Tales of Partition: survivors across the border recall their journey

For several years now, organisations on both sides of the border have been hurrying to record the stories of survivors.
Published July 27, 2017
Pakistani volunteers are seen transcribing interviews and testimonies of people who migrated from India to Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947.  — Photo by AFP
Pakistani volunteers are seen transcribing interviews and testimonies of people who migrated from India to Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947. — Photo by AFP

Sitting in her Karachi home, 76-year-old Jamshed Jahan Ara looks straight into the camera as she explains in a trembling voice how her family fled India during Partition in 1947.

She was just six years old when she and her family boarded an overcrowded train bound for the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan. Jahan Ara remembers watching armed Sikhs approach, and hearing her father telling her brother to kill the women of the family in case the bogie was attacked.

“One is my wife, another is my sister and one is my daughter,” she recalls him saying. “So, dear, be a man. I can't shoot them. You must kill all three and we will fight [the Sikhs] till the last before we surrender.' I [wondered] 'why would Neeam kill me? I have done nothing wrong,'” she says, emotion flooding her face as she remembered her father's reply: “A bullet is better [than being captured]”.

An emotional Jahan Ara recalls the train being attacked by Sikhs as she migrated from India to Pakistan with her family. — Photo by AFP
An emotional Jahan Ara recalls the train being attacked by Sikhs as she migrated from India to Pakistan with her family. — Photo by AFP
Jahan Ara points out a historical picture showing Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister along with her paternal uncle. — Photo by AFP
Jahan Ara points out a historical picture showing Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister along with her paternal uncle. — Photo by AFP

Jahan Ara's story is one of the many accounts of a fading generation that witnessed one of the largest and deadliest human migrations in human history, that took place after the subcontinent was divided 70 years ago. On both sides of the border, historians are racing to record the experiences of the survivors of the 1947 Partition.

In August 1947, the British finally exited the subcontinent, leaving behind an independent India, with chunks of its eastern and western regions hurriedly amputated to create Pakistan. Six thousand kilometres of new borders were drawn in just five weeks.

The partition etched a deep fissure in the region and threw millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on the road to their new homeland. Fifteen million people were uprooted. Entire villages were massacred. Tens of thousands of women were kidnapped and raped. Possibly as many as two million lives were lost.

An Indian woman looking at a map of the India-Pakistan boundaries as fixed by the boundary commission on August 17, 1947 at the Partition Museum in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP
An Indian woman looking at a map of the India-Pakistan boundaries as fixed by the boundary commission on August 17, 1947 at the Partition Museum in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP

Behind these statistics are the stories of the men and women who lived through that historic moment, the legacy of which still defines relations between the South Asian countries.

Students and volunteers in Karachi are transcribing fragments of oral history collected from across the country by the Citizen Archives of Pakistan.

Pakistani volunteers are seen transcribing interviews and testimonies of people who migrated from India to Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947, at their office of the Citizen Archive of Pakistan, in Karachi. — Photo by AFP
Pakistani volunteers are seen transcribing interviews and testimonies of people who migrated from India to Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947, at their office of the Citizen Archive of Pakistan, in Karachi. — Photo by AFP
Aliya Tayyabi, the head of Oral History Project of Citizen Archive of Pakistan, looks at archives pictures from the partition in 1947 at her office in Karachi. — Photo by AFP
Aliya Tayyabi, the head of Oral History Project of Citizen Archive of Pakistan, looks at archives pictures from the partition in 1947 at her office in Karachi. — Photo by AFP

“History for the longest amount of time has been limited to the people who were the rulers or the winners but history has a larger scope," said Aliya Tayyabi, director of the archives. "It has individuals who get affected. It has cultures that get affected.”

Race against time

Sukhwant Kaur, 78, had always struggled to find the words to explain her family's terrifying escape to the Indian side of the border.

Sitting in her home in Amritsar in northern India, Kaur, now a grandmother, can still recall with startling clarity the horrors she witnessed as a child of eight.

She recalls her mother asking her brother to drown her in a river. A small pond with corpses floating in it was the only place to find water. She remembers watching a woman cutting the umbilical cord of her newborn child with the only thing she could find: a stick of sugar cane.

Sushwant Kaur shows a photograph of her late father Sulkhan Singh, her son Jaswinder Singh sitting on her left, in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP
Sushwant Kaur shows a photograph of her late father Sulkhan Singh, her son Jaswinder Singh sitting on her left, in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP

“I feel much lighter inside having dared to explain all this,” said Kaur.

It is stories like Kaur and Jahan Ara's that, for several years now, organisations on both sides of the border, including the Citizen Archives of Pakistan, the Amritsar Partition Museum and the 1947 Partition Archive, have been hurrying to record and digitise.

Mallika Ahluwalia, CEO of the Partition Museum, speaking in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP
Mallika Ahluwalia, CEO of the Partition Museum, speaking in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP

“That generation is leaving us,” said Mallika Ahluwalia, director of the newly created Partition Museum. “There's this real sense of urgency.”

The projects are also seeking to transform that volatile period into more than just a chapter in a school textbook.

In Punjab, which saw some of the worst violence of 1947, the Partition Museum has enlisted the help of a dozen high school students from Amritsar. The teenagers were told to find three stories from the period from among their relatives.

Few families living around Amritsar, just 30 kilometres from Pakistan, had managed to escape partition untouched.

“While interviewing them, images were forming in front of my eyes. It was a painful experience; I almost felt the pain that they were going through at that time,” said 16-year-old student Aniket Bhatia.

'It wasn't just us Muslims who suffered'

Visitors looking at photographs and newspaper clippings at the Partition Museum in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP
Visitors looking at photographs and newspaper clippings at the Partition Museum in Amritsar. — Photo by AFP

Within the tales of desperate decisions and senseless brutality, however, emerge stories of love and hope.

“So many people who made it across, made it across because of the kindness of a friend, of a neighbour, of somebody who worked with them and in many cases even a stranger,” said Ahluwalia of the Partition Museum.

Survivors' accounts also offer objectivity from those who suffered most, says Aleena Mashhood of the Oral History Project, an increasingly valuable perspective as time goes on.

“They say something like, that wasn't [just] us Muslims who suffered, it was also the Hindus who suffered,” she said. “Your bias breaks.”

In Amritsar's Partition Museum, where the wounds that still define the region are preserved, the last room is perhaps aptly named “The Gallery of Hope”.