“All trains stop there”

This chapter focuses on what is probably the most popular icon of partition narratives—that of refugee trains being attacked and turned into “death trains.” There is hardly a single partition narrative in any genre that does not mention trains in some form or another. This chapter charts the ways in which train journeys have been represented in literature, cinema, and oral history testimonies in an attempt to explain the reason for this predominance. If we see partition as a violent re-inscribing of social hierarchies, then the icon of the “death train” becomes a space within which individual and collective agency can be expressed, as the dynamic between state and non-state forces is played out in this microcosm of the nation.