English · Chapter 45
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
War and Peace is a Language Development unit of the NEB Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is the human cost of war and the fragile value of peace. Rather than treating war as a matter of generals and treaties, the unit looks at what happens to ordinary people, to neighbours who have lived together for generations, when political decisions taken far away release hatred into their streets. Around this theme the unit provides a reading text with comprehension exercises, vocabulary for describing conflict and reconciliation, a grammar focus, a listening and speaking task, and a writing task in which students argue for peace or report on the consequences of war.
The reading text is an excerpt from Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan (1956), set during the Partition of British India in 1947. The passage opens by telling us that the summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. The heat and the late monsoon were the same, but the political climate was different. The country had been divided into India and Pakistan, and the division brought riots, murders and one of the largest movements of people in history. Muslims fled towards Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fled towards India, and both sides carried out killings on the way. The narrator notes that each community blamed the other, and that the truth, as in every such conflict, was that both had killed.
Against this background the excerpt introduces Mano Majra, a tiny village on the banks of the Sutlej, half a mile from the river and close to the new border. It has only three brick buildings: the house of the Hindu moneylender Lala Ram Lal, the Sikh gurdwara and the mosque. Its seventy or so families are mostly Sikh and Muslim, with the Sikhs owning the land and the Muslims working it as tenants. Yet the village has lived in harmony. All the villagers, whatever their religion, quietly revere the same local deity, a slab of sandstone near the pond, and the routine of the day is shared by everyone.