Another Lal Masjid in the Making? 'In the heartland of Punjab and Sindh, no one says a negative word about India'

June 12, 2008

Your thoughts on the India-Pakistan dynamics.
It is in the interest of the armed forces to continue to raise the bogey of an Indian threat to exploit the whole country. So, from 1954 they have dissolved the constitution, they have raped the country, they have created wars with India that nobody wanted. It is an open secret that what General Ayub Khan did in 1965 is exactly what Pervez Musharraf did in Kargil. There's no evidence of India ever attacking Pakistan. The people of Pakistan are quite aware of this.

The fact is that the army can only keep control over a large share of Pakistan's budget if it can continue to say that it is India that has its eyes on Pakistan and it will finish it off. That fear of India has been hammered to such a degree that it (the bogey of India) has been able to survive.

I believe the people of Pakistan are smart enough, and they have realised that their future is in friendship with India rather than Iran or Saudi Arabia. They have lived in these two countries. Indians and Pakistanis are treated in a shallow manner there.

When a Pakistani is visiting India, people won't let you pay for your meal. The same is true when an Indian is visiting Pakistan. Canadian Sikhs are going to Pakistan to visit Nankana Sahib. They come back and say that they couldn't believe it felt like home. In the heartland of Punjab and Sindh, you will not find anyone to say a negative word about India.

In India you might find people who are less aware of Pakistan but in Pakistan everybody knows that their brothers and sisters are Sikhs and Hindus who are on the other side of the border.

In my book I have stated my ancestors are Hindus. We migrated from Rajasthan to Punjab after a famine in early 1800 and we converted to Islam and our family settled there.

Despite different religion, people of Pakistan are smart and resilient. Sixty to 70 per cent of Pakistanis are Punjabis. So, as long as in Lahore and West Punjab there's goodwill towards India, the army cannot continue to create this myth that India is going to attack Pakistan.

Do you think one day Pakistan and India will be like the European Union?

Absolutely. I am 100 per cent sure it will happen because of goodwill. It will happen because of the laws of nature, because we are one people. We have common cuisine, common culture, common language, common clothes, common sense of humour, common geography, common weather -- except, some believe in Bhagwan, some believe in Khuda, some believe in Namokar Mantra, and some don't believe in anything.

There's no greater place on this earth to live as a human being than the subcontinent. India as a subcontinent is a marvel of god's creation. There should never be a communal clash because so much of Islam and Hinduism have been together. We need to bring Kabir's Bhakti movement back, which the British crushed in such a crafty manner that we were left paralysed.

Another Lal Masjid in the Making? 'Trying to make Pakistan into an Arab country is never going to work'

June 12, 2008

If Muslims can live in peace and harmony in India, why can't they live in peace and harmony in Pakistan, a country supposedly created for them?
The movement for Pakistan was never by the people that comprise Pakistan today. The movement for Pakistan was essentially by upper class Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

Right up to 1946, Balochistan and Sindh were not voting for the Muslim League. They were voting for the (Indian National) Congress party. Balochistan was an independent state and they declared their independence three days before India's Independence. The coalition government headed by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in Bengal was the result of Direct Action Day of August 16, 1945, which led to the massacre -- actually genocide -- of Hindus in Noakhali (now in Bangladesh). It happened when in fact Muslims and Hindus there lived happily for hundreds of years.

Why would a Muslim find living in Pakistan problematic?

Because the idea that some sort of an Islamic state has to be created can never function. It will result in failure when you set impossible targets from the first day. That is the problem. Pakistan as a secular country, like (Mohammad Ali) Jinnah said in his opening speech, never functioned. It resulted in the cleansing of all Hindus and Sikhs from Punjab.

Punjab is primarily 60 to 70 per cent of Pakistan. It was left completely wounded and destroyed. It is only now West Punjab is reconciling with its close links with East Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. It was a living organism that was cut into two.

India was so large that it managed to take those wounds but Pakistan, being comparatively a smaller country, its heritage was linked with northern India. You are trying to make Pakistan into an Arab country. It is never going to work.

Image: An Indian bus driver is embraced by a Pakistani after arriving at the Wagah border

Another Lal Masjid in the Making? 'Saudi Arabia, sadly, is a racist State'

June 12, 2008

Some people say the Islamic world is divided into the privileged class of Saudis and ayatollahs and the 'second class' of ordinary Muslims.
It is more than that. The Saudi Muslim does consider a non-Arab Muslim as inferior. Saudi Arabia, sadly, is a racist State. It has salaries based on the colour of your skin, where an Indian Muslim is discriminated more than an Indian Hindu because a Hindu doesn't pray five times a day but a Muslim does.

It is purely commercial and racial. There's no element of spirituality. They have Kentucky Fried Chicken right around the house of god. It is an insult to the faith what the Saudis have done. And ayatollahs have become millionaires who are buying properties in Canada.

If you live in Pakistan, why should you care what the Saudis think of you?

Because I care what white people think of black people in the civil rights movement. It is an insult to me as a human being not to accept when racism, sectarianism and hatred of other human beings is being dressed up in my faith. It is an outrage.

Is Islamism confined within the borders of Saudi Arabia and Iran?

It is happening in Canada. It is happening because of Saudi money. The Islam of Indonesia, Malaysia or Bengal, Bihar, Punjab is different as the spiritual faith there is completely depoliticiced.

You go to any Muslim cemetery in Canada -- you will not see a single tombstone. Why? This is a culture that celebrates the Taj Mahal, and in Canada we are not allowed to put a stone on the head of a child or a parent or a grandfather. Who decided that? The Saudi funded imams. This is contrary to all Islamic traditions. Go to any other country and you can see beautiful mausoleums, but here in Canada the imams, through Saudi influence, the city councils, have decreed that cemeteries here will have no tombstones. This is all Wahhabi influence.

In your book you discuss the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam and the United Nations' human rights declaration.

The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights, enacted unanimously in 1948, allows freedom of choice of religion -- which means no coercion (on) who should believe in what faith. In many Muslim countries, they have decreed that if you choose to convert from Islam to any other religion, you should be punished by death. Second is the equality of man and woman. Such laws cannot be created from the divine text.

So, we have these 57 countries, members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, who are controlled by the Saudis. Their head office is in Saudi Arabia. They fund the entire organisation. So, nobody can object to anything they want to do. They are principally involved in keeping the Muslim world in the era of darkness. Many Muslim States argue that the UN Declaration of Human Rights is part of the Judeo-Christian traditions and so it shouldn't be applicable to the Muslim world. It is astonishing.

In my point of view you are walking into a territory that's divine, reserved for god. Who is someone to tell me I am coming to your house and so you should convert your faith or I will kill you? That's what's happening because the moment a Muslim says that I think there's a problem here and what should we do, they issue a fatwa to kill you.

They expelled (Bangladeshi writer) Taslima Nasrin after pressure from Kolkata Muslims. It is horrible. It is a disgrace not only for Muslims but also for the Indian government to have done that. That woman had to run away and that shows how sometimes non-Muslims also become complicit, saying what do we care if one Muslim kills another Muslim.

Another Lal Masjid in the Making? 'Mosques have become places of politics'

June 12, 2008

You are making a distinction between such Muslims and secular Muslims.
About 50 to 60 per cent of the Muslim population is illiterate or semi-illiterate. They are not interested in political power. They barely exist, whether they are in Bihar or they are in Mauritius. They simply want to survive. This gain is for 1 to 2 per cent of the Muslim population. Through political power, they can send messages out.

Who are they?

Primarily the Saudi royal family, the ruling ayatollahs in Iran -- some ayatollahs are in jails in Iran -- and clerics everywhere.

Look at the structures of mosques in Toronto, or elsewhere in Canada. These are large properties. The imam is employed by the board and in many cases takes over the entire structures. I know one organisation that has a property worth $15 million accumulated by the congregation giving cash. Where does this money go? Anyone who controls that amount of money is in politics. He can manipulate lawmakers. He can buy memberships into political parties. He can hire buses and send them to demonstrations. This is what's happening.

It is in the interest of these people to keep Islam politicised so that they can be self-appointed leaders who can communicate with the Western politicians. The ordinary Muslim who is driving a cab or (is) even a physician doesn't have time for all this nonsense. These guys are taking advantage of it.

I have suggested, therefore, that donations given to religious institutions by Canadians shouldn't be in cash but by cheques or credit cards. The money from outside comes in cheques anyway, except there's no way for anybody finding out what's happening in the mosques, as there's no accountability of where this money goes.

There should be a maximum limit that an individual can donate in cash. He should give a cheque or a credit card, beyond that cash. The mosque will never accept that because it is then traceable.

Mosques have become places of politics, which is dangerous. Some mosques are openly defying their charters as charities because they indulge in politics. Every sermon is political because they invite politicians to speak and instead of looking after the affairs of the community and serving their spiritual needs, they [mosques] have become places of bargaining with political parties.

How do you distinguish between an Islamist and a Muslim?

An Islamist is someone who believes in invoking Islam for a political agenda. A Muslim, on the other hand, uses Islam as a moral compass for his betterment and the betterment of his family. An Islamist is also a Muslim but a Muslim is not an Islamist.

India's first education minister, Abul Kalam Azad, a most respected statesman in the country, was not an Islamist. He was against Islamists. Similarly, there are many ayatollahs in Iran who are in jails -- as they are not Islamists.

Another Lal Masjid in the Making? 'There's no greater place to live as a human being than the subcontinent'

June 12, 2008

The Atelier Club in downtown Toronto was packed to capacity recently for the launch of Pakistan-born Tarek Fateh's book Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.
Fateh's book argues that Muslims have been force-fed lies about their history for over a millennium -- not by Islam's enemies, but by its imams.

'Islam came to free humanity from the clutches of the clergy. Instead, the religion of peace has become a prisoner of war, held captive by the very priesthood it came to eliminate,' Fateh, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, writes in his book.

In an exclusive interview Rediff India Abroad Senior Editor Ajit Jain, the prolific author, broadcaster and columnist pointed out that in India "Muslims, who are 12 per cent of that country's population, thrive," while "next door in Pakistan and Bangladesh," which are Islamic States, "Muslims suffer."

Through the book -- written despite death threats against him -- Fateh wants Muslims to understand that their future lies in "models that are based in India, South Africa and Canada."

Many Muslims say Islam was supposed to be a way of life but it has become a dogma. That it has been politicised.

In some unfortunate way, it is correct. All the differences within the Muslim community, or the wars and the civil wars that have been fought, have never been about piety but about politics.

What is the solution to the increasingly political overtones to the perception of Islam?

We have to stand up to them (fundamentalists) and expose the ideology of hate. In the Indian context, this is the choice between Aurangzeb on the one side and Dara Shikoh on the other.

We know the catastrophe that happened after Aurangzeb weakened the whole of the subcontinent in his efforts to do what the Wahhabis (an ultra-conservative branch of Islam with roots in Saudi Arabia) are now doing. Aurangzeb killed his brother (Shikoh) who was the crown prince, because he (Shikoh) was very close to Hindus and Sikhs.

It is known historically how Dara Shikoh in the 16th century with the help of Hindu priests learnt Sanskrit and -- again, with their help -- he translated (50) Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita into Persian, followed on what Akbar the great started, Din-e-Ilahi.

The entire thing became such a huge loss to India. Because of Aurangzeb and Islamic war, the whole country became feeble and the British were able to take over the country soon after his (Aurangzeb's) death.

