Pervez Musharraf and India Pakistan Rapproachment
Gian Sarup
This is the story of how the division of India into two nations came to be enacted at the local level in the small, ancient and peaceful town of Bhera in 1947. The author, then a 14-year old kid, and his family were witnesses as well as targets of the movements and events that steadily unfolded into an irreversible migration of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs to India, ending centuries old sojourn of their families in Bhera. This segment of The Long Journey covers the post-1946 stirrings for Pakistan in Punjab, the rapidly deteriorating conditions for Hindus and Sikhs in the Rawalpindi region and elsewhere in western Punjab, the growing concerns of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs for their own security and future in soon to be formed Pakistan, local Muslim leadership’s intervention to prevent Hindu blood- shed, the departure of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs by a special train, the attempted ambush of the train by a Muslim mob near Bhera and the attack’s neutralization by the train’s army escort under the command of a Muslim captain, and the delivery of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs to a refugee collection camp in Mandi Bahauddin in Pakistan for eventual transit to India.
Hindu-Muslim/Sikh Relations in Bhera before 1946.
Despite the emerging differences in the viewpoints of the town’s Muslims and Hindus/Sikhs with regard to the idea of Pakistan, the two communities continued to live and interact without any religious friction. In our memories of the pre-1946 period there is no entry for communal tensions and riots between the town’s communities. Like in most other towns of Punjab, places of worship of each religion functioned without any interference from the followers of other faiths in Bhera. ChhaintaaN wali Masjid was adjacent to the Jhuggi wala Mandir; both shared a wall. The Mullah gave his Azaan five times a day from the mosque, and the Hindu temple had its daily prayer accompanied by the tolling of its bells every evening. The Sikh priest in the nearby Gurudwara recited Gurbani around five o’clock every morning, and this recital from the top of the Gurudawara’s clock tower (the highest point in the town) was heard far enough to wake up people of all faiths at that early hour in the surrounding neighborhoods. The public prayers of different faiths did not grate on anyone’s religious sensibilities, and this kind of long standing accommodation was not due to the absence of blaring loudspeakers in those days.
Relative to Hindus and Sikhs, Muslims were in a majority of more than 2 to I in Bhera. Hindus and Sikhs felt secure and safe. As a Hindu child growing up in the town, I never felt we were a minority, much less a vulnerable minority. A clear majority status in the town and western Punjab had given the Muslim community a lot of self-assuredness. When Punjabi Muslims felt aggrieved it was mostly because of what they thought was the way their coreligionists were denied their fair share of political power in the rest of India. In Punjab, Muslim numerical strength translated into proportionate political and administrative power under the system of separate electorates and religion-based quotas for jobs. Most of the time, the town’s Tehsildaars (the government administrators and judges), Thanedaars (Chiefs of Police), and Chairman of the town’s Municipal Committee in Bhera were Muslims. No Hindu or Sikh ever felt unhappy or aggrieved with these appointed and elected officials. Until 1946, Bhera’s Muslim’s self-assurance as a majority community was also reflected in their relative lack of overt political activity. Whereas the local branch of the Indian National Congress, largely comprised of Hindu and Sikh membership, held frequent public meetings and rallies against the British rule, the local Muslim League was relaxed and less demonstrative in its opposition to the British rule. Of course, the Muslim League was rapidly gaining strength and popularity among Muslims at the cost of Unionist party around this time. However, getting rid of religious minorities was not a part of Muslim League’s creed for Pakistan.
Communal Stirrings in Bhera
Alas this era of peace and tranquility was not to last for ever; Bhera was not an isolated island. The news of killings of Hindus on Mr. Jinnah’s Direct Action Day in Calcutta under the rule of Shaheed Suhrawardy in August 1946 was worrisome, but there was not any serious apprehension among us at that time about our own future and security as Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. Calcutta was far too distant a place to impact us seriously. We felt secure under the Unionist government of Khizar Hayat in Punjab. The Unionist party and government were comprised of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh landlords and Jats. However, when we heard a few months later about the massacres of Sikhs and Hindus closer home in the northwestern parts of Punjab, the situation acquired a threatening posture for us. With continuing reports of attacks on our religious communities in the rural areas of the Rawalpindi Division, we Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera began having tangible concerns for our own security.
Our father was totally apolitical. We did not get any newspaper at home, nor did we have a radio to keep us abreast of the news about the country’s inexorable move toward its partition. I had started reading the headlines in Urdu dailies like Milap and Pratap in our school’s library when I was in the sixth or seventh grade (around 1944). Both the newspapers had Hindu owners and editors. Mahasha Krishan and his son, Narinder, managed and edited the daily Pratap, and Mahasha Khush-hal Chand and his son, Ranbir, ran the daily Milap. Both the dailies were staunchly Arya Samajist in their outlook; they also subscribed to the political ideology of Indian National Congress. They promoted the Congress’ view that religion should not be the basis of nationhood, and they argued that there was no need to split India into different countries based on religious counts. These two news papers were clearly opposed to the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and carried on combative debates on this issue with the Muslim newspapers like Zamindar and Nawai Waqt.
One day I wandered into the town’s public library located in the Christian quarters behind the old Police Station and the Court Complex. That is where I came across the two Muslim newspapers, Zamindar and Nawai-Waqat, for the first time in my life. I was taken aback by their presentation of the news and their portrayals of Gandhi and Nehru as Hindu leaders who were promoting Hindu interests at the cost Muslims. Politically naïve, I could not believe that any body could miss the “truth” by such a wide margin. As a young boy of about 13-14 years of age, I had not yet learned the hard lesson of life that different groups can see the same event or person very differently based on their allegiances. The views of these newspapers were discordant, even antithetical, to the ones I had acquired as a young lad. Reading the two sets of Hindu and Muslim newspapers around 1945/46, one could hardly find any meeting ground between the Hindu and Muslim positions. The Muslim newspapers described Indian National Congress as a Hindu organization and its secular/nationalist platform a façade designed to hoodwink the Muslims. The Hindu newspapers painted the Muslim League as bent on wrecking the country’s oneness.
The Congress party did its utmost to woo Muslims to its fold, but kept losing the battle. The Indian Muslim League had staked its claim as the sole representative and protector of Muslim interests, a claim Indian National Congress could not concede without being reduced to the status of a party for Hindus alone. The local branch of the Congress party in Bhera was headed in the 1940’s by Chaanan Shah, a Munshi (a clerk and a book keeper) for Lala Ishar Das mehndian wale. Chaanan Shah, a tall, lanky man who was always dressed in white khaddar, had several high school students from the Arya high school become active workers of the town’s Congress party. My neighbor and classmate, Inder Raj Kapoor, was one of these student workers. Their main task was to shout slogans at the Congress party’s rallies and public meetings held in the rectangular ground of Ganjwali Mandi. When three officers (Shah Nawaz, Sehgal, and Dhillon - - a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh) of the Indian National Army (set up by Subhash Chandra Bose in Burma to fight the British) were put on their court-martial trial for treason in Delhi’s Red Fort, Inder Raj Kapoor assumed the command of the sloganeering squad. Inder instructed us that while we shouted the zindabad (Long Live: Dhillon/Sehgal/Shah Nawaz) slogans for each of the three officers on trial for treason, we should shout first and most often such slogans for Shah Nawaz. This was part of Inder’s earnest, though naïve, effort to convince Bhera’s Muslims that the Congress party was more than equally concerned about the fate of Col. Shah Nawaz as a Muslim freedom fighter. Alas, there were to be no winning of Muslim hearts from such tactics.
The political views of Muslims and Hindus/Sikhs had grown so much apart by this time that any political initiative coming from one community to bridge the gap was hardly trusted by the other. On one occasion I heard a discussion between some older Hindu boys from our mohalla and the three Muslim brothers who had a furniture-making carpentry shop opposite Jhugiwala Mandir. The Hindu boys tried hard, but could not convince these brothers about the religious impartiality of Gandhi and Nehru. However, the three brothers did concede that Subhash Chandra Bose was the only Hindu leader who was a true nationalist.
The Gathering Storm
One day in early 1947, I watched from the balcony of the Sikh Gurudawara the mock jannazaa (funeral) of Khizar Hayat, then the Chief Minister of Punjab. An effigy wrapped in a coffin cloth was being carried out by four people on a roughly hewn board and a few other people made the funeral procession. What the procession lacked in size, it made up by the ugliness of its behavior. It was not that they were shouting, “Hai, Hai,” and “Khizar Hayat Murdabad,” a couple of these protestors also kept beating the “dead body” with old, torn shoes. This gesture was the worst insult they could heap on their political opponent from their religion. As a child, I was perplexed at this mean spectacle of hatred. How could these Muslims think so ill of a fellow Muslim? I learned later that Khizar Hayat’s Unionist Party was a coalition of Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu landowners of Punjab. Most Hindus and Sikhs were satisfied with his administration and policies. But, Khizir Hayat had earned the ire of the Muslim community, because he did not readily go along with Mr. Jinnah’s call for the partition of country into India and Pakistan. Punjab was a critical component in Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan, and to allow such a non-cooperative Muslim leader to retain political power in Punjab was an affront to Muslim League. The clearly pro-Muslim League results of the elections and the wide-spread agitation against Khizar Hayat led him to resign in March of 1947. The British Governor took over the administration of the shaky province. Communal riots became rampant in Lahore by this time, especially after Master Tara Singh’s public tearing of a Muslim League’s banner. Reports of riots in the cities of Multan and Amritsar and of massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in the countryside of the Jhelum district (bordering our Sargodha district’s northwest) started coming by words of mouth. Bhera was still untouched by violence, though.
One evening in early June, I saw a small crowd, mostly Hindus, gathered to listen to a radio broadcast outside a house in the street not far from Chitti puli da darwaza. The Hindu owner had placed his radio on the front terrace of his house for the benefit of those who did not have a radio at their homes. I learned that Lord Mountbatten, Pandit Nehru, Mr. Jinnah, and Sardar Baldev Singh were scheduled to make statements on the independence and partition of India and formation of Pakistan. The radio reception was very poor, and I could not understand much of what these leaders had spoken. I gathered from the comments made by the grownup members of the audience that all the four speakers had indicated their consent to the country’s partition into India and Pakistan. The prospects of the country’s partition did not please the audience, but they appeared resigned to it. Bhera was so deep inside the Muslim majority part of Punjab that it was bound to go to Pakistan. Nothing they wished could avert it.
As the Central Government’s decision and the political parties’ seal of consent for the country’s partition into India and Pakistan became known, Hindus and Sikhs in western Punjab started feeling a tangible concern for their future and safety. In less than three months after this declaration, the country’s partition had to be completed into a Non-Muslim majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. There was an unwise haste to finish this enormous task in 90 days in the midst of a rapidly deteriorating situation. Howsoever dismayed, the Hindus and Sikhs did not consider it discreet in Bhera to voice any opposition against the decision on the formation of Pakistan and country’s partition. Somewhat reassuring was the absence of victory parades and loud jubilations by the local Muslims to celebrate the news of the soon to be formed Pakistan. Now that the demand for Pakistan had been officially conceded both by the government as well as the Indian National Congress and Akali Dal, we thought it should pacify the worked up feelings of Muslims in Punjab. Bhera was still at peace with itself, but the situation in the rest of the province remained grim, mean, and brutal.
Exploring Options: To Stay put or to Pack up
Around mid-June, a general meeting of the residents of our Hindu mohalla was held to look at their future in Pakistan and to consider the two options that were open to them: To stay put or to pack up and leave? The heads of the DhoanaN da mohalla families and their grown-up male members pondered the issue of their future and safety in the soon to be the Muslim state of Pakistan. All the mohalla elders spoke and variously expressed the ancestral kinship of their families with the land of Bhera and how emotionally wrenching was the mere thought of leaving the town for unknown places. They were born and had lived in Bhera all their lives. Most elders thought that the communal violence in Punjab and other provinces would subside and come under control with time. They recalled how over the centuries Punjab had seen many a king and kingdom change without any major harm coming to the ruled public (reyyat). Some pointed out that, when Muslims of Punjab joined the movement to carve out a separate country with a Muslim majority in Northwest India, ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs was not a part of their agenda. They also talked about the economic and social costs of abandoning the family’s established businesses, homes, and lands for an uncertain life in distant and unknown places. Overall, it was congenial for them to hope that no harm would come to them in Pakistan.
Lala Daya Ram Kapur and Lala Anant Ram Kapur, the elders of the mohalla’s two anchor families, indicated their decision to stay. They were optimistic that the deteriorating communal situation would be brought under control by the law and order authorities once the transition to Pakistan was completed. Most dramatic was the sanguine outlook of Ram Lall Dhawan, who was so resolute on staying in Bhera that he announced a major renovation project for his house in the mohalla (he, indeed, had already started some construction work in his house)!
On the other hand, we heard a darkly pessimistic forecast from another resident, Chaman Lal, an Arzi-navis (a petition-writer) in the local court. He warned against the comfort of hoping for the best and its attendant decision in favor of staying put. He recommended packing up and leaving the town while it was still safe to escape with one’s family to cities well east of Lahore. The safety of our families should come before any concerns on hardships and sacrifices, he argued. Based on what he had been able to gather from his Muslim clients, he felt sure that Muslims in the countryside were planning to kill and loot the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera at the opportune time. He also cautioned that the times had changed (is bar, waqt badal gayai hein), and history might not repeat itself to save us from harm. Pakistan was being ushered in not through a conquest by a king and his armies, but by the determined will of the majority community that had been persuaded to view Hindus and Sikhs as their enemies. Moreover, how Muslims would treat us here in Pakistan depended on how Hindus and Sikhs in the rest of India would behave toward Muslims. In contrast to Ram Lal Dhawan’s plans to renovate his house in the mohalla, Chaman Lal announced his plan to leave Bhera with his family in a week or so.
Few took Chaman Lal’s warning seriously and his words kindly. They disputed his sources of information as less than reliable. When he tried to defend his information, he was literally drowned in noisy interruptions. They instead talked about the predicament of the business men and land owners. It took their forefathers many a generation to have a successful business in place, and how could one throw it all away. One could sense the high-status elders of the mohalla turning hostile toward Chaman Lal, a man of modest means and standing in the mohalla’s social hierarchy, who was making them look less than fully concerned about the safety of their families. No one would let Chaman Lal speak any further, even when he kept pleading, “ik meri arz vi te sunno (Please listen to my one submission, too).” Apparently supporting Chaman Lal but in reality ridiculing him, two grownup boys repeatedly “asked” the elders to listen to his one “submission” (tusi inhan di ik arz te sunno). The gathering split into twos and threes, and one elder confided that it was easier for Chaman Lal to move to another town because he had portable skills to earn his livelihood; any way he had precious little to lose in Bhera. After all, what he needed to earn his livelihood was nothing more than a set of pens, ink pots, a cushion to sit on, and a chowki-desk for writing petitions outside any court building!
Our father, Hori Lall, earned a modest livelihood from his saraafa business in which he charged fees for attesting to the relative purity of gold and silver by testing them on his touchstones, and also made more money or incurred sizeable losses by buying and selling these precious metals. He had a lot of competition from three other sarafs in the Guru Bazaar: Lala Sita Ram Khanna (his shop also had the town’s sole dharma-kanta), Chuni Lal Chopra, and PiraN-Ditta Mal (see Note 3). In 1947, our father was already 58 years of age, handicapped by rheumatic knees, and lacking enough capital to start his business all over again in a different part of the country to provide for his family. His situation inclined him to believe that Hindus and Sikhs would be spared and allowed to live and work in Pakistan. In his way of thinking, the tensions had to subside and we all needed to wait it out.
Chaman Lal’s and his family (his wife, Shanti Devi; two daughters, Bimla and Krishna; and a young son, Hari Om) packed up and left for Patiala in the next few days. Theirs was the only family from our mohalla to migrate on its own accord well before August 15, 1947. Some mohalla residents made fun of his voluntary exile, and were wishful in predicting how he would one day regret his decision to uproot his family. By the end of August 1947 when the entire Hindu and Sikh population of Bhera felt threatened, trapped and desperate, everybody in our mohalla envied Chaman Lal for his foresightedness. Ram Lal Dhawan’s fate was the saddest; not only he had to stop the renovation work, he also had to get ready for leaving the house he had vowed never to abandon.
A Grim Incident
One day early August, we watched an incident in the mohalla with a lot of alarm. Carried on a cot, a man was brought to a house that belonged to Ram Tikaya Malhotra. Mr. Malhotra had retired from the North West Railways as a Platier (an official who inspects railway tracks while seated on a trolley pushed by two men running on the rails). He was a widower who had returned with his two daughters recently to Bhera to spend his retirement in his house in the mohalla. One of his daughters had appeared as a private candidate for the Punjab University’s Matriculation examination held in May/June. Because of the disturbed conditions in the province, the examination results did not become available in Bhera. Mr. Malhotra persuaded a young man, Tilakaa (Tilak Raj) to take a train to Lahore to obtain the exam results for his daughter. It was a dangerous assignment; we had started hearing of attacks on Hindu and Sikh passengers in trains.
Tilakaa and Prakash Habshi (see note 1) were two unmarried men in their thirties who were known for their pluck and ability to put up a tough fight. They lived in a chabbara over a shop next to the great banyan tree in the Jhugi Bazaar. It was Tilakaa’s reputation as daredevil, fearless guy that brought the risky assignment and made him accept it, i.e., he could not refuse the task without losing his face. When his train from Bhera stopped at Malakwal Junction for passengers to catch other trains, a couple of murderous men with knives and daggers barged in the compartments and dragged the Hindu and Sikh passengers out for killing. Seeing the odds piled up against him, Tilakaa told the attackers that he was a Muslim. They ordered him to take off his pyjama to check if had been circumcised or not. On finding him not circumcised and thus a Hindu, they stabbed him several times all over his body and left him for dead in the train. A few hours later when the same train returned to Bhera, half-dead Tilakaa was rescued and rushed to the town’s hospital. When he was brought to Mr. Ram Titakaya Malhotra’s house, he was wrapped up in bandages. Mr. Malhotra’s family took care of him, and provided the needed medical treatment. I do not recall any Hindu from that day onwards traveled out of Bhera by train. Any way a week or two later, the train service to Bhera from Malakwal was suspended. Buses from Bhera to Bhalwal continued to ply, but only Muslims passengers felt safe to travel by them.
Preparing for the Worst
The news of riots and killings from all over Punjab continued to pour in more macabre tones. The feeling of being trapped and resulting insecurity crystallized fast into a serious concern. All families in the mohalla were now expected to have some means to resist attacks on their lives if they were to materialize. The most common tools of defense were packets of powdered red pepper for women and limbs of dismantled charpais (four-legged, strung cots) for men. We had also piled up bricks, stones, and glass bottles to throw at those who would invade our neighborhood. No one in our mohalla owned a licensed (or unlicensed) firearm. The Gurkha guard of the Punjab National Bank in the street just outside our mohalla carried a gun on duty to protect the bank assets.
One day we witnessed a surprising scene. A police party was taking a Hindu, Mangal Sain, in handcuffs to the police station. Walking just behind Mangal Sain was a policeman carrying a water bucket with four or five sealed canisters immersed in it. According to the policeman, the canisters were homemade bombs and had been seized from Mangal Sain’s shop. Mangal Sain was a tinker by trade. He used to live in our mohalla with his widowed mother, Rajo. When his old mother died a couple of years earlier, he was still unmarried and moved out of our mohalla to stay somewhere else in the town. So far as we knew, he was a loner. We do not know what happened to Mangal Sain after his arrest. Whether and when he was tried, imprisoned, and released? Did he ever make it to India?
After Mangal Sain’s arrest, there was a rumor that the local police would search Hindu and Sikh houses to recover hidden weapons. For many years our family had owned a black baton with a concealed 6-inch blade. When the baton was pulled at its ends, its two inconspicuously fitted parts would split into a short handle with a double-edged blade and a second part as the sheath for the blade. This could be construed as our most “dangerous” weapon. Of course, it did not stand a chance to protect us against daggers, swords, and spears. We were nevertheless apprehensive at the possibility of getting caught with this baton in our house in the event of a door-to-door search by the police. Late one evening when it got dark, we pushed the baton down the roof-level mouth of the gutter-pipe. It slid down the pipe and, as expected, got stuck at the pipe’s foot-long elbow near the first floor. The rumored search never materialized, but we breathed free after the baton had lodged into an unsuspected recess of the gutter pipe!
Ushering in Pakistan
On August 14, a fairly large crowd of local Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians gathered outside the Court/Police Station buildings to cheer and salute the official unfurling of the Pakistan’s national flag. The independence from the British was a muted theme in the larger celebration of the birth of Pakistan. The Hindu and Sikh shop-keepers hoisted and prominently displayed Pakistani flags outside their shops.
After a few days of apparent quiet and peace, one very early morning (around the unusual hour of 3:00 a.m.) we were awakened by the continuous beat of drums (dhols) from a southwesterly direction. The untimely and steady beating of the drums was sensed by us as a kind of call for the Muslim faithful to arise and gather for a planned mission. Mobilized by the countryside Mullahs to avenge the killings of Muslims in the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of India, a mob was growing in size near one of the city’s gates and was set to start a bloody reprisal against the kafirs of Bhera.
The drum beat shook up all Hindus and Sikhs, throwing them into a state of foreboding. I could hear our parents’ worried talk as to what was likely to happen. I was seized by fear, my stomach churned, and I had to rush to the latrine. We could see families gathered on the roofs of their houses, worried and paralyzed. Other than bolting shut the mohalla’s main gate, there was no discernable mobilization on the part of the mohalla residents to organize even a modicum of defense against what appeared to be an imminent attack. We felt paralyzed.
Then the drums suddenly stopped their beat. We learned later that Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, the long serving Chairman of the town’s Municipal Committee and a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi since 1934, confronted these brigands that morning. At one point, he took off his turban and put it at the feet of the mob leader(s) and begged them to turn back to their homes and leave the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera alone. He told them that Hindus and Sikhs had lived in Bhera for centuries in peace with Muslims and they owed them at least a safe passage for the sake of Bhera’s past and fair name. His prominent stature in the community and his heart-felt appeal persuaded the mobs and their leaders to disperse. When most people got caught up in the vortex of religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some righteous, God-fearing persons held their heads well above the swirling waters of hatred and revenge. One such person was the native son of Bhera, Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, our savior. He was the one who single-handedly dissuaded the Muslim mobs of tenant farmers and villagers from acting on their plans to kill and plunder the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. We owe our survival as a community to this righteous man.
The immediate danger to our lives seemed to have been averted, but everyone came to realize that Bhera could not remain for long an oasis of safety and peace in the midst of wide spread hatreds in the country at large. It had belatedly become clear to us that there was no future for Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera, for that matter anywhere in Pakistan. We felt trapped. There was no safe way out. The trains were being stopped to pull out Hindus and Sikhs of the compartments for killing on the platforms, perhaps to avoid spilling their blood on the clothes of “fellow” Muslim passengers inside the train. Sikhs were readily identified by their turbans, facial hair, and the Kada (bangle) on their arms. Hindus could pass for Muslims but for their names and religious icons (if tattooed on their bodies) and their failure to recite the Islamic kalma. When there were no outward signs of a suspected person being a Hindu, the absence of circumcision in men betrayed their Hindu identity.
Safe Departures for Some with Connections.
