Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan

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Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is a renowned postcolonial thinker known for his two seminal works Black Skin and White Masks (1986) and The Wretched of the Earth (1991). The latter is a paean on the cult of vociferous revolution and it unravels how anticolonial sentiments may address the venture of decolonization. Fanon delves at length how ill equipped are the former colonies to function as independent nations and proffers an excoriating criticism on present day bourgeois nationalism in third world nations. Though written in the second half of the 20th century, and despite its avowed African commitment, it seems to be a prophecy on the plight of our nation too. The present article attempts a Fanonean appraisal on the twin literary jewels of Indian English literature namely Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956). While Rao muses over the pre-colonial India and her struggles, Singh reflects on the nascent independent India. Together they corroborate Fanon’s prophecies in The Wretched of the Earth on the nature of anticolonial struggle and the ramifications of autonomy in newly independent third world countries. Kanthapura portrays anticolonial struggle apropos of national insurgency in a typical south Indian village, Kanthapura and Train to Pakistan depicts the trauma of Partition in a border village, Mano Majra with clinical intensity.
Fanon views decolonization as a violent phenomenon replacing a set of men by another. It executes the strategy in which, “The last shall be the first and first last” (Fanon 28). The settler inaugurates and perpetuates his illicit statute on the colony with violence; police and army are the two wings to ascertain it. It is to be noted that the famous Battle of Plassey (...

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... Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1967. Print.
Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. New York: OUP, 2009. Print
Lazarus, Neil. “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Question of Representation in Postcolonial Theory.” Frantz Fanon: Critical perspectives. Ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini. London: Routledge, 1999. 161-94. Print.
Narayanan, Gomathi. “British Fathers and Indian Sons: Guilt and Pride for the Indian Freedom Movement in the Post-independence Indian Novel in English: The Art of "Scapegoating"” Journal of South Asian Literature 17. 1(1982): 207-24. Print.
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970. Print.
Ray, Robert J. “The Novels of Raja Rao.” World Literature Today 63. 2 (1989): 197-99. Print.
Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. Chennai: Orient Longman, 2005. Print.

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