Wherever Islam has become synonymous with violence and hate, Muslims have suffered tremendously. Of course, non-Muslims have also died by the hundreds, but the main victims have always been Muslims.

The traditional orphans of the Iran monarchs or the Indians recognised this was politics. This was not seriously about religion. Religion was merely a tool that allowed them to stay in power, whether it is Saudis or ayatollahs or in the Indian context, Aurangzeb, we had catastrophes, and repression, and secular Muslims had to fight political battles against these fascists.

My Most Memorable Journey #21
Ranjitji,

What a cogent and factual thoughts .These words are not meant to be hidden in an obscure chatroom but to be widely propagated amongst all Indo Pak forums at all levels.Not a single sane hindustani/pakistani is going to disagree.

Keep up the good work Ranjitji.

My Most Memorable Journey Ranjitji,

What a cogent and factual thoughts .These words are not meant to be hidden in an obscure chatroom but to be widely propagated amongst all Indo Pak forums at all levels.Not a single sane hindustani/pakistani is going to disagree.

Keep up the good work Ranjitji.

The Deoband Declaration on Terrorism: Why Now? Hindus in India forget their castes only at the time of riots.India is now indirectly ruled by the Muslims.Their tactical voting n huge multiplication in population resulting in huge vote bank selects the party in power .Its only a matter of time before they directly rule India.

The Naval War College Bomb Blasts The Price of Freedom

After an inspiring struggle for independence, the subcontinent was freed--and then split. Fifty years later, the scars of division remain

BY ANTHONY SPAETH/NEW DELHI

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

The Indian subcontinent was created in geophysical violence. A mass of floating land collided with Asia; in the process the Himalayan mountain chain was wrenched from the earth. So tremendous was the collision that the Himalayas are still rising 50 million years later.
The subcontinent we know today was born in a moment similarly awesome, historically portentous and destructive--a moment that continues to send powerful vibrations 50 years later. On Aug. 14-15, 1947, the nearly 400 million people of the subcontinent broke the shackles of eight centuries of rule by foreign sultans, emperors and, for 200 years, British colonialists. Following India's lead, the entire globe was propelled into an era of post-colonial freedom. It was a victory for mankind all the more remarkable for its improbability: India, fractious and humblingly poor, united to evict its sophisticated conquerers--and did so without war, under the banner of Mohandas K. Gandhi's ahimsa, or nonviolence.

But then something awful happened. Unity and transcendence turned to division and blood hunger. The subcontinent itself was torn into three separate chunks. Its people, formerly nonviolent fighters for freedom, became neighborly mass murderers. Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other, the only thing that joined them now was hatred and a fury still difficult to explain--and not, by a far measure, universally repented. "Our chaps would kill with really good spirit," reminisces Dilawar Butt, 73, a former member of the National Guard, who admits he helped torch a market in the city of Lahore in the summer of 1947, killing several hundred Hindus. "We didn't feel anything." Such behavior was not the monopoly of any single faction.

It's now 50 years on, and the subcontinent is on the brink of a revolution. India, the region's doddering giant for decades, is shedding its seemingly pathological inferiority complex, reaching out to a modern world it maintained at a disdainful remove. An economic miracle is possible if more than a billion people get better grindstones. That would be genuine cause for a proud 50th bash.

Unhappily, the fact of partition ensures that no celebration will escape a circumscription of mourning and loss. Even at the moment of freedom, the festivities were tainted. Shortly before midnight, Aug. 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India's Prime Minister a few minutes later, orated eloquently on his people's successful "tryst with destiny," a reference to the glorious freedom struggle. But by the time Nehru spoke, 20,000 people had already died in violence prompted by the mere prospect of partition. In the three months after Muslim Pakistan was rent from Hindu India, forcing parallel migrations of some 12 million people, hundreds of thousands more perished--perhaps a million. (An exact count has never been possible.) There are still thousands officially missing from population rolls: occupants of unmarked graves in fertile Punjab or Bengal, cremated ashes at the bottom of rivers, or skeletons in drinking wells, into which countless raped or terrified farm wives jumped to end their lives.

Partition: an arid term for an event so drenched in blood, madness and mass tragedy. On the subcontinent, it is commonly described as a shadow from the past, some kind of ephemeral projection of grief. It is far more: a division that changed the destinies of one of the most populated parts of the earth, and that continues to do so. Partition created a country, Pakistan, with such a tenuous hold on unity that it split in half 24 years later and still can't unite its warring, armed-to-the-mustache ethnic groups. Its eastern wing became Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest, most crowded countries, its 120 million people earning an average of $247 a year. Partition and its slaughters made enemies of India and Pakistan. They have fought three fratricidal wars and continue to spend obscene sums on their militaries. Both have nuclear weapons programs (although India officially reveres the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi). Indians and Pakistanis share a cuisine and enjoy the same films, but there is barely any trade allowed between the two lands, and cross-border visits are as few as the authorities can manage. The alienation seems eternal: reunification is never discussed on the subcontinent. Offshore, on the tiny island of Sri Lanka, partition had little impact in 1947. (Britain governed the colony, then known as Ceylon, separately from India and didn't grant independence until 1948.) But partition's perilous political and social lessons were rapidly absorbed. A British-style parliamentary system went rotten when politicians from the majority Sinhalese community fanned animosities against minority Tamils to get votes. A Tamil insurgency has raged for 14 years, claiming at least 60,000 lives. Its demand: a partition of Sri Lanka. Within India, an assortment of disgruntled minorities--Nagas, Kashmiris, Assamese--make the same demand today, with bus bombs and ambushes, 50 years after the original partition. Which may explain why a half-century of freedom is being observed mutedly throughout the subcontinent, with soul-searching supplements in newspapers rather than fireworks and festivals.

It's impossible to overstate the impact of the nearly 50-year agitation for freedom on the subcontinent's consciousness. The movement forged a nation called India from an enormous mob of linguistic groups, ethnic identities and rival castes. Schoolbooks, grandparents' tales and popular culture have planted the story deep into the imagination of the young. Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, published in 1989, was a recasting of the Mahabharata, India's sublime epic, with Gandhi, Nehru and other freedom-movement figures in the mythic roles. Looking Through Glass, a 1996 novel by Mukul Kesavan, is the story of an aimless modern Indian magically transported back to the more meaningful days of the freedom struggle. For many young Indians, the movement was a Golden Age they missed.

Partition has a far smaller claim on the popular imagination, having been almost psychologically detached from the uplifting events that preceded it. Partition fiction is mostly published in vernacular languages, which restricts readership, and films attempting to portray the event in all its epic tragedy have appeared on television in recent years but hardly ever on the big screen. There is a mass of historical literature on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, of course, predominantly obsessed with one question: what caused partition and the slaughters surrounding it?

There's plenty of blame to go around. When Britain decided after World War II to grant independence to the subcontinent, the population of nearly 400 million was 66% Hindu and 24% Muslim. (The latter group had been converted over centuries virtually since the advent of Islam.) It was a serious social divide. The purity requirements of Hinduism prevented intimate interaction, including marriage and even meal-sharing, and Muslims were generally poorer than their Hindu counterparts. The British encouraged separation of the groups to avoid joint rebellion, the so-called divide-and-rule policy. A highly durable theory in India, taught in textbooks, is that pernicious British fostering of Hindu-Muslim enmity led directly to partition and mass slaughter. Divide-and-rule preordained a fractured subcontinent.

But that theory ignores many significant milestones and misjudgments along the road. From 1920, Hindu India was rallied by the Indian National Congress under Gandhi, the barrister-turned-nonviolent agitator. Gandhi wanted the Muslim community in his movement--they were fiercely anti-British, though hardly committed to nonviolence--and to achieve that, he embraced the cause of the Ottoman Empire, whose Caliph was the protector of all Islamic holy sites. That tactic worked, but when the Caliphate itself was abolished in 1924, Muslims on the subcontinent lost their link to a pan-Islamic kingdom and grew acutely insecure about their place in predominantly Hindu India. In 1930, poet-philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal called for a Muslim state on the subcontinent. In 1933, a group of students at Cambridge University invented the name Pakistan, an acronym including initials from Punjab, Afghania (the current Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan), Kashmir, Sind and the last three letters of Baluchistan.

The 1930s and '40s saw some of the best moments of the freedom movement--such as Gandhi's famed Salt March, a 388 km protest walk against British taxes--along with setbacks and eternal negotiations with Britain over self-rule. In 1946, the British proposed an ambitious and intricate federation to which all parties agreed, including Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the powerful Muslim League. But Nehru, newly elected head of the Congress party, made an unfortunate remark at a press conference, saying the plans were subject to change by the Congress. Jinnah was enraged and Nehru, too proud to back down, let the statement stand. That was India's last chance at an undivided future. On Aug. 16, 1946, tens of thousands of Muslims gathered at pro-Pakistan rallies in Calcutta. Rioting led to mass murder and Hindu reprisals, and local blacksmiths worked around the clock producing weapons. Five thousand were dead in 72 hours; the gutters of Calcutta were clogged with corpses. It was mayhem unlike any India had experienced before. "The slaughter definitely made the partition inevitable," says Waheedul Haque, now an editorial writer in Dhaka. "It was the point of no return." The riots spread, and over the next year 20,000 people died as Muslims demanded Pakistan and Hindus promised a different fate: "graveyard-stan."

In March 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, became the final Viceroy of India, charged with negotiating independence with Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. The job was hurried because India seemed on the brink of civil war. On June 3, partition was formally confirmed, although the boundaries were not announced until after independence. Freedom came 30 minutes apart for the two countries on Aug. 14-15: to distinguish itself from India, Pakistan turned its clock back 30 minutes. Nehru told his people that their tryst with destiny had been achieved. It was, in fact, an assignation that was just building steam.

The refugees were on the move: poor people with humble possessions, staggering in the summer heat, in groups as large as half a million stretching 80 km. They passed each other as they made their way to new homes in Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan--or attempted to. Wajahat Husain was a 21-year-old army officer on the new border bisecting Punjab in 1947. Near the town of Jullundur, 103 km from the border, a trainload of would-be Muslim refugees had been attacked by resident Sikhs. When he reached the scene, Husain found corpses jumbled on the ground with bloodied swords and tied-up bedding. The landscape was still with death, except for one sound: in the midst of the carnage was an elderly woman, still alive and crying for her relatives; her arms and legs had been amputated. Then Husain stumbled on a mass of abandoned women's shoes. He made his way through some bushes and found naked women of all ages, dismembered and eviscerated, surrounded by crying, crawling babies.

The transfer of peoples was supposed to be as nonviolent as the freedom struggle. Gandhi, fearing trouble in hot-headed Calcutta, made a peace mission that miraculously calmed the air. Where he was absent, however, so were his principles. There were explanations later, though none sufficed on its own. Hindus were angry at Muslims for the splitting of the country. Sikhs were enraged over the loss of their lands to Pakistan. Some killings were retaliatory: a trainload of murdered Muslim refugees coming from India provoked a "ghost train" of dead Hindus going the other way. Much of the carnage was driven by rumors of atrocities that hadn't really occurred or attacks that weren't forthcoming. And, of course, everyone was doing it, including the British-trained police. "People on both sides had gone mad," says Abdullah Malik, then a 27-year-old journalist in Lahore. "Any sane person can't explain it. The entire people were caught in a frenzy."

