Harking Back: Tragic memories of the greatest exodus in human history

The other day a friend sent an internet message from across that ‘Line of Hate’ that his 90-year old grandfather, originally from Jhang, but now living in Ludhiana, had lost his memory and keeps asking the way back ‘home’ to his original village.

The Partition of our ancient land into, initially, two different countries based on communal considerations brought with it the greatest exodus in human history. But then faith-based considerations do not fade away easily. Today in both countries even thinking in non-faith terms is considered ‘treason’, increasingly so now in the once ‘secular’ India. But have you ever stopped to think just what this did to poor common people who left their hearths and homes and hundreds of years of loyalty to their soil to enter a strange land. This piece is about those very people, like the 90-year old gentleman from Jhang.

A few years ago while teaching a course on ‘The History of Lahore’ at a local university, I made the students carry out a field exercise of finding out a Partition victim and after interviewing them to write their story. This was real history and the students learnt more from this single exercise than the entire course. The 70-odd students were thrilled and their 3,000-word essays could easily have made an amazing ‘peoples history’ of the 1947 Partition.

There have been a few attempts at recording ‘Partition Stories’, the most distinguished being undertaken in the Berkeley office of the University of California. Luckily I have visited their huge office dedicated to recording Partition stories. In Amritsar across the ‘border’ there is a Partition Museum, full of photographs and recordings of victims as they experienced it. Sadly, all attempts to open a similar one in the decaying empty Bradlaugh Hall on Lahore’s Rattigan Road have been quashed by our rulers. In the same vein our precious over 400 years of archives lie decaying in the old French-Sikh era horse stables in the Lahore Secretariat reflects our true self.

Why are we like this? For most people Pakistan’s history does not exist before the Turkish-origin Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni. Amazingly, any Pakistani who wins a Nobel Prize is labelled a traitor and kicked out of our school textbooks. Within this mindset we see our total denial of the ‘Greatest Exodus in Human History’. The pain of the common man is denied. Their history and suffering is denied. Our ruling classes just do not take them in consideration.

Yes, it makes me angry, for our country is a beautiful one with an ancient history possessing the world’s oldest planned city of Mehrgarh in Balochistan. I am sure most readers have never heard of the place. In functional terms we remain the least literate on earth. If Mr Jinnah made clear at the very beginning that 20 per cent of our national wealth should be set aside for educating the poor, that portion of his speech has been ‘officially’ censored. He lay dying in the heat of an ambulance stranded outside Karachi that had ‘allegedly’ run out of petrol. This episode is never recalled. Our history is simply ‘Imagined’.

But let us forget such bitter facts and return to the poor victims of that exodus. In Lahore’s old walled city (those wall bricks our traders have stolen) lives in Mochi Gate an old lady named Fatima (her real name). Her family belonged to Uthian, just north of Amritsar. They were simple hardworking tillers of the land and were respected by villagers, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. When the hatred of Partition broke loose her entire family were butchered and the young Fatima was hidden away by a Sikh neighbour Harbans Singh Sandhu. While everyone went around looking to slaughter the little girl, for a whole week she hid under the huge basket meant for chickens.

After a month once tempers had cooled, she was dropped one night at the border. She walked her way to Walton’s refugee camp after experiencing a few horrid happenings. Ultimately, a well-meaning Lahore lady adopted her. When Fatima reached the age of 18 she was married off to a man who had lost his wife in the troubles that ravaged the Shahalami Bazaar area. Since then she has borne six children and Fatima seldom talks about her past.

But then when interviewed she craved to see her old village of Uthian, even though it presents her nothing but tragic events. Even then she remembered the good days where everyone was respectful and religion never mattered. Her story now stands recorded and one day it will see the light of day.

A few years ago as I sat outside a Cambridge library consuming my lunch and talking on the mobile with my brother in Lahori Punjabi, an old lady stopped and with loving eyes asked me: “Are you from Lahore?” Before I could respond she sat down next to me. Her opening sentence was: “When I hear a Lahori speak, all my hatred disappears”. Ajit Kaur smiled and said: “Why hate one another. That is for politicians and priests to promote”.

“I miss Lahore and my Chamberlain Road house. We originally belong to Dumaili in the Potohar. Have you ever heard of it?” “Certainly” I said. She smiled. “Do you know I was studying in Kinnaird College in 1947 and my father had a business nearby. She had a look of pain on her face.

“The men of Dumaili are handsome six-footers, fair and devoted to adventures”. It sounded exactly like our driver Imran from Dumaili, now working in Saudi Arabia. I wanted to hear her story. She started: “I never imagined that Punjabis being fair-minded people would become butchers overnight. When the troubles started my father rang Dr Yusuf, a family friend. He arranged for the military to pick us up and drop us at Amritsar. That is the last we saw of Lahore. Our three servants were all butchered”.

Then came the gruesome bit. “When Muslim ‘goondas’ surrounded our village, my ‘taaya’ took out his kirpan and beheaded his two beautiful daughters”. She had tears in her eyes. I was shocked. She explained that this was done to prevent rape. The uncle now lives in Delhi and at the mention of his old village he cries. “This Holocaust will live forever in our minds and hearts”, she said.

Then came a break when she asked what happened to our family in 1947. I told her that my grandfather had two family houses, one in Lahore’s walled city and the other in Amritsar’s Hatti Darwaza. a ‘haveli’ called Loharan de Haveli. There the Sikhs attacked and killed two domestic helpers. Ajit Kaur listened with care. Also my late mother-in-law lived in Amritsar and her house was completely burnt down. She always cried when recalling. The old Sikh lady calmed down.

I thought of adding a bit of history to these happenings. “Ranjit Singh was invited to enter Lahore in 1799 by the Muslim Arain community of Lahore, for they opened the door to the city”. I went on: “Bibi, in history there is always room to hate, it depends on what the rich rulers benefit from most”.

It makes me think of the hundreds of similar stories that exist in almost every family in Lahore. All those stories need to be documented. For the time being our rulers will resist the writing of such history for it does not suit them. But all of us must contribute, or else we will be a people without a history. Maybe, maybe, the promise the current ruler made of setting up a Partition Museum might come true. The proposal is on his desk. But then stern bureaucrats surround this otherwise fine man.