India has always been known for its civilizational culture and tolerance among its people. Then what has happened in 1947 which challenged the unity in its diversity. What has led to the partition of the country into India and Pakistan. Who got benefited from this decision to divide and who were the sufferer? How the decision has impacted the lives of the common people?
It has been seventy-three years after the partition of India but its scars can still be felt over the people of the country. While talking to Mr. Radha Krishan Bhagia, a retired assistant manager in the Reserve Bank of India, I learnt the different aspects of partition on the lives of people. He was one of those 10-12 million people who got displaced during partition along the religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises.
Mr. Bhagia came to India in 1947 at two years of age. He went to a school run by the government in military barracks and then did his graduation from the Somaiya college in Mumbai after which he joined the Reserve Bank of India in 1965 and worked there till 2002. Being a curious child, he always used to ask questions about the existing situation there from his father, grandfather or from other people and hence his knowledge and experience can become a great source of information for us and the coming generation ahead.
Lives before the Partition
His family were based in Kandavaro village in Nawab Shah district of Sindh province in undivided India. After the partition, they took a ship from Karachi, reached Gandhidham port in Gujarat and lived there for an year at the bank of Sabarmati river. Then, they went to Kota in Rajasthan and stayed there for another year and finally settled in Mumbai after 2-3 years of wondering in search of jobs.
In our conversation with Mr. Bhagia, he provided us with a detailed description of the lives, food, language, culture, demography and the political preferences of the people there. In the Sindh province, there were about six million Sindhis living there out of which 2.6 million were Hindu Sindhis and the rest were either Muslim or Sikh Sindhis. When asked about the relationship among them he told that they all, despite of their religions, lived together and also celebrated their festivals together. Sindhis were primarily Hindus but they started changing their religion from the 11th century onwards. The anger and conflict among them started at the end of the 18th century when Liyakat Ali and Zinnah started provoking people against each other. There was no such conflict before that as those 60% were also Hindus in their origin.
Their main language was Sindhi and two different scripts were used for writing: Devanagari and Arabi. They used another language Hatwanki(Hat means shop) primarily for trade purpose. It was a mixture of both Gurumukhi and Devanagari. Explaining the history of Sindhi language, he told us that Hindi literature was completely destroyed after the attacks of Muslims in India and they imposed their Persian language over them. Their script was Devanagari but it could not last for long because 60-65% of the population converted their religion into Muslims. But the question of script came back into picture when the British came to India. They announced the Devanagari script as the real script of Sindhi society. But when it was challenged by the Sindhi Muslim society, the Britishers realized that 60% of the population are Muslims here. So, they announced the Arabi script as the real script of Sindhi society.
Most of the Muslims were labourers and worked under the Hindu landowners. People from the Sindh also travelled to another British provinces like China, Mongolia and Russia for trade purposes. They used to do banking there. According to him, the business of banking has been started by the Sindhi society. What we call Promissory notes today (like bonds) they used to call them “Hundi”. It was done by the Sindhi people moving into foreign countries. They used to go by walking which took three to four months to reach there. It was a risky job though.
How did Partition change their lives?
The Hindu society was not even ready for the partition because of the continuous assurance given to them by Gandhi and Nehru. They were living a normal life there. But when the partition became a reality, they had to leave the country suddenly leaving everything behind. They left their homes only with a pair of cloth and some jewellery which the women could hide inside their clothes, although most of which were seized by them. Sometimes, they also keep the young women of their families with them. Such cases were less in Sindh though but were very high in Punjab. When Punjabi Sikh society tried to hide in the Gurudwaras, they put the whole Gurudwara on fire. Several people got burnt inside. They also used to kill the people sitting inside the train leaving for India.
The Muslims there left only enough space for one or two persons to walk at a time in the streets. “The Muslims (Mujahidin) who came from Bihar and other places in India and also the people (Muslims) living there were standing on both sides of the street and the Hindus had to walk through that only so that they could not carry any luggage with them.”
Most of them came to India by either ships, trains or some other local transports. People who came by trains tell us that half of the trains used to be filled with dead bodies. Almost every family has lost at least one or two of its members. Mr. Bhagia recalls an incident with his friend who was not even allowed to bring his father’s dead body with him who was shot dead by them. His friend did not even get to know what had happened to his father’s dead body there.
Once came to India, the refugees were kept in the military barracks to live in and were provided rations by the government there. The barracks were of the length of 6-8 boogies of a train without any walls separating them in between. There was no facility for water. People divided the barracks using shawls or bedsheets. Government also started running schools in the barracks for children.
How the partition had changed their political preferences?
The refugees were asked to live in the barracks leaving everything behind. There were no rooftops. They used to bring woods from the jungles for cooking. Although the government had provided the facility of rations but there were very long queues for that. He explains the situation by comparing it with a person who has hit someone’s head and is now providing him the bandages. The government was then trying to compensate for the consequences of partition by providing them food and shelter at free of cost. But the people became very cynical toward the government.
Houses of Muslims in Delhi and nearby who went to Pakistan were occupied by the Punjabis and Sindhis coming to India. But the Indian administration gave those houses back to the Muslims. The experience was very worse. Whereas the Pakistani government was in the support of the Muslims coming in their country. They gave the homes of the Hindus to Muslims coming there from Bihar and other regions of the country.
“We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever” (Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory)
There was neither faith nor aggression for the Muslim League as the Sindhis had never seen it as their party. They had faith in the congress leaders. They had not done any preparation before leaving the country only because the Congress leaders gave them the assurance that the Partition won’t happen in any case. So, all the aggression was only toward the congressmen. This was the reason that the Sindhi society was completely against Congress in the start.
They had a lot of respect for the RSS workers as they helped them a lot in settling here in India. RSS was also active in Sindh province since 1939. There were few full-timers emerged in RSS who had helped the Hindus in evacuating the country. The Hindus did not get any help from the administration there in Pakistan as they themselves wanted the Hindus to leave the country. In fact, they were promoting the violence. And the Indian administration was not ready for that. They had been believing that they won’t let the Partition happen at any cost.
Gurudatta in his series of novels has explained the same and raised the voices of the common people through his words. “Desh ki Hatya” is one of those novels which remain contested for a long time. The book has been seized and banned for many years by the Government of India. It is a novel with a detailed description of the everyday lives of the people during the partition.
“Partition memory is particularly pliable. Within it, the act of forgetting, either inevitably or purposefully, seems to play as much a part as remembering itself.” (Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory).
The Silly Season 