Muhammed Ashiq was a 12-year-old boy in the city of Wazirabad in 1947. He accompanied a gang of youths determined to attack a trainload of refugees headed for India and witnessed, though didn't participate in, the brutality. The vehicle stopped at an arranged place; the passengers were told to lie down in the train. Then the boys beat and stabbed them to death. A Hindu boy was left alive, and he begged his attackers: 'Kill me too.' They obliged. "At the time it seemed OK and justified," Ashiq says, "because we were doing it in reaction to what happened in India. Now it appears wrong." Singhara Singh, 83, a farmer in Sultanwind, Punjab admits to killing at least 40 Muslims with his sword and machete in 1947. "I feel no remorse," he insists. "The Muslims were responsible for the division of the country. We needed to teach them a lesson."

Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who turns 100 this year, blames Gandhi and his freedom struggle. He argues that the Mahatma needed a mass campaign to drive the British out, but the movement was overly narrow in scope and its foundation was the hatred shared by Hindus and Muslims for the British. He says the sophisticated, foreign-educated leaders of the freedom struggle didn't know the average Indian and ignored the masses' tendency to violence. "Mahatma Gandhi thought that his admonitions about non-violence would be listened to," Chaudhuri wrote in his 1987 memoir Thy Hand, Great Anarch! "Of course they were not and could not be." The late Dorab Patel, a former justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, reached a similar conclusion. "They had to launch mass movements," he said in an interview shortly before he died last March, "and you can't launch mass movements by talking of Charles James Fox and John Bright and William Gladstone." Patel's conclusion: "I feel that the partition was a price of the independence of India."

The mass slaughtering ended in November, abruptly and inexplicably--the partition's final mystery. And then it was time for millions to settle in their new homes. Ishrat Jahan was 11 when her family was forced to flee the foothills of the Himalayas in November 1947. "Our house was surrounded by militants carrying swords and enormous torches," she recalls. "If the Hindus attack," my father told us, "I will kill you all and then myself." Miraculously, they were spared. Their train to Pakistan was sprayed by bullets, killing most of the passengers riding on the roof, and when they finally arrived at their new home in Rawalpindi, their odyssey had a bloody coda. "Near our house there was a harsh smell," Jahan recalls. She and her sisters were sent to explore. A short distance away, they discovered a Hindu temple and a drinking well--both stuffed with corpses.

There is an argument that partition saved India as a united nation. It will always have its ethnic and caste fissiparousness, but the added strain of Pakistan and Bangladesh's hundreds of millions might have tipped the ever-delicate balance. There's a contrary argument, of course, that the subcontinent would have had a far superior 50 years by remaining a single country, a federation, or by acting like friendly neighbors. "I should imagine you would have a very powerful South Asia if they had managed to live together," says Barun Dey, director of the Maulana Azad Institute of Asia Studies, a Calcutta think tank.

Bangladesh and India today enjoy an improving equation. The partition slaughters in Bengal were lesser in scope than in Punjab, and India's military might helped secure Bangladesh's own freedom from Pakistan in 1971. Travel agents, in fact, see a booming business in people revisiting their original homes on either side of the border. Sri Lanka remains the region's odd man out, preoccupied with its own ethnic woes and of little interest to the rest of the subcontinent, especially to India, which intervened militarily in the late 1980s with catastrophic results.

Between India and Pakistan, however, the past 50 years have been long, warlike and demonstrably unhealing. "Pakistan was born with a hole in its heart," says I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "Afraid, afraid, afraid--the hole is fear." The country's most popular slogan once was Pakistan Zindabad, or Long Live Pakistan. Today, a more common usage is Pakistan Forever--a discernible taunt to India. On its side, India continues its provocations, large and small. It is building missiles capable of delivering atomic weapons--while Pakistan reportedly buys its from China--and still forbids direct flights from New Delhi to Islamabad to deny respect to the Pakistani capital. The Muslims that stayed behind in India, a populous 120 million, are less secure today than at any time since partition. Says Mahbub ul Haq, a former Pakistan finance minister: "The drama of partition cast a dark shadow on the evolution of these countries. They have never been able to outgrow the bitter legacy of the past."

Estrangement exists in the halls of power and on the streets, engulfing old and young. F.S. Aijazuddin, an investment banker in Lahore, recalls being on a bus in Paris when he was hailed by another subcontinental passenger. "Are you Indian?" asked the stranger. Aijazuddin, 55, said he was from Pakistan. "Oh, India-Pakistan, one and the same," replied his new friend blithely. "Then," said the banker, "can I say you're Pakistani?" The Indian man's smile faded and he turned away. The subcontinent gained freedom 50 years ago, along with borders, unimaginable bloodshed and a whole new enemy within.

Reinterpretation of Islam in Turkey The Price of Freedom

After an inspiring struggle for independence, the subcontinent was freed--and then split. Fifty years later, the scars of division remain

BY ANTHONY SPAETH/NEW DELHI

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

The Indian subcontinent was created in geophysical violence. A mass of floating land collided with Asia; in the process the Himalayan mountain chain was wrenched from the earth. So tremendous was the collision that the Himalayas are still rising 50 million years later.
The subcontinent we know today was born in a moment similarly awesome, historically portentous and destructive--a moment that continues to send powerful vibrations 50 years later. On Aug. 14-15, 1947, the nearly 400 million people of the subcontinent broke the shackles of eight centuries of rule by foreign sultans, emperors and, for 200 years, British colonialists. Following India's lead, the entire globe was propelled into an era of post-colonial freedom. It was a victory for mankind all the more remarkable for its improbability: India, fractious and humblingly poor, united to evict its sophisticated conquerers--and did so without war, under the banner of Mohandas K. Gandhi's ahimsa, or nonviolence.

But then something awful happened. Unity and transcendence turned to division and blood hunger. The subcontinent itself was torn into three separate chunks. Its people, formerly nonviolent fighters for freedom, became neighborly mass murderers. Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other, the only thing that joined them now was hatred and a fury still difficult to explain--and not, by a far measure, universally repented. "Our chaps would kill with really good spirit," reminisces Dilawar Butt, 73, a former member of the National Guard, who admits he helped torch a market in the city of Lahore in the summer of 1947, killing several hundred Hindus. "We didn't feel anything." Such behavior was not the monopoly of any single faction.

It's now 50 years on, and the subcontinent is on the brink of a revolution. India, the region's doddering giant for decades, is shedding its seemingly pathological inferiority complex, reaching out to a modern world it maintained at a disdainful remove. An economic miracle is possible if more than a billion people get better grindstones. That would be genuine cause for a proud 50th bash.

Unhappily, the fact of partition ensures that no celebration will escape a circumscription of mourning and loss. Even at the moment of freedom, the festivities were tainted. Shortly before midnight, Aug. 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India's Prime Minister a few minutes later, orated eloquently on his people's successful "tryst with destiny," a reference to the glorious freedom struggle. But by the time Nehru spoke, 20,000 people had already died in violence prompted by the mere prospect of partition. In the three months after Muslim Pakistan was rent from Hindu India, forcing parallel migrations of some 12 million people, hundreds of thousands more perished--perhaps a million. (An exact count has never been possible.) There are still thousands officially missing from population rolls: occupants of unmarked graves in fertile Punjab or Bengal, cremated ashes at the bottom of rivers, or skeletons in drinking wells, into which countless raped or terrified farm wives jumped to end their lives.

Partition: an arid term for an event so drenched in blood, madness and mass tragedy. On the subcontinent, it is commonly described as a shadow from the past, some kind of ephemeral projection of grief. It is far more: a division that changed the destinies of one of the most populated parts of the earth, and that continues to do so. Partition created a country, Pakistan, with such a tenuous hold on unity that it split in half 24 years later and still can't unite its warring, armed-to-the-mustache ethnic groups. Its eastern wing became Bangladesh, one of the world's poorest, most crowded countries, its 120 million people earning an average of $247 a year. Partition and its slaughters made enemies of India and Pakistan. They have fought three fratricidal wars and continue to spend obscene sums on their militaries. Both have nuclear weapons programs (although India officially reveres the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi). Indians and Pakistanis share a cuisine and enjoy the same films, but there is barely any trade allowed between the two lands, and cross-border visits are as few as the authorities can manage. The alienation seems eternal: reunification is never discussed on the subcontinent. Offshore, on the tiny island of Sri Lanka, partition had little impact in 1947. (Britain governed the colony, then known as Ceylon, separately from India and didn't grant independence until 1948.) But partition's perilous political and social lessons were rapidly absorbed. A British-style parliamentary system went rotten when politicians from the majority Sinhalese community fanned animosities against minority Tamils to get votes. A Tamil insurgency has raged for 14 years, claiming at least 60,000 lives. Its demand: a partition of Sri Lanka. Within India, an assortment of disgruntled minorities--Nagas, Kashmiris, Assamese--make the same demand today, with bus bombs and ambushes, 50 years after the original partition. Which may explain why a half-century of freedom is being observed mutedly throughout the subcontinent, with soul-searching supplements in newspapers rather than fireworks and festivals.

It's impossible to overstate the impact of the nearly 50-year agitation for freedom on the subcontinent's consciousness. The movement forged a nation called India from an enormous mob of linguistic groups, ethnic identities and rival castes. Schoolbooks, grandparents' tales and popular culture have planted the story deep into the imagination of the young. Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, published in 1989, was a recasting of the Mahabharata, India's sublime epic, with Gandhi, Nehru and other freedom-movement figures in the mythic roles. Looking Through Glass, a 1996 novel by Mukul Kesavan, is the story of an aimless modern Indian magically transported back to the more meaningful days of the freedom struggle. For many young Indians, the movement was a Golden Age they missed.

Partition has a far smaller claim on the popular imagination, having been almost psychologically detached from the uplifting events that preceded it. Partition fiction is mostly published in vernacular languages, which restricts readership, and films attempting to portray the event in all its epic tragedy have appeared on television in recent years but hardly ever on the big screen. There is a mass of historical literature on both sides of the India-Pakistan border, of course, predominantly obsessed with one question: what caused partition and the slaughters surrounding it?

There's plenty of blame to go around. When Britain decided after World War II to grant independence to the subcontinent, the population of nearly 400 million was 66% Hindu and 24% Muslim. (The latter group had been converted over centuries virtually since the advent of Islam.) It was a serious social divide. The purity requirements of Hinduism prevented intimate interaction, including marriage and even meal-sharing, and Muslims were generally poorer than their Hindu counterparts. The British encouraged separation of the groups to avoid joint rebellion, the so-called divide-and-rule policy. A highly durable theory in India, taught in textbooks, is that pernicious British fostering of Hindu-Muslim enmity led directly to partition and mass slaughter. Divide-and-rule preordained a fractured subcontinent.

But that theory ignores many significant milestones and misjudgments along the road. From 1920, Hindu India was rallied by the Indian National Congress under Gandhi, the barrister-turned-nonviolent agitator. Gandhi wanted the Muslim community in his movement--they were fiercely anti-British, though hardly committed to nonviolence--and to achieve that, he embraced the cause of the Ottoman Empire, whose Caliph was the protector of all Islamic holy sites. That tactic worked, but when the Caliphate itself was abolished in 1924, Muslims on the subcontinent lost their link to a pan-Islamic kingdom and grew acutely insecure about their place in predominantly Hindu India. In 1930, poet-philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal called for a Muslim state on the subcontinent. In 1933, a group of students at Cambridge University invented the name Pakistan, an acronym including initials from Punjab, Afghania (the current Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan), Kashmir, Sind and the last three letters of Baluchistan.