Some Hindu and Sikh families had relatives in the army and/or had resourceful relatives in India. These relatives sent army trucks or civilian trucks with army escorts to bring their families and friends safely to places like Amritsar in India. One day I saw a truck with a military escort parked outside a house on the periphery of SahniaN da mohalla. Four to five families and their belongings had been squeezed into the truck, including the family of the town’s hospital’s compounder (pharmacist). The compounder’s identical-twin sons were a year junior to me in the school, and I considered them very fortunate to have the kind of connections they had to secure their escape. Jagdish, an army officer, showed up with two military trucks. Besides evacuating his parents (his father was the town-crier and a part-time dough-kneader for Jolly’s Bakery) and siblings, he chose several other families to join his evacuation caravan. There were over one hundred men, women and children packed into the two trucks; among this batch of evacuees was the town’s prominent family of Lala Jiwan Mal Sahni.
The Last Straw: Reaching a Point of no Return
Hardly had our sense of relief over the stopped attack on Hindus and Sikhs lasted a week when a riot erupted near the ChopriaN da Mandi. A couple of Hindus were attacked around a shop, and one of them, a young man by the nickname of Bayya (son of Ram Lal Mandariya), was killed by a group of attackers. The panic spread rapidly and led to a fast and total shut down of every Hindu shop in the bazaars. Lal Kuppi’s kiryana shop in Guru Bazaar was set on fire, and the smoke from the smoldering fire could be seen for several hours from the neighboring mohallas (see Note 2). Hindus and Sikhs stopped doing whatever they were doing and rushed from wherever they were to find safety in their neighborhoods, and locked themselves behind the closed doors of their homes and shut the mohalla gate. I heard the loud banging of the house doors and window shutters as they were being shut forcefully. I thought we were having an earthquake. “They have started killing Hindus,” shouted someone. We became worried about our father and my elder brother, Prem Sarup, who were at our father’s saraafa shop. Hafiz, the rang-rez (the dyer) whose shop was opposite to our father’s in the Jhuggi bazaar, rushed to advise my father and brother to leave right away for our house for safety. He told them that riots had started in another part of the town. My father (who was on crutches due to arthritis in his knees at the time) and brother came “running” as fast as they could, and were let in behind the shut doors of our DhoanaN da mohalla.
The women had already been directed to go and hide in the dark recesses of a big, old house. They were asked to carry their pouches of red-chili powder to throw in the eyes of attackers. No body had thought of the possibility of the safe house (with one entrance and no separate exit for escape) for women and children being set on fire. Our house was adjacent to the mohalla’s main gate, and if an attack were to occur, we probably would have been among the first houses to bear the burnt of attack.
Later that day, sitting on a cot with his three sons (9, 14, and 19 years old) in another “safe” house in the mohalla, our father looked shaken to the core. With tears in his eyes, he told us that he had failed us as our father for not having the foresight to escape with our family well before the catastrophe struck. He would never forgive himself if our mother and we, his children, came to any harm.
We breathed easy when the riot did not spread to cause any damage beyond the death toll of one Hindu life and the single case of arson. The killing of one person was either an isolated incident in itself or something that was not allowed to spread. We are not aware if there was any intervention by people of good will likes Sheikh Fazal Haq or by the police to stop further violence. Any way, there was no more loss of life and destruction of property that day. Yet, the sheer terror (daih-shat) caused by this incident, coming at the heels of the averted attack by the Muslim mobs a few days earlier, was overwhelming in its impact on our psyches. It was a kind of last straw. Out of fear, the Hindu and Sikh shops, businesses, and schools remained shuttered from that day onwards to the very last day of our stay in Bhera. The prospects of a safe and secure future for Hindus and Sikhs as a community in Pakistan had collapsed irreparably for us. Even the most sympathetic local Muslims had by now come to view an exile for us to India as inevitable and in our best interests. No one asked us any more to stay back.
Worries over safety and survival had now become the foremost concern for the Hindus and Sikhs in the town. All of us were physically cooped up in our mohallas. We were also cut off from all news. We did not know what was happening to Hindus and Sikhs in other towns. The newspapers from Lahore had stopped arriving. The local generation of electricity had been severely curtailed to the extent that it could power only the street lights at nights. It was most likely due to the shortage and disrupted supply of diesel for running the generators. The smallest generator was run in the evenings and at nights; the result was that electric power was no longer available for domestic use at any hour. Only eight out of the 27 houses in the mohalla had electric connections to begin with. When the electricity was turned off for all homes, the few radios these families had became inoperable. The silence of the radios was disturbing. The lack of news about what was going on in the rest of Pakistan and in India fed our worst fears.
One late evening, Inder Malhotra, an electrician and our next door neighbor, used a ladder to reach the light-bracket of the mohalla’s sole electric pole, and was able to plug in one end of a long wire to its bulb-holder. The wire brought electric power to a radio that was placed on a table below the light. With the help of a wire-antenna, Inder was able to tune in the radio to catch the All India Radio Delhi station. The station was broadcasting live or recorded evening prayer of Gandhi ji. In his broken Hindi rendered a little more unintelligible because of the poor reception and static, Gandhi ji was recounting the dream he had the previous night in which he saw a Muslim bibi (lady) in a Delhi refugee camp without a blanket and shivering in cold. That is what we could make out of his narrative. It did not please us; how could Gandhi ji talk of the suffering of a Muslim bibi in Delhi while being so “utterly silent” on the plight of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan! We did not know then that he had been to Noakhli in East Pakistan around this time to bring peace there for Hindus after his success in stopping the killings of Muslims in Calcutta by going on a fast-unto-death there in mid-August (see Note 4).
Few Hindus now dared step far from their mohallas. Hindu women stopped going to the Jethu di khui area for buying their daily vegetables from the Muslim women vendors who used to bring baskets full of fresh produce from their farms each morning. Now one of these vendors started bringing her basket of vegetables to the mohalla for us to buy. Muslim cowherds continued to take the cows and buffalos of the mohalla families out for grazing. Bassu, a Muslim employee of Lala Anant Ram Kapur continued to prepare the feed for the family’s buffalo and milk the animal for the family. Our milk-woman, BegmaN, who lived just outside the mohalla next to the Sikh Gurudawara, continued to bring us buffalo milk measured in Gadwis. Balla Nai, a Muslim barber, came every second day to the mohalla for the elders to get their shaves. Most blessedly, jamedaars (Mussalies, the Muslim “category” of sweepers and latrine-cleaners) did not stop attending to their cleaning chores for Hindus and Sikhs. Shalli, who used to clean our dry latrine, did not kindly miss a day of her work for us in this critical period.
Our isolation in the mohalla from the external world made us more susceptible than usual to rumors of an impending attack. The mohalla elders approved a plan for nightly vigils by the mohalla’s youths (those who were older than 18 and unmarried). Different groups of 3 to 4 young men took their turns to patrol the street outside of the mohalla at night. Like professional chowkidars (watchmen), they used to walk with laathis (long bamboo staffs) in their hands, periodically shouting Jaagte-Raho (Keep awake). They were advised to rush back into the mohalla if they spotted any danger, instead of fighting it out. Although as many as four families and one commercial bank were housed in the street outside the gated mohalla, the main defense against any invaders had to be mounted primarily from the houses inside the mohalla. Small heaps of bricks and glass bottles were piled on the roof tops. These “missiles” were to be the weapons for our first line of resistance against the attackers. For any hand-to-hand combat, the limbs of cots and kitchen knives were the only available tools for men.
Waiting for the Evacuation Train: Overnight Camping at the Railway station
The “official” word was spread that a special train was expected to arrive any day to evacuate us. We started looking forward to a special train with army escorts to evacuate us safely to India. The first thing we used to do in those days was to go to the roofs of our houses in the morning and look in the direction of railway station for any sign of billowing smoke of a train’s engine (steam locomotive). We were advised to be prepared to leave on short notice. Accordingly we had started packing up our essential belongings and preparing the food we needed to carry with us. There was going to be only limited space in the train for the entire Hindu and Sikh population of Bhera and, naturally, very little room left even for their barely essential belongings. Our mother had to make the hard decisions on what few household things were worth taking with us and what needed to be left behind or thrown away. Besides the modest amount of family jewelry, the most valuable things in terms of sentiments were the three phulkaris she had saved for decades to give as welcome gifts to her prospective daughter-in-laws on the weddings days of her three sons. Also dear to her heart were a few very beautiful khais (bed sheets) she had got woven by the local Muslim weavers from the countless spools of cotton thread she had spun on her charkha (spin–wheel) over the years. She also had to think of a few other items; beddings, cooking utensils, essential clothing for everyone, etc. She also thought of cooking only those food items that won’t spoil readily, such as puris (fried breads), prathas, and khameeri roties. Besides a few vegetable preparations, she thought of carrying a small jar of mixed pickles that do not go stale.
Like other Hindu and Sikh business men, our father had the task of collecting from those who owed him money and of paying back his debts to other business men. The goal was to raise enough cash on hand to sustain the family for as long as one could in unknown settings. Our elder brother took on the task of going through stashes of family papers to gather any school documents, reports of births, photographs, and letters from the family members in one place to take along with us. One of the pictures he found was a group-photograph in sepia of our family before my younger brother and I were born (circa 1928-29). In the picture, our elder brother was a baby in our mother’s lap, our two unmarried sisters and another brother (who had died of typhoid in Rawalpindi where he was attending D.A.V. College for his F.Sc. in 1942) were in the standing row. Very precious was the presence of our paternal grandmother in the picture. Obviously the town’s only photographer (he had his shop/studio next to the Arya Samaj Mandir outside the Ganj wala darwaza) had been brought to the house for this event; he took the photograph of the family gathered on the flat roof of our house. Someone had forgotten to remove the rather ugly four-legged ghada-stand (ghadas are earthen pitchers used to cool water by seeped evaporation in summer months) in the background for this picture.
There were a hundred other things, small and big, that tugged at you but had to be left behind in the house. Our mother still harbored a certain hope that she would be able to return with her family to our home in Bhera. She did not want to throw anything away. She did not mind giving away a few things to the people who needed them. My mother’s Pfaff sewing machine was very dear to her heart. She had sewn most of her children’s clothing herself on this machine, and she did not want to part with it. When BegmaN, our milk-woman, approached our mother to sell this machine to her, she hesitated to sell it. BegmaN persuaded her with the argument that the sewing machine, if sold to her, would at least be in good hands and used properly, instead of gathering dust in the abandoned house for God knows how long. Touched by BegmaN’s words, our mother let her have it for a few rupees. The Pfaff sewing machine was the only article we sold in Bhera. Except for the few things we managed to carry with us, most other household things were left behind.
Finally the day of saying good-bye to Bhera came with the announcement that the long awaited special train would arrive later that day to take the Hindus and Sikhs away to India. What made the departure really tragic was our own looking forward to this day when we would escape from the town where our ancestors had lived as a community for centuries long before the arrival of Muslims in India. Now the time seemed to have arrived when we would leave it for ever. Most sadly, the opportunity to go far away from Bhera had turned into a kind of deliverance!
All families in the mohalla made hurried, last minute preparations for the departure and their march to the railway station. Our mother served us prathas with hot milk, and packed up the food she had prepared a day or two earlier for our journey to somewhere in India. Just before noon, a Baloch army man came to our mohalla to ask the families to hurry up and rush to the station. Lala Daya Ram Kapur, the old patriarch of the mohalla’s richest land-owning and business family, did not like this on-the-spot pressure to make it quick. He could not help asking the soldier what was the great rush when he was leaving all his properties and business behind in Pakistan. This did not please the soldier who told Lala Daya Ram to carry his home and lands “on his head” to India!
Everybody had to walk and carry their belongings on their person to the local Tonga stand outside the Ganj wala darwaza from where they could hire a tonga to ride and carry their belongings to the railway station. I was carrying on my head a large, bronze metal box containing all the food our mother had cooked for our trip and a bag full of sundry items. When I reached the town’s main chowk (intersection) I saw a sight that still haunts me. Sugreev, who had a kiryana shop opposite the Gurudawara entrance in the main bazaar, was desperately trying to restrain his old mother from breaking loose from him. It appeared that the old lady, her hair and clothes disheveled, had dementia and was hard to control. Her son had to take her along with his family to wherever the train was going to deliver them. I watched the struggle between the two for a few minutes, and then had to move on to join my family members who had moved ahead. Sugreev’s predicament was indeed heart breaking; I do not know the outcome of his efforts to bring his mother with him. He could not have left his mother behind on her own as their entire community was on the way to India. In the 1950s, I got to read Saadat Hasan Manto’s story, Toba Tek Singh, in Urdu and found the fate of Sugreev’s mother no less poignant than the plight of Bishen Singh in Manto’s story.
Carrying boxes, beddings, hand bags, and trunks (metal suit cases), men, women, and children walked in a slow, staggered procession in the direction of Bhera’s tonga stand. The town did not have more than two dozen tongas to begin with. The demand for these vehicles was especially great from those who had physical handicaps (e.g., our father was on crutches) or those who were carrying a lot of luggage with them. The tonga drivers made frequent trips to the station to meet the demand, and most people had to wait for their turn.
By the time our family reached the railway station by tonga, the huge waiting room with benches for the third-class passengers was overflowing with people. We had to lay down our goods under a tree on the road and sat on our trunks with rolled beddings for cushions. Many people were still coming in. The late comers settled with their belongings on the half-kaccha road with crushed stones embedded in its dirt surface. Once in a while, a policeman would arrive looking for a Hindu businessman (mostly individual bankers who had made loans against pawned stuff) and take him to the town’s police station in a tonga. It turned out that there was nothing sinister about these summonses. The Muslim clients of these Hindu businessmen and bankers had raised enough cash to retrieve the stuff they had pawned earlier with them. So far as we know, there were no unfair pressures on the Hindu businessmen to return the pawned materials without receiving payment of the loans they had extended. The few Hindus who were hauled to the police-station came back to the railway station to rejoin their folk.
Bhera’s railway station was the terminus for the Malakwal-Bhera railway line. The station had a long platform with two sets of railway tracks, two water-pitcher stands (one for Muslims and the other for Hindus), a shunting yard, a godown, and a circular turn-table for the train engines to reverse their direction for the return journey to Malakwal Junction. We noticed the presence of armed soldiers around the railway station and saw then posted as guards at the periphery. Besides the Baloch soldiers, there was also a batch of Sikh soldiers in this army contingent made available to provide armed escort for the train. The Captain of this unit was a middle-aged, tall, handsome Muslim gentleman. He was taking rounds of the extended site of our gathering.
It was already getting late in the day yet there were no signs of the train at the platform. We saw the Captain in frequent consultation with his colleagues. Then as it was about to get dark, the people thought of having the meals they had brought with them in the remaining light. The single water hand pump outside the station was crowded as each family came to fetch water for the evening meal. Everyone in the crowd was patient for its turn. The waiting line moved fast, because the families did not have big pots to fill. Around this time we were informed that the train’s arrival had been cancelled for the day. Each family made a bed or two on the ground. Except for the fortunate few who had found space in the waiting room, others had to make their beds in the open on the rough road to spend the night. I still remember how hard it was to lie down on a bare (no padding) sheet spread over the stone-studded pavement (see Note 5). Although it felt safe with the military men guarding our “camp,” we slept fitfully. The town’s fairground next to the railway station was turned into a toilet facility for the night.
In the morning, we were asked to go back to our homes in the town (tongas were available for the return trip), and advised to wait for another train in a day or two for our evacuation. We were also given to understand that no tongas would be available for our next trip to the station and that we were to bring only those goods with us that could be carried on our persons from our homes to the railway station. The new limit on how much luggage could be brought was prompted by the fact that the evacuees had managed to bring far more baggage with them than could have been stored in the railway compartments without displacing the passengers. The heaps of luggage could stand in the way of evacuating all those who had to leave.
Although we were not excited at going back to our homes, we felt relieved to find the locks on our houses intact on our return. No house in our mohalla was broken into during our twenty-four hours of absence. We felt embarrassed, because we had feared a kind of free-for-all looting of the goods and belongings that we had left behind. There were also no signs of any looting of the town’s Hindu and Sikh shops during our short absence from the scene.
Final Farewell to Bhera
A day or two later, we were ordered to return to the railway station for catching the special train that had already arrived. This time there were no tongas to take us to the station, so we set out early from our house this time. Whether they were sick or crippled, young children or old folks, everyone had to walk all the way from their homes to the railway station. The walking distance from the farthest point in the town to the station was three to four miles long, and it took quite some time to cover it. Most people had to make several stops on the way to catch their breath as they were not used to walking such a distance in a single stretch with their carry-on belongings. Our father was on the crutches. Our elder brother carried a small metal trunk on his head. I carried a gathhri (a wrapped bundle) of clothes for our daily wear, while my younger brother was assigned the task of carrying our prepared food for the journey. Our mother’s heels were sore and hurting so badly that she could hardly walk, especially with our hold-all bedding on her head. She had to stop several times on the way and we kept company with her. When she reached the station, she almost collapsed on the floor of the waiting room. She thought she was going to die there, and told our father to take good care of us, their three sons. I could not bear to see this scene, and kept praying to God to spare our mother’s life.
Someone suggested that we should contact a Muslim doctor (a Unaani hakeem) who lived in one of the nearby houses in a row. My elder brother went to get him to have a look at our mother. The doctor took my brother back to his house and sent with him a packet of powder medicine to be taken by our mother with a glass of milk. But we did not have milk on us to give it to our mother. Our neighbor in the waiting room was none other than a neighbor from our mohalla, Shrimati ShielaN Vanti Kapur (see Note 6). She had brought milk with her in a container for her baby daughter. Watching our mother’s condition, she offered a glass of milk for our mother to take with the medicine. After she had taken the medicine, our mother felt much better and in an hour or so of rest managed to board the train on her own feet.
My elder brother thinks that there were no more than ten bogies (cars) in this special train. As many as 5,000 to 6,000 Hindus and Sikhs (along with the baggage they had carried on their person to the station) had to be squeezed in those bogies. Bringing with us only those belongings that could be carried on our heads without breaking our necks made it possible for everybody to get evacuated in a single army-escorted train of ten bogies.
Before our special train left Bhera’s railway station one day in the third week of September, 1947, a batch of Muslim National Guards (the Muslim counterpart to the Hindu RSS of those days) showed up in their green uniforms and lined up on the platform in a “Guard-of-Honor” formation to bid us farewell. We watched them from the windows of our railway compartment, not knowing what to make of this entirely unexpected move. We were at that time suffering from the oppressive heat in our railway compartments. We were packed like herrings in the train; several families (over 100 persons) stuffed in each small compartment. The crowding made the inside of the train feel like an oven, even when all the windows were kept wide open. At one point, one Muslim national guard, Baalu (for Iqbal), who used to work as a sweeper for a Kapur family in our mohalla, approached the head of this family and advised that we better close the windows. It did not make any sense; he did not tell us why the windows need be closed. He kept pleading though. Before he went back to be with his fellow-guards, he made sure that we were going to shut all the windows. The gentleman returned after a while to ask why we had kept one window open. We told him that it would not shut. He suggested we better place a trunk (suit case) or even a rolled-bedding against the window to cover it. We sensed something was remiss, something ominous to befall us. It was only when the train suddenly stopped just a few miles from the station and we heard rapid firing by the escort soldiers that the full scope of the peril we were in dawned on us. It became clear why this caring person was so much concerned about the open windows. He knew of the planned attack on the train, but could not divulge it.
The train gave its whistle, its steam engine puffed and the train started to roll away from the railway station, passing Bhera’s first signal-arm (chotta haath) and then the second signal-arm (bada haath). The lowered signal-arms indicated all clear to the train, but there was a dreadful obstruction waiting for us. Hardly had the train moved three or four miles when it stopped due to an obstruction on he tracks near Hazurpur. A large mob of marauders was waiting there to ambush us. The Captain, our second savior after Sheikh Fazal Haq, ordered his men to open fire in order to deter the mob. The firing by his men succeeded in stopping the attack and saving the lives of Bhera’s Hindu/Sikh men, women, and children. Some of the attackers must have been injured and a few perhaps even got killed. The Muslim and Sikh soldiers removed the tree trunk from the railway tracks that the attackers had placed there to halt the train, and the train resumed its journey to Malakwal.
The men waiting to ambush our train were mostly from Bhera’s surrounding villages (including a few from the town itself), who could hardly wait to kill the Hindu and Sikh men, and carry away their women and cash and jewelry as maal-e-ghanimat. Once turned back from the gates of Bhera by the pleas of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, most of them showed up “dutifully” a few weeks later to waylay our special evacuation train. We do not know if they were there for their mission when the first train did not show up a day or two earlier. However on this occasion, before our train was stopped a few miles from Bhera, we could see from the window chinks a few of these folks running by the side of our train. They had axes and spears in their hands, and those who did not have a donkey or a camel were carrying cots on their heads to bring back the booty. These laggards were trying hard to reach the site of planned ambush in time so as not to miss on their share of the spoils. When the train was stopped at the barricade that had been set up for the purpose, the main body of raiders came rushing from behind the embankments of a canal to attack us. The Captain promptly ordered his armed men to open fire, making the mobs retreat and find shelter behind the embankments. But for the effective protection provided by the armed escort commanded by the Captain, Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs would have been a captive target for butchery in the stalled train (see Note 7).
This time the train did not stop until it reached Malakwal Junction. Perhaps for security reasons, our train was parked in the open before reaching one of the railway platforms with sheds. It was easier for the soldiers to guard and defend the train in the open; it avoided sneak attacks coming from built-up structures. The Sikh soldiers were assigned the guard duty; they stood every 20 feet or soon either side of the train. It was a very hot day in September, and the soldiers stood in the sun for hours until the train was cleared to leave. We had no idea our train was bound for Mandi Bahauddin until we reached its railway station and were asked to get off. The town had been selected to serve as a collection-point camp for Hindu and Sikh refugees from Jhelum and Sargodha districts.
At Mandi Bahauddin Railway Station, I saw quite a few Hindu elders (one from our mohalla) take off their turbans and lay them at the Captain’s feet as a gesture of their deep gratitude for saving them, their womenfolk and children. He was uneasy at this gesture and just stepped back from the turbans, telling the Hindus that what he did to save them and their families was a matter of duty for him. He surely was a true Muslim, a gentleman officer, and a karmayogi for whom a duty performed was its own reward. We do not know this officer’s name or the place he was from, but his face will ever remain hallowed in our memories. He was a stranger, but our savior. May God bless his soul.
NOTES
Note 1: Behind his back, Prakash was referred to as Habshi (African) because his father was a Bherochi Hindu and mother an African woman. He was a good looking, tall, dark, muscular, curly haired man known for his toughness and courage.
Note 2. The town did not have any fire-fighting equipment other than one wheeled open-tank with a manual pumping mechanism. The water from the tank had to be pumped by four persons (two o each side) for jetting it with a hose on the fire. This vehicle had rusted over the years as it lay abandoned in the front yard of the town’s municipal committee’s building. A preferred and more common method of fighting fires was to form a bucket brigade in which men formed a chain to move buckets filled from the water drawn from nearby wells to the fire site. Understandably on this day, no Hindu or Sikh would endanger his life to form a chain of citizen fire-fighters to douse the fire in Lal Kuppi’s shop.
