Fanon's Postcolonialism: Depiction in Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan Eeshpreet Kaur College

Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan is a saga of brotherhood and bloodshed. Set against the backdrop of the 1947 partition, it narrates the collective tale of the millions of people who suffered blows – both emotional and physical as friend turned against friend in the name of God. Mano Majra becomes a micro India set ablaze within the pages of the novel. It captures captures perfectly the lives of people just before the departure of the British and can thus be read in reference to various postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon.

In his 1952 work, titled Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon delved deeper into the effects of colonialism not only on the minds of the colonised but also that of the coloniser. In his postcolonial theory, he put forth the idea that the colonised - traumatised, suppressed and made to feel inferior - start to develop their idea of ‘Self’ in relation to their colonial ‘master’. They do their best to adopt or at the very least, to imitate the coloniser and become ‘white’ in manner if not in the colour of their skin. They unmoor themselves from their own cultures and turn instead to the Western one’s introduced by the coloniser. In Fanon’s own words, they don ‘white masks over black skin’.

Train to...