Train to Pakistan.

Ethnic conflict has been a staple of cross-cultural contact for as long as more than one race and religion have tried to co-exist. In the border between Pakistan and India, the theme of revenge killing calling for ever more revenge killing has found a clear voice in TRAIN TO PAKISTAN by Khushwant Singh. Nearly everyone in the novel is flawed to some degree with the effects and aftereffects of ethnic cleansing. There is no clear cut hero although a criminal named Jugga comes closest. Jugga is a Sikh thief who happens to take a Moslem woman as a lover. Their illicit relation is a microcosm of all that is terribly wrong when the cut of a person's beard counts more than the content of his soul. Jugga is far from an angel, but he slowly grows in stature from the baseness of his profession to one who is forced to contemplate the consequences of his own role in the ongoing cycle of killing between Sikh and Moslem. He is used as a pawn in the Sikh's killing of innocent Moslems, and his choice is the same that all men of revived conscience have had to face in similar such times: should he participate willingly even eagerly in the proposed slaughter of a train of deported Moslems shipped unceremoniously to Pakistan or should he speak out against the insanity that is insane only to him? The various flaws of all the characters of the novel--their vicious caste system, their willingness to demonize other races, their unwillingness to question even the most fundamental elements of their dogma--all stem from the cycle of killing that did not begin with the trainload of Sikh corpses that entered the sleepy town of Mano Majra in India. This mass killing is simply a sociological given: its root cause goes back uncounted centuries of strife between Moslem and Sikh yet it is hailed by Sikhs as 'the' reason to replicate the slaughter of Moslems on yet another train headed to Pakistan. Khushwant Singh portrays a society of confused, angry villagers who see no way out of the ongoing cycle of killing except to perpetuate that killing. Singh suggests that the men of good conscience who try to make even token attempts to bring this insanity to a halt are few and far between. The events of clashes between Sikh and Moslem that have occurred since this book was first published in 1956 further suggest that such men of good conscience have grown fewer in number.

I didn't expect that this was going to be a terrific novel and it wasn't. However, I got caught up in it with its perspective on how individuals were impacted by the participation of India. It was an awful but riveting tale. I would recommend it.