Note 3. PiraN Ditta (Given by Pirs) was a Hindu, but this name was common among Hindus and Muslims alike in western Punjab until the early twentieth century. However, there was also a separate Hindu variant of this name, GuraN Ditta. For the Muslim names of Allah Ditta and Allah Ditti, Hindus had corresponding names of Ram Ditta and Ram Ditti. Some Hindu men were named Ram Rakha (Protected by Ram) and women, Ram Rakhi. The Muslim counterparts for these names were Allah Rakha and Allah Rakhi. Allah Jawaya and Ram Jawaya were the other pair of names from the same tradition; however a Hindu name like Ram Tikaya does not appear to have a matching name among Muslims.
Note 4. In their book, Freedom at Midnight, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre describe Suhrawardy’s rush to meet Gandhi just before his planned departure for Noakhli and requested him to first help save Calcutta’s Muslims. Gandhi made Suhrawardy accept a few conditions before he started on his long fast in Calcutta and delayed his departure for Noakhli (1975, pp.225-226)
Note 5. The road between the tonga-stand and the railway station was prepared by having a steam-roller go over the spread of crushed rocks and pebbles on the road’s dugout bed; no layer of asphalt was ever laid over the road’s stone-studded pavement which by 1947 had turned terribly rough and uneven.
Note 6. Mrs. ShielaN Vanti Kapur was a daughter-in-law of Lala Daya Ram Kapur of our mohalla and the wife of Mr. Harbans Lal Kapur, a leading advocate in the town. One of their sons, Narinder K. Kapur, a Seventh grader in the Arya Highh School in 1947, retired as a Judge of the Punjab/Haryana High Court in Chandigarh.
.
Note 7. The planned attack on Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera in their mohallas and homes, if it had not been averted, would have been less costly in lost lives than this attack, if not foiled, on a trainload of passengers. In the former case, many of the intended targets could have escaped in several mohallas. In some, they could have inflicted some damage to the attackers in gated neighborhoods. In contrast, the attack on the train, if it had not been stopped, would have led to a total massacre of the towns’ Hindus and Sikhs who were sitting ducks with nowhere to escape and had no tools to put up even a token resistance.
____________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________
Posted by
saharanpuri
Feb 28, 2008 12:09 am
The Long Journey (Part I): From Bhera to Mandi BahauddinGian Sarup
This is the story of how the division of India into two nations came to be enacted at the local level in the small, ancient and peaceful town of Bhera in 1947. The author, then a 14-year old kid, and his family were witnesses as well as targets of the movements and events that steadily unfolded into an irreversible migration of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs to India, ending centuries old sojourn of their families in Bhera. This segment of The Long Journey covers the post-1946 stirrings for Pakistan in Punjab, the rapidly deteriorating conditions for Hindus and Sikhs in the Rawalpindi region and elsewhere in western Punjab, the growing concerns of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs for their own security and future in soon to be formed Pakistan, local Muslim leadership’s intervention to prevent Hindu blood- shed, the departure of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs by a special train, the attempted ambush of the train by a Muslim mob near Bhera and the attack’s neutralization by the train’s army escort under the command of a Muslim captain, and the delivery of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs to a refugee collection camp in Mandi Bahauddin in Pakistan for eventual transit to India.
Hindu-Muslim/Sikh Relations in Bhera before 1946.
Despite the emerging differences in the viewpoints of the town’s Muslims and Hindus/Sikhs with regard to the idea of Pakistan, the two communities continued to live and interact without any religious friction. In our memories of the pre-1946 period there is no entry for communal tensions and riots between the town’s communities. Like in most other towns of Punjab, places of worship of each religion functioned without any interference from the followers of other faiths in Bhera. ChhaintaaN wali Masjid was adjacent to the Jhuggi wala Mandir; both shared a wall. The Mullah gave his Azaan five times a day from the mosque, and the Hindu temple had its daily prayer accompanied by the tolling of its bells every evening. The Sikh priest in the nearby Gurudwara recited Gurbani around five o’clock every morning, and this recital from the top of the Gurudawara’s clock tower (the highest point in the town) was heard far enough to wake up people of all faiths at that early hour in the surrounding neighborhoods. The public prayers of different faiths did not grate on anyone’s religious sensibilities, and this kind of long standing accommodation was not due to the absence of blaring loudspeakers in those days.
Relative to Hindus and Sikhs, Muslims were in a majority of more than 2 to I in Bhera. Hindus and Sikhs felt secure and safe. As a Hindu child growing up in the town, I never felt we were a minority, much less a vulnerable minority. A clear majority status in the town and western Punjab had given the Muslim community a lot of self-assuredness. When Punjabi Muslims felt aggrieved it was mostly because of what they thought was the way their coreligionists were denied their fair share of political power in the rest of India. In Punjab, Muslim numerical strength translated into proportionate political and administrative power under the system of separate electorates and religion-based quotas for jobs. Most of the time, the town’s Tehsildaars (the government administrators and judges), Thanedaars (Chiefs of Police), and Chairman of the town’s Municipal Committee in Bhera were Muslims. No Hindu or Sikh ever felt unhappy or aggrieved with these appointed and elected officials. Until 1946, Bhera’s Muslim’s self-assurance as a majority community was also reflected in their relative lack of overt political activity. Whereas the local branch of the Indian National Congress, largely comprised of Hindu and Sikh membership, held frequent public meetings and rallies against the British rule, the local Muslim League was relaxed and less demonstrative in its opposition to the British rule. Of course, the Muslim League was rapidly gaining strength and popularity among Muslims at the cost of Unionist party around this time. However, getting rid of religious minorities was not a part of Muslim League’s creed for Pakistan.
Communal Stirrings in Bhera
Alas this era of peace and tranquility was not to last for ever; Bhera was not an isolated island. The news of killings of Hindus on Mr. Jinnah’s Direct Action Day in Calcutta under the rule of Shaheed Suhrawardy in August 1946 was worrisome, but there was not any serious apprehension among us at that time about our own future and security as Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. Calcutta was far too distant a place to impact us seriously. We felt secure under the Unionist government of Khizar Hayat in Punjab. The Unionist party and government were comprised of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh landlords and Jats. However, when we heard a few months later about the massacres of Sikhs and Hindus closer home in the northwestern parts of Punjab, the situation acquired a threatening posture for us. With continuing reports of attacks on our religious communities in the rural areas of the Rawalpindi Division, we Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera began having tangible concerns for our own security.
Our father was totally apolitical. We did not get any newspaper at home, nor did we have a radio to keep us abreast of the news about the country’s inexorable move toward its partition. I had started reading the headlines in Urdu dailies like Milap and Pratap in our school’s library when I was in the sixth or seventh grade (around 1944). Both the newspapers had Hindu owners and editors. Mahasha Krishan and his son, Narinder, managed and edited the daily Pratap, and Mahasha Khush-hal Chand and his son, Ranbir, ran the daily Milap. Both the dailies were staunchly Arya Samajist in their outlook; they also subscribed to the political ideology of Indian National Congress. They promoted the Congress’ view that religion should not be the basis of nationhood, and they argued that there was no need to split India into different countries based on religious counts. These two news papers were clearly opposed to the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and carried on combative debates on this issue with the Muslim newspapers like Zamindar and Nawai Waqt.
One day I wandered into the town’s public library located in the Christian quarters behind the old Police Station and the Court Complex. That is where I came across the two Muslim newspapers, Zamindar and Nawai-Waqat, for the first time in my life. I was taken aback by their presentation of the news and their portrayals of Gandhi and Nehru as Hindu leaders who were promoting Hindu interests at the cost Muslims. Politically naïve, I could not believe that any body could miss the “truth” by such a wide margin. As a young boy of about 13-14 years of age, I had not yet learned the hard lesson of life that different groups can see the same event or person very differently based on their allegiances. The views of these newspapers were discordant, even antithetical, to the ones I had acquired as a young lad. Reading the two sets of Hindu and Muslim newspapers around 1945/46, one could hardly find any meeting ground between the Hindu and Muslim positions. The Muslim newspapers described Indian National Congress as a Hindu organization and its secular/nationalist platform a façade designed to hoodwink the Muslims. The Hindu newspapers painted the Muslim League as bent on wrecking the country’s oneness.
The Congress party did its utmost to woo Muslims to its fold, but kept losing the battle. The Indian Muslim League had staked its claim as the sole representative and protector of Muslim interests, a claim Indian National Congress could not concede without being reduced to the status of a party for Hindus alone. The local branch of the Congress party in Bhera was headed in the 1940’s by Chaanan Shah, a Munshi (a clerk and a book keeper) for Lala Ishar Das mehndian wale. Chaanan Shah, a tall, lanky man who was always dressed in white khaddar, had several high school students from the Arya high school become active workers of the town’s Congress party. My neighbor and classmate, Inder Raj Kapoor, was one of these student workers. Their main task was to shout slogans at the Congress party’s rallies and public meetings held in the rectangular ground of Ganjwali Mandi. When three officers (Shah Nawaz, Sehgal, and Dhillon - - a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Sikh) of the Indian National Army (set up by Subhash Chandra Bose in Burma to fight the British) were put on their court-martial trial for treason in Delhi’s Red Fort, Inder Raj Kapoor assumed the command of the sloganeering squad. Inder instructed us that while we shouted the zindabad (Long Live: Dhillon/Sehgal/Shah Nawaz) slogans for each of the three officers on trial for treason, we should shout first and most often such slogans for Shah Nawaz. This was part of Inder’s earnest, though naïve, effort to convince Bhera’s Muslims that the Congress party was more than equally concerned about the fate of Col. Shah Nawaz as a Muslim freedom fighter. Alas, there were to be no winning of Muslim hearts from such tactics.
The political views of Muslims and Hindus/Sikhs had grown so much apart by this time that any political initiative coming from one community to bridge the gap was hardly trusted by the other. On one occasion I heard a discussion between some older Hindu boys from our mohalla and the three Muslim brothers who had a furniture-making carpentry shop opposite Jhugiwala Mandir. The Hindu boys tried hard, but could not convince these brothers about the religious impartiality of Gandhi and Nehru. However, the three brothers did concede that Subhash Chandra Bose was the only Hindu leader who was a true nationalist.
The Gathering Storm
One day in early 1947, I watched from the balcony of the Sikh Gurudawara the mock jannazaa (funeral) of Khizar Hayat, then the Chief Minister of Punjab. An effigy wrapped in a coffin cloth was being carried out by four people on a roughly hewn board and a few other people made the funeral procession. What the procession lacked in size, it made up by the ugliness of its behavior. It was not that they were shouting, “Hai, Hai,” and “Khizar Hayat Murdabad,” a couple of these protestors also kept beating the “dead body” with old, torn shoes. This gesture was the worst insult they could heap on their political opponent from their religion. As a child, I was perplexed at this mean spectacle of hatred. How could these Muslims think so ill of a fellow Muslim? I learned later that Khizar Hayat’s Unionist Party was a coalition of Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu landowners of Punjab. Most Hindus and Sikhs were satisfied with his administration and policies. But, Khizir Hayat had earned the ire of the Muslim community, because he did not readily go along with Mr. Jinnah’s call for the partition of country into India and Pakistan. Punjab was a critical component in Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan, and to allow such a non-cooperative Muslim leader to retain political power in Punjab was an affront to Muslim League. The clearly pro-Muslim League results of the elections and the wide-spread agitation against Khizar Hayat led him to resign in March of 1947. The British Governor took over the administration of the shaky province. Communal riots became rampant in Lahore by this time, especially after Master Tara Singh’s public tearing of a Muslim League’s banner. Reports of riots in the cities of Multan and Amritsar and of massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in the countryside of the Jhelum district (bordering our Sargodha district’s northwest) started coming by words of mouth. Bhera was still untouched by violence, though.
One evening in early June, I saw a small crowd, mostly Hindus, gathered to listen to a radio broadcast outside a house in the street not far from Chitti puli da darwaza. The Hindu owner had placed his radio on the front terrace of his house for the benefit of those who did not have a radio at their homes. I learned that Lord Mountbatten, Pandit Nehru, Mr. Jinnah, and Sardar Baldev Singh were scheduled to make statements on the independence and partition of India and formation of Pakistan. The radio reception was very poor, and I could not understand much of what these leaders had spoken. I gathered from the comments made by the grownup members of the audience that all the four speakers had indicated their consent to the country’s partition into India and Pakistan. The prospects of the country’s partition did not please the audience, but they appeared resigned to it. Bhera was so deep inside the Muslim majority part of Punjab that it was bound to go to Pakistan. Nothing they wished could avert it.
As the Central Government’s decision and the political parties’ seal of consent for the country’s partition into India and Pakistan became known, Hindus and Sikhs in western Punjab started feeling a tangible concern for their future and safety. In less than three months after this declaration, the country’s partition had to be completed into a Non-Muslim majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. There was an unwise haste to finish this enormous task in 90 days in the midst of a rapidly deteriorating situation. Howsoever dismayed, the Hindus and Sikhs did not consider it discreet in Bhera to voice any opposition against the decision on the formation of Pakistan and country’s partition. Somewhat reassuring was the absence of victory parades and loud jubilations by the local Muslims to celebrate the news of the soon to be formed Pakistan. Now that the demand for Pakistan had been officially conceded both by the government as well as the Indian National Congress and Akali Dal, we thought it should pacify the worked up feelings of Muslims in Punjab. Bhera was still at peace with itself, but the situation in the rest of the province remained grim, mean, and brutal.
Exploring Options: To Stay put or to Pack up
Around mid-June, a general meeting of the residents of our Hindu mohalla was held to look at their future in Pakistan and to consider the two options that were open to them: To stay put or to pack up and leave? The heads of the DhoanaN da mohalla families and their grown-up male members pondered the issue of their future and safety in the soon to be the Muslim state of Pakistan. All the mohalla elders spoke and variously expressed the ancestral kinship of their families with the land of Bhera and how emotionally wrenching was the mere thought of leaving the town for unknown places. They were born and had lived in Bhera all their lives. Most elders thought that the communal violence in Punjab and other provinces would subside and come under control with time. They recalled how over the centuries Punjab had seen many a king and kingdom change without any major harm coming to the ruled public (reyyat). Some pointed out that, when Muslims of Punjab joined the movement to carve out a separate country with a Muslim majority in Northwest India, ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs was not a part of their agenda. They also talked about the economic and social costs of abandoning the family’s established businesses, homes, and lands for an uncertain life in distant and unknown places. Overall, it was congenial for them to hope that no harm would come to them in Pakistan.
Lala Daya Ram Kapur and Lala Anant Ram Kapur, the elders of the mohalla’s two anchor families, indicated their decision to stay. They were optimistic that the deteriorating communal situation would be brought under control by the law and order authorities once the transition to Pakistan was completed. Most dramatic was the sanguine outlook of Ram Lall Dhawan, who was so resolute on staying in Bhera that he announced a major renovation project for his house in the mohalla (he, indeed, had already started some construction work in his house)!
On the other hand, we heard a darkly pessimistic forecast from another resident, Chaman Lal, an Arzi-navis (a petition-writer) in the local court. He warned against the comfort of hoping for the best and its attendant decision in favor of staying put. He recommended packing up and leaving the town while it was still safe to escape with one’s family to cities well east of Lahore. The safety of our families should come before any concerns on hardships and sacrifices, he argued. Based on what he had been able to gather from his Muslim clients, he felt sure that Muslims in the countryside were planning to kill and loot the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera at the opportune time. He also cautioned that the times had changed (is bar, waqt badal gayai hein), and history might not repeat itself to save us from harm. Pakistan was being ushered in not through a conquest by a king and his armies, but by the determined will of the majority community that had been persuaded to view Hindus and Sikhs as their enemies. Moreover, how Muslims would treat us here in Pakistan depended on how Hindus and Sikhs in the rest of India would behave toward Muslims. In contrast to Ram Lal Dhawan’s plans to renovate his house in the mohalla, Chaman Lal announced his plan to leave Bhera with his family in a week or so.
Few took Chaman Lal’s warning seriously and his words kindly. They disputed his sources of information as less than reliable. When he tried to defend his information, he was literally drowned in noisy interruptions. They instead talked about the predicament of the business men and land owners. It took their forefathers many a generation to have a successful business in place, and how could one throw it all away. One could sense the high-status elders of the mohalla turning hostile toward Chaman Lal, a man of modest means and standing in the mohalla’s social hierarchy, who was making them look less than fully concerned about the safety of their families. No one would let Chaman Lal speak any further, even when he kept pleading, “ik meri arz vi te sunno (Please listen to my one submission, too).” Apparently supporting Chaman Lal but in reality ridiculing him, two grownup boys repeatedly “asked” the elders to listen to his one “submission” (tusi inhan di ik arz te sunno). The gathering split into twos and threes, and one elder confided that it was easier for Chaman Lal to move to another town because he had portable skills to earn his livelihood; any way he had precious little to lose in Bhera. After all, what he needed to earn his livelihood was nothing more than a set of pens, ink pots, a cushion to sit on, and a chowki-desk for writing petitions outside any court building!
Our father, Hori Lall, earned a modest livelihood from his saraafa business in which he charged fees for attesting to the relative purity of gold and silver by testing them on his touchstones, and also made more money or incurred sizeable losses by buying and selling these precious metals. He had a lot of competition from three other sarafs in the Guru Bazaar: Lala Sita Ram Khanna (his shop also had the town’s sole dharma-kanta), Chuni Lal Chopra, and PiraN-Ditta Mal (see Note 3). In 1947, our father was already 58 years of age, handicapped by rheumatic knees, and lacking enough capital to start his business all over again in a different part of the country to provide for his family. His situation inclined him to believe that Hindus and Sikhs would be spared and allowed to live and work in Pakistan. In his way of thinking, the tensions had to subside and we all needed to wait it out.
Chaman Lal’s and his family (his wife, Shanti Devi; two daughters, Bimla and Krishna; and a young son, Hari Om) packed up and left for Patiala in the next few days. Theirs was the only family from our mohalla to migrate on its own accord well before August 15, 1947. Some mohalla residents made fun of his voluntary exile, and were wishful in predicting how he would one day regret his decision to uproot his family. By the end of August 1947 when the entire Hindu and Sikh population of Bhera felt threatened, trapped and desperate, everybody in our mohalla envied Chaman Lal for his foresightedness. Ram Lal Dhawan’s fate was the saddest; not only he had to stop the renovation work, he also had to get ready for leaving the house he had vowed never to abandon.
A Grim Incident
One day early August, we watched an incident in the mohalla with a lot of alarm. Carried on a cot, a man was brought to a house that belonged to Ram Tikaya Malhotra. Mr. Malhotra had retired from the North West Railways as a Platier (an official who inspects railway tracks while seated on a trolley pushed by two men running on the rails). He was a widower who had returned with his two daughters recently to Bhera to spend his retirement in his house in the mohalla. One of his daughters had appeared as a private candidate for the Punjab University’s Matriculation examination held in May/June. Because of the disturbed conditions in the province, the examination results did not become available in Bhera. Mr. Malhotra persuaded a young man, Tilakaa (Tilak Raj) to take a train to Lahore to obtain the exam results for his daughter. It was a dangerous assignment; we had started hearing of attacks on Hindu and Sikh passengers in trains.
Tilakaa and Prakash Habshi (see note 1) were two unmarried men in their thirties who were known for their pluck and ability to put up a tough fight. They lived in a chabbara over a shop next to the great banyan tree in the Jhugi Bazaar. It was Tilakaa’s reputation as daredevil, fearless guy that brought the risky assignment and made him accept it, i.e., he could not refuse the task without losing his face. When his train from Bhera stopped at Malakwal Junction for passengers to catch other trains, a couple of murderous men with knives and daggers barged in the compartments and dragged the Hindu and Sikh passengers out for killing. Seeing the odds piled up against him, Tilakaa told the attackers that he was a Muslim. They ordered him to take off his pyjama to check if had been circumcised or not. On finding him not circumcised and thus a Hindu, they stabbed him several times all over his body and left him for dead in the train. A few hours later when the same train returned to Bhera, half-dead Tilakaa was rescued and rushed to the town’s hospital. When he was brought to Mr. Ram Titakaya Malhotra’s house, he was wrapped up in bandages. Mr. Malhotra’s family took care of him, and provided the needed medical treatment. I do not recall any Hindu from that day onwards traveled out of Bhera by train. Any way a week or two later, the train service to Bhera from Malakwal was suspended. Buses from Bhera to Bhalwal continued to ply, but only Muslims passengers felt safe to travel by them.
Preparing for the Worst
The news of riots and killings from all over Punjab continued to pour in more macabre tones. The feeling of being trapped and resulting insecurity crystallized fast into a serious concern. All families in the mohalla were now expected to have some means to resist attacks on their lives if they were to materialize. The most common tools of defense were packets of powdered red pepper for women and limbs of dismantled charpais (four-legged, strung cots) for men. We had also piled up bricks, stones, and glass bottles to throw at those who would invade our neighborhood. No one in our mohalla owned a licensed (or unlicensed) firearm. The Gurkha guard of the Punjab National Bank in the street just outside our mohalla carried a gun on duty to protect the bank assets.
One day we witnessed a surprising scene. A police party was taking a Hindu, Mangal Sain, in handcuffs to the police station. Walking just behind Mangal Sain was a policeman carrying a water bucket with four or five sealed canisters immersed in it. According to the policeman, the canisters were homemade bombs and had been seized from Mangal Sain’s shop. Mangal Sain was a tinker by trade. He used to live in our mohalla with his widowed mother, Rajo. When his old mother died a couple of years earlier, he was still unmarried and moved out of our mohalla to stay somewhere else in the town. So far as we knew, he was a loner. We do not know what happened to Mangal Sain after his arrest. Whether and when he was tried, imprisoned, and released? Did he ever make it to India?
After Mangal Sain’s arrest, there was a rumor that the local police would search Hindu and Sikh houses to recover hidden weapons. For many years our family had owned a black baton with a concealed 6-inch blade. When the baton was pulled at its ends, its two inconspicuously fitted parts would split into a short handle with a double-edged blade and a second part as the sheath for the blade. This could be construed as our most “dangerous” weapon. Of course, it did not stand a chance to protect us against daggers, swords, and spears. We were nevertheless apprehensive at the possibility of getting caught with this baton in our house in the event of a door-to-door search by the police. Late one evening when it got dark, we pushed the baton down the roof-level mouth of the gutter-pipe. It slid down the pipe and, as expected, got stuck at the pipe’s foot-long elbow near the first floor. The rumored search never materialized, but we breathed free after the baton had lodged into an unsuspected recess of the gutter pipe!
Ushering in Pakistan
On August 14, a fairly large crowd of local Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Christians gathered outside the Court/Police Station buildings to cheer and salute the official unfurling of the Pakistan’s national flag. The independence from the British was a muted theme in the larger celebration of the birth of Pakistan. The Hindu and Sikh shop-keepers hoisted and prominently displayed Pakistani flags outside their shops.
After a few days of apparent quiet and peace, one very early morning (around the unusual hour of 3:00 a.m.) we were awakened by the continuous beat of drums (dhols) from a southwesterly direction. The untimely and steady beating of the drums was sensed by us as a kind of call for the Muslim faithful to arise and gather for a planned mission. Mobilized by the countryside Mullahs to avenge the killings of Muslims in the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of India, a mob was growing in size near one of the city’s gates and was set to start a bloody reprisal against the kafirs of Bhera.
The drum beat shook up all Hindus and Sikhs, throwing them into a state of foreboding. I could hear our parents’ worried talk as to what was likely to happen. I was seized by fear, my stomach churned, and I had to rush to the latrine. We could see families gathered on the roofs of their houses, worried and paralyzed. Other than bolting shut the mohalla’s main gate, there was no discernable mobilization on the part of the mohalla residents to organize even a modicum of defense against what appeared to be an imminent attack. We felt paralyzed.
