SOCIETY: SEA OF FORGOTTEN TALES
Qari Muhammad Farooq has a fading memory of riding on his father’s shoulders as a toddler when a group of Sikhs attacked them. He got separated from his father. His leg was injured. He does not recall much else. Not his father’s name or that of his village, not even his own name.
He started walking, headed nowhere. The small child did not know where to go. A Sikh man named Amroo came across him and took him to his home in the village Devidaspura, district Gurdaspur. Amroo had a wife and a son named Boota Singh. Farooq lived with the Sikh family for about four years. Then, the police came. The newly-carved states of India and Pakistan had decided to exchange stranded/abandoned children. The police was there at the behest of the government to send Farooq off to Pakistan. He was put on a bus filled with boys and girls of all ages, and women.
In the new country, he was sent to Milli Darul Atfal near Chauburji in Lahore. Around 400 girls and boys who were stranded in India or separated from their families were boarded here. Farooq was raised there until 1960, when Milli Darul Atfal was disbanded and he was shifted to a private orphanage. He went to a madressah and memorised the Quran. Over the years, he became head of the madressah, did his double masters, got married and had kids. He is now an old man but still yearns to connect to his kin.
Through YouTube and personal dedication, a few individuals are preserving the stories of those who experienced the violence of Partition and helping families reconect
Khayyam Chohan owns a small plot of land in Okara and runs a driving school. In January 2017, he started a YouTube channel on the stories of the Partition. “[In the violence of Partition], my nani (maternal grandmother) saw her family killed in front of her [in the village of Chandha Kalaan in Haryana],” says Chohan of how he started his channel.
“She was the only survivor in her family. Her painful life story always moved me. Then I started listening to similar accounts of other people, which led me to record them. When I had gathered about 10 stories, I started sharing them on YouTube.” So far he has shared interviews of more than 100 Partition survivors.
Chohan’s first post on YouTube received a positive response of about 2,000 views within days of uploading. He has travelled throughout Okara, to Pattoki and Sahiwal to record first-hand accounts of Partition survivors. Although he took up this project as volunteer work, it brings him enough earning to bear the expenses of filming the videos and cover the cost of travel. Chohan now has over 79,000 subscribers to his channel.
Chohan shared a video of Farooq’s story on his YouTube channel, Desi Infotainer. An oral history recorder in India, Tarsem Singh Tarana, prompted by the video, began a search for the village where Farooq and Boota Singh grew up. Tarana’s investigation helped reconnect two ‘brothers’ on either side of the border. Now Farooq talks to Boota Singh often over the phone.
Nasir Dhillon runs another YouTube channel by the name of Punjabi Lehar. His grandfather’s family had migrated from India and the old man would regularly visit them in India until the 1970s and 1980s.
“My grandfather’s memories of East Punjab inspired me always,” says Dhillon. “So far, I have recorded about 500 stories and uploaded more than half of them on YouTube.
For Dhillon, it all started with a Facebook page whose response prompted him to upload videos on YouTube. “[On the Facebook page], we got requests from Indians to trace the family homes of their elders. This gave us the idea to record interviews of the generation of people who had migrated [to Pakistan] from India in 1947. This led to more requests.”
He was a traffic warden and ran a little property business on the side when Dhillon started the oral history initiative about three years ago, along with a couple of friends, including Bhupinder Singh Lovely of Nankana.