Harking back: Lahore and bitter lessons of our ‘forgotten past’

It seems Lahore is much larger than what our imagination allows us to fathom. When one travels to faraway places, in one form or another, memories of our city come forth, normally in emotive ways.

The last two weeks have been spent in San Francisco visiting my daughter. The begum has been busy cooking away and freezing the most delicious dishes which yours truly will never reach. Also my two grandsons are spoiling their Nani beyond measure. So that allows me time to research on various aspects of Lahore’s history.

In this piece we will dwell on the famous ‘Ghadar’ Museum in San Francisco. Then on to the amazing Partition 1947 Archives in Berkeley University, and lastly, no less importantly, are the people one meets while walking along old train trails, as also to the nearest market. In California distances are massive, so to shop one goes in huge cars.

My attempt to visit the Ghadar Museum, an event which in 1915 and 1916 Punjabis living in California collected funds to sail to British India to ‘invade’ and liberate their homeland. They collected a lot of arms and hired a Japanese ship called Kamagata Maru and set sail for India. At Calcutta a majority were butchered on the docks of the Bengal capital. But then a lot of them managed to make it overland to the Punjab and Lahore.

In Lahore in Lohari Mandi they set up an office under the leadership of Maulvi Barkat Ali, Ram Chandra and Sohan Singh Barkna and launched a newspaper called ‘Ghadar’. It became hugely popular. But then with local assistance the colonialists very soon traced and executed most of them. A few like Taraknath Das were arrested and sent to jail for being ‘German agents’. The promising Ghadar Movement fizzled out.

However, the California-based newspaper ‘Ghadar’ continued and was seen by US authorities as an effort by conspirators and they were sent to prison for violating ‘neutrality’ laws. So hundreds of “Ghadri Babas” spent long prison sentences, and were released after promising to work free on Californian field.

Today those ‘Ghadri’ families own huge tracts of agricultural lands and are very well off. The museum called the Gadar Museum continues but under Indian official auspices and is open only once a week on a Wednesday, and one can visit it on appointment only. The Indian government keeps a tight control on them. Probably the ‘Khalistan Scare’ still works on their minds. But then books and artifacts from Lahore and the Punjab are on display and worth visiting.

Next in Berkeley University is a new institution called the ‘1947 Partition Archives’ which is led by an amazing scholar Dr Guneeta Singh Bhalla. In her team of eight persons, they collect stories of partition, in video, written, photographs and sound of this greatest human exodus in history, which remains the least remembered in our land. This in itself is a tragedy. “Just imagine how the German Holocaust is exhibited and our Exodus was much bigger in a shorter time period, yet our children have no idea about it”.

This Oral History Research Program needs to be replicated all over the sub-continent. My interest was fired by the possibility of the Bradlaugh Hall being conserved and a 1947 Partition Museum Trust being set up in Lahore by concerned educationists and scholars. It might take two years before the hall is ready, but preparation for the Museum needed attention now. One hopes people will support this effort. A Trust is the best way to ensure its longevity.

Lastly, let me return to real human beings. As I walked one day along the old Iron Trail of old steam trains in San Ramon, one crossed an Indian couple who looked very Punjabi. After a friendly greeting they asked where I was from. ‘Lahore’. The lady virtually exploded in happiness and said: “My family was from Vachoowali in Lahore”. She started with the strange question: “Is it still there”. Of course, places never disappear, was my response. She quickly broke into another story when her husband joined in.

“My name is Khanna. My father had a shop in Anarkali, which we just left and fled the mobs. We lived in Lohari Gate”. So here was a couple from Lahore who remembered Lahore. We spent 20 minutes on the trail and exchanged experiences and I asked Mr. Khanna to contact the 1947 Archives office in Berkeley, which he promised to do. “I will ask my son to make a donation”, he said.

The Khanna family now live in Chandigarh where they tell me that there is a group of old Lahoris who gather every afternoon once their children go to work. “We do not discuss Lahore all the time, but it is our prime reason to get together. It is not that we remain alien to the environment, but that being old Lahoris gives us a special reason to meet.

This reminded me of an Indian couple who stayed with us in Lahore a few years ago. They were the Malhotra family, an educationist-publisher couple. I took Arun to his home town Bhera, where with utmost precision he walked to his old house. At the doorway was a dilapidated temple in which two donkeys stood. Mr. Malhotra went silent and returned. He did not speak all the way back to Lahore. Sad event it was.

His wife Goldy’s father belonged to Ludhiana and had their home in Lower Mall, just behind the government office that faces the Town Hall. It is a massive house and she is always welcome when she is in Lahore. We have stuck up a Facebook friendship and she loves learning about her city. The couple’s son has migrated to Canada and they visit every year.

This brings me to what a lot of Indian and Pakistani aging couples do every year. Middle class families have two or three children, whom they educate well. They are mostly computer wizards and they are all pulled to California. So as parents they visit for six months every year, and if you by chance happen to be in San Francisco or its nearby towns, you surely will bump into them.

That is why Lahore can be seen everywhere. Be it Cambridge University in England or any top USA university or a computer-led company, you are surely to come across this set of Lahoris. Be they doctors or MBAs or any qualified person, opportunities abound. By the time you read this column we will have returned to my university in Cambridge, and very soon will be in Lahore. It has been a fruitful two weeks, but then a lot of reading remains.