Recognise your history: Re-narrating the ‘glorified’ Indian Partition 1947

Nahal Sheikh

Skirmish - an episode of irregular or unpremeditated fighting, especially between parts of armies. This word is often heard when the name of two countries, India and Pakistan, appear in the same phrase. Amidst a pandemic, anxiety over if and how a Covid vaccine will work, and nations falling in recession, India-Pakistan border skirmishes are ever in their zealous activation.

This is not surprising behaviour, rather a pattern moulded over history. Decades have passed since the Indian Partition in 1947 and no triumph or catastrophe has broken through what seems to be a habit. A habitual practice between the two states where violence, or rather, the threat of violence, is a condition for either’s existence.

While the latest, and the oldest, point of contention is Kashmir, a disputed piece of land subject to endless territorial claims by both countries, many other reasons have come and gone, caused and maintained the India-Pak antagonistic relationship. Some of these include Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971, nuclear tests by India in 1974, more tests by both countries in 1998, terrorist attacks by groups associated with Pakistan, oscillating governments at both borders, and yet again Kashmir.

The constant amongst this genealogy of violent estrangement is one narrative—a narrative of the ‘glory’ of war.

If we read history books about Independence wars towards the end of WWII in 1945, once colonies and now newly emerged nation-states were thrilled to be free and decolonised. The Middle East, Africa, and Asia were all part of this geographical and psychological transformation—a realisation of what freedom should look like. And it is true, says Young in Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction that “the winning of independence from colonial rule remains an extraordinary, historic achievement.” In the juxtaposition of this victory, something we either consciously disengage from or subconsciously fail to recognise, is how the gloriousness of independence hides away the suffering and trauma of those individuals who experienced the violence rooted in these wars.

The Indian subcontinent underwent a unique form of independence in 1947. It not only gained independence from the 200-year-long British Raj but broke into two parts creating a Hindu-majority Republic of India and a Muslim-majority Islamic Republic of Pakistan. While the aim here is not to blame the British for this division, their ‘divide and rule’ policy had dire consequences a united India faced. For a region made of diverse religions and cultures, Dalrymple in The New Yorker explains how “communities that had co-existed for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence.”

One of history’s largest migrations took place during this independence war, where up to 20 million people were displaced in the entirety of the subcontinent. Some of these immigrants walked across a newly cartographed border and built new lives. Some were not so lucky and remained stuck in a state of in-between, neither here nor there. Some ended up continents away settling in as South Asian diasporas in their once-coloniser’s land of the United Kingdom, along with other countries who were not direct colonisers but benefitted from the British Raj in one way or another. The magnitude of population exchange was not the only overwhelming character of this war, but also the magnitude of violence that swept what became India and Pakistan.

Destruction, looting, arson, forced conversions, abductions and a rampage of sexual violence were all part of this ‘glorified’ war of independence, where around 100 thousand women were raped. Aside from the statistics and records of the trauma and violence that ensued, there are many oral histories from individuals who were part of this war and remember its brutal disorder vividly. Maini-Thompson interviewed his grandfather, Malvinder Pal Singh, in Scroll.in who disconcertingly recalls how he felt like a victim to the Partition, both emotionally and physically. He belonged from Lahore which was once geographically located in India but later in Pakistan—this transformed Singh from a Hindu in India, who had Muslim friends and celebrated Islamic festivals, to a refugee from Pakistan migrating to India.

“I witnessed shops being looted, holy Qurans being burnt, and papers torn. I saw these things while leaving on foot. We left when things were getting worse. It became very dangerous. People were scared for their lives.”

An imposed national identity on Singh drew him into a long and frightening haul of migration that uprooted him from his home and a sense of belonging. Similarly, the Partition Museum interviewed Amol Swani who remembers the raucous of riots, their accompanying threat of sexually assaulting women and the psychological anguish that consumed her.

“One day we heard, near the newly-made doors of our house, that a Muslim leader was coming called Mullah Manki. My father’s office was below our home. When he heard this, he was scared and came upstairs to the house. It was just my mother and I [...] My father came upstairs with a can of petrol and matchsticks in his hands. He came and said, ‘If anything happens, you burn yourselves alive and don’t let yourselves fall in Muslim hands.’ He handed the things to my mother. My mother was mature and had courage but I cried a lot. I said, ‘How can we kill ourselves?’”