The 1930s and '40s saw some of the best moments of the freedom movement--such as Gandhi's famed Salt March, a 388 km protest walk against British taxes--along with setbacks and eternal negotiations with Britain over self-rule. In 1946, the British proposed an ambitious and intricate federation to which all parties agreed, including Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the powerful Muslim League. But Nehru, newly elected head of the Congress party, made an unfortunate remark at a press conference, saying the plans were subject to change by the Congress. Jinnah was enraged and Nehru, too proud to back down, let the statement stand. That was India's last chance at an undivided future. On Aug. 16, 1946, tens of thousands of Muslims gathered at pro-Pakistan rallies in Calcutta. Rioting led to mass murder and Hindu reprisals, and local blacksmiths worked around the clock producing weapons. Five thousand were dead in 72 hours; the gutters of Calcutta were clogged with corpses. It was mayhem unlike any India had experienced before. "The slaughter definitely made the partition inevitable," says Waheedul Haque, now an editorial writer in Dhaka. "It was the point of no return." The riots spread, and over the next year 20,000 people died as Muslims demanded Pakistan and Hindus promised a different fate: "graveyard-stan."

In March 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, became the final Viceroy of India, charged with negotiating independence with Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah. The job was hurried because India seemed on the brink of civil war. On June 3, partition was formally confirmed, although the boundaries were not announced until after independence. Freedom came 30 minutes apart for the two countries on Aug. 14-15: to distinguish itself from India, Pakistan turned its clock back 30 minutes. Nehru told his people that their tryst with destiny had been achieved. It was, in fact, an assignation that was just building steam.

The refugees were on the move: poor people with humble possessions, staggering in the summer heat, in groups as large as half a million stretching 80 km. They passed each other as they made their way to new homes in Hindu India or Muslim Pakistan--or attempted to. Wajahat Husain was a 21-year-old army officer on the new border bisecting Punjab in 1947. Near the town of Jullundur, 103 km from the border, a trainload of would-be Muslim refugees had been attacked by resident Sikhs. When he reached the scene, Husain found corpses jumbled on the ground with bloodied swords and tied-up bedding. The landscape was still with death, except for one sound: in the midst of the carnage was an elderly woman, still alive and crying for her relatives; her arms and legs had been amputated. Then Husain stumbled on a mass of abandoned women's shoes. He made his way through some bushes and found naked women of all ages, dismembered and eviscerated, surrounded by crying, crawling babies.

The transfer of peoples was supposed to be as nonviolent as the freedom struggle. Gandhi, fearing trouble in hot-headed Calcutta, made a peace mission that miraculously calmed the air. Where he was absent, however, so were his principles. There were explanations later, though none sufficed on its own. Hindus were angry at Muslims for the splitting of the country. Sikhs were enraged over the loss of their lands to Pakistan. Some killings were retaliatory: a trainload of murdered Muslim refugees coming from India provoked a "ghost train" of dead Hindus going the other way. Much of the carnage was driven by rumors of atrocities that hadn't really occurred or attacks that weren't forthcoming. And, of course, everyone was doing it, including the British-trained police. "People on both sides had gone mad," says Abdullah Malik, then a 27-year-old journalist in Lahore. "Any sane person can't explain it. The entire people were caught in a frenzy."

Muhammed Ashiq was a 12-year-old boy in the city of Wazirabad in 1947. He accompanied a gang of youths determined to attack a trainload of refugees headed for India and witnessed, though didn't participate in, the brutality. The vehicle stopped at an arranged place; the passengers were told to lie down in the train. Then the boys beat and stabbed them to death. A Hindu boy was left alive, and he begged his attackers: 'Kill me too.' They obliged. "At the time it seemed OK and justified," Ashiq says, "because we were doing it in reaction to what happened in India. Now it appears wrong." Singhara Singh, 83, a farmer in Sultanwind, Punjab admits to killing at least 40 Muslims with his sword and machete in 1947. "I feel no remorse," he insists. "The Muslims were responsible for the division of the country. We needed to teach them a lesson."

Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who turns 100 this year, blames Gandhi and his freedom struggle. He argues that the Mahatma needed a mass campaign to drive the British out, but the movement was overly narrow in scope and its foundation was the hatred shared by Hindus and Muslims for the British. He says the sophisticated, foreign-educated leaders of the freedom struggle didn't know the average Indian and ignored the masses' tendency to violence. "Mahatma Gandhi thought that his admonitions about non-violence would be listened to," Chaudhuri wrote in his 1987 memoir Thy Hand, Great Anarch! "Of course they were not and could not be." The late Dorab Patel, a former justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, reached a similar conclusion. "They had to launch mass movements," he said in an interview shortly before he died last March, "and you can't launch mass movements by talking of Charles James Fox and John Bright and William Gladstone." Patel's conclusion: "I feel that the partition was a price of the independence of India."

The mass slaughtering ended in November, abruptly and inexplicably--the partition's final mystery. And then it was time for millions to settle in their new homes. Ishrat Jahan was 11 when her family was forced to flee the foothills of the Himalayas in November 1947. "Our house was surrounded by militants carrying swords and enormous torches," she recalls. "If the Hindus attack," my father told us, "I will kill you all and then myself." Miraculously, they were spared. Their train to Pakistan was sprayed by bullets, killing most of the passengers riding on the roof, and when they finally arrived at their new home in Rawalpindi, their odyssey had a bloody coda. "Near our house there was a harsh smell," Jahan recalls. She and her sisters were sent to explore. A short distance away, they discovered a Hindu temple and a drinking well--both stuffed with corpses.

There is an argument that partition saved India as a united nation. It will always have its ethnic and caste fissiparousness, but the added strain of Pakistan and Bangladesh's hundreds of millions might have tipped the ever-delicate balance. There's a contrary argument, of course, that the subcontinent would have had a far superior 50 years by remaining a single country, a federation, or by acting like friendly neighbors. "I should imagine you would have a very powerful South Asia if they had managed to live together," says Barun Dey, director of the Maulana Azad Institute of Asia Studies, a Calcutta think tank.

Bangladesh and India today enjoy an improving equation. The partition slaughters in Bengal were lesser in scope than in Punjab, and India's military might helped secure Bangladesh's own freedom from Pakistan in 1971. Travel agents, in fact, see a booming business in people revisiting their original homes on either side of the border. Sri Lanka remains the region's odd man out, preoccupied with its own ethnic woes and of little interest to the rest of the subcontinent, especially to India, which intervened militarily in the late 1980s with catastrophic results.

Between India and Pakistan, however, the past 50 years have been long, warlike and demonstrably unhealing. "Pakistan was born with a hole in its heart," says I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "Afraid, afraid, afraid--the hole is fear." The country's most popular slogan once was Pakistan Zindabad, or Long Live Pakistan. Today, a more common usage is Pakistan Forever--a discernible taunt to India. On its side, India continues its provocations, large and small. It is building missiles capable of delivering atomic weapons--while Pakistan reportedly buys its from China--and still forbids direct flights from New Delhi to Islamabad to deny respect to the Pakistani capital. The Muslims that stayed behind in India, a populous 120 million, are less secure today than at any time since partition. Says Mahbub ul Haq, a former Pakistan finance minister: "The drama of partition cast a dark shadow on the evolution of these countries. They have never been able to outgrow the bitter legacy of the past."

Estrangement exists in the halls of power and on the streets, engulfing old and young. F.S. Aijazuddin, an investment banker in Lahore, recalls being on a bus in Paris when he was hailed by another subcontinental passenger. "Are you Indian?" asked the stranger. Aijazuddin, 55, said he was from Pakistan. "Oh, India-Pakistan, one and the same," replied his new friend blithely. "Then," said the banker, "can I say you're Pakistani?" The Indian man's smile faded and he turned away. The subcontinent gained freedom 50 years ago, along with borders, unimaginable bloodshed and a whole new enemy within.

Reinterpretation of Islam in Turkey Re: # 209

DM sahib

Mr Gian sarup a fellow khatri like u wants to contact u .his mail id is gsarup@verizon.net.
he is a retired professor staying in chicago n is trying to get in touch with u for quite sometime after reading your article on amazing khatris of punjab.

rgds

vivek

Pervez Musharraf and India Pakistan Rapproachment Re: # 211

DMji

I truly appreciate your articles and views.I was surprised to know that u n your family suffered such horrendous treatment at the hand of Muslims and still u harbour no illwill towards them.My effort towrds posting of these articles is that to say todays generation of never to forget the history and realise how Pakistan solved its minority problem .

BTW the writer of abv artcle MR giansarup is in US and can be contacted at gsarup@verizon.net
His site is bhera.com

Pakistan, a Different Country! A PRINCESS BRIDE

The great-great-granddaughter of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" returns to her home in Pakistan after an overlong absence

BY SUKETU MEHTA/LAHORE

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

One day in august 1947, Nony Singh overheard her father talking about shooting her. She was around ten then, a Sikh girl growing up in a big house in Lahore, just before partition. She was walking along a passageway when she overheard a conversation out on the veranda: her grandfather, her father and her uncles were planning how they would defend themselves against Muslim mobs that were returning with increasing frequency to the house. The men--most of whom were army or police officers--had stockpiled a huge cache of arms in the house. The teenage girls in the family--her oldest sister and her three aunts--had already been sent to safety across the border to Simla, a hill resort that would eventually fall to India; only Nony and her two younger sisters were left in Lahore. She heard her father tell the others that, if Muslims broke into the house, he would fight to the end. But before the end came, he said, "I will take the three girls into a room and line them up and shoot them."
We were standing on this same veranda now, my friend Nony Singh and I, 50 years later. It was the first time she had returned to Lahore since 1947. She was making a unique crossing, not merely from the country in which she lives to the one left behind, not just from her present home to an earlier one, but from approaching old age back to the territory of childhood, a realm preserved only in dreams and old photographs.

What made her return unusual was that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of the Punjab," the Sikh king who at the beginning of the 19th century ruled over all of Punjab from Lahore. So when she came back, it was with a special sense of belonging, above and beyond that of the many other partition refugees visiting ancestral homes. Signing the Pakistani visa forms in Delhi, she had remarked: "I felt I own the place. How dare they ask for a visa?"

Nony had left Lahore on a sour note: a fight with her best friend Fauziya, who lived next door. Nony had made a doll, with a long plait, the face painted with watercolors, and a wardrobe fashioned of brightly colored scraps from her aunts' old clothes. Fauziya wanted Nony to marry her attractive doll to Fauziya's male doll. At first Nony agreed, but then Fauziya told her that since her doll was female, it would have to come with a dowry--all the doll-clothes and doll-bedding that Nony had hand-stitched. Also, Fauziya insisted, after the wedding the female doll would have to stay in the male doll's house--as was the custom among humans. Nony turned down the match, and Fauziya stopped speaking to her. A few days later, Nony and her family left Pakistan forever, taking the doll with her. She has always regretted, she told me, that she left Pakistan on a fight over the distribution of property.

What she wanted to do now was to go back to the two houses in which she had grown up: her maternal grandmother's amid the winding lanes of Anarkali Bazaar, and her paternal grandfather's in Model Town. Her grandmother had died soon after crossing the border, Nony said: "We were thrown out. We felt very hurt. My grandmother died of sorrow."

The Anarkali Bazaar house is now a printing shop. Sometime after partition it was taken over by the former tenants, and stacks of old books crowd the rooms where her grandmother once conducted business from behind a latticed screen with the accountants, making sure that rent-collection from her numerous shops in the bazaar was in order. Though he was quite ill, the old man who now owns the house invited Nony for dinner because, he said, he had something to explain. He was ashamed. At partition, he said, Nony's grandmother had given his father the key to the house for safekeeping. The father had kept all her grandmother's possessions locked in the upper rooms of the house, allowing no one to enter them. Then, he said, after a family dispute his cousins had broken into the rooms and stolen everything. He said he had lived with the guilt for 50 years. Now at last he could explain and apologize. Nony said later, "I was embarrassed also, and I was hurt. This was my house, and some other people took it over. But I admired him for telling me. His family was so affectionate. The human feeling was what mattered."