Then the drums suddenly stopped their beat. We learned later that Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, the long serving Chairman of the town’s Municipal Committee and a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi since 1934, confronted these brigands that morning. At one point, he took off his turban and put it at the feet of the mob leader(s) and begged them to turn back to their homes and leave the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera alone. He told them that Hindus and Sikhs had lived in Bhera for centuries in peace with Muslims and they owed them at least a safe passage for the sake of Bhera’s past and fair name. His prominent stature in the community and his heart-felt appeal persuaded the mobs and their leaders to disperse. When most people got caught up in the vortex of religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some righteous, God-fearing persons held their heads well above the swirling waters of hatred and revenge. One such person was the native son of Bhera, Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, our savior. He was the one who single-handedly dissuaded the Muslim mobs of tenant farmers and villagers from acting on their plans to kill and plunder the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. We owe our survival as a community to this righteous man.
The immediate danger to our lives seemed to have been averted, but everyone came to realize that Bhera could not remain for long an oasis of safety and peace in the midst of wide spread hatreds in the country at large. It had belatedly become clear to us that there was no future for Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera, for that matter anywhere in Pakistan. We felt trapped. There was no safe way out. The trains were being stopped to pull out Hindus and Sikhs of the compartments for killing on the platforms, perhaps to avoid spilling their blood on the clothes of “fellow” Muslim passengers inside the train. Sikhs were readily identified by their turbans, facial hair, and the Kada (bangle) on their arms. Hindus could pass for Muslims but for their names and religious icons (if tattooed on their bodies) and their failure to recite the Islamic kalma. When there were no outward signs of a suspected person being a Hindu, the absence of circumcision in men betrayed their Hindu identity.
Safe Departures for Some with Connections.
Some Hindu and Sikh families had relatives in the army and/or had resourceful relatives in India. These relatives sent army trucks or civilian trucks with army escorts to bring their families and friends safely to places like Amritsar in India. One day I saw a truck with a military escort parked outside a house on the periphery of SahniaN da mohalla. Four to five families and their belongings had been squeezed into the truck, including the family of the town’s hospital’s compounder (pharmacist). The compounder’s identical-twin sons were a year junior to me in the school, and I considered them very fortunate to have the kind of connections they had to secure their escape. Jagdish, an army officer, showed up with two military trucks. Besides evacuating his parents (his father was the town-crier and a part-time dough-kneader for Jolly’s Bakery) and siblings, he chose several other families to join his evacuation caravan. There were over one hundred men, women and children packed into the two trucks; among this batch of evacuees was the town’s prominent family of Lala Jiwan Mal Sahni.
The Last Straw: Reaching a Point of no Return
Hardly had our sense of relief over the stopped attack on Hindus and Sikhs lasted a week when a riot erupted near the ChopriaN da Mandi. A couple of Hindus were attacked around a shop, and one of them, a young man by the nickname of Bayya (son of Ram Lal Mandariya), was killed by a group of attackers. The panic spread rapidly and led to a fast and total shut down of every Hindu shop in the bazaars. Lal Kuppi’s kiryana shop in Guru Bazaar was set on fire, and the smoke from the smoldering fire could be seen for several hours from the neighboring mohallas (see Note 2). Hindus and Sikhs stopped doing whatever they were doing and rushed from wherever they were to find safety in their neighborhoods, and locked themselves behind the closed doors of their homes and shut the mohalla gate. I heard the loud banging of the house doors and window shutters as they were being shut forcefully. I thought we were having an earthquake. “They have started killing Hindus,” shouted someone. We became worried about our father and my elder brother, Prem Sarup, who were at our father’s saraafa shop. Hafiz, the rang-rez (the dyer) whose shop was opposite to our father’s in the Jhuggi bazaar, rushed to advise my father and brother to leave right away for our house for safety. He told them that riots had started in another part of the town. My father (who was on crutches due to arthritis in his knees at the time) and brother came “running” as fast as they could, and were let in behind the shut doors of our DhoanaN da mohalla.
The women had already been directed to go and hide in the dark recesses of a big, old house. They were asked to carry their pouches of red-chili powder to throw in the eyes of attackers. No body had thought of the possibility of the safe house (with one entrance and no separate exit for escape) for women and children being set on fire. Our house was adjacent to the mohalla’s main gate, and if an attack were to occur, we probably would have been among the first houses to bear the burnt of attack.
Later that day, sitting on a cot with his three sons (9, 14, and 19 years old) in another “safe” house in the mohalla, our father looked shaken to the core. With tears in his eyes, he told us that he had failed us as our father for not having the foresight to escape with our family well before the catastrophe struck. He would never forgive himself if our mother and we, his children, came to any harm.
We breathed easy when the riot did not spread to cause any damage beyond the death toll of one Hindu life and the single case of arson. The killing of one person was either an isolated incident in itself or something that was not allowed to spread. We are not aware if there was any intervention by people of good will likes Sheikh Fazal Haq or by the police to stop further violence. Any way, there was no more loss of life and destruction of property that day. Yet, the sheer terror (daih-shat) caused by this incident, coming at the heels of the averted attack by the Muslim mobs a few days earlier, was overwhelming in its impact on our psyches. It was a kind of last straw. Out of fear, the Hindu and Sikh shops, businesses, and schools remained shuttered from that day onwards to the very last day of our stay in Bhera. The prospects of a safe and secure future for Hindus and Sikhs as a community in Pakistan had collapsed irreparably for us. Even the most sympathetic local Muslims had by now come to view an exile for us to India as inevitable and in our best interests. No one asked us any more to stay back.
Worries over safety and survival had now become the foremost concern for the Hindus and Sikhs in the town. All of us were physically cooped up in our mohallas. We were also cut off from all news. We did not know what was happening to Hindus and Sikhs in other towns. The newspapers from Lahore had stopped arriving. The local generation of electricity had been severely curtailed to the extent that it could power only the street lights at nights. It was most likely due to the shortage and disrupted supply of diesel for running the generators. The smallest generator was run in the evenings and at nights; the result was that electric power was no longer available for domestic use at any hour. Only eight out of the 27 houses in the mohalla had electric connections to begin with. When the electricity was turned off for all homes, the few radios these families had became inoperable. The silence of the radios was disturbing. The lack of news about what was going on in the rest of Pakistan and in India fed our worst fears.
One late evening, Inder Malhotra, an electrician and our next door neighbor, used a ladder to reach the light-bracket of the mohalla’s sole electric pole, and was able to plug in one end of a long wire to its bulb-holder. The wire brought electric power to a radio that was placed on a table below the light. With the help of a wire-antenna, Inder was able to tune in the radio to catch the All India Radio Delhi station. The station was broadcasting live or recorded evening prayer of Gandhi ji. In his broken Hindi rendered a little more unintelligible because of the poor reception and static, Gandhi ji was recounting the dream he had the previous night in which he saw a Muslim bibi (lady) in a Delhi refugee camp without a blanket and shivering in cold. That is what we could make out of his narrative. It did not please us; how could Gandhi ji talk of the suffering of a Muslim bibi in Delhi while being so “utterly silent” on the plight of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan! We did not know then that he had been to Noakhli in East Pakistan around this time to bring peace there for Hindus after his success in stopping the killings of Muslims in Calcutta by going on a fast-unto-death there in mid-August (see Note 4).
Few Hindus now dared step far from their mohallas. Hindu women stopped going to the Jethu di khui area for buying their daily vegetables from the Muslim women vendors who used to bring baskets full of fresh produce from their farms each morning. Now one of these vendors started bringing her basket of vegetables to the mohalla for us to buy. Muslim cowherds continued to take the cows and buffalos of the mohalla families out for grazing. Bassu, a Muslim employee of Lala Anant Ram Kapur continued to prepare the feed for the family’s buffalo and milk the animal for the family. Our milk-woman, BegmaN, who lived just outside the mohalla next to the Sikh Gurudawara, continued to bring us buffalo milk measured in Gadwis. Balla Nai, a Muslim barber, came every second day to the mohalla for the elders to get their shaves. Most blessedly, jamedaars (Mussalies, the Muslim “category” of sweepers and latrine-cleaners) did not stop attending to their cleaning chores for Hindus and Sikhs. Shalli, who used to clean our dry latrine, did not kindly miss a day of her work for us in this critical period.
Our isolation in the mohalla from the external world made us more susceptible than usual to rumors of an impending attack. The mohalla elders approved a plan for nightly vigils by the mohalla’s youths (those who were older than 18 and unmarried). Different groups of 3 to 4 young men took their turns to patrol the street outside of the mohalla at night. Like professional chowkidars (watchmen), they used to walk with laathis (long bamboo staffs) in their hands, periodically shouting Jaagte-Raho (Keep awake). They were advised to rush back into the mohalla if they spotted any danger, instead of fighting it out. Although as many as four families and one commercial bank were housed in the street outside the gated mohalla, the main defense against any invaders had to be mounted primarily from the houses inside the mohalla. Small heaps of bricks and glass bottles were piled on the roof tops. These “missiles” were to be the weapons for our first line of resistance against the attackers. For any hand-to-hand combat, the limbs of cots and kitchen knives were the only available tools for men.
Waiting for the Evacuation Train: Overnight Camping at the Railway station
The “official” word was spread that a special train was expected to arrive any day to evacuate us. We started looking forward to a special train with army escorts to evacuate us safely to India. The first thing we used to do in those days was to go to the roofs of our houses in the morning and look in the direction of railway station for any sign of billowing smoke of a train’s engine (steam locomotive). We were advised to be prepared to leave on short notice. Accordingly we had started packing up our essential belongings and preparing the food we needed to carry with us. There was going to be only limited space in the train for the entire Hindu and Sikh population of Bhera and, naturally, very little room left even for their barely essential belongings. Our mother had to make the hard decisions on what few household things were worth taking with us and what needed to be left behind or thrown away. Besides the modest amount of family jewelry, the most valuable things in terms of sentiments were the three phulkaris she had saved for decades to give as welcome gifts to her prospective daughter-in-laws on the weddings days of her three sons. Also dear to her heart were a few very beautiful khais (bed sheets) she had got woven by the local Muslim weavers from the countless spools of cotton thread she had spun on her charkha (spin–wheel) over the years. She also had to think of a few other items; beddings, cooking utensils, essential clothing for everyone, etc. She also thought of cooking only those food items that won’t spoil readily, such as puris (fried breads), prathas, and khameeri roties. Besides a few vegetable preparations, she thought of carrying a small jar of mixed pickles that do not go stale.
Like other Hindu and Sikh business men, our father had the task of collecting from those who owed him money and of paying back his debts to other business men. The goal was to raise enough cash on hand to sustain the family for as long as one could in unknown settings. Our elder brother took on the task of going through stashes of family papers to gather any school documents, reports of births, photographs, and letters from the family members in one place to take along with us. One of the pictures he found was a group-photograph in sepia of our family before my younger brother and I were born (circa 1928-29). In the picture, our elder brother was a baby in our mother’s lap, our two unmarried sisters and another brother (who had died of typhoid in Rawalpindi where he was attending D.A.V. College for his F.Sc. in 1942) were in the standing row. Very precious was the presence of our paternal grandmother in the picture. Obviously the town’s only photographer (he had his shop/studio next to the Arya Samaj Mandir outside the Ganj wala darwaza) had been brought to the house for this event; he took the photograph of the family gathered on the flat roof of our house. Someone had forgotten to remove the rather ugly four-legged ghada-stand (ghadas are earthen pitchers used to cool water by seeped evaporation in summer months) in the background for this picture.
There were a hundred other things, small and big, that tugged at you but had to be left behind in the house. Our mother still harbored a certain hope that she would be able to return with her family to our home in Bhera. She did not want to throw anything away. She did not mind giving away a few things to the people who needed them. My mother’s Pfaff sewing machine was very dear to her heart. She had sewn most of her children’s clothing herself on this machine, and she did not want to part with it. When BegmaN, our milk-woman, approached our mother to sell this machine to her, she hesitated to sell it. BegmaN persuaded her with the argument that the sewing machine, if sold to her, would at least be in good hands and used properly, instead of gathering dust in the abandoned house for God knows how long. Touched by BegmaN’s words, our mother let her have it for a few rupees. The Pfaff sewing machine was the only article we sold in Bhera. Except for the few things we managed to carry with us, most other household things were left behind.
Finally the day of saying good-bye to Bhera came with the announcement that the long awaited special train would arrive later that day to take the Hindus and Sikhs away to India. What made the departure really tragic was our own looking forward to this day when we would escape from the town where our ancestors had lived as a community for centuries long before the arrival of Muslims in India. Now the time seemed to have arrived when we would leave it for ever. Most sadly, the opportunity to go far away from Bhera had turned into a kind of deliverance!
All families in the mohalla made hurried, last minute preparations for the departure and their march to the railway station. Our mother served us prathas with hot milk, and packed up the food she had prepared a day or two earlier for our journey to somewhere in India. Just before noon, a Baloch army man came to our mohalla to ask the families to hurry up and rush to the station. Lala Daya Ram Kapur, the old patriarch of the mohalla’s richest land-owning and business family, did not like this on-the-spot pressure to make it quick. He could not help asking the soldier what was the great rush when he was leaving all his properties and business behind in Pakistan. This did not please the soldier who told Lala Daya Ram to carry his home and lands “on his head” to India!
Everybody had to walk and carry their belongings on their person to the local Tonga stand outside the Ganj wala darwaza from where they could hire a tonga to ride and carry their belongings to the railway station. I was carrying on my head a large, bronze metal box containing all the food our mother had cooked for our trip and a bag full of sundry items. When I reached the town’s main chowk (intersection) I saw a sight that still haunts me. Sugreev, who had a kiryana shop opposite the Gurudawara entrance in the main bazaar, was desperately trying to restrain his old mother from breaking loose from him. It appeared that the old lady, her hair and clothes disheveled, had dementia and was hard to control. Her son had to take her along with his family to wherever the train was going to deliver them. I watched the struggle between the two for a few minutes, and then had to move on to join my family members who had moved ahead. Sugreev’s predicament was indeed heart breaking; I do not know the outcome of his efforts to bring his mother with him. He could not have left his mother behind on her own as their entire community was on the way to India. In the 1950s, I got to read Saadat Hasan Manto’s story, Toba Tek Singh, in Urdu and found the fate of Sugreev’s mother no less poignant than the plight of Bishen Singh in Manto’s story.
Carrying boxes, beddings, hand bags, and trunks (metal suit cases), men, women, and children walked in a slow, staggered procession in the direction of Bhera’s tonga stand. The town did not have more than two dozen tongas to begin with. The demand for these vehicles was especially great from those who had physical handicaps (e.g., our father was on crutches) or those who were carrying a lot of luggage with them. The tonga drivers made frequent trips to the station to meet the demand, and most people had to wait for their turn.
By the time our family reached the railway station by tonga, the huge waiting room with benches for the third-class passengers was overflowing with people. We had to lay down our goods under a tree on the road and sat on our trunks with rolled beddings for cushions. Many people were still coming in. The late comers settled with their belongings on the half-kaccha road with crushed stones embedded in its dirt surface. Once in a while, a policeman would arrive looking for a Hindu businessman (mostly individual bankers who had made loans against pawned stuff) and take him to the town’s police station in a tonga. It turned out that there was nothing sinister about these summonses. The Muslim clients of these Hindu businessmen and bankers had raised enough cash to retrieve the stuff they had pawned earlier with them. So far as we know, there were no unfair pressures on the Hindu businessmen to return the pawned materials without receiving payment of the loans they had extended. The few Hindus who were hauled to the police-station came back to the railway station to rejoin their folk.
Bhera’s railway station was the terminus for the Malakwal-Bhera railway line. The station had a long platform with two sets of railway tracks, two water-pitcher stands (one for Muslims and the other for Hindus), a shunting yard, a godown, and a circular turn-table for the train engines to reverse their direction for the return journey to Malakwal Junction. We noticed the presence of armed soldiers around the railway station and saw then posted as guards at the periphery. Besides the Baloch soldiers, there was also a batch of Sikh soldiers in this army contingent made available to provide armed escort for the train. The Captain of this unit was a middle-aged, tall, handsome Muslim gentleman. He was taking rounds of the extended site of our gathering.
It was already getting late in the day yet there were no signs of the train at the platform. We saw the Captain in frequent consultation with his colleagues. Then as it was about to get dark, the people thought of having the meals they had brought with them in the remaining light. The single water hand pump outside the station was crowded as each family came to fetch water for the evening meal. Everyone in the crowd was patient for its turn. The waiting line moved fast, because the families did not have big pots to fill. Around this time we were informed that the train’s arrival had been cancelled for the day. Each family made a bed or two on the ground. Except for the fortunate few who had found space in the waiting room, others had to make their beds in the open on the rough road to spend the night. I still remember how hard it was to lie down on a bare (no padding) sheet spread over the stone-studded pavement (see Note 5). Although it felt safe with the military men guarding our “camp,” we slept fitfully. The town’s fairground next to the railway station was turned into a toilet facility for the night.
In the morning, we were asked to go back to our homes in the town (tongas were available for the return trip), and advised to wait for another train in a day or two for our evacuation. We were also given to understand that no tongas would be available for our next trip to the station and that we were to bring only those goods with us that could be carried on our persons from our homes to the railway station. The new limit on how much luggage could be brought was prompted by the fact that the evacuees had managed to bring far more baggage with them than could have been stored in the railway compartments without displacing the passengers. The heaps of luggage could stand in the way of evacuating all those who had to leave.
Although we were not excited at going back to our homes, we felt relieved to find the locks on our houses intact on our return. No house in our mohalla was broken into during our twenty-four hours of absence. We felt embarrassed, because we had feared a kind of free-for-all looting of the goods and belongings that we had left behind. There were also no signs of any looting of the town’s Hindu and Sikh shops during our short absence from the scene.
Final Farewell to Bhera
A day or two later, we were ordered to return to the railway station for catching the special train that had already arrived. This time there were no tongas to take us to the station, so we set out early from our house this time. Whether they were sick or crippled, young children or old folks, everyone had to walk all the way from their homes to the railway station. The walking distance from the farthest point in the town to the station was three to four miles long, and it took quite some time to cover it. Most people had to make several stops on the way to catch their breath as they were not used to walking such a distance in a single stretch with their carry-on belongings. Our father was on the crutches. Our elder brother carried a small metal trunk on his head. I carried a gathhri (a wrapped bundle) of clothes for our daily wear, while my younger brother was assigned the task of carrying our prepared food for the journey. Our mother’s heels were sore and hurting so badly that she could hardly walk, especially with our hold-all bedding on her head. She had to stop several times on the way and we kept company with her. When she reached the station, she almost collapsed on the floor of the waiting room. She thought she was going to die there, and told our father to take good care of us, their three sons. I could not bear to see this scene, and kept praying to God to spare our mother’s life.
Someone suggested that we should contact a Muslim doctor (a Unaani hakeem) who lived in one of the nearby houses in a row. My elder brother went to get him to have a look at our mother. The doctor took my brother back to his house and sent with him a packet of powder medicine to be taken by our mother with a glass of milk. But we did not have milk on us to give it to our mother. Our neighbor in the waiting room was none other than a neighbor from our mohalla, Shrimati ShielaN Vanti Kapur (see Note 6). She had brought milk with her in a container for her baby daughter. Watching our mother’s condition, she offered a glass of milk for our mother to take with the medicine. After she had taken the medicine, our mother felt much better and in an hour or so of rest managed to board the train on her own feet.
My elder brother thinks that there were no more than ten bogies (cars) in this special train. As many as 5,000 to 6,000 Hindus and Sikhs (along with the baggage they had carried on their person to the station) had to be squeezed in those bogies. Bringing with us only those belongings that could be carried on our heads without breaking our necks made it possible for everybody to get evacuated in a single army-escorted train of ten bogies.
Before our special train left Bhera’s railway station one day in the third week of September, 1947, a batch of Muslim National Guards (the Muslim counterpart to the Hindu RSS of those days) showed up in their green uniforms and lined up on the platform in a “Guard-of-Honor” formation to bid us farewell. We watched them from the windows of our railway compartment, not knowing what to make of this entirely unexpected move. We were at that time suffering from the oppressive heat in our railway compartments. We were packed like herrings in the train; several families (over 100 persons) stuffed in each small compartment. The crowding made the inside of the train feel like an oven, even when all the windows were kept wide open. At one point, one Muslim national guard, Baalu (for Iqbal), who used to work as a sweeper for a Kapur family in our mohalla, approached the head of this family and advised that we better close the windows. It did not make any sense; he did not tell us why the windows need be closed. He kept pleading though. Before he went back to be with his fellow-guards, he made sure that we were going to shut all the windows. The gentleman returned after a while to ask why we had kept one window open. We told him that it would not shut. He suggested we better place a trunk (suit case) or even a rolled-bedding against the window to cover it. We sensed something was remiss, something ominous to befall us. It was only when the train suddenly stopped just a few miles from the station and we heard rapid firing by the escort soldiers that the full scope of the peril we were in dawned on us. It became clear why this caring person was so much concerned about the open windows. He knew of the planned attack on the train, but could not divulge it.
The train gave its whistle, its steam engine puffed and the train started to roll away from the railway station, passing Bhera’s first signal-arm (chotta haath) and then the second signal-arm (bada haath). The lowered signal-arms indicated all clear to the train, but there was a dreadful obstruction waiting for us. Hardly had the train moved three or four miles when it stopped due to an obstruction on he tracks near Hazurpur. A large mob of marauders was waiting there to ambush us. The Captain, our second savior after Sheikh Fazal Haq, ordered his men to open fire in order to deter the mob. The firing by his men succeeded in stopping the attack and saving the lives of Bhera’s Hindu/Sikh men, women, and children. Some of the attackers must have been injured and a few perhaps even got killed. The Muslim and Sikh soldiers removed the tree trunk from the railway tracks that the attackers had placed there to halt the train, and the train resumed its journey to Malakwal.
The men waiting to ambush our train were mostly from Bhera’s surrounding villages (including a few from the town itself), who could hardly wait to kill the Hindu and Sikh men, and carry away their women and cash and jewelry as maal-e-ghanimat. Once turned back from the gates of Bhera by the pleas of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, most of them showed up “dutifully” a few weeks later to waylay our special evacuation train. We do not know if they were there for their mission when the first train did not show up a day or two earlier. However on this occasion, before our train was stopped a few miles from Bhera, we could see from the window chinks a few of these folks running by the side of our train. They had axes and spears in their hands, and those who did not have a donkey or a camel were carrying cots on their heads to bring back the booty. These laggards were trying hard to reach the site of planned ambush in time so as not to miss on their share of the spoils. When the train was stopped at the barricade that had been set up for the purpose, the main body of raiders came rushing from behind the embankments of a canal to attack us. The Captain promptly ordered his armed men to open fire, making the mobs retreat and find shelter behind the embankments. But for the effective protection provided by the armed escort commanded by the Captain, Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs would have been a captive target for butchery in the stalled train (see Note 7).
This time the train did not stop until it reached Malakwal Junction. Perhaps for security reasons, our train was parked in the open before reaching one of the railway platforms with sheds. It was easier for the soldiers to guard and defend the train in the open; it avoided sneak attacks coming from built-up structures. The Sikh soldiers were assigned the guard duty; they stood every 20 feet or soon either side of the train. It was a very hot day in September, and the soldiers stood in the sun for hours until the train was cleared to leave. We had no idea our train was bound for Mandi Bahauddin until we reached its railway station and were asked to get off. The town had been selected to serve as a collection-point camp for Hindu and Sikh refugees from Jhelum and Sargodha districts.
