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Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh

1956 novel about a fictional peasant village in India, half Sikh, half Muslim. At first, this peaceful community avoided the sectarian violence surrounding the 1947 Partition. Until it didn't.

Before everything went wrong, people in this village ordered their days to the schedule of trains passing the town, rarely stopping. But as the chaos of the Partition accelerates, the train system becomes unpredictable and inconsistent, upsetting the natural rhythm of this village and of everyone in it. Then, one particular train arrives that changes everything, engulfing this town in chaos, and a community that lived peacefully for generations suddenly evicts all its Muslims.

I've been reading about India's Partition era because I fear we might see something like it again in the coming years. History rhymes, it has cycles and patterns, and periodically we see mass movements of peoples that reliably explode into terrible violence. You could certainly rank India's Partition with some of history's worst cases: see for example the Bronze Age Collapse, the post-World War II Savage Continent era (I stole the phrase Keith Lowe's book of the same name, see the reading list below), and the 4th century collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire following the Battle of Adrianople (chronicled in Alessandro Barbero's excellent The Day of the Barbarians). I'm sure there are many, many more.

This book isn't a pleasant read, but I believe it is a necessary read. It's a good book, well-written, paced slowly at first (as the reader settles into a different era with a different pace), and then it accelerates to a rapid conclusion--a single act of bravery surrounded by a constellation of cowardice. Sadly, cowardice is the rule rather than the exception: the leaders whose responsibility it is to "do something" about the violence do nothing.
 
It's always a good idea to choose a well-regarded novel about a historical period in addition to reading that period's history. Just as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms teaches you about World War I, and Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles teaches you more about living in an inflationary era, fiction often teaches you much more than anything else. 

Pair with:
The Shadow of the Great Game by Narenda Singh Sarila
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe
The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero

Notes/quotes:
* "You talk rashly like a child. It will get you into trouble one day. Your principal should be to see everything and say nothing. The world changes so rapidly that if you want to get on you cannot afford to align yourself with any person or point of view. Even if you feel strongly about something, learn to keep silent." [I can't help thinking about this today: we have incredibly fierce partisanship in the United States, wars brewing in other parts of the world, an uncertain world order where countries are choosing new sides... it may be dangerous to offer too many opinions about anything.]

* Iqbal, a young, educated non-practicing Sikh who can pass for a Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, arrives in the village as a communist activist/"community organizer." There's quite a vivid scene here where one of the villager brings him a glass of milk that his wife just milked from a buffalo, and he stirs it for the visitor with his own dirty finger. [Ultimately Iqbal turns out to be an example of the cowardice I wrote about above: all he does is implore everybody else to "do something" while standing idly by.]

* The villagers actually never had a problem with English colonial control, they didn't comprehend the idea of being free, they didn't even grasp why the English left. "Freedom is for the educated people who fought for it. We were slaves of the English, now we will be slaves of the educated Indians--or the Pakistanis... We were better off under the British. At least there was security."

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