When she left the man's house, she was given bangles and an embroidered veil--the traditional gifts a daughter of the house is given when she returns to her in-laws. The symbolism was clear: this was Nony's true home, here in Lahore. Delhi and India were merely in-laws, the family into which she had found herself married.

Nony was overwhelmed at the reception she received, not just from the people who lived in her family's houses, but from taxi-drivers, bellboys, merchants in the bazaars. Her coming from India was good for substantial discounts in the ancient shops of Anarkali Bazaar. As a daughter of the neighborhood, she was able to buy a 750-rupee suit for 600 rupees. The elderly proprietor of a photo shop, upon learning Nony was from India, said he was, too, and asked her to have lunch or dinner with his family.

One evening we went to the Pak Tea House, a writers' cafe that Pakistan's greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, used to frequent. A group of poets and writers clustered around us. Surprisingly, this was the place in Pakistan where Nony found the closest thing resembling hostility toward her as an Indian. A professor of Urdu literature declared that the enmity between India and Pakistan would be solved if India "liberated" Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. "I was scared of their fanaticism," Nony said. "They were so vehement. These are the people that create the frenzy. If they were my age, they would never have talked that way." After one in the group maligned Maulana Azad, a prominent Muslim in the freedom struggle who chose to stay in India and is therefore reviled in Pakistani history texts, Nony added: "He was talking like a fanatic about Pakistan. I wish he had seen that united India [before partition]. We sacrificed together, we shed our blood together to win freedom. Then what happened?" For all her warm feelings toward ordinary Pakistanis, Nony remained clear about the political gulf between the two countries: "The difference between India and Pakistan is army rule. Their youngsters hate India. Army rule has dinned it into their heads to make war. Our democracy, whatever it is, has worked."

Not always. Like most Hindu and Sikh refugees who fled to India, Nony's family did well in their new homeland. She married a fellow refugee, a farmer who in 1965 set a record for wheat production. Then in 1984 India's Sikhs suffered through what for many of them was a second partition: the pogroms against Nony's community that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Nony and her three daughters were saved by a Hindu neighbor across the street, who hid them from the fury of the mobs for 11 days.

Once the riots were over and she could return to her house, Nony worried about what she should put on the name plate outside her gate. After all, she had just witnessed the evil attention a Sikh name could attract. In the end, she used only the number 15, the address of the house. She still regrets not being able to display a name. "I felt one day people will be reduced just to numbers," she says. "We are not proud of being anything--Sikh, Hindu, Muslim."

Her grandfather's home in Model Town was a household of women before partition. Nony's father was frequently away on army duty, and her grandfather usually closeted himself with his second wife on the ground floor. As teenage girls are wont to do, Nony's aunts and her sisters liked to play the radio full blast, mostly film music--Saigal, Kanan Bala, Nurjehan. Her aunts often stole away to the movies, a forbidden activity. Once they took the family tonga, or horse-cart, and caromed down the road until they lost control of the horse, crashed, and fell off laughing--shocking all the neighbors. Before partition the family was united, rich and happy.

When she traveled to Lahore, she was looking for something that would be defined for her by Badar, the man who now lives in her grandfather's house. At the end of the lavish dinner his family had laid out for Nony and me, Badar became thoughtful. Like his wife, he said, he was the child of partition refugees who had made the crossing the other way, from Delhi and Bhopal to Pakistan. "It is a miracle you're here," he said, turning to Nony. "It's like a movie, a dream. After 50 years, coming back to this house." Then he reflected: "Man is always in search of old things. We go to ruins, to museums. You have come to look for old things. Something is lost. That is common to all men." A little later, he asked, "What is lost?" and then answered his own question. "I think it is love."

Now, age 61 and living in Delhi, Nony is not at peace. After her husband died in 1982, she became ensnared in property disputes--the curse of the descendants of India's princely class. Her days are taken up dealing with her six lawyers and her multiple ongoing law suits, many of which she has inherited from her ancestors like a useless watch. All this has made her a bit lonely in her adopted city. Says she: "Delhi to me seems faceless."

I returned to Delhi ahead of Nony. She wrote me from Lahore: "Here I am in conversation with my grandparents, my mother, my father, my aunts, my sisters, my little brother. For the first time I am not grieving for my grandmother having gone, for my Daddy having gone... For the first time I feel that part of my grieving shall go--as if I have called them all back to meet me at a place where they gave me birth, as if I have had a long conversation with them and clarified all my doubts, of not having done my best for them, for not having given them enough love... Here, meeting them after their deaths was easier because we all belonged together, we belonged to each other, we belonged to this soil, this town. On the other side of the border we had all separated, our personalities scattered. Here we are all one, we are together in grief and in happiness... Here--in Pakistan--an enemy of my country India!"

How did Hindus Become Vegetarians? A PRINCESS BRIDE

The great-great-granddaughter of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" returns to her home in Pakistan after an overlong absence

BY SUKETU MEHTA/LAHORE

---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----

One day in august 1947, Nony Singh overheard her father talking about shooting her. She was around ten then, a Sikh girl growing up in a big house in Lahore, just before partition. She was walking along a passageway when she overheard a conversation out on the veranda: her grandfather, her father and her uncles were planning how they would defend themselves against Muslim mobs that were returning with increasing frequency to the house. The men--most of whom were army or police officers--had stockpiled a huge cache of arms in the house. The teenage girls in the family--her oldest sister and her three aunts--had already been sent to safety across the border to Simla, a hill resort that would eventually fall to India; only Nony and her two younger sisters were left in Lahore. She heard her father tell the others that, if Muslims broke into the house, he would fight to the end. But before the end came, he said, "I will take the three girls into a room and line them up and shoot them."
We were standing on this same veranda now, my friend Nony Singh and I, 50 years later. It was the first time she had returned to Lahore since 1947. She was making a unique crossing, not merely from the country in which she lives to the one left behind, not just from her present home to an earlier one, but from approaching old age back to the territory of childhood, a realm preserved only in dreams and old photographs.

What made her return unusual was that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of the Punjab," the Sikh king who at the beginning of the 19th century ruled over all of Punjab from Lahore. So when she came back, it was with a special sense of belonging, above and beyond that of the many other partition refugees visiting ancestral homes. Signing the Pakistani visa forms in Delhi, she had remarked: "I felt I own the place. How dare they ask for a visa?"

Nony had left Lahore on a sour note: a fight with her best friend Fauziya, who lived next door. Nony had made a doll, with a long plait, the face painted with watercolors, and a wardrobe fashioned of brightly colored scraps from her aunts' old clothes. Fauziya wanted Nony to marry her attractive doll to Fauziya's male doll. At first Nony agreed, but then Fauziya told her that since her doll was female, it would have to come with a dowry--all the doll-clothes and doll-bedding that Nony had hand-stitched. Also, Fauziya insisted, after the wedding the female doll would have to stay in the male doll's house--as was the custom among humans. Nony turned down the match, and Fauziya stopped speaking to her. A few days later, Nony and her family left Pakistan forever, taking the doll with her. She has always regretted, she told me, that she left Pakistan on a fight over the distribution of property.

What she wanted to do now was to go back to the two houses in which she had grown up: her maternal grandmother's amid the winding lanes of Anarkali Bazaar, and her paternal grandfather's in Model Town. Her grandmother had died soon after crossing the border, Nony said: "We were thrown out. We felt very hurt. My grandmother died of sorrow."

The Anarkali Bazaar house is now a printing shop. Sometime after partition it was taken over by the former tenants, and stacks of old books crowd the rooms where her grandmother once conducted business from behind a latticed screen with the accountants, making sure that rent-collection from her numerous shops in the bazaar was in order. Though he was quite ill, the old man who now owns the house invited Nony for dinner because, he said, he had something to explain. He was ashamed. At partition, he said, Nony's grandmother had given his father the key to the house for safekeeping. The father had kept all her grandmother's possessions locked in the upper rooms of the house, allowing no one to enter them. Then, he said, after a family dispute his cousins had broken into the rooms and stolen everything. He said he had lived with the guilt for 50 years. Now at last he could explain and apologize. Nony said later, "I was embarrassed also, and I was hurt. This was my house, and some other people took it over. But I admired him for telling me. His family was so affectionate. The human feeling was what mattered."

When she left the man's house, she was given bangles and an embroidered veil--the traditional gifts a daughter of the house is given when she returns to her in-laws. The symbolism was clear: this was Nony's true home, here in Lahore. Delhi and India were merely in-laws, the family into which she had found herself married.

Nony was overwhelmed at the reception she received, not just from the people who lived in her family's houses, but from taxi-drivers, bellboys, merchants in the bazaars. Her coming from India was good for substantial discounts in the ancient shops of Anarkali Bazaar. As a daughter of the neighborhood, she was able to buy a 750-rupee suit for 600 rupees. The elderly proprietor of a photo shop, upon learning Nony was from India, said he was, too, and asked her to have lunch or dinner with his family.

One evening we went to the Pak Tea House, a writers' cafe that Pakistan's greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, used to frequent. A group of poets and writers clustered around us. Surprisingly, this was the place in Pakistan where Nony found the closest thing resembling hostility toward her as an Indian. A professor of Urdu literature declared that the enmity between India and Pakistan would be solved if India "liberated" Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. "I was scared of their fanaticism," Nony said. "They were so vehement. These are the people that create the frenzy. If they were my age, they would never have talked that way." After one in the group maligned Maulana Azad, a prominent Muslim in the freedom struggle who chose to stay in India and is therefore reviled in Pakistani history texts, Nony added: "He was talking like a fanatic about Pakistan. I wish he had seen that united India [before partition]. We sacrificed together, we shed our blood together to win freedom. Then what happened?" For all her warm feelings toward ordinary Pakistanis, Nony remained clear about the political gulf between the two countries: "The difference between India and Pakistan is army rule. Their youngsters hate India. Army rule has dinned it into their heads to make war. Our democracy, whatever it is, has worked."

Not always. Like most Hindu and Sikh refugees who fled to India, Nony's family did well in their new homeland. She married a fellow refugee, a farmer who in 1965 set a record for wheat production. Then in 1984 India's Sikhs suffered through what for many of them was a second partition: the pogroms against Nony's community that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Nony and her three daughters were saved by a Hindu neighbor across the street, who hid them from the fury of the mobs for 11 days.

Once the riots were over and she could return to her house, Nony worried about what she should put on the name plate outside her gate. After all, she had just witnessed the evil attention a Sikh name could attract. In the end, she used only the number 15, the address of the house. She still regrets not being able to display a name. "I felt one day people will be reduced just to numbers," she says. "We are not proud of being anything--Sikh, Hindu, Muslim."

Her grandfather's home in Model Town was a household of women before partition. Nony's father was frequently away on army duty, and her grandfather usually closeted himself with his second wife on the ground floor. As teenage girls are wont to do, Nony's aunts and her sisters liked to play the radio full blast, mostly film music--Saigal, Kanan Bala, Nurjehan. Her aunts often stole away to the movies, a forbidden activity. Once they took the family tonga, or horse-cart, and caromed down the road until they lost control of the horse, crashed, and fell off laughing--shocking all the neighbors. Before partition the family was united, rich and happy.

