How does one become two? How did Hindustan get divided into India and Pakistan? What goes into a partition? What gets taken out, ravaged, savaged, bloodied, battered, maimed, murdered, lost? What happens to a soul that straddles nations and religions? What happens to the language in which Hindustan has been written and translated?

Two poets from different historical moments occupy the same hell and speak of these issues: such is the conceit of Dozakhnama. Rabishankar Bal has done a tremendous job of telling us both about the lives of two writers — Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan “Ghalib” (1797-1869) and Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) — and also about a nation and a language that are partitioned. Ghalib lived through the 1857 mutiny against the British and Manto through the 1947 Partition of India. Both are pivotal moments in the history of Hindustan and of the city that served for much of that time as its capital — Delhi, Dilli, Dehli.
One cannot tell which way the story will go if one did not already know. The novel frames itself endlessly — it pretends to be a long-lost novel written by Manto about Ghalib in the form of stories within stories being translated for us by the writer who does not himself read Urdu and who has to get a translator to help him. So we read a translated novel about a translated novel that gives us history and literature and love and life and death. And Delhi.
This novel is about many things; arguably, it is as much about Manto’s Bombay as it is about Ghalib’s Delhi. But in its meandering historical course and in its passionate poetic musings, it is a novel about the folly played out in the rise and fall of Delhi.
Two better interlocutors we could not ask for in a discussion of these subjects. In the novel, Ghalib dislikes the court of Delhi but that does not prevent him from lamenting the demise of the culture, the tehzeeb, that Delhi had nonetheless created: “To me, the death of Delhi was the death of adab and akhlaq.” The death of Delhi foretells not only the death of culture, but also the death of a fabric in which people were indifferent to whether the tapestry was woven by Hindus or Muslims.
One culture, then, despite two countries; Manto puts this most poignantly when he begins the novel with the end of Partition: “The world has never seen so much killing, so many rapes, so much treachery, all of which began in 1947 on the pretext of there being two nations; today, you
lie in a grave in one of those countries, and I, in a grave in the other.”
Two people divided in time and by politics, united by a love of wine, women and song. Both intellectual snobs — Ghalib thinks he is second only to Amir Khusrau and Manto assumes he alone can feel the pulse of his world. Both love Urdu even though Ghalib states that Farsi is the superior poetic language and Manto failed his Urdu exams in school. Ah, Urdu! Born in Delhi in the 13th and 14th centuries, Muhammad Husain Azad described “the tree of Urdu (that) grew in the soil of Sanskrit and (Braj) Bhasha, (and) flourished in the breezes of Persian”. No one knows when Urdu first “started”, but Amir Khusrau is most often acknowledged as being its progenitor. Except the language in which Khusrau wrote was not called Urdu — that name was an invention of the 19th century when the British insisted on a divide between Hindus and Muslims. Despite this enforced schism, Urdu continued to be the language of all Hindustan well into the 20th century. As Ghalib and Manto remind us, Urdu was and continues to be a composite language, cutting across community, religion, class, region and nation.
One of the consequences of this syncretism was a nation united by language; I speak not of an “India” created by the British but of “Hindustan” — what now comprises north India and Pakistan. Dozakhnama is filled with countless examples — countless — of casual friendships, political alliances, poetic exchanges between Hindus and Muslims. It is this syncretism that was repeatedly targeted, beginning in 1857 and culminating in 1947.
To Frances W. Pritchett’s brilliant study of Urdu — Nets of Awareness — we owe a deep debt for tracing the decline of Urdu and Delhi. According to her, “(Altaf Husain) Hali, recited at (a) Lahore mushairah (as early as the 1870s) an elegy that mourned the loss of the tehzeeb of Delhi: ‘Oh friend, don’t speak of Delhi as it used to be,/I cannot possibly bear to hear this story.’” The British response to the 1857 mutiny was bloody and relentless and, most damagingly, divisive. While Hindus were allowed back into the city in early 1858, “it was not until November 1859, more than two years after the Muslims of Delhi had been expelled from their city (that they were given permission to return) — and the city to which they returned was irrevocably transformed”.
Won at a very high price, the British battle for Delhi proved decisive for their policy of divide and rule, a policy that both India and Pakistan seem to have taken on fully as their own. This is the reason why Manto spurns the opportunity to make money by claiming refugee status in Pakistan: “Here the country had been partitioned because of misguided politics, and was I supposed to cash in on this and become a rich man overnight? It wasn’t possible to stoop so low.” Echoing Ghalib’s cries of despair after 1857, Manto says of 1947 that “(it) was not just the Partition of India, not just Hindustan ki taksim, this was also a partition of friendship.” Ghalib finds succour only in friends in 1857 — “In times of distress, someone or the other always stood by me. Hira Singh and Shivjiram Brahman were like my sons, my pupils…”
Too many policies were initiated to militate against such syncretism. A Mirza Ghalib writing a paean in praise of Kashi, a Saadat Hasan being provided safe escort by Ashok Kumar — these were the people who died in 1947, who had been dying since 1857. A Delhi that was home to Urdu and Hindi was torn apart repeatedly: “The death that visited us during the riots was not the lord’s gift, my brothers. There was no funeral prayer for them, no janaza, you can still hear their unfulfilled souls fluttering their wings…”
Wan at the prospect of ever-more destruction being visited on Delhi, Ghalib reminisces, “Emperor Shahjahan had two lines of Amir Khusrau’s poetry inscribed on the walls of the Red Fort — ‘Agar firdaus bar rue zamin ast, hamin ast o hamin ast o hamin ast (If there is heaven on earth it is here, it is here, it is here).’” Khusrau may have said these lines about Kashmir, but Ghalib reminds us that this is what Dilliwalas used to think about their city. Perhaps most notably, one can hear echoes of Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit in Khusrau’s Farsi. The linguistic divide, so spuriously laid over the religious divide, was alien to Ghalib’s Delhi and Manto’s Hindustan. Dozakhnama gives us these unending stories about the end of a world that it nonetheless assures us can never end. The story of Delhi goes on — its syncretism battered and bruised, it continues to speak in a mongrel language that is the stuff of epic tales.