At Mandi Bahauddin Railway Station, I saw quite a few Hindu elders (one from our mohalla) take off their turbans and lay them at the Captain’s feet as a gesture of their deep gratitude for saving them, their womenfolk and children. He was uneasy at this gesture and just stepped back from the turbans, telling the Hindus that what he did to save them and their families was a matter of duty for him. He surely was a true Muslim, a gentleman officer, and a karmayogi for whom a duty performed was its own reward. We do not know this officer’s name or the place he was from, but his face will ever remain hallowed in our memories. He was a stranger, but our savior. May God bless his soul.
NOTES
Note 1: Behind his back, Prakash was referred to as Habshi (African) because his father was a Bherochi Hindu and mother an African woman. He was a good looking, tall, dark, muscular, curly haired man known for his toughness and courage.
Note 2. The town did not have any fire-fighting equipment other than one wheeled open-tank with a manual pumping mechanism. The water from the tank had to be pumped by four persons (two o each side) for jetting it with a hose on the fire. This vehicle had rusted over the years as it lay abandoned in the front yard of the town’s municipal committee’s building. A preferred and more common method of fighting fires was to form a bucket brigade in which men formed a chain to move buckets filled from the water drawn from nearby wells to the fire site. Understandably on this day, no Hindu or Sikh would endanger his life to form a chain of citizen fire-fighters to douse the fire in Lal Kuppi’s shop.
Note 3. PiraN Ditta (Given by Pirs) was a Hindu, but this name was common among Hindus and Muslims alike in western Punjab until the early twentieth century. However, there was also a separate Hindu variant of this name, GuraN Ditta. For the Muslim names of Allah Ditta and Allah Ditti, Hindus had corresponding names of Ram Ditta and Ram Ditti. Some Hindu men were named Ram Rakha (Protected by Ram) and women, Ram Rakhi. The Muslim counterparts for these names were Allah Rakha and Allah Rakhi. Allah Jawaya and Ram Jawaya were the other pair of names from the same tradition; however a Hindu name like Ram Tikaya does not appear to have a matching name among Muslims.
Note 4. In their book, Freedom at Midnight, Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre describe Suhrawardy’s rush to meet Gandhi just before his planned departure for Noakhli and requested him to first help save Calcutta’s Muslims. Gandhi made Suhrawardy accept a few conditions before he started on his long fast in Calcutta and delayed his departure for Noakhli (1975, pp.225-226)
Note 5. The road between the tonga-stand and the railway station was prepared by having a steam-roller go over the spread of crushed rocks and pebbles on the road’s dugout bed; no layer of asphalt was ever laid over the road’s stone-studded pavement which by 1947 had turned terribly rough and uneven.
Note 6. Mrs. ShielaN Vanti Kapur was a daughter-in-law of Lala Daya Ram Kapur of our mohalla and the wife of Mr. Harbans Lal Kapur, a leading advocate in the town. One of their sons, Narinder K. Kapur, a Seventh grader in the Arya Highh School in 1947, retired as a Judge of the Punjab/Haryana High Court in Chandigarh.
.
Note 7. The planned attack on Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera in their mohallas and homes, if it had not been averted, would have been less costly in lost lives than this attack, if not foiled, on a trainload of passengers. In the former case, many of the intended targets could have escaped in several mohallas. In some, they could have inflicted some damage to the attackers in gated neighborhoods. In contrast, the attack on the train, if it had not been stopped, would have led to a total massacre of the towns’ Hindus and Sikhs who were sitting ducks with nowhere to escape and had no tools to put up even a token resistance.
____________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________
Voting For Change
Reminiscences of a displaced Hindu
Gian Sarup
Bhera is a town that is cherished even by those who had to flee it en masse and for ever in very dire circumstances. The town continues to evoke a sense of a paradise lost for our generation of men and women who had to leave Bhera in 1947. We have very warm memories of our childhood in our ancestral town, our place of birth, and our watan.
I am a 73-years old Hindu from Bhera. In 1947, I was a 13-years old kid who had moved to the 9th class in the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School, popularly known as the Arya High School. I still remember the poem, “Hubb-ul-watani,” (love for one’s native land) in our Urdu textbook for the Seventh Class. The poem started with the lines, “Dilli mein ek sitar niwazi ki jaan thaa, aur jaan se aziz tha Dilli ko jaananta.” This sitar player accepted an offer of “khilat-o-zar” from the Royal Court of Hyderabad, and one day he set out on his journey to Deccan in a carriage sent to fetch him. When his carriage reached near the famous Jama Masjid, the sitar player looked at the grand sight and asked the gadibaan (the driver) whether Hyderabad would have a mosque like Jama Masjid. The driver replied that there were several beautiful mosques in Hyderabad but there was none like the Jama Masjid of Delhi. By the time a few more of the city’s landmarks, each judged as unmatched by the gadibaan, went by, the carriage had reached the banks of river Jamuna. The sitar player could not help asking once again if they had a river like Jamuna in the environs of Hyderabad. The driver told him that there was a river there, but it was no match to the enchanting Jamuna of Delhi. The sitar player could not take it any more, and told the driver to turn back to Delhi where he would make do with much less but would be at home in his watan!
Patriotism once used to be basically local, centered on hometowns. Your town was the axis of your attachments and pride. We used to be nourished on local hubb-ul-watani. Our emotional ties were centered on all manner of things associated with the town. Bhera’s heroes and characters, its boli and humor, its history and folklore, its festivals and celebrations, its food and confections, its bazaars and mohallas, and its places of worship and even orchards became the facets of our local pride. The very name of the town became a core component of our being.
When the Hindu and Sikh families left Bhera and other places in West Punjab for India at the time of country’s partition, a large number of them found their way to Delhi. After this huge influx of Punjabi refugees, Delhi became largely a Punjabi city. There are scores of localities in Delhi that are predominantly populated by the now grown up children of these refugees from Pakistani Punjab, yet there are only four localities in Greater Delhi that were named after the towns in West Punjab: Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Miyanwali Nagar. Bhera Enclave is located in the northwest sector of Delhi. Bherochis started building their houses there toward the end of 1970’s, as much as three decades after they had arrived in India. Their hubb-ul-watani beckoned them to resurrect for their future generations a sliver of Bhera, nearly four hundred miles southeast of their ancestral hometown on the banks of river Jehlum. In the office of the Enclave’s Community Center, the lead plaque tells the visitors, “The residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA – the city of their ancestors.”
A poignant example of the hubb-ul-watani of a Bherochi Hindu is the content of the last rites (antim-sanskaar) of his death in Delhi. Joginder Nath Kapur was the son of a prominent Kapur family of Bhera. His father owned the largest iron shop in the town’s main bazaar. Kapur Sahib, as we used to address Joginder ji, matriculated from the Arya School and got his B.Sc from a college in Lahore. He taught Science and English in his alma mater in Bhera and also coached its hockey team for a while. In Delhi, he started a large private coaching college (Delhi Public College) that catered to thousands of refugee students like me who worked fulltime in offices and attended its classes in the evenings to appear as private candidates for university exams. For a science teacher, Kapur Sahib was highly proficient in Persian. Whenever the regular tutor for our Intermediate Persian class went on leave, Kapur Sahib would step in and teach us Persian poetry by translating and explicating Rumi, Saadi, and Firdosi! Once in a while, on public demand in the college functions, he would recite in his inimitable style the sorrowful poem, Ek saarson ka kafila, shauq-e-watan dil mein liye, aazad sab afkaar se, athkelian karta hua, wapis tha ghar ko jaa raha” by Vakil Abdul Hamid Sahib. When this noble son of Bhera died in 1987 in Delhi, the last rites at his Kirya-Karam ceremony included a discourse, “The Historical Importance of Bhera: A respectful tribute to the memory of Swargya (Late) Joginder Nath Kapur,” in Hindi. I cannot think of a more touching gesture of a people’s regard for their place of origin. The lecture was delivered by Dr. Birbal Gandhi of Bhera Enclave. It is a four-page long document in chaste Hindi. I can translate here only the last line of this address: “The efforts of the Bhera Welfare Society succeeded in securing [enough] land in the West Delhi area for the construction of houses by displaced Bherochis so that the name of Bhera lasts for long (ta ke Bhera ka naam qaaim rahe).
The generation of our children knows the names of the towns their parents and grandparents had come from, but generally have little, if any, interest in the history or the character of these places. Newer generations generally do not speak Punjabi at home, though they understand it. They can neither read nor write Urdu. Their grandparents are not there any more; their parents, uncles, and aunts do not reminisce about Bhera that often in their presence. Born and raised in India and some foreign countries, not many among them are looking forward to visiting their ancestral hometowns in Pakistan. Professor Kalpana Sahni, the daughter of the late Prof. Bhisham Sahni, has been one heartening and notable exception. On a visit to Lahore, she undertook a trip to Bhera where she tried to locate the home of her ancestors in the Sahniyan da Mohalla. She wrote a very evocative piece, “The persistence of memory: Another country, an ancestral village, and remembrances that spill across time and borders.” It originally appeared in Outlook (October 30, 2000), an Indian weekly newsmagazine, and can now be found on several web sites on Bhera, such as www.merabhera.com or www.geocities.com/hbugvi . Prof. Sahni’s desire to visit her father’s ancestral town and home must have been kindled over many years of listening to her family’s remembrances of the old times, accounts of her forefathers’ move from Bhera to Rawalpindi, mention of sundry characters from Bhera, and conversations in what she calls the give-away Punjabi of Bhera (see Note 1). Her father’s writings inspired her as well. Bhisham Sahni’s last novel, Mayyadas ki Marhi, was set in Bhera. The original novel written in Hindi came out in 1988. Its English version, The Mansion (also translated in English by her father), was published by Harper-Collins in 1995. She apparently has had a very Bhera-nurturing family environment.
Our generation’s emotional bond with Bhera might have faded quite a bit, (dil bhi kam dukhta hai, woh yaad bhi kam aatai hein), but it never withered. In India or outside of it, when we come across someone from Bhera or a nearby town, we greet them heartily as our watanis. In the spring of 1982, I had taken some of my relatives from India to show them around Chicago (about sixty miles east of the town where I have lived since 1972). Not far from the Shedd Aquarium, I spotted a gentleman who looked like an Indian or a Pakistani taking pictures of the scenery. He must have noticed me, too. At one point he approached me and asked if I could take a few pictures of him with Lake Michigan for the background. I readily took the shots he wanted, and we started chatting when I discovered that he was from Mandi Phularwan, a town hardly 12 miles away from Bhera. He was Dr. Aijaz Sarvar Gilani., vacationing by himself in the United States. We immediately felt connected like watanis, exchanged our addresses, and wondered aloud how we two strangers, born and raised in two towns so close to each other, were destined to run into each other in Chicago of all the places! Just before we took leave of each other, he asked if I knew how well Hindus from Phularwan were faring in India. I was moved by his concern to know how well the folk, who were once a part of his hometown community, were doing in exile. I was sad to disappoint him, for I did not know of anyone from Phularwan. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he left in his tourist bus.
Hindus and Sikhs visiting their hometowns in Pakistan are overwhelmed by the warmth (bahut piyar mohabbat naal milde ne) with which the people greet them there. In 1978, my younger brother, then a British citizen, took a short trip to Bhera via Lahore from Delhi. On his return to England, he wrote me a series of letters about his visit to Bhera. He writes in one of his letters:
“I talked to a few Muslims, but those who came to know that I am a Hindu who is here on a visit, were overjoyed and started talking about the good old days when Hindus and Muslims lived together as brothers. I will never forget the Muslim co-passenger who did not let me buy my bus ticket from Bhalwal to Sargodha [he paid for my ticket]. Another passenger offered me tea en route. One of the Muslim servants of Mr. Telreja (a Sindhi Hindu in Lahore) pressed me to go and see a Punjabi movie on his expense.
Our hubb-ul-watani warms our hearts to learn how prosperous once Bhera was. The entry on Bhera in the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) reads: “ . . .the town was the largest and most prosperous commercial town in this part of the Province, having a direct export trade to Kabul, the Derajat, and Sukkur, and importing European goods from Karachi and Amritsar (1908, Volume VIII: Behrampur to Bombay, p.100). Around 1975, my younger brother made a special trip from Harrow to the India House Library in London to get a photo-copy of the page from which the above quote is reproduced.
The same sentiment of love for Bhera hurt us when we came across dispatches on the town’s decline. In the 1950’and 1960’s sixties, visitors reported a depressing picture of Bhera as a declining town. I have not read Balraj Sahani’s book in which he talks about his visit to Bhera. The impression I got from a conversation with his brother Bhisham Sahni, a senior colleague of mine at Delhi College, was that Balraj ji had found large parts of the town in a state of utter desolation and ruins. It depressed us to learn that the town had fallen into such a sorry state.
Sometimes I buy travel guides on Pakistan, especially if they have something to say about Bhera. One of these books, published in 1990, reports:
Old towns were washed away by the rivers and replaced by new towns on safer ground. Some have just died; Bhera, near Sargodha, for example, used to be a flourishing place. It was an ancient town where Sher Shah [Suri] built a beautiful mosque. There were shrines which attracted pilgrims. Bhera was a center of Moghul local government. It was plundered by the Durrani, repopulated by the Sikhs and prospered under the British when it became the most important city for miles around. Then as the canal colonies flourished, other towns grew and Bhera waned. Local government was moved [in fact the local administration was downgraded from a tehsil to a sub-tehsil status, though the court was not removed]. Having sustained a lot of damage in 1947, it is now a ghost town. (Insight Guides: Pakistan. APA Publications: HK,1990, p.180).
My heart kind of sank when I read the last characterization, and wondered why the rundown condition of Bhera had not gotten any better during the thirty years between Balraj Sahni’s impression and the summation in this travel book (it had many superb pictures but none of Bhera; a sinking ship?).
For the last few years, we have been getting some reassuring news. We hear of a resurgent spirit of Bhera, though some parts of the old town remain in a moribund condition. It may no longer be news for the residents of Bhera, but we learned only recently that the town had been getting Sui gas for quite some time and has a public water supply system. The town now has an Intermediate College, something it did not have in the pre-Partition days. The access afforded to Bhera by the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has been another happy tiding. The town now has a population of 33,600 (2001), compared to the rough estimate of 28,000 we used to hear before the partition. Several new colonies have sprung up around the old town. However, information on the condition of the satellite villages of Bhera is hard to come by.
One wonders what happened to the two hamlets of Khan Mohammad Da and Haathiwind on the bus route from Bhera to Bhalwal. Folks in one of these villages used to “harvest” shora left as residue by evaporating shallow pools of water in embanked plots of arid land. No commercially available map of Pakistan shows these old villages and others like Bathuni. I did succeed in finding the neighboring village of Hazurpur in my Lonely Planet Travel Atlas for India and Bangladesh (1995, p.12 and 16). This atlas is my proud possession, because it maps also show Haranpur, my father’s place of birth, and also Jalalpur (Sharif), my mother’s place of birth (my Nannaka shehar). The three towns of Bhera, Haranpur, and Jalalpur -- all three situated on the banks of Jehlum -- have been variously linked to Alexander’s battle with King Porus in 326 B.C. In terms of geographic origins then, our ancestry is indeed a tapestry of ancient strands. Our family could not bring much personal stuff with us when we left Bhera, but the most treasured things my mother made a point of carrying on her were two Phulkaaris and one Baagh. She gave one precious heirloom piece to each one of her three daughters-in-law when they came as brides to our house in Delhi. One of these pieces was stitched by our paternal grandmother in Haranpur, the other by our maternal grandmother in Jalalpur, and the last of the three by our mother in Bhera!
Bhera continues to inspire love and pride for the town among the new and old generations of its current residents. Their hubb-ul-watani is reflected in their dedicated efforts to put Bhera on the internet map. They have invested huge personal resources to set up several websites on Bhera. Besides the Wikipedia’s site on Bhera, there are web sites that have been set up by individual Pakistani Bherochis. The website by H. A. Bugavi is perhaps the oldest site, distinguished for its genuine concern for the historical assets of Bhera. The other by Ali Javeed appears more systematic and open to contributions from Bherochis who had to leave the town in 1947. These gentlemen are inspired by their sheer love for their town. Their websites cover the town’s history, architecture, mosques, abandoned temples and the Sikh gurdawara, and the illustrious lives of its distinguished sons. Visiting these sites comes close to a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who have been away for so long and have felt banished and cut off.
Now that Pakistani visas have become relatively easy to obtain, it has encouraged the Hindu and Sikh expatriates to visit the town. If one can, someone of our generation (born and raised in Bhera) should spend a few days to study the changes the town has gone through. My brother got less than four hours to spend in Bhera. He and his host, the late Mrs. Kamala Sahni of Salam, took the circular drive around the town, went to the Railway Station from where they followed the road to Ganjwala Darwaaza and on to the Chowk, and parked the car in Gopal Bahri’s katra. From there, they took a walking trip to the DhoanaN wala Mohalla where we were born and raised, visited the Jhugi wala Mandir (adjacent to the ChhaintaaN wali Masjid), looked at what was once our father’s shop (still vacant and locked up), found in total ruin the facing shop of Hafiz Lilari (Rangraze) who dyed the chunnis of Hindu girls in the local spectrum of colors, took a stroll in the Guru Bazaar, walked to the Jeetu da Maidaan to meet Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah at his clinic, and to a few other places. Besides the overall impressions of the town, my brother also shared with me some precious bits of information that were closer to our hearts.
Massi Durgan’s house, adjacent to ours, was a tibba, the upper story of our house was not there, but other houses in the mohalla looked reasonably intact and were occupied by refugees from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana,. As I and my escort (Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah’s son) entered the mohalla, I saw a lady washing clothes inside the deori, at the very place in our house where our Mataji (Mother) used to wash our clothes. I am sure the hand-pump is still there. It was day time and no man [being present] at home, it was not appropriate to speak to the orthodox lady who was inside our house…I was inside the mohalla for about ten minutes…”
Now nearly thirty years later (since his 1978 visit), we find ourselves old and frail to travel and visit the town we left behind. People of our generation (my elder brother is 78, and younger brother 68) make do with our very precious remembrances of Bhera and visits to its web sites. When we manage to get together, we hardly tire of talking about Bhera, much to the apparent boredom of our wives whose parents were from three different towns in Pakistan: Pind Daaddan Khan, Sialkot, and Jampur near D.G.Khan. One day we brothers sat down and prepared a schematic map of our DhoanaN wala Mohalla (named after the Hindu caste of Dhawans) as it existed in the pre-Partition days. We numbered all the houses inside the mohalla and in the alley leading to it from 1 to 30, and prepared a companion list of the names of the families that lived in these houses until 1947. Unlike most Hindu neighborhoods like SahniyaN da Mohalla, our mohalla and a few others were gated neighborhoods with their circumscribed boundaries. The Hindu mohallas were generally named after single Hindu castes, but their resident families often belonged to other castes as well. In our Mohalla, for instance, we had only one Dhawan family, but also one Bahri, one Khanna, two Kapur, four Malhotra families, and a few other castes.
People of our parents’ generation are gone from this world, and ours is the last generation that has personal memories of the good old Bhera of our childhood and also of our trail of woe and survival to the Wagah border. We know first hand the price our parents’ generation and ours paid in the grand drama of the birth of two nations as it was enacted in Bhera. Pakistanis who are our contemporaries from Bhera witnessed these events from the other side. They are the audiences who may have some resonance for our roodad (narrative). It will be nice to hear from them on how the things and events I talk about here looked to them from the other side.
When most people got caught up in the vortex of the religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some righteous, God-fearing persons held their heads well above the swirling waters of hatred and revenge. The Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera, who were able to escape to India after 15th August 1947, owe their lives to two such men, both of them true Muslims and great men. One of them was the native son of Bhera, Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha. He was the one who single-handedly dissuaded the Muslim mobs of tenant farmers and villagers from acting on their plans to kill and plunder the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. The Muslim mobs had gathered one morning near one of the city’s gates to launch their attack. Their drums had kept their sinister beat all through the previous night to rally the believers. Mobilized by the countryside Mullahs to avenge the killings of Muslims in the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of India, the mob was all worked up to start a bloody reprisal against the kafirs. We learned that Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha confronted the brigands early that morning. At one point, he took off his turban and put it at the feet of the mob leader(s) and begged them to turn back to their homes and leave the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera alone. He told them that Hindus and Sikhs had lived in Bhera for centuries in peace with Muslims and they owed them at least a safe passage for the sake of Bhera’s past and fair name. His prominent stature in the community (see Note 2) and his heart-felt appeal persuaded the mobs to disperse. His hubb-ul-watani for the hometown and his faith combined to save the day for the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Our present and coming generations should be indebted to this very righteous person.
Someone looking through the archival papers of the late Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha would find many a letter written from India by Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs who had individually conveyed their gratitude to him for saving the lives of their families and community in 1947. Our father, Hori Lall, also wrote to Sheikh Sahib in the mid-1950s, thanking him deeply for his intervention that saved our lives. In 1978, my brother made it a point to visit Sheikh Sahib’s house in Bhera to pay his respects to the memory of our singular savior. He wrote about it, “On our circular tour of the town, we stopped at the residence of the late Sheikh F. H. Piracha as I wanted to pay my respects. Unfortunately, his son [very likely, Ehsan-ul-Haq, who later became a junior minister in Bhuto’s government], was not at home.” The web site by the Prince Brothers (http://bhera.sitesled.com/piracha.html) has an excellent article in Urdu on this pre-eminent khaandaan of the Pirachas. It recounts the illustrious careers and contributions of its members to their nation and the town of Bhera. I wish its authors would consider it fit to include this act of profound humanity by Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha in their biographical essay on him and also arrange to include a picture of him.
The other savior of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs was a tall, handsome Muslim Captain attached to the army contingent that was sent to Bhera for safely escorting our evacuation-train to the Mandi Bahauddin refugee camp. A few miles from Bhera near Hazurpur, the train was stopped by a large mob of marauders drawn from the neighboring villages. They were waiting there to ambush the train. The Captain ordered his men to open fire in order to deter the mob. He succeeded in scaring them to disperse, thus stopping the attack and saving the lives of Bhera’s Hindu/Sikh men, women, and children. Some of the attackers must have been injured and a few perhaps even got killed. His Muslim and Sikh soldiers removed the tree trunk from the railway tracks that the attackers had placed there to halt the train, and the train resumed its journey to Malakwal and onto Mandi Bahauddin. At Mandi Bahauddin Railway Station, I saw quite a few Hindu elders (one from our mohalla) take off their turbans and lay them at the Captain’s feet as a gesture of their deep gratitude for saving them, their womenfolk and children. He was uneasy at this gesture and just stepped back from the turbans, telling the Hindus that what he did to save them and their families was a matter of duty for him. He surely was a true Muslim, a gentleman officer, and a karmayogi for whom a duty performed was its own reward. We do not know this officer’s name or the place he was from, but his face will ever remain hallowed in our memories. He was a stranger, but a great benefactor. May God bless his soul.