When she traveled to Lahore, she was looking for something that would be defined for her by Badar, the man who now lives in her grandfather's house. At the end of the lavish dinner his family had laid out for Nony and me, Badar became thoughtful. Like his wife, he said, he was the child of partition refugees who had made the crossing the other way, from Delhi and Bhopal to Pakistan. "It is a miracle you're here," he said, turning to Nony. "It's like a movie, a dream. After 50 years, coming back to this house." Then he reflected: "Man is always in search of old things. We go to ruins, to museums. You have come to look for old things. Something is lost. That is common to all men." A little later, he asked, "What is lost?" and then answered his own question. "I think it is love."

Now, age 61 and living in Delhi, Nony is not at peace. After her husband died in 1982, she became ensnared in property disputes--the curse of the descendants of India's princely class. Her days are taken up dealing with her six lawyers and her multiple ongoing law suits, many of which she has inherited from her ancestors like a useless watch. All this has made her a bit lonely in her adopted city. Says she: "Delhi to me seems faceless."

I returned to Delhi ahead of Nony. She wrote me from Lahore: "Here I am in conversation with my grandparents, my mother, my father, my aunts, my sisters, my little brother. For the first time I am not grieving for my grandmother having gone, for my Daddy having gone... For the first time I feel that part of my grieving shall go--as if I have called them all back to meet me at a place where they gave me birth, as if I have had a long conversation with them and clarified all my doubts, of not having done my best for them, for not having given them enough love... Here, meeting them after their deaths was easier because we all belonged together, we belonged to each other, we belonged to this soil, this town. On the other side of the border we had all separated, our personalities scattered. Here we are all one, we are together in grief and in happiness... Here--in Pakistan--an enemy of my country India!"

Pervez Musharraf and India Pakistan Rapproachment A PRINCESS BRIDE

The great-great-granddaughter of the legendary "Lion of the Punjab" returns to her home in Pakistan after an overlong absence

BY SUKETU MEHTA/LAHORE

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One day in august 1947, Nony Singh overheard her father talking about shooting her. She was around ten then, a Sikh girl growing up in a big house in Lahore, just before partition. She was walking along a passageway when she overheard a conversation out on the veranda: her grandfather, her father and her uncles were planning how they would defend themselves against Muslim mobs that were returning with increasing frequency to the house. The men--most of whom were army or police officers--had stockpiled a huge cache of arms in the house. The teenage girls in the family--her oldest sister and her three aunts--had already been sent to safety across the border to Simla, a hill resort that would eventually fall to India; only Nony and her two younger sisters were left in Lahore. She heard her father tell the others that, if Muslims broke into the house, he would fight to the end. But before the end came, he said, "I will take the three girls into a room and line them up and shoot them."
We were standing on this same veranda now, my friend Nony Singh and I, 50 years later. It was the first time she had returned to Lahore since 1947. She was making a unique crossing, not merely from the country in which she lives to the one left behind, not just from her present home to an earlier one, but from approaching old age back to the territory of childhood, a realm preserved only in dreams and old photographs.

What made her return unusual was that she is the great-great-granddaughter of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the "Lion of the Punjab," the Sikh king who at the beginning of the 19th century ruled over all of Punjab from Lahore. So when she came back, it was with a special sense of belonging, above and beyond that of the many other partition refugees visiting ancestral homes. Signing the Pakistani visa forms in Delhi, she had remarked: "I felt I own the place. How dare they ask for a visa?"

Nony had left Lahore on a sour note: a fight with her best friend Fauziya, who lived next door. Nony had made a doll, with a long plait, the face painted with watercolors, and a wardrobe fashioned of brightly colored scraps from her aunts' old clothes. Fauziya wanted Nony to marry her attractive doll to Fauziya's male doll. At first Nony agreed, but then Fauziya told her that since her doll was female, it would have to come with a dowry--all the doll-clothes and doll-bedding that Nony had hand-stitched. Also, Fauziya insisted, after the wedding the female doll would have to stay in the male doll's house--as was the custom among humans. Nony turned down the match, and Fauziya stopped speaking to her. A few days later, Nony and her family left Pakistan forever, taking the doll with her. She has always regretted, she told me, that she left Pakistan on a fight over the distribution of property.

What she wanted to do now was to go back to the two houses in which she had grown up: her maternal grandmother's amid the winding lanes of Anarkali Bazaar, and her paternal grandfather's in Model Town. Her grandmother had died soon after crossing the border, Nony said: "We were thrown out. We felt very hurt. My grandmother died of sorrow."

The Anarkali Bazaar house is now a printing shop. Sometime after partition it was taken over by the former tenants, and stacks of old books crowd the rooms where her grandmother once conducted business from behind a latticed screen with the accountants, making sure that rent-collection from her numerous shops in the bazaar was in order. Though he was quite ill, the old man who now owns the house invited Nony for dinner because, he said, he had something to explain. He was ashamed. At partition, he said, Nony's grandmother had given his father the key to the house for safekeeping. The father had kept all her grandmother's possessions locked in the upper rooms of the house, allowing no one to enter them. Then, he said, after a family dispute his cousins had broken into the rooms and stolen everything. He said he had lived with the guilt for 50 years. Now at last he could explain and apologize. Nony said later, "I was embarrassed also, and I was hurt. This was my house, and some other people took it over. But I admired him for telling me. His family was so affectionate. The human feeling was what mattered."

When she left the man's house, she was given bangles and an embroidered veil--the traditional gifts a daughter of the house is given when she returns to her in-laws. The symbolism was clear: this was Nony's true home, here in Lahore. Delhi and India were merely in-laws, the family into which she had found herself married.

Nony was overwhelmed at the reception she received, not just from the people who lived in her family's houses, but from taxi-drivers, bellboys, merchants in the bazaars. Her coming from India was good for substantial discounts in the ancient shops of Anarkali Bazaar. As a daughter of the neighborhood, she was able to buy a 750-rupee suit for 600 rupees. The elderly proprietor of a photo shop, upon learning Nony was from India, said he was, too, and asked her to have lunch or dinner with his family.

One evening we went to the Pak Tea House, a writers' cafe that Pakistan's greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, used to frequent. A group of poets and writers clustered around us. Surprisingly, this was the place in Pakistan where Nony found the closest thing resembling hostility toward her as an Indian. A professor of Urdu literature declared that the enmity between India and Pakistan would be solved if India "liberated" Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. "I was scared of their fanaticism," Nony said. "They were so vehement. These are the people that create the frenzy. If they were my age, they would never have talked that way." After one in the group maligned Maulana Azad, a prominent Muslim in the freedom struggle who chose to stay in India and is therefore reviled in Pakistani history texts, Nony added: "He was talking like a fanatic about Pakistan. I wish he had seen that united India [before partition]. We sacrificed together, we shed our blood together to win freedom. Then what happened?" For all her warm feelings toward ordinary Pakistanis, Nony remained clear about the political gulf between the two countries: "The difference between India and Pakistan is army rule. Their youngsters hate India. Army rule has dinned it into their heads to make war. Our democracy, whatever it is, has worked."

Not always. Like most Hindu and Sikh refugees who fled to India, Nony's family did well in their new homeland. She married a fellow refugee, a farmer who in 1965 set a record for wheat production. Then in 1984 India's Sikhs suffered through what for many of them was a second partition: the pogroms against Nony's community that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. Nony and her three daughters were saved by a Hindu neighbor across the street, who hid them from the fury of the mobs for 11 days.

Once the riots were over and she could return to her house, Nony worried about what she should put on the name plate outside her gate. After all, she had just witnessed the evil attention a Sikh name could attract. In the end, she used only the number 15, the address of the house. She still regrets not being able to display a name. "I felt one day people will be reduced just to numbers," she says. "We are not proud of being anything--Sikh, Hindu, Muslim."

Her grandfather's home in Model Town was a household of women before partition. Nony's father was frequently away on army duty, and her grandfather usually closeted himself with his second wife on the ground floor. As teenage girls are wont to do, Nony's aunts and her sisters liked to play the radio full blast, mostly film music--Saigal, Kanan Bala, Nurjehan. Her aunts often stole away to the movies, a forbidden activity. Once they took the family tonga, or horse-cart, and caromed down the road until they lost control of the horse, crashed, and fell off laughing--shocking all the neighbors. Before partition the family was united, rich and happy.

When she traveled to Lahore, she was looking for something that would be defined for her by Badar, the man who now lives in her grandfather's house. At the end of the lavish dinner his family had laid out for Nony and me, Badar became thoughtful. Like his wife, he said, he was the child of partition refugees who had made the crossing the other way, from Delhi and Bhopal to Pakistan. "It is a miracle you're here," he said, turning to Nony. "It's like a movie, a dream. After 50 years, coming back to this house." Then he reflected: "Man is always in search of old things. We go to ruins, to museums. You have come to look for old things. Something is lost. That is common to all men." A little later, he asked, "What is lost?" and then answered his own question. "I think it is love."

Now, age 61 and living in Delhi, Nony is not at peace. After her husband died in 1982, she became ensnared in property disputes--the curse of the descendants of India's princely class. Her days are taken up dealing with her six lawyers and her multiple ongoing law suits, many of which she has inherited from her ancestors like a useless watch. All this has made her a bit lonely in her adopted city. Says she: "Delhi to me seems faceless."

I returned to Delhi ahead of Nony. She wrote me from Lahore: "Here I am in conversation with my grandparents, my mother, my father, my aunts, my sisters, my little brother. For the first time I am not grieving for my grandmother having gone, for my Daddy having gone... For the first time I feel that part of my grieving shall go--as if I have called them all back to meet me at a place where they gave me birth, as if I have had a long conversation with them and clarified all my doubts, of not having done my best for them, for not having given them enough love... Here, meeting them after their deaths was easier because we all belonged together, we belonged to each other, we belonged to this soil, this town. On the other side of the border we had all separated, our personalities scattered. Here we are all one, we are together in grief and in happiness... Here--in Pakistan--an enemy of my country India!"

Pervez Musharraf and India Pakistan Rapproachment The Long Journey (Part II): Mandi Bahauddin, Pakistan to Delhi, India



Gian Sarup



The first half of this part of the journey takes the community of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs from their arrival at Mandi Bahauddin Refugee Camp in Pakistan to Atari, the first Indian railway station east of the Wagah border. The narrative in this part is one of jug-beeti; what the community went through from the day of its landing at the Mandi Bahauddin railway station to the day of its safe arrival in India. The second half of this segment extends from Chhe-Harta in Amritsar to Delhi via Ludhiana and Ambala Cantt, and is more like an aap-beeti, our family looking for and finding its lost daughters and their families and coping with problems of homelessness. It also has an element of jug-beeti to the extent it represents the broad experiences of other refugee families who sought their missing relatives and struggled to secure a roof over their heads in India.



Once we disembarked from the special train at Mandi Bahauddin and after our elders had conveyed their gratitude to the Captain for saving our lives, we were made to march to a walled complex of cotton mills abandoned by its Hindu/Sikh owners. On the way to this cotton mills area, the men from the Baloch army-unit kept pushing and goading us to move faster by hitting us at times with their rifle butts. I saw one of the soldiers hit the headmaster (Mr. Pindi Das Chopra) of our school, and his teenage daughter started crying (see Note 1). Later, some people surmised that the harsh attitude of the Baloch soldiers was probably due to their anger at having learned from the train crew that the safety of the arriving Hindus and Sikhs was secured at the cost of several Muslim lives.



