s memories.
“relocates the family into hidden
mountains once caravans of millions snaked across
a bloody border striking august heat under threats” ecdysis III. P13
membery has many layers. Preeti Kaur Rajpal faces the languages in her life: Punjabi and English. She knows other languages, but these two are there for her writing. She learns the Punjabi script of Gurmukhi. This is a script used in Punjab now. It reads left to right. Her poem, aphasia, presents two facing pages; one reads left to right, the other right to left (in the fifth Udaasi, pp 94-94.) It is also the Sikh script used in prayer in which the Sikhism Guru Granth Sahib is written. It means “of the guru’s mouth.” membery includes many Punjabi phrases in Punjabi and English ones. Her reader must have a discipline to match the author’s. “Look it up,” I instruct myself, and “it will pay back.” This old computer has learned some Punjabi, but it could not find it all. Rajpal moves her feelings and imagination into the history of her grandparents and of Punjab as though she had slipped into their memories as one might slip into their clothes. Visiting Patiala, a city in East Punjab, when she was young. “a swarm of cousins parents and grandparents sleep/on the rooftop a long row of hand loomed white sheets” P14, counting your stars in patiala. The children find it odd that the grandfather allows flies to linger on him without swatting them away. She learns more about her grandfather, who he really is. The children are
“giggling/at what old age can undo he tells us they have to sit somewhere/we all have to sit somewhere the flies their thousands of eyes/thousands of flying stars watching the thousands of lights” p14 counting your stars in patiala
Rajpal was not alive when the Partition happened, but she has made her grandparents’ experiences and their awareness of others’ experiences part of her life. In 2001, after the terrorist attack on Americans and others in airplanes and the Twin Towers, a Sikh man was killed because he was wearing a turban. The murderer knew nothing about Sikhs, assumed he was an Arab, figured all Arabs were somehow involved or responsible for the attacks. This is what spurs prejudice: easy actions and stupid ideas. Then, awarding oneself instant permission to kill as though there are no courts and juries or “Hello, what’s up with you?”
The author allows the reader to approach the Sikhs’ spiritual life. As she learns Punjabi and learns to read Gurmukhi text; the language is her key to her ancestors’ thoughts and the principles of Sikhs’ holy leaders. That text is used in modern Punjab, and is also used for prayer. Rajpal divides her book into five udaasis or chapters. They are named in honor of the preaching tours made by the Sikhs’ founder, Guru Nanak Sahib Ji. In this usage, udasi means a long absence from home. The author writes that there are five of the udasis (some say four) made by Guru Nanak Sahib Ji. Her udaasis highlight moments or years of her growing awareness of life in America, called Umreeka in Northern Indian pronunciation. This balances with her own introspective, growing self awareness.
Ragpal’s fourth udassi is headed, “PATRIOT ACT,MISCELLEANEOUS.” Much of this writing is set into “footnotes.” They do not refer back to a previous part of the text. Their content is like significant appendices, pointed information shared between the author and her readers. The information enlarges the meaning of the previous poetry and is numbered, but not by a number on a previous word. The numbers float freely in the page space above the “footnote.” Even page-long language is set under a horizontal line a quarter across the page. Setting it apart from other narration enhances the whole. On page 53, the number 2 is given to this: “sound travels :: all directions” Number 4 on page 54 begins this udaasi’s examination of sound. Number 13 on page 58 is called origin story: The author remembers “her mother read to us” but the origin story begins “first there was light/then there was sound/then the word of the Guru”
Shabad, a word from Sanskrit with obscure derivation, can mean verse, voice, or, in another string of meanings it would include word, utterance, and speech.
before we sleep our mother reads us
the janam sakhi the stories of Guru Nanak
the birth of story told to us
in the long traveling language
the cardinal directions of his epic
journeys on foot p58 origin story (fourth udaasi)
....of my nana’s military coast the drum trembling
the hammer hitting the anvil then stirrup
then the burning song vibrating in my ear p58
Describing the way our ears make sound, she relates to the drums of war. She shares her interest in language and how we learn the world through sound, but she returns to nation wide history:
during the world war
journeying unknown countries
our shabad our word
our war what is
the universe to us printed
sesame seed
....our shabad amongst the things he carried p59
She returns to the hardships of her grandparents. They were there; they may have seen thousands of bodies and the endless lines of people trying to escape.
Rajpal breaks lines to increase the weight of the words and what they can say for her and to us.
The taking
away
the tearing
apart they never spoke
of the tearing a p a r t
time no one spoke
a new country of many
languages where no one spoke odyssey p60 (fourth udassi)
My great grandmother, Katherine Seidel, lived next door to me and my family. She was born in Russia. I thought that was interesting and asked my parents, told my parents, I wanted to know more about her life in Russia. She never spoke about it, they told me. No one of her generation will talk about it. She and I played card games, gin rummy and pick up the parcel or something like that. My father, a soldier in World War II, built a house for his grandmother and two uncles and one for us with the G.I. Bill. It is true, survivors do not want to revisit horrors by hearing themselves describe it.