How do you judge a community? One way is to look at the great men and women it has produced from its ranks (the elitist measure). The other way to evaluate a community is to look at its average member (the common-man measure). Judged by the first (the best person) standard, Bhera wins hands down. The exemplary stand of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq in saving his town’s Hindus and Sikhs from a sure massacre brings credit not only to his person and his family, but also to the entire community of Bhera’s Muslims. S. Radhakrishanan, a philosopher and a former President of India, portrayed the “best man” view of a society in these words: “When the wick is ablaze at its tip, the whole lamp is said to be burning bright.” It surely applies to Bhera, and its people can rightfully take pride in the radiant nobility of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq.
Judged by the other, “common man” standard, Bhera’s Muslims acquitted themselves quite well. We, the departed Hindus and Sikhs, have to recognize the essential decency of the Muslim folks of Bhera. If men like Sheikh Fazal-ul-Haq and the Muslim Captain saved our lives, then the Muslim commoners of Bhera can be said to have spared our lives. The local Muslim community did not seek to harm, much less to annihilate, the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. We are grateful to all those who by their decency and restraint made it possible for us to leave the town in relative peace and safety. Except for one case of fatal stabbing of a Hindu boy, Bayya (son of Ram Lal Mandharia) and one case of arson (Lall Kuppi’s kiryaana shop in Guru Bazaar was set on fire), we were let go unharmed from Bhera. Few towns in West as well as East Punjab could match Bhera’s record of good sense in those trying times of collective insanity when the sanctity of human life and the honor of women did not seem to matter any more.
Before our special train left Bhera’s railway station one day in September, 1947, a batch of Muslim National Guards (the Muslim counterpart of those days to the Hindu RSS) showed up in their green uniforms and lined up on the platform in a “Guard-of-Honor” formation to bid us farewell. We watched them from the windows of our railway compartment, not knowing what to make of this entirely unexpected move. We were at that time more concerned about the oppressive heat in our railway compartments. We were packed like herrings in the train; several families stuffed in each small compartment, and as many as 7,000 Hindus and Sikhs (along with the baggage they could carry on their person from their homes to the railway station) squeezed in eight or nine railway bogies. The crowding made the inside of the train feel like an oven, even when all the windows were kept wide open. At one point, one Muslim national guard, Baalu (for Iqbal), who used to work as a sweeper for a Kapur family in our mohalla, approached the head of this family and advised that we better close the windows. It did not make any sense; he did not tell us why the windows need be closed. He kept pleading though. Before he went back to be with his fellow-guards, he made sure that we were going to shut all the windows. The gentleman returned after a while to ask why we had kept one window open. We told him that it would not shut. He suggested we better place a trunk (suit case) or even a rolled-bedding against the window to cover it. We sensed something was remiss, something ominous to befall us. It was only when the train suddenly stopped just a few miles from the station and we heard rapid firing by the escort soldiers that the full scope of the peril we were in dawned on us. It became clear why this caring person was so much concerned about the open windows. He knew of the planned attack, but could not divulge it.
Naturally, it is hard for us to forgive the out-of-towners from the surrounding villages (including a few from the town itself), who could hardly wait to kill the Hindu and Sikh men, and carry away their women and cash and jewelry as maal-e-ghanimat. Once turned back from the gates of Bhera by the pleas of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, most of them showed up again a few weeks later to waylay the special train for the evacuation of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Before our train was stopped a few miles away from Bhera, we could see from the window chinks a few of these folks running by the side of our train. They had axes and spears in their hands, and those who did not have a donkey or a camel were carrying cots on their heads to bring back the booty. These laggards were trying hard to reach the site of planned ambush in time so as not to miss on their share of the spoils. When the train stopped at the barricade that had been set up for the purpose, the main body of raiders came rushing from behind the embankments of a canal to attack the train. The Captain promptly ordered his armed men to open fire, making the mobs retreat and find shelter behind the embankments. But for the effective protection provided by the armed escort, Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs would have been a captive target for butchery in the stalled train
As we moved farther from the blessed land of Bhera, our troubles started multiplying and getting real bad. The long stay in the Mandi Bahauddin camp was marked by unnerving uncertainties, hardships, and a cholera epidemic in the camp. On the reassuring side was the presence of a battalion of Baloch regiment posted at the camp to guard it. After several weeks of stay in the camp, the Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs boarded another refugee train that would take them from Mandi Bahauddin to the Indian border. The 44-hour long journey from Mandi Bahauddin to the Wagha border via Lala Musa (this journey in normal times took no more than three to four hours) was a frightening passage. But we were fortunate to make it safely to India. We got down from the train at Attari railway station and kissed the soil of India.
To be uprooted from your native lands, family homes and means of livelihood and to have your “dukh-sukh di saanjhi” community scattered across a thousand towns were an enormous dislocation for our parents’ generation. What they ended up facing was contrary to the history as they had known it. They had believed that kingdoms and governments could change, but the people (raiyyat) stayed put in their towns and were left largely untouched. The events as they transpired left them heart-broken. They had to leave for an unknown place in India and start a new life in a new setting. Any hope of returning one day with their ousted communities to their hometowns had disappeared fast. They realized that they and their children have been banished for ever and the keys to their houses they carried on them were no more than mementos. It took them decades of struggle and untold hardships to resettle. Most made it eventually in the new country, while countless others languished on the way to an ever elusive recovery. Yes, the anguish of our irreversible displacement has been hard to overcome.
Just as erstwhile rivals, who once pursued the same prize in town, become mellow over time, the sole inheritors of Bhera have started to empathize with the town’s disinherited people of 1947. The dispossessed have for long been resigned to whatever hand the fate had played for them and the inheritors of Bhera did not show any visible triumph in seeing us leave the land of our forefathers. The wounds of our loss have crusted, if not disappeared. The two sides now get together, talk, and write without serious recriminations and hurts. They see each other from the distance of time and space, and no party appears diabolic to the other any longer. There is a noticeable nostalgia for the times when we lived like neighbors without any running battles. A couplet form Momin says it all:
Kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi chah thi, kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi rah thi,
Kabhi ham bhi tum bhi thai aashnaa, tumhen yaad ho ke na yaad ho.
Once we and you had good will between us,
Once we and you had a way between us;
Once we and you were also friends,
Now you may remember it or you may not.
The overall amity among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in Bhera of the pre-Partition days was based on the concept of shared “ann-jal-hawah,” common life experiences, and a joyful pride in everything Bherochi from its phenian to mehndi (henna). Our pride in Bhera served to bind us, making us all feel that we were better than the people of neighboring towns! We were immensely proud of the town’s long history and the great persons the town had produced in different fields. When it comes to the mystic bond of shared ann-jal-hawah, the town’s Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs savored roties made from the locally grown wheat, drank the “salubrious” water from its Jehlum-fed aquifers, breathed the refreshing (“khush-gawaar”) air of Bhera, and basked in its “balmy” sunshine. With apologies to Faiz, we may slightly reword one of his couplets (see Note 3) from “Raqeeb se.”
[Hum] pe bhi [bikhra] hai uss [ufaq] se [khursheed] ka noor,
Jis mein beeti hui [subhoan] ki [jhalak] baaqi hai
The Sun spread its rays from the same horizon on us as well
The glimpses of those luminous mornings are still with us.
In the realm of common experiences, we all learned to take our first steps and to walk on Bhera’s terra firma, picked up its boli for our mother tongue, and partook of its romantic legends of Heer-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahiwal. When we went to school, we started learning Urdu from Class I, English from Class V, Hindi in VI, and Persian or Sanskrit in Class VII onwards. Exposure to a steady set of common influences had created a sort of common cultural ethos for the town.
Not too distant in the future, our generation who along with our parents had witnessed the finale of the centuries-old sojourn of Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera will not be around to tell about it. The ranks of our generation are dwindling steadily. So let us remember Bhera and celebrate our sad and happy memories of this town while we can! No one could have said it any better than Ghalib:
Naghama-hai gham ko bhi eh dil ghanimat janeai
Be-sadaa ho jaaey ga yeh saaz-e-hasti ek din!
O’ heart, consider even your sad songs to be a blessing,
One of these days, this instrument of our being will go silent.
NOTES
Note 1: Besides expressions like “aasaan-jasaan,” some words were pronounced so distinctively in Bhera that a Bherochi was instantly identified. Here is an anecdote we used to hear. Someone was once asked the name of the town he was from, and he repeated the question to get it right, “Maira shehar?” The person who had asked the question immediately responded, “Stop, stop. You do not have to tell me what town you are from. I know it, you must be from Bhera!” Around 1950, my younger brother and I were going from Karol Bagh to Pahar Ganj by a tonga in Delhi, and were chatting. All of a sudden, an older passenger on the front seat, asked us, “O mundeo, tussi pichhon Bherai de ho?” (Boys, are you originally from Bhera?) Astonished, we asked him how he figured out where we were from. He told us that it was our maira, maira (instead of mera) that gave away our origin! As the lady in the Sahniyan da Mohalla house in Bhera told Kalpana Sahni, “We have only to open our mouths to give ourselves away!”
Note 2: Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha served as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi from 1934 to 1946. He was also the Chairman of Bhera’s Municipal Committee from 1924 to 1958.
Note 3: The original couplet as Faiz wrote it is as follows:
Tujh pe bhi barsaa hai uss baam se mehtab ka noor
Jis mein beeti hui raaton ki kassak baqi hai.
From the same balcony, Diana shed her luminous rays on you as well.
The sweet pain of those nights past, still lingers in our hearts!
Posted by
saharanpuri
Feb 25, 2008 10:46 am
Re: # 399Remembering the Beloved Town of Bhera:Reminiscences of a displaced Hindu
Gian Sarup
Bhera is a town that is cherished even by those who had to flee it en masse and for ever in very dire circumstances. The town continues to evoke a sense of a paradise lost for our generation of men and women who had to leave Bhera in 1947. We have very warm memories of our childhood in our ancestral town, our place of birth, and our watan.
I am a 73-years old Hindu from Bhera. In 1947, I was a 13-years old kid who had moved to the 9th class in the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School, popularly known as the Arya High School. I still remember the poem, “Hubb-ul-watani,” (love for one’s native land) in our Urdu textbook for the Seventh Class. The poem started with the lines, “Dilli mein ek sitar niwazi ki jaan thaa, aur jaan se aziz tha Dilli ko jaananta.” This sitar player accepted an offer of “khilat-o-zar” from the Royal Court of Hyderabad, and one day he set out on his journey to Deccan in a carriage sent to fetch him. When his carriage reached near the famous Jama Masjid, the sitar player looked at the grand sight and asked the gadibaan (the driver) whether Hyderabad would have a mosque like Jama Masjid. The driver replied that there were several beautiful mosques in Hyderabad but there was none like the Jama Masjid of Delhi. By the time a few more of the city’s landmarks, each judged as unmatched by the gadibaan, went by, the carriage had reached the banks of river Jamuna. The sitar player could not help asking once again if they had a river like Jamuna in the environs of Hyderabad. The driver told him that there was a river there, but it was no match to the enchanting Jamuna of Delhi. The sitar player could not take it any more, and told the driver to turn back to Delhi where he would make do with much less but would be at home in his watan!
Patriotism once used to be basically local, centered on hometowns. Your town was the axis of your attachments and pride. We used to be nourished on local hubb-ul-watani. Our emotional ties were centered on all manner of things associated with the town. Bhera’s heroes and characters, its boli and humor, its history and folklore, its festivals and celebrations, its food and confections, its bazaars and mohallas, and its places of worship and even orchards became the facets of our local pride. The very name of the town became a core component of our being.
When the Hindu and Sikh families left Bhera and other places in West Punjab for India at the time of country’s partition, a large number of them found their way to Delhi. After this huge influx of Punjabi refugees, Delhi became largely a Punjabi city. There are scores of localities in Delhi that are predominantly populated by the now grown up children of these refugees from Pakistani Punjab, yet there are only four localities in Greater Delhi that were named after the towns in West Punjab: Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Miyanwali Nagar. Bhera Enclave is located in the northwest sector of Delhi. Bherochis started building their houses there toward the end of 1970’s, as much as three decades after they had arrived in India. Their hubb-ul-watani beckoned them to resurrect for their future generations a sliver of Bhera, nearly four hundred miles southeast of their ancestral hometown on the banks of river Jehlum. In the office of the Enclave’s Community Center, the lead plaque tells the visitors, “The residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA – the city of their ancestors.”
A poignant example of the hubb-ul-watani of a Bherochi Hindu is the content of the last rites (antim-sanskaar) of his death in Delhi. Joginder Nath Kapur was the son of a prominent Kapur family of Bhera. His father owned the largest iron shop in the town’s main bazaar. Kapur Sahib, as we used to address Joginder ji, matriculated from the Arya School and got his B.Sc from a college in Lahore. He taught Science and English in his alma mater in Bhera and also coached its hockey team for a while. In Delhi, he started a large private coaching college (Delhi Public College) that catered to thousands of refugee students like me who worked fulltime in offices and attended its classes in the evenings to appear as private candidates for university exams. For a science teacher, Kapur Sahib was highly proficient in Persian. Whenever the regular tutor for our Intermediate Persian class went on leave, Kapur Sahib would step in and teach us Persian poetry by translating and explicating Rumi, Saadi, and Firdosi! Once in a while, on public demand in the college functions, he would recite in his inimitable style the sorrowful poem, Ek saarson ka kafila, shauq-e-watan dil mein liye, aazad sab afkaar se, athkelian karta hua, wapis tha ghar ko jaa raha” by Vakil Abdul Hamid Sahib. When this noble son of Bhera died in 1987 in Delhi, the last rites at his Kirya-Karam ceremony included a discourse, “The Historical Importance of Bhera: A respectful tribute to the memory of Swargya (Late) Joginder Nath Kapur,” in Hindi. I cannot think of a more touching gesture of a people’s regard for their place of origin. The lecture was delivered by Dr. Birbal Gandhi of Bhera Enclave. It is a four-page long document in chaste Hindi. I can translate here only the last line of this address: “The efforts of the Bhera Welfare Society succeeded in securing [enough] land in the West Delhi area for the construction of houses by displaced Bherochis so that the name of Bhera lasts for long (ta ke Bhera ka naam qaaim rahe).
The generation of our children knows the names of the towns their parents and grandparents had come from, but generally have little, if any, interest in the history or the character of these places. Newer generations generally do not speak Punjabi at home, though they understand it. They can neither read nor write Urdu. Their grandparents are not there any more; their parents, uncles, and aunts do not reminisce about Bhera that often in their presence. Born and raised in India and some foreign countries, not many among them are looking forward to visiting their ancestral hometowns in Pakistan. Professor Kalpana Sahni, the daughter of the late Prof. Bhisham Sahni, has been one heartening and notable exception. On a visit to Lahore, she undertook a trip to Bhera where she tried to locate the home of her ancestors in the Sahniyan da Mohalla. She wrote a very evocative piece, “The persistence of memory: Another country, an ancestral village, and remembrances that spill across time and borders.” It originally appeared in Outlook (October 30, 2000), an Indian weekly newsmagazine, and can now be found on several web sites on Bhera, such as www.merabhera.com or www.geocities.com/hbugvi . Prof. Sahni’s desire to visit her father’s ancestral town and home must have been kindled over many years of listening to her family’s remembrances of the old times, accounts of her forefathers’ move from Bhera to Rawalpindi, mention of sundry characters from Bhera, and conversations in what she calls the give-away Punjabi of Bhera (see Note 1). Her father’s writings inspired her as well. Bhisham Sahni’s last novel, Mayyadas ki Marhi, was set in Bhera. The original novel written in Hindi came out in 1988. Its English version, The Mansion (also translated in English by her father), was published by Harper-Collins in 1995. She apparently has had a very Bhera-nurturing family environment.
Our generation’s emotional bond with Bhera might have faded quite a bit, (dil bhi kam dukhta hai, woh yaad bhi kam aatai hein), but it never withered. In India or outside of it, when we come across someone from Bhera or a nearby town, we greet them heartily as our watanis. In the spring of 1982, I had taken some of my relatives from India to show them around Chicago (about sixty miles east of the town where I have lived since 1972). Not far from the Shedd Aquarium, I spotted a gentleman who looked like an Indian or a Pakistani taking pictures of the scenery. He must have noticed me, too. At one point he approached me and asked if I could take a few pictures of him with Lake Michigan for the background. I readily took the shots he wanted, and we started chatting when I discovered that he was from Mandi Phularwan, a town hardly 12 miles away from Bhera. He was Dr. Aijaz Sarvar Gilani., vacationing by himself in the United States. We immediately felt connected like watanis, exchanged our addresses, and wondered aloud how we two strangers, born and raised in two towns so close to each other, were destined to run into each other in Chicago of all the places! Just before we took leave of each other, he asked if I knew how well Hindus from Phularwan were faring in India. I was moved by his concern to know how well the folk, who were once a part of his hometown community, were doing in exile. I was sad to disappoint him, for I did not know of anyone from Phularwan. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he left in his tourist bus.
Hindus and Sikhs visiting their hometowns in Pakistan are overwhelmed by the warmth (bahut piyar mohabbat naal milde ne) with which the people greet them there. In 1978, my younger brother, then a British citizen, took a short trip to Bhera via Lahore from Delhi. On his return to England, he wrote me a series of letters about his visit to Bhera. He writes in one of his letters:
“I talked to a few Muslims, but those who came to know that I am a Hindu who is here on a visit, were overjoyed and started talking about the good old days when Hindus and Muslims lived together as brothers. I will never forget the Muslim co-passenger who did not let me buy my bus ticket from Bhalwal to Sargodha [he paid for my ticket]. Another passenger offered me tea en route. One of the Muslim servants of Mr. Telreja (a Sindhi Hindu in Lahore) pressed me to go and see a Punjabi movie on his expense.
Our hubb-ul-watani warms our hearts to learn how prosperous once Bhera was. The entry on Bhera in the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) reads: “ . . .the town was the largest and most prosperous commercial town in this part of the Province, having a direct export trade to Kabul, the Derajat, and Sukkur, and importing European goods from Karachi and Amritsar (1908, Volume VIII: Behrampur to Bombay, p.100). Around 1975, my younger brother made a special trip from Harrow to the India House Library in London to get a photo-copy of the page from which the above quote is reproduced.
The same sentiment of love for Bhera hurt us when we came across dispatches on the town’s decline. In the 1950’and 1960’s sixties, visitors reported a depressing picture of Bhera as a declining town. I have not read Balraj Sahani’s book in which he talks about his visit to Bhera. The impression I got from a conversation with his brother Bhisham Sahni, a senior colleague of mine at Delhi College, was that Balraj ji had found large parts of the town in a state of utter desolation and ruins. It depressed us to learn that the town had fallen into such a sorry state.
Sometimes I buy travel guides on Pakistan, especially if they have something to say about Bhera. One of these books, published in 1990, reports:
Old towns were washed away by the rivers and replaced by new towns on safer ground. Some have just died; Bhera, near Sargodha, for example, used to be a flourishing place. It was an ancient town where Sher Shah [Suri] built a beautiful mosque. There were shrines which attracted pilgrims. Bhera was a center of Moghul local government. It was plundered by the Durrani, repopulated by the Sikhs and prospered under the British when it became the most important city for miles around. Then as the canal colonies flourished, other towns grew and Bhera waned. Local government was moved [in fact the local administration was downgraded from a tehsil to a sub-tehsil status, though the court was not removed]. Having sustained a lot of damage in 1947, it is now a ghost town. (Insight Guides: Pakistan. APA Publications: HK,1990, p.180).
My heart kind of sank when I read the last characterization, and wondered why the rundown condition of Bhera had not gotten any better during the thirty years between Balraj Sahni’s impression and the summation in this travel book (it had many superb pictures but none of Bhera; a sinking ship?).
For the last few years, we have been getting some reassuring news. We hear of a resurgent spirit of Bhera, though some parts of the old town remain in a moribund condition. It may no longer be news for the residents of Bhera, but we learned only recently that the town had been getting Sui gas for quite some time and has a public water supply system. The town now has an Intermediate College, something it did not have in the pre-Partition days. The access afforded to Bhera by the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has been another happy tiding. The town now has a population of 33,600 (2001), compared to the rough estimate of 28,000 we used to hear before the partition. Several new colonies have sprung up around the old town. However, information on the condition of the satellite villages of Bhera is hard to come by.
One wonders what happened to the two hamlets of Khan Mohammad Da and Haathiwind on the bus route from Bhera to Bhalwal. Folks in one of these villages used to “harvest” shora left as residue by evaporating shallow pools of water in embanked plots of arid land. No commercially available map of Pakistan shows these old villages and others like Bathuni. I did succeed in finding the neighboring village of Hazurpur in my Lonely Planet Travel Atlas for India and Bangladesh (1995, p.12 and 16). This atlas is my proud possession, because it maps also show Haranpur, my father’s place of birth, and also Jalalpur (Sharif), my mother’s place of birth (my Nannaka shehar). The three towns of Bhera, Haranpur, and Jalalpur -- all three situated on the banks of Jehlum -- have been variously linked to Alexander’s battle with King Porus in 326 B.C. In terms of geographic origins then, our ancestry is indeed a tapestry of ancient strands. Our family could not bring much personal stuff with us when we left Bhera, but the most treasured things my mother made a point of carrying on her were two Phulkaaris and one Baagh. She gave one precious heirloom piece to each one of her three daughters-in-law when they came as brides to our house in Delhi. One of these pieces was stitched by our paternal grandmother in Haranpur, the other by our maternal grandmother in Jalalpur, and the last of the three by our mother in Bhera!
Bhera continues to inspire love and pride for the town among the new and old generations of its current residents. Their hubb-ul-watani is reflected in their dedicated efforts to put Bhera on the internet map. They have invested huge personal resources to set up several websites on Bhera. Besides the Wikipedia’s site on Bhera, there are web sites that have been set up by individual Pakistani Bherochis. The website by H. A. Bugavi is perhaps the oldest site, distinguished for its genuine concern for the historical assets of Bhera. The other by Ali Javeed appears more systematic and open to contributions from Bherochis who had to leave the town in 1947. These gentlemen are inspired by their sheer love for their town. Their websites cover the town’s history, architecture, mosques, abandoned temples and the Sikh gurdawara, and the illustrious lives of its distinguished sons. Visiting these sites comes close to a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who have been away for so long and have felt banished and cut off.
Now that Pakistani visas have become relatively easy to obtain, it has encouraged the Hindu and Sikh expatriates to visit the town. If one can, someone of our generation (born and raised in Bhera) should spend a few days to study the changes the town has gone through. My brother got less than four hours to spend in Bhera. He and his host, the late Mrs. Kamala Sahni of Salam, took the circular drive around the town, went to the Railway Station from where they followed the road to Ganjwala Darwaaza and on to the Chowk, and parked the car in Gopal Bahri’s katra. From there, they took a walking trip to the DhoanaN wala Mohalla where we were born and raised, visited the Jhugi wala Mandir (adjacent to the ChhaintaaN wali Masjid), looked at what was once our father’s shop (still vacant and locked up), found in total ruin the facing shop of Hafiz Lilari (Rangraze) who dyed the chunnis of Hindu girls in the local spectrum of colors, took a stroll in the Guru Bazaar, walked to the Jeetu da Maidaan to meet Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah at his clinic, and to a few other places. Besides the overall impressions of the town, my brother also shared with me some precious bits of information that were closer to our hearts.