My younger brother Rajinder and I were carrying some bags and utensils containing the food cooked by our mother in Bhera for the journey. Fried breads like puris and to some extent prathas do not spoil readily. The bags were not heavy, and we walked fast to arrive in a cotton mill compound. We were separated from our mother, father, and elder brother. Other families also got split on the way. It took some time for people to find each other. The huge, windowless godowns (warehouses) for cotton storage were deep, dark caverns; their only sources of light were two big gates on the same side. The lack of cross-ventilation made the humid heat inside these godowns most unbearable. We chose to stay in the open.



After spending only a few hours in the cotton-mill compound, we were ordered to march to a different site .We were escorted by the same men, but this time there was no undue rushing and harsh prodding. We landed in the abandoned building of the town’s Khalsa (Sikh) High School. The classrooms were bright and airy, verandahs provided ample shade, and the school’s lawns in quadrangular compounds had trees and shrubs. Our family spent the first night in the open compound; our area was no more than the area of two side-by-side beds. At night, the retarded daughter of one of our immediate neighbors in the compound kept throwing her rather heavy legs on our mother. Our mother took the punishment; none of us could save her from this thrashing. The women had to sleep next to women, and men could sleep next only to men from other “adjacent” families. In the open, there were no boundaries of privacy between families, except that men and women from different families could not be contiguous to each other.



Next day the families from Bhera were able to move into empty classrooms. There were no desks or any other furniture in the school’s classrooms; they had been apparently removed by the looters. In one classroom, I found two chemistry-lab beakers that served as our glasses. In another, I found an Urdu book that recounted the adventures of Omer Ayaar (Omer, the clever and naughty) as a child and young boy. It gave me a few days of very enjoyable reading.



Some families had limited cash on their hands. They were worried how long would their cash reserves last for food if the length of their stay in the camp got stretched beyond their resources. Luckily, the Muslim vendors just outside the camp charged reasonable prices for the grocery items like wheat flour, oil, vegetables. Almost all men in the camp were without work and income, except for a few doctors who charged nominal fees for their consultations. One person who was most in demand and made the most money in the camp was the sole Hindu barber from Bhera. Older people of our father’s generation were not used to shaving with safety razor blades. They were dependent on the barbers to give them their daily shave with their folding razors. The boys in the camp happily skipped their haircuts, but most of the elderly people needed their faces shaved every second or third day, depending upon how busy the resident Hindu barber of the camp happened to be on a given day.



Then the cholera broke out in the camp. The reasons were not far to seek. The crowding and the unhygienic conditions in the camp were most likely to have brought it about. There were very few toilets (mostly dry latrines that were infrequently serviced), far too few for the thousands of men and women. Most people went to the open areas around the camp and relieved themselves. The children would climb the stairs to go to the roof of the classroom buildings for the same purpose. Pretty soon, the sanitary situation worsened; there was a lot of filth and stench in the relieving areas. As the deaths due to cholera started to increase; we could see from the roofs several cremation fires burning next to the camp in the evenings. Among those who died of cholera was the wife of Lala Ralla Ram, who had a goldsmithy shop not far from our father’s sarafa shop. She died away from home, leaving behind her two young daughters and husband in the camp. One heard rumors that nila-thotha (copper sulphate) was being mixed in the milk that was sold by Muslim dairymen to the camp residents. The dairymen used to bring their buffaloes to a main road near the camp to sell the fresh milk. Every one insisted that the buffaloes be milked in the customers’ presence. That was done, but it did not stop the cholera. Most people started drinking boiled water, and washed the vegetables thoroughly before cooking them. Whenever any one of our family members had queasy feelings, we were given a teaspoon of brandy which we had brought with us in a quarter-sized bottle. We considered brandy as the medicinal antidote for all manner of gastric troubles. No one in our family got cholera; we were lucky because the brandy could not have stopped it. Lala Ralla Ram’s wife was given some brandy for her loose motions and vomiting, but it did not help her.



To relieve the crowding in the school building, the camp authorities permitted the camp residents to move into regular houses on the street that connected the school with the town. There was a great rush to get private rooms for the families. Our family managed to occupy a kitchen for our room in a big house with four apartment-like units. The house had a large inner compound. Our neighbors in this house were the extended family of Lala Daya Ram Kapoor from our mohalla, and another family of Lala Des Raj Mehta who for many years had served as an elected member on the Bhera’s municipal committee. He had, however, lost his seat to a Young Turk, Dewan Dina Nath Sahni, in the last municipal elections held before the country’s Partition.



In the pre-Partition era, Mandi Bahauddin was a flourishing, well-to-do town, not far from the town of Chillianwala where the Sikh armies valiantly fought the British forces in 1849. In the pre-Partition days, visitors to Mandi Bahauddin were told that, if they were to visit the battle ground near that town, they could still find the shells of the bullets fired in the battle. The Sikh families of the town were the most prosperous ones, and had constructed spacious houses, each house having several living units within it, but only one main entrance. Most of the houses were double-storeyed, and had hand-pumps for the second floors as well. Unlike Bhera’s, Mandi Bahauddin’s streets ran parallel and were straight, wide and paved.



I had spent my one summer vacation around 1941-42 at my younger sister’s house in Mandi Bahauddin. Her husband was a doctor who had started his private practice in the town after obtaining his LSMF medical degree from the Christian Medical College in Ludhiana. My brother-in-law also taught Physiology at the town’s Khalsa High School, the site of our camp; the school did not offer that many classes in Physiology to warrant the hiring of a full-time instructor for this subject. I had very pleasant memories from my earlier visit to this town. Five years later in September of 1947, I found the town deserted and looking forlorn. Its entire Sikh/Hindu population had already left the town, and Muslims from other towns had yet not moved in to fill the vacuum caused by the exodus of local Hindus and Sikhs.



Our month-long stay in the Mandi Bahauddin camp was one of unnerving uncertainties, a cholera epidemic, and numerous hardships and deprivations. Our sojourn in this town came to an end with the arrival of a special train that took us on our journey from Mandi Bahauddin to India. The train had its first stop at Lal Musa Junction. This railway station used to be a very busy place twenty-four hours a day, bustling with hurried transit passengers, railway porters and hawkers of food stuff. Now there were not any passengers, porters, or hawkers to be seen at the platforms. It appeared that the normal train runs and most other operations had been suspended due to the widespread disturbances.



Our railway compartment’s only toilet was utterly messed up by overuse; nearly a hundred nervous men, women, and children using it. We requested a railway employee who was sweeping the platform to clean up our toilet for something like a hundred rupees (it was a big sum then) or for any price he thought fit. He was half tempted by the size of the reward, but thought it appropriate to consult with one of his colleagues. His colleague told him in our presence not to do the job for the Hindus! By comparison, the Muslim jamedars of Bhera thankfully continued to clean our latrines until the last day of our departure.



In normal times, passengers on the trains approaching from the Malakwal side had to change trains for their onward journey in the direction of Lahore or Rawalpindi. Now because of the disturbed conditions, it was not advisable to allow the refugees to walk to another platform for boarding a different train. Our train needed to be shunted and re-routed to continue its journey in a different direction to the Indian border via Lahore. We knew it was going to be a long stop, but not as long as it turned out to be.



The train waited for a few hours at the platform where it had arrived from Mandi Bahauddin, and then it was moved to a distant and deserted shunting area for the night. This secluded area gave us shivers of concern and fright. There was a small military escort to protect us if we were to come under attack, but we were not sure that they would be able to stop the mobs if they turned out in large numbers. Partly because we were not informed as to why the train was moved from the railway platform to this lonely spot, we thought that the move was perhaps a plot to facilitate an attack like the infamous one that had taken place near Kamoke (see Note 2). We kept a night long vigil, prayed non-stop, and panicked at any unusual sound that came from any direction. The morning brought a big relief. The fears of an overnight attack were not borne out. Now we could hardly wait for the train to be on its way to India.



The train finally left the Lala Musa station around noon time and sped past towns like Gujrat and Gujranwala (we could see the burned out houses and shops that bordered the railway tracks). But it had an uncomfortably long stop at Muridke. The engine-driver left the train at this station to get some milk from the town for his tea. He took more than two hours to return, while the train-load of refugees waited for him in a state of panic! Next, the train stopped briefly at Mughalpura, and then came to a much longer halt near Harbanspura for hours. It was around 9:00 p.m. when our train stopped there. The inordinately long stop, so close to our destination, was dragging on, and giving us lots of anxiety and fright. We could hear the sound of beating drums (which for us meant a kind of clarion call for mobs to gather and raid the train). Because our train was once again not parked at a platform, it felt disturbingly eerie around the train. We did not dare step down from the train. We learned later that the Muslim locomotive-driver, out of concern for his own safety, had declined to drive the train into the Indian Territory. It took a lot of persuasion and guarantees by the armed escort to persuade the unwilling driver to take the train to Atari, the first station after the border with India. It was around 3:00 in the morning when our train finally reached Attari after crossing the Wagah border we could not see. Almost all of us got down and knelt on our knees to kiss the soil of India. We shouted loudly, “Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akaal; Har Har Mahadev.” Hundreds of local Sikh men and women were there to welcome us at that early hour and to treat us to chappatis and daal, a very precious meal after 44 hours of train journey in the land that had turned hostile and murderous.



The train then took us to Chhe-Haratta, a satellite town of textile mills west of Amritsar, where the entire train load of refugees disembarked. We found an evacuated shop for our temporary stay in this town. The shop was a brick structure with a wide door that opened on the Grand Trunk road. Our parents bought milk, sugar, flour, and tea leaves from somewhere. They also brought a pan full of “cream” from which they planned to make ghee by heating it and skimming the milk-solids from the top. We must have looked emaciated to our parents; they wanted to provide us the missed Punjabi “essentials” of butter and ghee for good health.



Like most Indian shops, our shop-residence in Chhe-Haratta did not have any toilet facilities inside the premises or a nearby community facility. We all had to cross the Grand Trunk Road to find an uninhabited open-air area for use as a toilet facility. Luckily for us, we were used to squatting and hardly a furlong away from the road we found an abandoned brick kiln that served the purpose. Earlier, we had brought several bricks from the kiln to improvise a chullah (stove) in the shop for cooking.



When we were still in Bhera and saw the situation for the Hindus and Sikhs getting increasingly hostile and hopeless all over western Punjab, our family thought constantly and worried about the well-beings of our two married sisters and their families living in Rawalpindi and Mianwali. The postal services had almost broken down, residential telephones were non-existent in those days, and traveling by train had become suicidal. There was no way to find out how they were doing. Our sisters were equally concerned about their parents and brothers in Bhera. We were to learn later that, after our elder sister’s family reached Taran Taran in India from Rawalpindi, our brother-in-law traveled from one big city to another in Indian Punjab, trying to find us in refugee camps or any one else from Bhera who knew of our whereabouts.



One day our parents and elder brother, Prem Sarup, went to Amritsar to gather any news about our two sisters and their families. Were the families of our sisters stuck in those towns or they were able to escape well in time to India? Were they alive, safe in India, or were they kidnapped, killed, hurt, or trapped in Pakistan? The in-laws of our elder sister were settled in Tarantaran (near Amritsar). Our parents ran into someone who had recently met our sister’s in-laws in that town. They learned from him to our great relief that our elder sister’s family had safely made it to India from Rawalpindi a few days before August 15. We found out further that she and her family had moved to Patiala to stay with her elder brother-in-law’s family. However, our parents could not get any news about our younger sister and her three-year old son who were in Mianwali with her in-laws at the time of country’s partition. There was no organized source of information in Amritsar or anywhere else to find out the fate of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistani towns. We prayed for the safety of our sister, her son, and her in-laws.



