Harking Back: Celebrating ‘freedom’ without forgetting its sorrow

Today is the 75th anniversary of the birth of Pakistan. It is an occasion where we celebrate our ‘freedom’ from colonial rule meaning 98 years of British Raj for us. It was a bloody birth to say the least resulting in the ‘Greatest Exodus in Human History’.

The birth of Pakistan we read about in our history textbooks, naturally from an Islamic point of view and how others hate our religion. In India it is the other way round, for given the communal India that has, sadly, emerged on the 14th of August they are going to observe ‘Partition Horror Remembrance Day’. Given India’s population mix, surely it is out of spite or is it a genuine feeling of regret one cannot say. Their Independence Day is tomorrow on the 15th of August, brought a day later on the advice of soothsayers.

But what India does is their business, though had they coordinated with Pakistan both the countries could have jointly observed, in peace and quiet, the memories of the horrors of Partition a day earlier or a day later. At least in sorrow we should cooperate. This is an endless ‘hate-inspired’ topic that is best left alone.

The question we should ask ourselves on this special day is that just as we observe Independence Day today with flag-waving and sweet-eating pastimes, would it not be a sensible thing to consider just what actually happened. Imagine within a two-month period almost 30 million plus people gave up their soil, their work and their homes to move to a land that was not theirs, and in the process almost two million innocent people were slaughtered in communal hatred that even today refuses to completely subside.

The scale of this horror has been unprecedented. Our land has seen endless foreign invasions starting from pre-Aryan times. You name it the murderers are there in our history books, be it Mahmud the Turk-Afghan invader, or the Mongol Genghis Khan, or the Mughal Babar, or the numerous Afghans over the centuries, to the British trading company. Killings and horrors they all did create, with our women being the biggest sufferers. But in August and September 1947 the Exodus of Partition was the greatest ever.

Let me digress and narrate a personal undertaking a few years ago. As chance would have it yours truly delivered a session of lectures on ‘History of Lahore’ and ‘History of Punjab’ at the LUMS in Lahore. The class was a massive 70 students. It occurred to me that none of them had any idea of the horrors of Partition. So a 20 per cent marks project was immediately designed and the start was a YouTube recording of an old Sikh who fled from his village near Gujjar Khan.

This old man narrated in tears how a Muslim mob had surrounded their village demanding their women. The old man’s father collected all the family women and started beheading them himself. As he sobbed in the video, I noticed that nearly all the girls in the class were also sobbing. It was a very moving moment and then a long silence followed.

The project was for them to go out and find a person who had migrated in the August 1947 Partition, interview them in depth and write a 4,000-word piece. The result was utterly amazing. Never before have I seen such genuine effort and research on this subject. The university promised to get these papers printed in book form, though I have yet to hear back from them.

But this experience got me firmly on the path of exploring stories and real life events about the horrors of Partition. My first stop was the Walton Road refugee camp site, which housed at any one time over 50,000 refugees. They were slowly shifted to the rest of Punjab. A large number of wounded persons died there and were buried all over the place.

Then as luck would have it Syed Babar Ali asked me to visit the Berkeley office of the 1947 Partition Archives in California. As I was visiting my daughter there it was amazing to see the team led by Dr. Guneeta Bhalla Singh recording video and print versions of individual stories from all over the world. Their collection is today the largest Partition Archives in the world.

In my current time as a researcher in Wolfson College, Cambridge, this effort continues. Recently, I interviewed a lady whose house was on Lahore’s Montgomery Road, and whose family was saved by the late Dr Yusuf, the famous Lahore doctor, who personally dropped the family at the Wagah border and later shipped their household items by truck. The lady described how along the way human bodies lay all over the place from Lahore to Amritsar.

But then it was delightful to learn that Dr Keven Greenbank, the famous Cambridge archivist, had a major role in seeing the Amritsar Partition Museum come about. He is similarly willing to contribute if Lahore also sets up a Partition Museum. Towards this end my involvement has come forth many a time in these columns. Let me narrate progress so far.

For a long time we have been advocating the conservation of the famous Bradlaugh Hall on Rattigan Road. This is the famous hall where Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, the Aga Khan, Rajagopalachari, and every known freedom fight leaders spoke and debated. This was also the place where Bhagat Singh stayed and from here set forth for his fatal undertaking. After years of effort now the Punjab government of Pakistan has agreed to conserve the hall.

One just hopes that work on the project starts soon, for the next step is for a Lahore Partition Museum Trust to take over and set into motion a non-ending educational process so that our children learn more and more about what happened. This is critical for the future of our students, let alone their teachers. The reality of the Partition process must be brought forward.

So on this 75th Independence Day celebration, it would not be out of place to remember all those who never made it across that partition line, drawn by British bureaucrats dividing the Muslim-majority States of Punjab and Bengal into two each, hence depriving Pakistan of the States that in principle should have come to them. That is another endless debate.

But should not our school children also get involved in whatever research is possible about Partition victims. Surely their grandparents have stories to tell, and these should all be recorded. One assumes by the time the 76th anniversary comes around, their numbers will have greatly diminished. So while today we will rejoice – and rightly so - it might make sense to think about those who never made it across that Line of Hate.