Massi Durgan’s house, adjacent to ours, was a tibba, the upper story of our house was not there, but other houses in the mohalla looked reasonably intact and were occupied by refugees from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana,. As I and my escort (Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah’s son) entered the mohalla, I saw a lady washing clothes inside the deori, at the very place in our house where our Mataji (Mother) used to wash our clothes. I am sure the hand-pump is still there. It was day time and no man [being present] at home, it was not appropriate to speak to the orthodox lady who was inside our house…I was inside the mohalla for about ten minutes…”
Now nearly thirty years later (since his 1978 visit), we find ourselves old and frail to travel and visit the town we left behind. People of our generation (my elder brother is 78, and younger brother 68) make do with our very precious remembrances of Bhera and visits to its web sites. When we manage to get together, we hardly tire of talking about Bhera, much to the apparent boredom of our wives whose parents were from three different towns in Pakistan: Pind Daaddan Khan, Sialkot, and Jampur near D.G.Khan. One day we brothers sat down and prepared a schematic map of our DhoanaN wala Mohalla (named after the Hindu caste of Dhawans) as it existed in the pre-Partition days. We numbered all the houses inside the mohalla and in the alley leading to it from 1 to 30, and prepared a companion list of the names of the families that lived in these houses until 1947. Unlike most Hindu neighborhoods like SahniyaN da Mohalla, our mohalla and a few others were gated neighborhoods with their circumscribed boundaries. The Hindu mohallas were generally named after single Hindu castes, but their resident families often belonged to other castes as well. In our Mohalla, for instance, we had only one Dhawan family, but also one Bahri, one Khanna, two Kapur, four Malhotra families, and a few other castes.
People of our parents’ generation are gone from this world, and ours is the last generation that has personal memories of the good old Bhera of our childhood and also of our trail of woe and survival to the Wagah border. We know first hand the price our parents’ generation and ours paid in the grand drama of the birth of two nations as it was enacted in Bhera. Pakistanis who are our contemporaries from Bhera witnessed these events from the other side. They are the audiences who may have some resonance for our roodad (narrative). It will be nice to hear from them on how the things and events I talk about here looked to them from the other side.
When most people got caught up in the vortex of the religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some righteous, God-fearing persons held their heads well above the swirling waters of hatred and revenge. The Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera, who were able to escape to India after 15th August 1947, owe their lives to two such men, both of them true Muslims and great men. One of them was the native son of Bhera, Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha. He was the one who single-handedly dissuaded the Muslim mobs of tenant farmers and villagers from acting on their plans to kill and plunder the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. The Muslim mobs had gathered one morning near one of the city’s gates to launch their attack. Their drums had kept their sinister beat all through the previous night to rally the believers. Mobilized by the countryside Mullahs to avenge the killings of Muslims in the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of India, the mob was all worked up to start a bloody reprisal against the kafirs. We learned that Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha confronted the brigands early that morning. At one point, he took off his turban and put it at the feet of the mob leader(s) and begged them to turn back to their homes and leave the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera alone. He told them that Hindus and Sikhs had lived in Bhera for centuries in peace with Muslims and they owed them at least a safe passage for the sake of Bhera’s past and fair name. His prominent stature in the community (see Note 2) and his heart-felt appeal persuaded the mobs to disperse. His hubb-ul-watani for the hometown and his faith combined to save the day for the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Our present and coming generations should be indebted to this very righteous person.
Someone looking through the archival papers of the late Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha would find many a letter written from India by Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs who had individually conveyed their gratitude to him for saving the lives of their families and community in 1947. Our father, Hori Lall, also wrote to Sheikh Sahib in the mid-1950s, thanking him deeply for his intervention that saved our lives. In 1978, my brother made it a point to visit Sheikh Sahib’s house in Bhera to pay his respects to the memory of our singular savior. He wrote about it, “On our circular tour of the town, we stopped at the residence of the late Sheikh F. H. Piracha as I wanted to pay my respects. Unfortunately, his son [very likely, Ehsan-ul-Haq, who later became a junior minister in Bhuto’s government], was not at home.” The web site by the Prince Brothers (http://bhera.sitesled.com/piracha.html) has an excellent article in Urdu on this pre-eminent khaandaan of the Pirachas. It recounts the illustrious careers and contributions of its members to their nation and the town of Bhera. I wish its authors would consider it fit to include this act of profound humanity by Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha in their biographical essay on him and also arrange to include a picture of him.
The other savior of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs was a tall, handsome Muslim Captain attached to the army contingent that was sent to Bhera for safely escorting our evacuation-train to the Mandi Bahauddin refugee camp. A few miles from Bhera near Hazurpur, the train was stopped by a large mob of marauders drawn from the neighboring villages. They were waiting there to ambush the train. The Captain ordered his men to open fire in order to deter the mob. He succeeded in scaring them to disperse, thus stopping the attack and saving the lives of Bhera’s Hindu/Sikh men, women, and children. Some of the attackers must have been injured and a few perhaps even got killed. His Muslim and Sikh soldiers removed the tree trunk from the railway tracks that the attackers had placed there to halt the train, and the train resumed its journey to Malakwal and onto Mandi Bahauddin. At Mandi Bahauddin Railway Station, I saw quite a few Hindu elders (one from our mohalla) take off their turbans and lay them at the Captain’s feet as a gesture of their deep gratitude for saving them, their womenfolk and children. He was uneasy at this gesture and just stepped back from the turbans, telling the Hindus that what he did to save them and their families was a matter of duty for him. He surely was a true Muslim, a gentleman officer, and a karmayogi for whom a duty performed was its own reward. We do not know this officer’s name or the place he was from, but his face will ever remain hallowed in our memories. He was a stranger, but a great benefactor. May God bless his soul.
How do you judge a community? One way is to look at the great men and women it has produced from its ranks (the elitist measure). The other way to evaluate a community is to look at its average member (the common-man measure). Judged by the first (the best person) standard, Bhera wins hands down. The exemplary stand of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq in saving his town’s Hindus and Sikhs from a sure massacre brings credit not only to his person and his family, but also to the entire community of Bhera’s Muslims. S. Radhakrishanan, a philosopher and a former President of India, portrayed the “best man” view of a society in these words: “When the wick is ablaze at its tip, the whole lamp is said to be burning bright.” It surely applies to Bhera, and its people can rightfully take pride in the radiant nobility of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq.
Judged by the other, “common man” standard, Bhera’s Muslims acquitted themselves quite well. We, the departed Hindus and Sikhs, have to recognize the essential decency of the Muslim folks of Bhera. If men like Sheikh Fazal-ul-Haq and the Muslim Captain saved our lives, then the Muslim commoners of Bhera can be said to have spared our lives. The local Muslim community did not seek to harm, much less to annihilate, the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. We are grateful to all those who by their decency and restraint made it possible for us to leave the town in relative peace and safety. Except for one case of fatal stabbing of a Hindu boy, Bayya (son of Ram Lal Mandharia) and one case of arson (Lall Kuppi’s kiryaana shop in Guru Bazaar was set on fire), we were let go unharmed from Bhera. Few towns in West as well as East Punjab could match Bhera’s record of good sense in those trying times of collective insanity when the sanctity of human life and the honor of women did not seem to matter any more.
Before our special train left Bhera’s railway station one day in September, 1947, a batch of Muslim National Guards (the Muslim counterpart of those days to the Hindu RSS) showed up in their green uniforms and lined up on the platform in a “Guard-of-Honor” formation to bid us farewell. We watched them from the windows of our railway compartment, not knowing what to make of this entirely unexpected move. We were at that time more concerned about the oppressive heat in our railway compartments. We were packed like herrings in the train; several families stuffed in each small compartment, and as many as 7,000 Hindus and Sikhs (along with the baggage they could carry on their person from their homes to the railway station) squeezed in eight or nine railway bogies. The crowding made the inside of the train feel like an oven, even when all the windows were kept wide open. At one point, one Muslim national guard, Baalu (for Iqbal), who used to work as a sweeper for a Kapur family in our mohalla, approached the head of this family and advised that we better close the windows. It did not make any sense; he did not tell us why the windows need be closed. He kept pleading though. Before he went back to be with his fellow-guards, he made sure that we were going to shut all the windows. The gentleman returned after a while to ask why we had kept one window open. We told him that it would not shut. He suggested we better place a trunk (suit case) or even a rolled-bedding against the window to cover it. We sensed something was remiss, something ominous to befall us. It was only when the train suddenly stopped just a few miles from the station and we heard rapid firing by the escort soldiers that the full scope of the peril we were in dawned on us. It became clear why this caring person was so much concerned about the open windows. He knew of the planned attack, but could not divulge it.
Naturally, it is hard for us to forgive the out-of-towners from the surrounding villages (including a few from the town itself), who could hardly wait to kill the Hindu and Sikh men, and carry away their women and cash and jewelry as maal-e-ghanimat. Once turned back from the gates of Bhera by the pleas of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, most of them showed up again a few weeks later to waylay the special train for the evacuation of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Before our train was stopped a few miles away from Bhera, we could see from the window chinks a few of these folks running by the side of our train. They had axes and spears in their hands, and those who did not have a donkey or a camel were carrying cots on their heads to bring back the booty. These laggards were trying hard to reach the site of planned ambush in time so as not to miss on their share of the spoils. When the train stopped at the barricade that had been set up for the purpose, the main body of raiders came rushing from behind the embankments of a canal to attack the train. The Captain promptly ordered his armed men to open fire, making the mobs retreat and find shelter behind the embankments. But for the effective protection provided by the armed escort, Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs would have been a captive target for butchery in the stalled train
As we moved farther from the blessed land of Bhera, our troubles started multiplying and getting real bad. The long stay in the Mandi Bahauddin camp was marked by unnerving uncertainties, hardships, and a cholera epidemic in the camp. On the reassuring side was the presence of a battalion of Baloch regiment posted at the camp to guard it. After several weeks of stay in the camp, the Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs boarded another refugee train that would take them from Mandi Bahauddin to the Indian border. The 44-hour long journey from Mandi Bahauddin to the Wagha border via Lala Musa (this journey in normal times took no more than three to four hours) was a frightening passage. But we were fortunate to make it safely to India. We got down from the train at Attari railway station and kissed the soil of India.
To be uprooted from your native lands, family homes and means of livelihood and to have your “dukh-sukh di saanjhi” community scattered across a thousand towns were an enormous dislocation for our parents’ generation. What they ended up facing was contrary to the history as they had known it. They had believed that kingdoms and governments could change, but the people (raiyyat) stayed put in their towns and were left largely untouched. The events as they transpired left them heart-broken. They had to leave for an unknown place in India and start a new life in a new setting. Any hope of returning one day with their ousted communities to their hometowns had disappeared fast. They realized that they and their children have been banished for ever and the keys to their houses they carried on them were no more than mementos. It took them decades of struggle and untold hardships to resettle. Most made it eventually in the new country, while countless others languished on the way to an ever elusive recovery. Yes, the anguish of our irreversible displacement has been hard to overcome.
Just as erstwhile rivals, who once pursued the same prize in town, become mellow over time, the sole inheritors of Bhera have started to empathize with the town’s disinherited people of 1947. The dispossessed have for long been resigned to whatever hand the fate had played for them and the inheritors of Bhera did not show any visible triumph in seeing us leave the land of our forefathers. The wounds of our loss have crusted, if not disappeared. The two sides now get together, talk, and write without serious recriminations and hurts. They see each other from the distance of time and space, and no party appears diabolic to the other any longer. There is a noticeable nostalgia for the times when we lived like neighbors without any running battles. A couplet form Momin says it all:
Kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi chah thi, kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi rah thi,
Kabhi ham bhi tum bhi thai aashnaa, tumhen yaad ho ke na yaad ho.
Once we and you had good will between us,
Once we and you had a way between us;
Once we and you were also friends,
Now you may remember it or you may not.
The overall amity among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in Bhera of the pre-Partition days was based on the concept of shared “ann-jal-hawah,” common life experiences, and a joyful pride in everything Bherochi from its phenian to mehndi (henna). Our pride in Bhera served to bind us, making us all feel that we were better than the people of neighboring towns! We were immensely proud of the town’s long history and the great persons the town had produced in different fields. When it comes to the mystic bond of shared ann-jal-hawah, the town’s Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs savored roties made from the locally grown wheat, drank the “salubrious” water from its Jehlum-fed aquifers, breathed the refreshing (“khush-gawaar”) air of Bhera, and basked in its “balmy” sunshine. With apologies to Faiz, we may slightly reword one of his couplets (see Note 3) from “Raqeeb se.”
[Hum] pe bhi [bikhra] hai uss [ufaq] se [khursheed] ka noor,
Jis mein beeti hui [subhoan] ki [jhalak] baaqi hai
The Sun spread its rays from the same horizon on us as well
The glimpses of those luminous mornings are still with us.
In the realm of common experiences, we all learned to take our first steps and to walk on Bhera’s terra firma, picked up its boli for our mother tongue, and partook of its romantic legends of Heer-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahiwal. When we went to school, we started learning Urdu from Class I, English from Class V, Hindi in VI, and Persian or Sanskrit in Class VII onwards. Exposure to a steady set of common influences had created a sort of common cultural ethos for the town.
Not too distant in the future, our generation who along with our parents had witnessed the finale of the centuries-old sojourn of Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera will not be around to tell about it. The ranks of our generation are dwindling steadily. So let us remember Bhera and celebrate our sad and happy memories of this town while we can! No one could have said it any better than Ghalib:
Naghama-hai gham ko bhi eh dil ghanimat janeai
Be-sadaa ho jaaey ga yeh saaz-e-hasti ek din!
O’ heart, consider even your sad songs to be a blessing,
One of these days, this instrument of our being will go silent.
NOTES
Note 1: Besides expressions like “aasaan-jasaan,” some words were pronounced so distinctively in Bhera that a Bherochi was instantly identified. Here is an anecdote we used to hear. Someone was once asked the name of the town he was from, and he repeated the question to get it right, “Maira shehar?” The person who had asked the question immediately responded, “Stop, stop. You do not have to tell me what town you are from. I know it, you must be from Bhera!” Around 1950, my younger brother and I were going from Karol Bagh to Pahar Ganj by a tonga in Delhi, and were chatting. All of a sudden, an older passenger on the front seat, asked us, “O mundeo, tussi pichhon Bherai de ho?” (Boys, are you originally from Bhera?) Astonished, we asked him how he figured out where we were from. He told us that it was our maira, maira (instead of mera) that gave away our origin! As the lady in the Sahniyan da Mohalla house in Bhera told Kalpana Sahni, “We have only to open our mouths to give ourselves away!”
Note 2: Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha served as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi from 1934 to 1946. He was also the Chairman of Bhera’s Municipal Committee from 1924 to 1958.
Note 3: The original couplet as Faiz wrote it is as follows:
Tujh pe bhi barsaa hai uss baam se mehtab ka noor
Jis mein beeti hui raaton ki kassak baqi hai.
From the same balcony, Diana shed her luminous rays on you as well.
The sweet pain of those nights past, still lingers in our hearts!
Voting For Change
Reminiscences of a displaced Hindu
Gian Sarup
Bhera is a town that is cherished even by those who had to flee it en masse and for ever in very dire circumstances. The town continues to evoke a sense of a paradise lost for our generation of men and women who had to leave Bhera in 1947. We have very warm memories of our childhood in our ancestral town, our place of birth, and our watan.
I am a 73-years old Hindu from Bhera. In 1947, I was a 13-years old kid who had moved to the 9th class in the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School, popularly known as the Arya High School. I still remember the poem, “Hubb-ul-watani,” (love for one’s native land) in our Urdu textbook for the Seventh Class. The poem started with the lines, “Dilli mein ek sitar niwazi ki jaan thaa, aur jaan se aziz tha Dilli ko jaananta.” This sitar player accepted an offer of “khilat-o-zar” from the Royal Court of Hyderabad, and one day he set out on his journey to Deccan in a carriage sent to fetch him. When his carriage reached near the famous Jama Masjid, the sitar player looked at the grand sight and asked the gadibaan (the driver) whether Hyderabad would have a mosque like Jama Masjid. The driver replied that there were several beautiful mosques in Hyderabad but there was none like the Jama Masjid of Delhi. By the time a few more of the city’s landmarks, each judged as unmatched by the gadibaan, went by, the carriage had reached the banks of river Jamuna. The sitar player could not help asking once again if they had a river like Jamuna in the environs of Hyderabad. The driver told him that there was a river there, but it was no match to the enchanting Jamuna of Delhi. The sitar player could not take it any more, and told the driver to turn back to Delhi where he would make do with much less but would be at home in his watan!
Patriotism once used to be basically local, centered on hometowns. Your town was the axis of your attachments and pride. We used to be nourished on local hubb-ul-watani. Our emotional ties were centered on all manner of things associated with the town. Bhera’s heroes and characters, its boli and humor, its history and folklore, its festivals and celebrations, its food and confections, its bazaars and mohallas, and its places of worship and even orchards became the facets of our local pride. The very name of the town became a core component of our being.
When the Hindu and Sikh families left Bhera and other places in West Punjab for India at the time of country’s partition, a large number of them found their way to Delhi. After this huge influx of Punjabi refugees, Delhi became largely a Punjabi city. There are scores of localities in Delhi that are predominantly populated by the now grown up children of these refugees from Pakistani Punjab, yet there are only four localities in Greater Delhi that were named after the towns in West Punjab: Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Miyanwali Nagar. Bhera Enclave is located in the northwest sector of Delhi. Bherochis started building their houses there toward the end of 1970’s, as much as three decades after they had arrived in India. Their hubb-ul-watani beckoned them to resurrect for their future generations a sliver of Bhera, nearly four hundred miles southeast of their ancestral hometown on the banks of river Jehlum. In the office of the Enclave’s Community Center, the lead plaque tells the visitors, “The residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA – the city of their ancestors.”
A poignant example of the hubb-ul-watani of a Bherochi Hindu is the content of the last rites (antim-sanskaar) of his death in Delhi. Joginder Nath Kapur was the son of a prominent Kapur family of Bhera. His father owned the largest iron shop in the town’s main bazaar. Kapur Sahib, as we used to address Joginder ji, matriculated from the Arya School and got his B.Sc from a college in Lahore. He taught Science and English in his alma mater in Bhera and also coached its hockey team for a while. In Delhi, he started a large private coaching college (Delhi Public College) that catered to thousands of refugee students like me who worked fulltime in offices and attended its classes in the evenings to appear as private candidates for university exams. For a science teacher, Kapur Sahib was highly proficient in Persian. Whenever the regular tutor for our Intermediate Persian class went on leave, Kapur Sahib would step in and teach us Persian poetry by translating and explicating Rumi, Saadi, and Firdosi! Once in a while, on public demand in the college functions, he would recite in his inimitable style the sorrowful poem, Ek saarson ka kafila, shauq-e-watan dil mein liye, aazad sab afkaar se, athkelian karta hua, wapis tha ghar ko jaa raha” by Vakil Abdul Hamid Sahib. When this noble son of Bhera died in 1987 in Delhi, the last rites at his Kirya-Karam ceremony included a discourse, “The Historical Importance of Bhera: A respectful tribute to the memory of Swargya (Late) Joginder Nath Kapur,” in Hindi. I cannot think of a more touching gesture of a people’s regard for their place of origin. The lecture was delivered by Dr. Birbal Gandhi of Bhera Enclave. It is a four-page long document in chaste Hindi. I can translate here only the last line of this address: “The efforts of the Bhera Welfare Society succeeded in securing [enough] land in the West Delhi area for the construction of houses by displaced Bherochis so that the name of Bhera lasts for long (ta ke Bhera ka naam qaaim rahe).
The generation of our children knows the names of the towns their parents and grandparents had come from, but generally have little, if any, interest in the history or the character of these places. Newer generations generally do not speak Punjabi at home, though they understand it. They can neither read nor write Urdu. Their grandparents are not there any more; their parents, uncles, and aunts do not reminisce about Bhera that often in their presence. Born and raised in India and some foreign countries, not many among them are looking forward to visiting their ancestral hometowns in Pakistan. Professor Kalpana Sahni, the daughter of the late Prof. Bhisham Sahni, has been one heartening and notable exception. On a visit to Lahore, she undertook a trip to Bhera where she tried to locate the home of her ancestors in the Sahniyan da Mohalla. She wrote a very evocative piece, “The persistence of memory: Another country, an ancestral village, and remembrances that spill across time and borders.” It originally appeared in Outlook (October 30, 2000), an Indian weekly newsmagazine, and can now be found on several web sites on Bhera, such as www.merabhera.com or www.geocities.com/hbugvi . Prof. Sahni’s desire to visit her father’s ancestral town and home must have been kindled over many years of listening to her family’s remembrances of the old times, accounts of her forefathers’ move from Bhera to Rawalpindi, mention of sundry characters from Bhera, and conversations in what she calls the give-away Punjabi of Bhera (see Note 1). Her father’s writings inspired her as well. Bhisham Sahni’s last novel, Mayyadas ki Marhi, was set in Bhera. The original novel written in Hindi came out in 1988. Its English version, The Mansion (also translated in English by her father), was published by Harper-Collins in 1995. She apparently has had a very Bhera-nurturing family environment.
Our generation’s emotional bond with Bhera might have faded quite a bit, (dil bhi kam dukhta hai, woh yaad bhi kam aatai hein), but it never withered. In India or outside of it, when we come across someone from Bhera or a nearby town, we greet them heartily as our watanis. In the spring of 1982, I had taken some of my relatives from India to show them around Chicago (about sixty miles east of the town where I have lived since 1972). Not far from the Shedd Aquarium, I spotted a gentleman who looked like an Indian or a Pakistani taking pictures of the scenery. He must have noticed me, too. At one point he approached me and asked if I could take a few pictures of him with Lake Michigan for the background. I readily took the shots he wanted, and we started chatting when I discovered that he was from Mandi Phularwan, a town hardly 12 miles away from Bhera. He was Dr. Aijaz Sarvar Gilani., vacationing by himself in the United States. We immediately felt connected like watanis, exchanged our addresses, and wondered aloud how we two strangers, born and raised in two towns so close to each other, were destined to run into each other in Chicago of all the places! Just before we took leave of each other, he asked if I knew how well Hindus from Phularwan were faring in India. I was moved by his concern to know how well the folk, who were once a part of his hometown community, were doing in exile. I was sad to disappoint him, for I did not know of anyone from Phularwan. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he left in his tourist bus.
Hindus and Sikhs visiting their hometowns in Pakistan are overwhelmed by the warmth (bahut piyar mohabbat naal milde ne) with which the people greet them there. In 1978, my younger brother, then a British citizen, took a short trip to Bhera via Lahore from Delhi. On his return to England, he wrote me a series of letters about his visit to Bhera. He writes in one of his letters:
“I talked to a few Muslims, but those who came to know that I am a Hindu who is here on a visit, were overjoyed and started talking about the good old days when Hindus and Muslims lived together as brothers. I will never forget the Muslim co-passenger who did not let me buy my bus ticket from Bhalwal to Sargodha [he paid for my ticket]. Another passenger offered me tea en route. One of the Muslim servants of Mr. Telreja (a Sindhi Hindu in Lahore) pressed me to go and see a Punjabi movie on his expense.
Our hubb-ul-watani warms our hearts to learn how prosperous once Bhera was. The entry on Bhera in the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) reads: “ . . .the town was the largest and most prosperous commercial town in this part of the Province, having a direct export trade to Kabul, the Derajat, and Sukkur, and importing European goods from Karachi and Amritsar (1908, Volume VIII: Behrampur to Bombay, p.100). Around 1975, my younger brother made a special trip from Harrow to the India House Library in London to get a photo-copy of the page from which the above quote is reproduced.
