The years after World War II resulted in the restructuring of many nations devastated by the war, as well as a realignment in the international order. An estimated 14 million people were displaced by the Partition, which aimed to divide the nations along religious lines and initially led to widespread chaos and violence. Singh died at the age of 99.Ī Train to Pakistan takes place in 1947, the year in which India gained independence from Britain and the new nation of Pakistan was created from the Partition of India. They had two children-a son named Rahul, and a daughter, Mala. Singh married his wife Kaval, who died some years before him, in 1939.
He received many honors for his work in journalism and fiction, including a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to Indian literature. In addition to Train to Pakistan, Singh is also known for his two-volume work A History of the Sikhs, 1469-1964 (vol. He discontinued his support for the prime minister, however, after Indian troops attacked and killed hundreds of Sikhs at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. From 1980 to 1986, he served in India’s upper house of parliament and was a supporter of Indira Gandhi’s government. The following year, he began a career as a journalist with All India Radio and spent the next two decades working as an editor of leading publications in India while continuing to publish fiction. He published his first short story collection, The Mark of Vishnu, and Other Stories, in London in 1950. During his four years in the foreign service, he took posts in London and Ottawa and also started to write fiction. He started his law practice in Lahore on the eve of the Second World War and practiced until the Partition of India in 1947, at which point he moved his family to Delhi and took a position with the Indian Foreign Service as a press attaché. Singh earned a Bachelor of Arts from Government College in Lahore in 1934 before obtaining his law degree from London’s King’s College in 1938.
Later, he would become a prolific translator of Urdu poetry. His native tongue was Punjabi, but he was also fluent in Urdu and grew up reading the work of Urdu poets. To explore the posed query, this paper will use Virginia Woolf's ideas from -"Professions for Women" (1942) an article apparently archaic today, but the ideas posited in it were very much contemporary to the novel's setting, as well as Julia Kristeva's apparently contemporary ideas in - "Woman Can Never Be Defined" (1974), where these critics talked about women's sexuality, their professions, their privileged relationship with father/paternal figure of their family, and how all these lead them to abidance towards prejudiced masculine norms set by the society.Khushwant Singh was born to an affluent Sikh family and grew up in the Muslim-majority village of Hadali, then part of British India. However, this paper aims at studying how in an overtly masculine society as portrayed in the novel, amidst the fright of religious persecution, sexualized violence, the fallaciousness of mob rule, and formation of new identities via displacement - two of the novel's main female characters - Nooran, who is sexually subjugated within the text, and Haseena Begum, who uses her bodily charm to meet her days ends, stand out differently due to the disparity in their social orientations, and life choices. Having set the plot of his novel in a fictional Punjabi village 'Mano Majra' - located near to the India - Pakistan border, Singh attempted to analyze how human relationships change in a tormented - apocalyptic society. Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956), a quintessential post-colonial novel and a lucid modern classic - is based on the societal conditions and upheavals of during and post-liberation Pak - Indo subcontinent in 1947.