I didn’t get to write on “Roots” last week, but after the discussion today I thought that I’d do that here. On my first reading of the story, the parts that struck me the most were a moment at the beginning and the end. Upon further reflection, I think that is an intentional effect of the story’s design. What struck me initially was this passage:
The surgery on Hindustan has been performed with crippled hands and blunt scalpels so that thousands of arteries have been slit, a river of blood is flowing, and no one has any stamina left to stitch the wounds up (189)
It is crafted, I think, to be more than just visually and sensorially evocative. The way it is formulated implies a distinction between the “crippled hands” that conducted this surgery and the “no one" left to stitch the wounds. A distinct agent performed the surgery. That agent slit the arteries and unleashed that river of blood — now no one remains with the energy to stitch those wounds up. Hindustan did not perform this surgery on itself. Ismat Chughtai carefully constructs this metaphor in such a way that it is an outside agent that inflicted the wounds of partition, and that the bleeding that resulted is merely because “no has any stamina left to stitch the wounds up” — it is the result of exhaustion, of passivity. To an extent, this is fair. In any portrayal of partition, it is essential to spotlight the British colonial role. They actively fomented religious tensions in India. At the moment of decolonization, they handled Partition with a disastrous lack of care. But a metaphor that puts the onus of partition’s atrocities entirely on the British lands as misled. It obfuscates the active and violent role that (those who would become) Indians and Pakistanis played; it obfuscates the fact that those religious tensions far predate the British. In a sense, positioning the violence as the responsibility of the British denies Indian agency. Rendering Indians as passive victims of Britain-induced wounds — at the moment of partition and in the history that preceded it — denies Indians' active role in the violence. Acknowleding that agency means acknowleding that the philosophical and historical tensions between Islam and Hinduism (or Islam and Sikhism) predate colonialism. They are a tension in Indian culture that needs to be reconciled as such.
Despite this, I think my commentary here makes me sound more critical of the metaphor than I am. I appreciate its craft and its implications more than I dispute them, though I’m just concerned by the passivity it implies on the part of the people of Hindustan.
After this point in the story, the prose was drier and more factual. It recounts dialogues; it recounts family dynamics. It is structured, I think, to mirror the quotidian attitude people had in their engagement with Partition before the materiality of it hit them. It was just something to argue about, something to discuss. The sort of prose needed to render that relationship is more bare. But Chughtai’s prose returns to its evocative best when they are packing to move out of their multi-generational family home. The family matriarch, their Amma, looks around in sadness; she relives generations of life lived in her home. As a reader, I was swept away by the sudden enumeration of all her cherished memories in the space. The very shape of the prose, clause after clause, comma after comma, mirrors the experience of recollecting. It inserted me into their Amma’s experience. In this passage, Chughtai brings in the titular plant motif: her heart “wilts” (199). Shortly after, she worries:
The crop that she had irrigated with her blood for fifty years had gone into exile today, staggering and falling as it went in search of a new field. Who knew if the new field would prove fertile for these plants? Would they wither and die, these poor, exiled plants? (201)
This metaphor is strangely, uncannily hybrid: these are plants that drink blood; these plants that can stagger. They seem somewhere in between being botanical and animal: they are of leaf but they are of blood and limb. I think it’s a very beautiful way to evoke territorial groundedness and the experience of being uprooted. The dissolution of conventional sense around the plant/animal is doing work in itself: transplantation leads to this loss of sense. All of a sudden, people lose a botanical beauty and are placed in this mangled world in which it makes sense for one to die like a plant, drink blood, and walk at once. People lose a botanical beauty when uprooted.