Many Muslims also migrated from and to what was once East Pakistan and now Bangladesh. Not all parts of the region experienced the war’s rampage at the same time; instead it erupted earlier in some places and traveled to others later. Ila Banerjee recalls how the riots reached her in Mymensingh, East Pakistan after the Partition in 1950 which forced her family to finally migrate.

“At the time of Partition, my age was around 12 or 13 years. We actually did not come to India at the time of Partition because at that time the situations there [East Pakistan] were not that bad. Riots like the ones that happened in West Punjab did not happen here; it was pretty okay. So my father was thinking, whether to come or not, or will they stay there with their jobs and all that. So, we used to live in a lot of fear. We did go to school but amidst a lot of fear. But in 1950 one day I went to school and the teachers asked us to go home because the condition of the town was very bad, and till the time it doesn’t get better, don’t come to school. That day after I came home, I never got a chance to go back to school. After that the town’s condition became really bad [...] Stabbing here, stabbing there, at night there would be fires. So there was a lot of fear and terror. At night, no one would sleep. So, after understanding the situation [...] it was decided that I along with my elder sister would be sent to India. Like this, he [my father] had booked tickets from Dhaka to Calcutta.”

A student-led project for the course “The Partition in Literature” taught by Deepika Bahri in 2004 recorded many more oral histories. Some of these highlight more than the murders, rapes, looting and fires such as their long-lasting consequences on families who were displaced from their homes. The anonymous ‘E’ describes this elongated impact on the lives of so many.

“Everyone suffered; no particular people, not particularly to any community—everybody suffered [...] I mean people were uprooted badly, and I tell you, it took us about 20 years to come out to an average level. There is a lot of hard work. [My] father, as I told you, was head of the village, quite a well-to-do man. He had to go work for 45 rupees at a shop. You can imagine the plight of that man. Everybody suffered; we suffered badly and I tell you… we suffered every way, for sometime we went without meals.”

Seventy-five years later, these stories may be perceived by some as ‘sacrifice’ for an independent nation, they may think the painful suffering was ‘worth’ it. However, this is not a question of worth, rather a statement of the fact that the suffering did take place and it was traumatic for many of those who left their homes without a choice, found themselves in riots, had family members and friends injured, killed, raped, and had to rebuild their lives from nothing with new identities. How we label and remember history produces specific knowledge around an incident that may not be accurate but accepted as the ‘truth’. We tend to forget that the Partition ensued multiple truths for Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and many more.

By ignoring the trauma and living in inaccurate collective pasts, the Partition’s gloriousness continues to haunt our present existence. The historical narrative of ‘glory’ overpowers the conflictual divides that were once created and still have impacts on several communities today spread across the region. Hostilities over Kashmir are still the biggest threat to peaceful India-Pak relations; both countries’ arts and cultural industries struggle to find collaborative spaces; state-encouraged extreme nationalism is on the rise; and neither an Indian nor a Pakistani can think of safely traveling across the Wagah Border—a geographically marked line created by a stranger British architect named Radcliffe all those years ago.

The experience of belonging from the Indian subcontinent, whether one is Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi—this specific “South Asian” experience—is one inundated with a bloody history. Through this experience we find ourselves in a mode of subjugation to a mono-narrative: a single tunnel-vision perspective that in its entirety with its consequences, is no better than being overpoweringly controlled by someone or something tangible, human or machine.

But a narrative is something that can be built, revised and re-built to more honestly reflect a common history that affects people on both sides of the border, people who once celebrated each other’s religious festivals in unsiome. This revision can translate into (non-)fiction literature, film, news media, school curriculums and discussions in our homes. It will allow us to step away from illusory references about a common experience and normalise new perspectives in nations that were once colonies as well as nations that were once the colonisers.

A new narration can help future generations leave behind an idealised version of the war, take into account emotional historical resonances no matter how horrid, and bring forward a re-imagining of the Indian Partition 1947 to break the historical standstill.

Historyjfa12 March 2021FeaturedComment