Understanding Partition - Politics, Memories, Experiences
We know that the joy of our country�s independence from
colonial rule in 1947 was tarnished by the violence and
brutality of Partition. The Partition of British India into the
sovereign states of India and Pakistan (with its western and
eastern wings) led to many sudden developments.
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Thousands
of lives were snuffed out, many others changed dramatically,
cities changed, India changed, a new country was born, and
there was unprecedented genocidal violence and migration.
This chapter will examine the history of Partition: why and
how it happened as well as the harrowing experiences of
ordinary people during the period 1946-50 and beyond. It will
also discuss how the history of these
experiences can be reconstructed by talking to
people and interviewing them, that is, through
the use of oral history. At the same time, it will
point out the strengths and limitations of oral
history. Interviews can tell us about certain
aspects of a society�s past of which we may know
very little or nothing from other types of sources.
But they may not reveal very much about many
matters whose history we would then need to
build from other materials. We will return to
this issue towards the end of the chapter.
Some Partition Experiences
Here is an incident narrated by one who
experienced those trying times to a researcher
in 1993. The informant was Pakistani, the
researcher Indian. The job of this researcher was
to understand how those who had lived more or
less harmoniously for generations inflicted so
much violence on each other in 1947.
�I am simply returning my father�s karz, his debt�
This is what the researcher recorded:
During my visits to the History Department Library of Punjab
University, Lahore, in the winter of 1992, the librarian, Abdul Latif, a
pious middle-aged man, would help me a lot. He would go out of his
way, well beyond the call of duty, to provide me with relevant material,
meticulously keeping photocopies requested by me ready before my
arrival the following morning. I found his attitude to my work so
extraordinary that one day I could not help asking him, �Latif Sahib,
why do you go out of your way to help me so much?� Latif Sahib
glanced at his watch, grabbed his namazi topi and said, �I must go for
namaz right now but I will answer your question on my return.�
Stepping into his office half an hour later, he continued:
�Yes, your question. I � I mean, my father belonged to Jammu, to
a small village in Jammu district. This was a Hindu-dominated village
and Hindu ruffians of the area massacred the hamlet�s Muslim
population in August 1947. One late afternoon, when the Hindu
mob had been at its furious worst, my father discovered he was
perhaps the only Muslim youth of the village left alive. He had already
lost his entire family in the butchery and was looking for ways of
escaping. Remembering a kind, elderly Hindu lady, a neighbour, he implored
her to save him by offering him shelter at her place. The lady agreed to help
father but said, �Son, if you hide here, they will get both of us. This is of no
use. You follow me to the spot where they have piled up the dead. You lie
down there as if dead and I will dump a few dead-bodies on you. Lie there
among the dead, son, as if dead through the night and run for your life
towards Sialkot at the break of dawn tomorrow.�
�My father agreed to the proposal. Off they went to that spot, father lay on
the ground and the old lady dumped a number of bodies on him. An hour
or so later a group of armed Hindu hoodlums appeared. One of them yelled,
�Any life left in anybody?� and the others started, with their crude staffs and
guns, to feel for any trace of life in that heap. Somebody shouted, �There is
a wrist watch on that body!� and hit my father�s fingers with the butt of his
rifle. Father used to tell us how difficult it was for him to keep his outstretched
palm, beneath the watch he was wearing, so utterly still. Somehow he
succeeded for a few seconds until one of them said �Oh, it�s only a watch.
Come let us leave, it is getting dark.� Fortunately, for Abbaji, they left and my
father lay there in that wretchedness the whole night, literally running for his life
at the first hint of light. He did not stop until he reached Sialkot.
�I help you because that Hindu mai helped my father. I am simply returning
my father�s karz, his debt.�
�But I am not a Hindu,� I said. �Mine is a Sikh family, at best a mixed Hindu-
Sikh one.�
�I do not know what your religion is with any surety. You do not wear
uncut hair and you are not a Muslim. So, for me you are a Hindu and I do my
little bit for you because a Hindu mai saved my father.�
A Momentous Marker
Partition or holocaust?
The narratives just presented point to the pervasive
violence that characterised Partition. Several
hundred thousand people were killed and
innumerable women raped and abducted. Millions
were uprooted, transformed into refugees in alien
lands. It is impossible to arrive at any accurate
estimate of casualties: informed and scholarly
guesses vary from 200,000 to 500,000 people. In all
probability, some 15 million had to move across
hastily constructed frontiers separating India
and Pakistan. As they stumbled across these
�shadow lines� � the boundaries between the two
new states were not officially known until two days
after formal independence � they were rendered
homeless, having suddenly lost all their immovable
property and most of their movable assets, separated
from many of their relatives and friends as well,
torn asunder from their moorings, from their houses,
fields and fortunes, from their childhood memories.
Thus stripped of their local or regional cultures, they
were forced to begin picking up their life from scratch.
Was this simply a partition, a more or less orderly
constitutional arrangement, an agreed-upon division
of territories and assets? Or should it be called a sixteenmonth
civil war, recognising that there were wellorganised
forces on both sides and concerted attempts
to wipe out entire populations as enemies? The survivors
themselves have often spoken of 1947 through other
words: �maashal-la� (martial law), �mara-mari� (killings),
and �raula�, or �hullar� (disturbance, tumult, uproar).
Speaking of the killings, rape, arson, and loot that
constituted Partition, contemporary observers and
scholars have sometimes used the expression
�holocaust� as well, primarily meaning destruction or
slaughter on a mass scale.
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