The Blood Sacrifice: Partition and the Psyche
In 2008, we brought this subject to the table at a conference in Lahore, said Dr Sanjeev.
On May 10, 1857, the first rumblings of the Indian Rebellion broke out in the garrison town of Meerut. The military uprisings that followed in spurts across the northern part of the country are well known, they have found their way into every history textbook since. Few people, however, know that shortly after the eruption in Meerut, came the ransacking of the mental hospital in Delhi. It is a historic event, one that was soon buried in the annals of history and very nearly lost for good.
At the risk of proffering moral platitudes, one might say that the inmates, the ailing and the insane, weren't important enough victims. That however, does seem to fit the bill. The Partition brought with it the bloodshed of millions, with sectarian differences seeping into every aspect of civil life. Hindu doctors and patients alike were targeted at the hospital in Lahore and their Muslim counterparts in India were subject to blatant massacre, once in a clinic in Paharganj. They immigrated en masse, doctors, nurses and practitioners, with little thought left to spare for the patients who remained behind. It would be nearly four years after Independence that the mental patients were transferred back to their countries. Only half the original number returned from Lahore and although the government of Punjab was asked to respond to the allegations of violence within these institutions, the deaths were attributed to causes like malaria and subsequently forgotten.
Can social trauma disturb the individual psyche? The emergence of thinkers like Charles Darwin and more importantly, Freud, did shape Western psychiatric thought to link the universal with the deeply personal, according to the Psychological Impact of Partition, a collection of essays edited by Dr Alok Sarin and Dr Sanjeev Jain.
What:The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India
Edited by: Dr Sanjeev Jain and Dr Alok Sarin
The book does, at its outset, describe a patient who “ran the whole gamut of political belief,” from being an admirer of Bose to concerning himself with the welfare of untouchables to attempting suicide after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi! Identity, sociocultural fabrics and the politics of the day, doctors had come to learn, had a definite bearing on psychiatric disease.
Folklore and culture are rich with references to the traumas of Partition, with writers like Sadat Hassan Manto’s “terrifying chronicles of the damned,” according to Ashok Bhalla, which delved into the darkest depths of the psyche. Social sciences, folk music and literature have dealt with the subject with depth and sympathy in equal measure and find their way into the book, too. Mainstream psychiatry, however, has had precious little to say on the subject, although the scars of Partition remain evident, even today.
"The silence was telling," says Dr Alok Sarin, a psychiatrist and former Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library , Teen Murti House , New Delhi. That led Dr Sarin and Dr Sanjeev Jain, Professor of Psychiatry, NIMHANS, down into the "abyss"of history, to explore the agonies that came with the sectarian hatred, mass uprootings and the shattering of social identity that came with Partition.
The Psychological Impact of Partition is arguably, the first of its kind from the medical field itself. As Dr Sarin and Dr Jain describe, the lack of a social healthcare framework and a distinct focus on "modernity" in medicine, psychiatric treatment for the mentally ill in India became synonymous with confinement, methods like ECT and pharmaceuticals. "The impact of Partition has been felt and experienced first hand by medical health professionals at the time," explains Dr Sarin. "Still, very little was done by way of examining the situation."
“In 2008, we brought this subject to the table at a conference in Lahore,” said Dr Sanjeev. “We were told the matter was too sensitive and subsequently given a dinnertime slot.” To their surprise, the place was packed. They describe also, instances of practitioners recounting events from their own lives, or those of their families that linked back to the Partition. It is a subject of great complexity, where the average man found himself capable of violence he could not until this point have even imagined. The victims needed support and it seemed the perpetrators of violence had suffered untold miseries too.
Their research, combined with the fellowship at Teen Murti House, gave them access to newspaper archives, eyewitness accounts and medical data from the British Library, along with interactions within the field is the first look at the effects of the Partition on the psyche. They found, in Lord Mountbatten’s personal collection, a cutting from the Statesman which said healthcare systems would remain undivided by partition. This, of course, was not the case and this “mindless partitioning of patients” brought what Dr Sanjeev calls, “the second epiphany.” The barbaric processes involved are laid out Manto’s Toba Tek Singh: “We thought it was fiction when it turned out to be based on actual fact,” says Dr Sanjeev.
More chillingly still, the senseless traumas caused on millions showed the definite underpinnings of political sleight. “You have hospitals, teachers, lawyers and doctors all divided on religious grounds,” he says. “There was a loss of continuity, a disruption in the sense of rootedness and all of it caused by political processes. Not random processes either, but very deliberate, designed for the systematic destruction of a civil society.” It’s an old game, they agree, one that has found great favour in politics: Hindus versus Muslims, Palestine versus the Jews and so on. “In India, that society was so integrated and cohesive that to break it apart seemed to require a blood sacrifice of a million people,” Dr Sanjeev remarks.
Traces of this remain today, in Uttar Pradesh, for instance. “Allahabad is Allahabad, how can you break it up into different cultures? Once you start making divisions, you don’t stop. Every person is different, yes but we have been made to believe to see chasms that cannot be crossed.”