Early one morning in Chhe-Haratta, a caravan of tired, haggard, young and old men and women was moving in front of our shop-residence along the Grand Trunk Road. This was a caravan of Muslim refugees trudging toward the Pakistani border. They had their slow moving bullock carts to carry their children and the old and infirm. A few goats and donkeys were also in tow. Their clothes were tattered and covered with dust; they had apparently been on the road for several days. From the kind of clothes they were wearing, it appeared that they were from areas like Panipat, Karnal, Rohtak, and Gurgaon from the Ambala division of undivided Punjab. None of the women were wearing burqa. They were poor folks from rural areas. They had a military escort accompanying the caravan. The unending stream of men, women, children, and their carts flowed slowly but steadily. We watched them from the shop we were living in. We were so benumbed by own experiences as refugees that we did not feel much empathy at that time for those who were going through a much greater hardship in getting to their promised land of shelter. But, we did not feel any hostility against these poor folks who were being made to pay for the escalating madness of others on each side of the border. They must have been worried over the prospect of spending another anxious night in the open on the Indian side of the border; the remaining distance to Pakistan would have taken longer than the remaining daylight hours they had for their trek.



One day while our parents and elder brother were away to Amritsar, Rajinder and I thought of treating ourselves to hot tea. We built the fire in the chullah (stove), put a patilla (pan) half-full of water on the stove, threw in a few spoon-full of tea leaves, and brought the water to boil. When we poured half a cup of milk into the dark brown brew, much to our surprise the brew turned pure white like regular milk. We threw in more tea leaves, but the brew retained its whiteness. We sipped the white brew; it tasted somewhat like hot tea, but did not look the brewed tea we got used to drinking in the Mandi Bahauddin camp. We attributed the transformation of the brew into a pure white beverage to the remarkable purity of the Amritsari milk. When our parents returned, we told our mother of what had transpired. She asked us from where we had gotten the milk when there was no milk at home. We pointed out the pan from which we had taken half a cup of milk to pour into the tea brew. She told us that it was no milk; it was the cream from which she was going to make ghee for us! She asked us if we had noticed the richness of the crème compared to the ordinary milk. We as children in Bhera had never heard of “cream.” I do not think our mother had heard of it either, but someone must have told our parents to go for this milk-product to make unadulterated ghee at home.



After staying in Chhe Haratta for no more than four or five days, we got a train from Amritsar and reached Ludhiana. We stayed there with our father’s cousin-sister (Bhua VeeraN) who with her family had left Bhera a month or so before August 15. They were staying in the vacant house of a Muslim family who had apparently left for Pakistan in the wake of riots. In one niche of a room, they had found a miniature copy of the holy Koran. One day, my elder brother and I hawked the local Urdu newspaper at the railway station to earn some money, but our enterprise was cut short by the regular newspaper vendors who got us chased out.



Meanwhile, our brother-in-law (the husband of our elder sister) had been traveling to several cities like Amritsar, Jalandher, Ambala, and Ludhiana in Indian Punjab to look for us. Our elder sister and at that time her only child (our niece) stayed back with the family of our brother-in-law’s brother in Patiala while he was searching for us. Finally, he found us in Ludhiana. We learned from him that our younger sister and her son were in Lucknow staying there with her brother-in-law’s family. He did not know more about her, but it was singularly good news to hear their safe arrival in Lucknow. Our brother-in-law advised us to go to Ambala where he would join us after personally briefing our sister in Patiala about our well-being.



Our next stop was Ambala Cantonment. The train from Ludhiana terminated its run there. We were advised by someone to go to a refugee camp on the outskirts of Ambala Cantt. There we found an open-air grassy spot in the Prem Nagar refugee camp. It was now early November when Ambala nights get quite cold. We bought or were given two sets of razaais (quilts) and tulaais (cotton mattresses with the thickness of a quilt) by the camp authorities. We did not get a tent, so we had to sleep in the open. When we got up early in morning, we found the outer side of our quilts was soaked wet and the overnight dew drops had coalesced to start dripping from the quilts on to our tulaai mattresses.



We had brought some pots and pans from our stay in Chhe-Hartta, we needed some wood to make fire for making tea. Rajinder and I walked to the nearby railway tracks that were lined by trees, and started foraging for fallen twigs and branches for the needed fuel. While we were busy in this task, a train passed us. A boy from our mohalla, Ved Bahri, was waving at us from the boarding steps of the packed train. We were quite excited to see a familiar face from Bhera, and waved back joyously.



The same day or a day later, our brother-in-law arrived in Ambala and took us from the open-air camp site to the Arya Samaj Mandir in Ambala Cantt. We were allowed to stay in the hall’s two-foot wide gallery (balcony) that went along the hall’s four inner walls and was at the first floor level above the ground floor. We had to cook outside the hall, but we had a roof over our head and access to regular toilets.



Ambala was relatively easy to get in, but it was real hard to get out of Ambala at that time, especially if you were a refugee who wanted to go to Delhi. The Central Government in Delhi had banned the entry of Hindu and Sikh refugees to Delhi for fear of further riots against the town’s Muslims. Hindu and Sikh refugees like us from Pakistan had to apply for permits to get on any Delhi-bound train. A member of the Board that issued permits for travel from Ambala to Delhi, was Mr. Jaswant Rai. He was the principal of the D.A.V. College, Rawalpindi, and our brother-in-law who was the Art & Drawing teacher in the D.A.V. High School knew him. Our brother-in-law was able to persuade Mr. Rai to grant us the prized permit. But one had to wait for days to get a train to Delhi. No trains were running on schedule to Delhi. So we were camped at the Ambala Cantt railway station to catch any train that could carry us to Delhi.



The Ambala Cantt railway platform was packed with refugee squatters waiting for any Delhi-bound train. While waiting there, someone from our naanaka (maternal grandparents) town, Jalalpur Sharif, recognized our mother and told her that her old mother (our grandmother, Naani) with her son’s family was camped in the passengers’ waiting room outside of the railway station. My mother took me along to visit her mother and her brother’s (our uncle’s) family. I was carrying the permit that would allow us to re-enter the railway platform. The huge waiting room (the waiting halls outside a railway station only had roofs, but no walls) was overflowing with refugee families who had eked out barely enough space to spread their legs. After checking with a few other occupants of the waiting room we were able to locate my grandmother, my aunt and three cousins in very shabby circumstances. My grandmother was lying on the floor, looking listless with her eyes closed. She was very sick with gastroenteritis, dehydrated and barely alive. Our mother (Bhag Vanti) held her mother’s hand and tried to wake her mother, “Baibai, mein Vanti aan, Baibai.” (Mother, I am Vanti, Vanti; Mother). Our grandmother struggled to shed her daze, and greeted her daughter back, “Vantiaye, theek hein, Hori Lall (our father) and bachhe theek nein,” (Vantiaye, are you fine; Is Hori Lall alright, are the children fine?). The Maan Beti (Mother-Daughter) met, cried, and talked. We learned that her son (our uncle) and a grandson were stuck in Murree, and it was our aunt (her daughter-in-law) who had managed to bring her family from Jalalpur to Amballa Cantt. Our aunt was also taking care of the grandma, cleaning her up, and washing her soiled clothes. She also had to carry her old and sick mother-in-law (our Naani) on her back from place to place. There was no medical care available to the refugees in these terrible conditions. Our mother must have sensed that it was to be her last meeting with her mother?



Afraid that a train to Delhi could show up any time at the platform where other members of our family were waiting with our very meager belongings, I kept pushing my mother to cut short her talking with her mother so that we could return to the platform. She rebuked me severely for my pestering haste and lack of regard for my grandma. After about half-an-hour of the reunion, my mother and I walked back to the platform.



Several weeks after we managed to reach Delhi, we learned that our Naani ji had died the day after our mother had met her in the Amabala waiting room. The morning after she met her daughter, her son (our uncle, mamaji) and her eldest grandson showed up to rejoin their family. It was a miracle for its timing. Our grandma was most glad to see them, especially her grandson of whom she was very fond. Hardly two hours after this second reunion, she breathed her last. It appears that she had held on to her life for an extra day to meet her only daughter, her younger son and a grandson for the last time. Then she died in peace. She was cremated in a city hundreds of miles away from her hometown, in an alien place that she had perhaps never heard of in her life! At least, her son was there to light her pyre.



In 2003, I was in Ambala Cantt for two or three days. I tried to locate and visit the waiting room where our Naani had passed away 56 years earlier in such pitiable conditions. The entire area was utterly changed and so congested that my efforts to see and photograph the place where she had breathed her last did not work out.



Going back to the day we were at the Ambala Cantt. Railway station waiting to catch any train that would take us to Delhi, a train arrived well past midnight. There was a virtual stampede at the platform when a train said to be for Delhi came to a stop. The train was already packed many times its capacity. Getting in a compartment was no mean struggle; it required super-human effort of pushing, squeezing and wading our way through the crushing humanity of desperate passengers on the platform and in the train cars. People started pushing their luggage through the window. Four of us (our parents and two brothers) managed to squeeze in one railway compartment. Our elder brother had to climb to the roof of the train and perch himself there among hundreds of others for the journey to Delhi. I do not know how well prepared he was to take on the cold winds of early December morning on the exposed top of a running train. When the train stopped at Jagadhari station and a few refugees got off the train, our brother was able to join us in the compartment.



Our train from Ambala arrived at the old Delhi Junction around eleven P.M. We asked our tonga driver to take us to Kothi No.19, Barakhamba Road near Connaught Place. On the way, my younger brother and I made the tonga stop right in the intersection of Nayya Bazaar and Khari Bowli so that we could get down to look at the tracks for the trams that used to run in those days in old Delhi. In Bhera when some people talked about trams in Delhi streets we had difficulty comprehending how the tram tracks did not interfere with the cross-traffic of other types of vehicles on those roads. We used to think of the trams tracks to be raised tracks above the ground. Little did we know until this day of revelation that the tram rails were embedded in the ground like in Bhera’s only grade crossing of the station road and the shunting yard rails.



It was past midnight when we showed up at 19 Barakhamba Road. The kothi belonged to Smt. Sat Bharawan, who was like a sister (moonh-boli behn) to our father. We woke her up so late in the night. My father shared his plight with her, and she graciously let us in and found a room with two beds for our family. My father had all along thought we could find temporary shelter at her place. She was originally from his place of birth, Haranpur in district Jehlum. She and our father had grown up as children in Haranpur. Our father had visited her and her husband a couple of times in Delhi over the years on his trips to Dayal Bagh, Agra. Our father was a follower of the Radhaswami sect, a religious-cultural reform movement founded in Dayal Bagh in 1861. His moonh-boli sister and her husband were staunch Arya Samajists. Delhi’s largest Arya Samaj Mandir near Lajpat Rai Market in Chandni Chowk is named Dewan Hall after her late husband’s name, Dewan Chand. A school on the Arya Samaj Road in Karol Bagh is named after her, Sat Bharawan Higher Secondary School for Girls. My father’s faith in Smt. Sat Bharawan’s generosity was not misplaced. She let us stay at her place for over two months. There were four or five other refugee families who had also found shelter with her. One of them was the family of Ram Lal Mandaria whose young son, Bayya, was the sole victim of communal killing in Bhera.