The same sentiment of love for Bhera hurt us when we came across dispatches on the town’s decline. In the 1950’and 1960’s sixties, visitors reported a depressing picture of Bhera as a declining town. I have not read Balraj Sahani’s book in which he talks about his visit to Bhera. The impression I got from a conversation with his brother Bhisham Sahni, a senior colleague of mine at Delhi College, was that Balraj ji had found large parts of the town in a state of utter desolation and ruins. It depressed us to learn that the town had fallen into such a sorry state.
Sometimes I buy travel guides on Pakistan, especially if they have something to say about Bhera. One of these books, published in 1990, reports:
Old towns were washed away by the rivers and replaced by new towns on safer ground. Some have just died; Bhera, near Sargodha, for example, used to be a flourishing place. It was an ancient town where Sher Shah [Suri] built a beautiful mosque. There were shrines which attracted pilgrims. Bhera was a center of Moghul local government. It was plundered by the Durrani, repopulated by the Sikhs and prospered under the British when it became the most important city for miles around. Then as the canal colonies flourished, other towns grew and Bhera waned. Local government was moved [in fact the local administration was downgraded from a tehsil to a sub-tehsil status, though the court was not removed]. Having sustained a lot of damage in 1947, it is now a ghost town. (Insight Guides: Pakistan. APA Publications: HK,1990, p.180).
My heart kind of sank when I read the last characterization, and wondered why the rundown condition of Bhera had not gotten any better during the thirty years between Balraj Sahni’s impression and the summation in this travel book (it had many superb pictures but none of Bhera; a sinking ship?).
For the last few years, we have been getting some reassuring news. We hear of a resurgent spirit of Bhera, though some parts of the old town remain in a moribund condition. It may no longer be news for the residents of Bhera, but we learned only recently that the town had been getting Sui gas for quite some time and has a public water supply system. The town now has an Intermediate College, something it did not have in the pre-Partition days. The access afforded to Bhera by the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has been another happy tiding. The town now has a population of 33,600 (2001), compared to the rough estimate of 28,000 we used to hear before the partition. Several new colonies have sprung up around the old town. However, information on the condition of the satellite villages of Bhera is hard to come by.
One wonders what happened to the two hamlets of Khan Mohammad Da and Haathiwind on the bus route from Bhera to Bhalwal. Folks in one of these villages used to “harvest” shora left as residue by evaporating shallow pools of water in embanked plots of arid land. No commercially available map of Pakistan shows these old villages and others like Bathuni. I did succeed in finding the neighboring village of Hazurpur in my Lonely Planet Travel Atlas for India and Bangladesh (1995, p.12 and 16). This atlas is my proud possession, because it maps also show Haranpur, my father’s place of birth, and also Jalalpur (Sharif), my mother’s place of birth (my Nannaka shehar). The three towns of Bhera, Haranpur, and Jalalpur -- all three situated on the banks of Jehlum -- have been variously linked to Alexander’s battle with King Porus in 326 B.C. In terms of geographic origins then, our ancestry is indeed a tapestry of ancient strands. Our family could not bring much personal stuff with us when we left Bhera, but the most treasured things my mother made a point of carrying on her were two Phulkaaris and one Baagh. She gave one precious heirloom piece to each one of her three daughters-in-law when they came as brides to our house in Delhi. One of these pieces was stitched by our paternal grandmother in Haranpur, the other by our maternal grandmother in Jalalpur, and the last of the three by our mother in Bhera!
Bhera continues to inspire love and pride for the town among the new and old generations of its current residents. Their hubb-ul-watani is reflected in their dedicated efforts to put Bhera on the internet map. They have invested huge personal resources to set up several websites on Bhera. Besides the Wikipedia’s site on Bhera, there are web sites that have been set up by individual Pakistani Bherochis. The website by H. A. Bugavi is perhaps the oldest site, distinguished for its genuine concern for the historical assets of Bhera. The other by Ali Javeed appears more systematic and open to contributions from Bherochis who had to leave the town in 1947. These gentlemen are inspired by their sheer love for their town. Their websites cover the town’s history, architecture, mosques, abandoned temples and the Sikh gurdawara, and the illustrious lives of its distinguished sons. Visiting these sites comes close to a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who have been away for so long and have felt banished and cut off.
Now that Pakistani visas have become relatively easy to obtain, it has encouraged the Hindu and Sikh expatriates to visit the town. If one can, someone of our generation (born and raised in Bhera) should spend a few days to study the changes the town has gone through. My brother got less than four hours to spend in Bhera. He and his host, the late Mrs. Kamala Sahni of Salam, took the circular drive around the town, went to the Railway Station from where they followed the road to Ganjwala Darwaaza and on to the Chowk, and parked the car in Gopal Bahri’s katra. From there, they took a walking trip to the DhoanaN wala Mohalla where we were born and raised, visited the Jhugi wala Mandir (adjacent to the ChhaintaaN wali Masjid), looked at what was once our father’s shop (still vacant and locked up), found in total ruin the facing shop of Hafiz Lilari (Rangraze) who dyed the chunnis of Hindu girls in the local spectrum of colors, took a stroll in the Guru Bazaar, walked to the Jeetu da Maidaan to meet Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah at his clinic, and to a few other places. Besides the overall impressions of the town, my brother also shared with me some precious bits of information that were closer to our hearts.
Massi Durgan’s house, adjacent to ours, was a tibba, the upper story of our house was not there, but other houses in the mohalla looked reasonably intact and were occupied by refugees from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana,. As I and my escort (Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah’s son) entered the mohalla, I saw a lady washing clothes inside the deori, at the very place in our house where our Mataji (Mother) used to wash our clothes. I am sure the hand-pump is still there. It was day time and no man [being present] at home, it was not appropriate to speak to the orthodox lady who was inside our house…I was inside the mohalla for about ten minutes…”
Now nearly thirty years later (since his 1978 visit), we find ourselves old and frail to travel and visit the town we left behind. People of our generation (my elder brother is 78, and younger brother 68) make do with our very precious remembrances of Bhera and visits to its web sites. When we manage to get together, we hardly tire of talking about Bhera, much to the apparent boredom of our wives whose parents were from three different towns in Pakistan: Pind Daaddan Khan, Sialkot, and Jampur near D.G.Khan. One day we brothers sat down and prepared a schematic map of our DhoanaN wala Mohalla (named after the Hindu caste of Dhawans) as it existed in the pre-Partition days. We numbered all the houses inside the mohalla and in the alley leading to it from 1 to 30, and prepared a companion list of the names of the families that lived in these houses until 1947. Unlike most Hindu neighborhoods like SahniyaN da Mohalla, our mohalla and a few others were gated neighborhoods with their circumscribed boundaries. The Hindu mohallas were generally named after single Hindu castes, but their resident families often belonged to other castes as well. In our Mohalla, for instance, we had only one Dhawan family, but also one Bahri, one Khanna, two Kapur, four Malhotra families, and a few other castes.
People of our parents’ generation are gone from this world, and ours is the last generation that has personal memories of the good old Bhera of our childhood and also of our trail of woe and survival to the Wagah border. We know first hand the price our parents’ generation and ours paid in the grand drama of the birth of two nations as it was enacted in Bhera. Pakistanis who are our contemporaries from Bhera witnessed these events from the other side. They are the audiences who may have some resonance for our roodad (narrative). It will be nice to hear from them on how the things and events I talk about here looked to them from the other side.
When most people got caught up in the vortex of the religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some rig
Posted by
saharanpuri
Feb 25, 2008 10:42 am
Remembering the Beloved Town of Bhera:Reminiscences of a displaced Hindu
Gian Sarup
Bhera is a town that is cherished even by those who had to flee it en masse and for ever in very dire circumstances. The town continues to evoke a sense of a paradise lost for our generation of men and women who had to leave Bhera in 1947. We have very warm memories of our childhood in our ancestral town, our place of birth, and our watan.
I am a 73-years old Hindu from Bhera. In 1947, I was a 13-years old kid who had moved to the 9th class in the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School, popularly known as the Arya High School. I still remember the poem, “Hubb-ul-watani,” (love for one’s native land) in our Urdu textbook for the Seventh Class. The poem started with the lines, “Dilli mein ek sitar niwazi ki jaan thaa, aur jaan se aziz tha Dilli ko jaananta.” This sitar player accepted an offer of “khilat-o-zar” from the Royal Court of Hyderabad, and one day he set out on his journey to Deccan in a carriage sent to fetch him. When his carriage reached near the famous Jama Masjid, the sitar player looked at the grand sight and asked the gadibaan (the driver) whether Hyderabad would have a mosque like Jama Masjid. The driver replied that there were several beautiful mosques in Hyderabad but there was none like the Jama Masjid of Delhi. By the time a few more of the city’s landmarks, each judged as unmatched by the gadibaan, went by, the carriage had reached the banks of river Jamuna. The sitar player could not help asking once again if they had a river like Jamuna in the environs of Hyderabad. The driver told him that there was a river there, but it was no match to the enchanting Jamuna of Delhi. The sitar player could not take it any more, and told the driver to turn back to Delhi where he would make do with much less but would be at home in his watan!
Patriotism once used to be basically local, centered on hometowns. Your town was the axis of your attachments and pride. We used to be nourished on local hubb-ul-watani. Our emotional ties were centered on all manner of things associated with the town. Bhera’s heroes and characters, its boli and humor, its history and folklore, its festivals and celebrations, its food and confections, its bazaars and mohallas, and its places of worship and even orchards became the facets of our local pride. The very name of the town became a core component of our being.
When the Hindu and Sikh families left Bhera and other places in West Punjab for India at the time of country’s partition, a large number of them found their way to Delhi. After this huge influx of Punjabi refugees, Delhi became largely a Punjabi city. There are scores of localities in Delhi that are predominantly populated by the now grown up children of these refugees from Pakistani Punjab, yet there are only four localities in Greater Delhi that were named after the towns in West Punjab: Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Miyanwali Nagar. Bhera Enclave is located in the northwest sector of Delhi. Bherochis started building their houses there toward the end of 1970’s, as much as three decades after they had arrived in India. Their hubb-ul-watani beckoned them to resurrect for their future generations a sliver of Bhera, nearly four hundred miles southeast of their ancestral hometown on the banks of river Jehlum. In the office of the Enclave’s Community Center, the lead plaque tells the visitors, “The residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA – the city of their ancestors.”
A poignant example of the hubb-ul-watani of a Bherochi Hindu is the content of the last rites (antim-sanskaar) of his death in Delhi. Joginder Nath Kapur was the son of a prominent Kapur family of Bhera. His father owned the largest iron shop in the town’s main bazaar. Kapur Sahib, as we used to address Joginder ji, matriculated from the Arya School and got his B.Sc from a college in Lahore. He taught Science and English in his alma mater in Bhera and also coached its hockey team for a while. In Delhi, he started a large private coaching college (Delhi Public College) that catered to thousands of refugee students like me who worked fulltime in offices and attended its classes in the evenings to appear as private candidates for university exams. For a science teacher, Kapur Sahib was highly proficient in Persian. Whenever the regular tutor for our Intermediate Persian class went on leave, Kapur Sahib would step in and teach us Persian poetry by translating and explicating Rumi, Saadi, and Firdosi! Once in a while, on public demand in the college functions, he would recite in his inimitable style the sorrowful poem, Ek saarson ka kafila, shauq-e-watan dil mein liye, aazad sab afkaar se, athkelian karta hua, wapis tha ghar ko jaa raha” by Vakil Abdul Hamid Sahib. When this noble son of Bhera died in 1987 in Delhi, the last rites at his Kirya-Karam ceremony included a discourse, “The Historical Importance of Bhera: A respectful tribute to the memory of Swargya (Late) Joginder Nath Kapur,” in Hindi. I cannot think of a more touching gesture of a people’s regard for their place of origin. The lecture was delivered by Dr. Birbal Gandhi of Bhera Enclave. It is a four-page long document in chaste Hindi. I can translate here only the last line of this address: “The efforts of the Bhera Welfare Society succeeded in securing [enough] land in the West Delhi area for the construction of houses by displaced Bherochis so that the name of Bhera lasts for long (ta ke Bhera ka naam qaaim rahe).
The generation of our children knows the names of the towns their parents and grandparents had come from, but generally have little, if any, interest in the history or the character of these places. Newer generations generally do not speak Punjabi at home, though they understand it. They can neither read nor write Urdu. Their grandparents are not there any more; their parents, uncles, and aunts do not reminisce about Bhera that often in their presence. Born and raised in India and some foreign countries, not many among them are looking forward to visiting their ancestral hometowns in Pakistan. Professor Kalpana Sahni, the daughter of the late Prof. Bhisham Sahni, has been one heartening and notable exception. On a visit to Lahore, she undertook a trip to Bhera where she tried to locate the home of her ancestors in the Sahniyan da Mohalla. She wrote a very evocative piece, “The persistence of memory: Another country, an ancestral village, and remembrances that spill across time and borders.” It originally appeared in Outlook (October 30, 2000), an Indian weekly newsmagazine, and can now be found on several web sites on Bhera, such as www.merabhera.com or www.geocities.com/hbugvi . Prof. Sahni’s desire to visit her father’s ancestral town and home must have been kindled over many years of listening to her family’s remembrances of the old times, accounts of her forefathers’ move from Bhera to Rawalpindi, mention of sundry characters from Bhera, and conversations in what she calls the give-away Punjabi of Bhera (see Note 1). Her father’s writings inspired her as well. Bhisham Sahni’s last novel, Mayyadas ki Marhi, was set in Bhera. The original novel written in Hindi came out in 1988. Its English version, The Mansion (also translated in English by her father), was published by Harper-Collins in 1995. She apparently has had a very Bhera-nurturing family environment.
Our generation’s emotional bond with Bhera might have faded quite a bit, (dil bhi kam dukhta hai, woh yaad bhi kam aatai hein), but it never withered. In India or outside of it, when we come across someone from Bhera or a nearby town, we greet them heartily as our watanis. In the spring of 1982, I had taken some of my relatives from India to show them around Chicago (about sixty miles east of the town where I have lived since 1972). Not far from the Shedd Aquarium, I spotted a gentleman who looked like an Indian or a Pakistani taking pictures of the scenery. He must have noticed me, too. At one point he approached me and asked if I could take a few pictures of him with Lake Michigan for the background. I readily took the shots he wanted, and we started chatting when I discovered that he was from Mandi Phularwan, a town hardly 12 miles away from Bhera. He was Dr. Aijaz Sarvar Gilani., vacationing by himself in the United States. We immediately felt connected like watanis, exchanged our addresses, and wondered aloud how we two strangers, born and raised in two towns so close to each other, were destined to run into each other in Chicago of all the places! Just before we took leave of each other, he asked if I knew how well Hindus from Phularwan were faring in India. I was moved by his concern to know how well the folk, who were once a part of his hometown community, were doing in exile. I was sad to disappoint him, for I did not know of anyone from Phularwan. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he left in his tourist bus.
Hindus and Sikhs visiting their hometowns in Pakistan are overwhelmed by the warmth (bahut piyar mohabbat naal milde ne) with which the people greet them there. In 1978, my younger brother, then a British citizen, took a short trip to Bhera via Lahore from Delhi. On his return to England, he wrote me a series of letters about his visit to Bhera. He writes in one of his letters:
“I talked to a few Muslims, but those who came to know that I am a Hindu who is here on a visit, were overjoyed and started talking about the good old days when Hindus and Muslims lived together as brothers. I will never forget the Muslim co-passenger who did not let me buy my bus ticket from Bhalwal to Sargodha [he paid for my ticket]. Another passenger offered me tea en route. One of the Muslim servants of Mr. Telreja (a Sindhi Hindu in Lahore) pressed me to go and see a Punjabi movie on his expense.
Our hubb-ul-watani warms our hearts to learn how prosperous once Bhera was. The entry on Bhera in the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) reads: “ . . .the town was the largest and most prosperous commercial town in this part of the Province, having a direct export trade to Kabul, the Derajat, and Sukkur, and importing European goods from Karachi and Amritsar (1908, Volume VIII: Behrampur to Bombay, p.100). Around 1975, my younger brother made a special trip from Harrow to the India House Library in London to get a photo-copy of the page from which the above quote is reproduced.
The same sentiment of love for Bhera hurt us when we came across dispatches on the town’s decline. In the 1950’and 1960’s sixties, visitors reported a depressing picture of Bhera as a declining town. I have not read Balraj Sahani’s book in which he talks about his visit to Bhera. The impression I got from a conversation with his brother Bhisham Sahni, a senior colleague of mine at Delhi College, was that Balraj ji had found large parts of the town in a state of utter desolation and ruins. It depressed us to learn that the town had fallen into such a sorry state.
Sometimes I buy travel guides on Pakistan, especially if they have something to say about Bhera. One of these books, published in 1990, reports:
Old towns were washed away by the rivers and replaced by new towns on safer ground. Some have just died; Bhera, near Sargodha, for example, used to be a flourishing place. It was an ancient town where Sher Shah [Suri] built a beautiful mosque. There were shrines which attracted pilgrims. Bhera was a center of Moghul local government. It was plundered by the Durrani, repopulated by the Sikhs and prospered under the British when it became the most important city for miles around. Then as the canal colonies flourished, other towns grew and Bhera waned. Local government was moved [in fact the local administration was downgraded from a tehsil to a sub-tehsil status, though the court was not removed]. Having sustained a lot of damage in 1947, it is now a ghost town. (Insight Guides: Pakistan. APA Publications: HK,1990, p.180).
My heart kind of sank when I read the last characterization, and wondered why the rundown condition of Bhera had not gotten any better during the thirty years between Balraj Sahni’s impression and the summation in this travel book (it had many superb pictures but none of Bhera; a sinking ship?).
For the last few years, we have been getting some reassuring news. We hear of a resurgent spirit of Bhera, though some parts of the old town remain in a moribund condition. It may no longer be news for the residents of Bhera, but we learned only recently that the town had been getting Sui gas for quite some time and has a public water supply system. The town now has an Intermediate College, something it did not have in the pre-Partition days. The access afforded to Bhera by the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has been another happy tiding. The town now has a population of 33,600 (2001), compared to the rough estimate of 28,000 we used to hear before the partition. Several new colonies have sprung up around the old town. However, information on the condition of the satellite villages of Bhera is hard to come by.
One wonders what happened to the two hamlets of Khan Mohammad Da and Haathiwind on the bus route from Bhera to Bhalwal. Folks in one of these villages used to “harvest” shora left as residue by evaporating shallow pools of water in embanked plots of arid land. No commercially available map of Pakistan shows these old villages and others like Bathuni. I did succeed in finding the neighboring village of Hazurpur in my Lonely Planet Travel Atlas for India and Bangladesh (1995, p.12 and 16). This atlas is my proud possession, because it maps also show Haranpur, my father’s place of birth, and also Jalalpur (Sharif), my mother’s place of birth (my Nannaka shehar). The three towns of Bhera, Haranpur, and Jalalpur -- all three situated on the banks of Jehlum -- have been variously linked to Alexander’s battle with King Porus in 326 B.C. In terms of geographic origins then, our ancestry is indeed a tapestry of ancient strands. Our family could not bring much personal stuff with us when we left Bhera, but the most treasured things my mother made a point of carrying on her were two Phulkaaris and one Baagh. She gave one precious heirloom piece to each one of her three daughters-in-law when they came as brides to our house in Delhi. One of these pieces was stitched by our paternal grandmother in Haranpur, the other by our maternal grandmother in Jalalpur, and the last of the three by our mother in Bhera!
Bhera continues to inspire love and pride for the town among the new and old generations of its current residents. Their hubb-ul-watani is reflected in their dedicated efforts to put Bhera on the internet map. They have invested huge personal resources to set up several websites on Bhera. Besides the Wikipedia’s site on Bhera, there are web sites that have been set up by individual Pakistani Bherochis. The website by H. A. Bugavi is perhaps the oldest site, distinguished for its genuine concern for the historical assets of Bhera. The other by Ali Javeed appears more systematic and open to contributions from Bherochis who had to leave the town in 1947. These gentlemen are inspired by their sheer love for their town. Their websites cover the town’s history, architecture, mosques, abandoned temples and the Sikh gurdawara, and the illustrious lives of its distinguished sons. Visiting these sites comes close to a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who have been away for so long and have felt banished and cut off.
Now that Pakistani visas have become relatively easy to obtain, it has encouraged the Hindu and Sikh expatriates to visit the town. If one can, someone of our generation (born and raised in Bhera) should spend a few days to study the changes the town has gone through. My brother got less than four hours to spend in Bhera. He and his host, the late Mrs. Kamala Sahni of Salam, took the circular drive around the town, went to the Railway Station from where they followed the road to Ganjwala Darwaaza and on to the Chowk, and parked the car in Gopal Bahri’s katra. From there, they took a walking trip to the DhoanaN wala Mohalla where we were born and raised, visited the Jhugi wala Mandir (adjacent to the ChhaintaaN wali Masjid), looked at what was once our father’s shop (still vacant and locked up), found in total ruin the facing shop of Hafiz Lilari (Rangraze) who dyed the chunnis of Hindu girls in the local spectrum of colors, took a stroll in the Guru Bazaar, walked to the Jeetu da Maidaan to meet Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah at his clinic, and to a few other places. Besides the overall impressions of the town, my brother also shared with me some precious bits of information that were closer to our hearts.
Massi Durgan’s house, adjacent to ours, was a tibba, the upper story of our house was not there, but other houses in the mohalla looked reasonably intact and were occupied by refugees from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana,. As I and my escort (Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah’s son) entered the mohalla, I saw a lady washing clothes inside the deori, at the very place in our house where our Mataji (Mother) used to wash our clothes. I am sure the hand-pump is still there. It was day time and no man [being present] at home, it was not appropriate to speak to the orthodox lady who was inside our house…I was inside the mohalla for about ten minutes…”
Now nearly thirty years later (since his 1978 visit), we find ourselves old and frail to travel and visit the town we left behind. People of our generation (my elder brother is 78, and younger brother 68) make do with our very precious remembrances of Bhera and visits to its web sites. When we manage to get together, we hardly tire of talking about Bhera, much to the apparent boredom of our wives whose parents were from three different towns in Pakistan: Pind Daaddan Khan, Sialkot, and Jampur near D.G.Khan. One day we brothers sat down and prepared a schematic map of our DhoanaN wala Mohalla (named after the Hindu caste of Dhawans) as it existed in the pre-Partition days. We numbered all the houses inside the mohalla and in the alley leading to it from 1 to 30, and prepared a companion list of the names of the families that lived in these houses until 1947. Unlike most Hindu neighborhoods like SahniyaN da Mohalla, our mohalla and a few others were gated neighborhoods with their circumscribed boundaries. The Hindu mohallas were generally named after single Hindu castes, but their resident families often belonged to other castes as well. In our Mohalla, for instance, we had only one Dhawan family, but also one Bahri, one Khanna, two Kapur, four Malhotra families, and a few other castes.
People of our parents’ generation are gone from this world, and ours is the last generation that has personal memories of the good old Bhera of our childhood and also of our trail of woe and survival to the Wagah border. We know first hand the price our parents’ generation and ours paid in the grand drama of the birth of two nations as it was enacted in Bhera. Pakistanis who are our contemporaries from Bhera witnessed these events from the other side. They are the audiences who may have some resonance for our roodad (narrative). It will be nice to hear from them on how the things and events I talk about here looked to them from the other side.
When most people got caught up in the vortex of the religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some rig