Reflections on Partition

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 15^th 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.