Preeti Kaur Rajpal took her family’s experiences into her body and thoughts.
Rajpal describes the feeling of strangeness in her family’s new home, the feelings that consecutive waves of newcomers, new Americans, experience in Umreeka: hostility, drifting with no anchor, loss of profession, loss of status, an occasional bright surprise. The evolution from oppressed Irish, No Chinese, No Dogs No Italians to Americans; how that happens is mysterious. How permanent can it be?
Her mother kept a miniature of Guru for good luck on “test/days a school child worried”. When her mother brought
“our miniaturized limbs
to umreeka where we became
half of half and half again
in her red pocket i imagine
where we
became
the small print
of another country p 61, odyssey further (in fourth udaasi)
Her grandfather advised her “always read the small print.” P 53, footnote 1, (fourth udaasi) Being the “small print of another country,” sounds as though they are belittled, but her grandfather knew that the content of small print was big in importance.
The author’s identification with her grandparents expands in her daily life. In the capture she discovers the rot of the Partition’s world.
i descend into the dark halls
climbing down the concrete
stories of my university library
the subterranean air swamps
dry icehusk within the vault
filled with old laws of quiet
mildew colonizes the air
as spores scatter in my gaping p40 the capture (third udaasi)
In following stanzas, the library is no longer a real library. It is the reflection of putrid life left by the wars and the theft of the lives of those who were murdered. Those who were able to exist were stripped of belongings, of individual, and community identity.
“I pull out a coined book from the slot
on the census its half truths and lies
counting wrapped in the white bark
of grand trunk road eucalyptus
its infected stem cankers and leaves
of gall the tattered cotton cloth zeroes
lined up in each molding book of dead
I smudge their residue on my forehead p40
....I run my fingers through annexation
kings and their ruin sons exiled
in faded garb the deeds signed away
in an empire’s official language
the recitations of Yama’s century
released river from the colonial dam
nation lower castes unlanded in record
mouths stuffed shut like book lice
....of enlightenment the neon flickering our stolen
gold the festering boils cut open incandescent
the spoils p41
Rajpal participates in the agony of so many thousands of people, her family’s painful escape, the deaths of Punjabis and Muslims and Hindus. Then, she finds some hope in the laughter of her parents and their parents. It is written into a drawing of her hand with verses on each finger and around the hand.
The closing poem is lafz. The definition I found for that word is word, a saying, a promise. Its origin is Arabic. It is a long poem propelled by the author’s wonder about what life could continue or accomplish through water. She returns to the water she played in as a child taking her grandmother’s water bucket which she was not supposed to do. “we children cup our hands to catch the jumping water...into the river of laughing frogs...” p 9
the place of articulation (second udassi)
A grateful reader can breathe more freely watching Rajpal turn to the natural world.
i immerse my hand
into the sleeping water
where all suffering
melds with the water
singing to become water
in its first memory p 92 lafz (fifth udaasi)
i remove my cotton garments
i remove my countries I remove
my green shoes and dead skin
i descend the slick slip steps p97
While this ending poem is not one titled ecdysis of which four parts occur through the book, it narrates the shedding of her previous skins. Perhaps shedding what is no longer needed, she also finds her new “skin,” a relationship to the outer world. It is her desire to be called by her own name.
the water rises to meet me
laughing and babbling
gurgles her own glee
at remembering to say her
own true name once more p99 lafz (fifth udaasi)
It has been a long series of true journeys that are horrifying and disgusting. These are journeys made by people she loves, but they are their journeys.
For “her own true name” to be authentic, she must be Preeti. It is her name, and she reveals her purpose as preeti means love.
References
“Violence and Migration: A Study of Killing in the Trains During the Partition of Punjab in 1947,” by Navdip Kaur, Proceeding of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 72, Part -1 (2011) pp947-954
The Partition of India and the Sikhs, 1940-1947, by Gurharpal Singh and Giogio Shani, published online by Cambridge University Press, 19 November 2021
(Canada accused India of being linked to the murder of a Sikh leader in Canada, shot in Sept., 2023. It started a major break between the two countries. The man was Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Considered a terrorist by India, his supporters consider him a peaceful advocate for Khalistan, an independent homeland for Sikhs. In India he was wanted for involvement in a 2007 bombing of a cinema and the assassination of a Sikh Indian politician, 2009. The Sikhs in India are 2% of the population.)
Writer and dancer/choreographer Leslie Friedman’s writing has been published in France, India, Poland, and the US. Her dancing and dances have won applause from audiences and critics on four continents. The US State Dept. co-sponsored her with host countries on historic “Firsts:” performance tours to Russia, China, Egypt, Poland, others. She received her History Ph.D. from Stanford, taught there, Vassar, Case Western Reserve, and left academia to write and dance full time. She received the Fulbright Lectureship to India and Senior Lectureship to Bulgaria. She has published two nature memoirs: The Dancer’s Garden and The Story of Our Butterflies.