Partition was to India what the
Holocaust was to Europe. A vast human tragedy, on an unimaginable
scale. I’m working with a lawyer in Delhi right now. The clients
are almost always prosperous Punjabis. Their ancestors, like some of
mine, came to Delhi in absolute penury with nothing at all. Today so
many of them are rich businessmen, the upper middle class of Delhi.
Those who made the great trek survived the carnage, the mass
killings of millions of people. A strange madness hit people on both
sides. People and communities who had lived together for generations
killing, raping, maiming. A Punjab in India without Punjabi
Mussalmans. A Punjab in Pakistan without Sardars or Hindus.
South Delhi and West Delhi’s posh
neighbourhoods were all once refugee colonies. Lajpat Nagar, Punjabi
Bagh, Karol Bagh, Nizammudin etc. The demographics and culture of
Delhi were irreversibly changed to become the Punjabi city it now is.
From the tezheeb of old Delhi, the culture became that of the brash
Punjabi. The other great city that changed was Karachi. With the
influx of Mohajirs, Muslims from Delhi, Lucknow, Hyderabad and many
other cities across India was created the conflict between Sindhis
and Mohajirs that still reverberates in modern Pakistan.
As I was watching Bhaag Milkha Bhaag
today, the sheer inhumanity of it struck me. We remember it, for
sure, but not enough. Too many people have tried to kill each other
in a riot motivated by religion in independent India for Partition to
be remembered properly.
My maternal grandfather, my Nana, who
is 82 years old, was born in 1931 in Lahore. Lahore, the lament of so
many. That famous saying, ‘Jinne Lahore Nahi Dekhaya, Wo Jameya hi
nahi’ ( Whosoever hasn’t seen Lahore, hasn’t really lived, more
literally hasn’t been born .) People came from Sialkot, Multan,
countless villages but Lahore is the place most remembered. My Nana
learnt Urdu and Persian in school, grew up reading in the Nastaliq
script. He learnt to read Hindi ( written in Devanagari) much later,
as an adult. At the age of 16, he came to Delhi. His brother had a
shop and house in Dariyaganj in Delhi. He, his mother and brothers
were holidaying in Delhi on 15th August 1947. (His father
had passed away some years earlier.) They never went back. Most of
their houses, belongings left behind. They were one of the lucky
ones. They had a place to stay in Delhi, and they saw no violence.
They were better off than so many people. My Nana tells me how a
leading lawyer in Lahore was seen selling food on the
streets of Delhi. Just try to imagine it. You’ve lived somewhere,
all your life. Then, you can never go back there again. They’ve
drawn a border. An imaginary line. It took years and years for people
to rebuild their lives.
My paternal grandmother (Dadi) was born
in Multan in 1941. Her father worked in the Railways. They lived very
close to the Railway Station in Multan. She vaguely remembers the
train journey they made to get to Delhi. Her father had paid off
someone to take care of the family, and being in the Railways somehow
made it possible for them to get here safely. My great-grandfather
eventually came later, braving much danger. They were financially
ruined, of course, and they rebuilt a life in Haridwar, and later
Dehradun.
These are stories I’ve grown up with
and they were traumatic events for them and their families, even
defined them; and as a child I wondered what led people in power to
make such strange decisions, which ruin so many lives. These were
people who did not see the horrors and massacres of that time, and it
affected them more than most other things in their lifetimes. My
other two grandparents are from Gurdaspur, the Muslim majority
district which came to India. There is a conspiracy theory that
Radcliffe ( and consequently Britain) gave Gurdaspur to India because
it is an easily navigable link to Jammu and Kashmir, something that
enabled India to gain access to it. Whatever it was, Gurdaspur, by
quirk of fate today has almost no Muslims. A few years ago, I was
walking around Batala, my ancestral hometown in Gurdaspur, and saw an
old abandoned mosque I think which was recently redeveloped by the
ASI or the Punjab government. Left behind in 1947, to rot. Like Hindu
temples in Pakistan.
The greatest migration in human
history. We need a museum for it. Like the Holocaust museum. Where
one can go and ruminate, in peace. Amrita Pritam’s dirge for the
Punjab, ‘Ajj Akha Waris Shah Nu’ which exhorts the poet Waris
Shah(of Heer Ranjha fame) to rise from his grave and stop the madness
is one of the many literary works which references Partition. Train
to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines(
which among other things references the effects of partition in
Bengal), Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar, Satish Gujral’s paintings are further examples.
I’m also interested in the cultural
consequences. A rejection of the Muslim heritage of Punjab. Apart
from Malerkotla near Patiala there are almost no Muslims in Indian
Punjab any more. Punjab’s culture became agriculture. I didn’t
grow up hearing about Sufi Punjabi poetry. Punjab became a Sikh
state, the language an inherent part of Sikh identity. The Punjabi in
Pakistan became the oppressor. Their cultural confusion became even
more critical. They ended up trying to become Arabs, rejecting their
South Asian heritage. As the last generation which lived through
partition passes away, people growing up in India and Pakistan today
cannot even contemplate how the countries lived as one. That the
young Pakistani’s grandmother had Hindu and Sikh friends, that
Jalandhar and Ludhiana had a majority of Muslims.
This post in no way yearns for a
rejection of Partition. It happened and two countries were created
which had widely different destinies. Just that the demonisation of
the ‘other’ led to the peculiar circumstances where the ordinary
person of each country has no idea how the other half lives and what
it is really like. I just hope that it becomes easier to visit Pakistan for the ordinary Indian and vice versa. My attempt to
go to Lahore in January this year fell flat sadly due to bureaucratic
inanities which would never have been the case had I been trying to
get to another country.
India and Pakistan, North Korea and
South Korea, Palestine and Israel. Examples of sheer human stupidity.
One day we will learn. One day.
