Between the Great Divide

by Anam Zakaria

  In 1947, when Partition happened, Amardeep’s father, Sunder Singh, was running his business in Gorakhpur as usual. ‘Maharaja Hari Singh was dilly-dallying. It is said that a week after Partition he hoisted the Pakistani flag in Srinagar. He had wanted a loose partnership with Pakistan for trade, etc., given the geographical realities. But then, in October 1947, the tribal raids took place. They entered forcefully and Hari Singh panicked, packed up his bags and left for Bombay. Once the tribal raids began, everything changed for Kashmir, and for my father’s sisters and brothers who were still there.’

  Over the course of the next two hours, Amardeep tells me personal tales of what his relatives experienced during the raids. The first story he shares is that of his bua (aunt). ‘She recalled how huge waves of tribals had started to enter, on roaring trucks. They were chanting slogans, the most popular of which was, Hindu ka zar, Sikh ka sar (We want the Hindu’s wealth and the Sikh’s head). Their arrival led to sudden panic everywhere. Until then the people had thought that regardless of whether Hari Singh acceded to India or Pakistan, Kashmir would remain relatively independent. But the next morning, there was a massacre on the streets. On 22 October, the tribals rounded up 300 Sikhs at Dumel Bridge in Muzaffarabad; Sikhs were far more easily identifiable than Hindus because of their turbans. Initially, the raiders said, We’ll let you go, we’re just collecting you in one place, no harm will come your way. But as soon as they had all come together, they fired upon them. Many people fell on the bridge or into the Jhelum River below.’1 This was the same bridge I had visited with Sharjeel, it was the same holy water by which I had stood.

  ‘My bua was there that day. She had three children; one was an infant while the other two, Arjun Singh and Hari Singh, were not even ten years old. There was total terror in the city and in the frenzy, Arjun and Hari got separated from her. Not knowing what to do, my bua went into hiding with her infant. There was no food, no water, and being famished herself, she had no milk in her to feed the child, who kept crying out of hunger. The wails were so loud that everyone around her, people who were also in hiding, told her the baby would give them away, that the raiders would find them and kill all of them. To save everyone my bua sacrificed the baby… she threw her baby into the river.’

  My heart sinks as I hear this. One woman, losing all three children in a day. So helpless, so vulnerable that she had to murder one of her own to protect herself. How would someone move on from that? Amardeep continues to speak but it takes me a moment to bring myself back to our conversation. I don’t have the heart, the words, to be noting down what he is saying. ‘In 1948, my father, Sunder Singh, received a letter in Gorakhpur. It read, “Sunder Singh, Gorakhpur, India,” and was signed by Hari Singh,’ I hear Amardeep say and my heart skips a beat. Was there a silver lining to the story? Did one of her children survive?

  ‘It turned out that Christian missionaries had found my bua’s two boys and taken them to Rawalpindi. A year later, Hari Singh (the younger son of the bua) managed to get a letter out to the only relative he knew. As a child, Hari Singh would hear from his mother that her brother—my father—had gone far away to Gorakhpur and that she didn’t know when he would return. So, Sunder Singh and Gorakhpur were the two names that Hari Singh knew. Luckily, since there were hardly any Sikhs in Gorakhpur, my father was easily located. When he received the letter, he rushed to my bua to tell her the children were still alive. They were able to locate them in Pindi and brought them back to India around late 1948 or early 1949. But not everyone was as lucky.’

  The next story Amardeep shares with me is that of his mother-in-law, Satwant Kaur, and her brother. ‘My mother-in-law belonged to Muzaffarabad. Both her parents died in the massacre in Muzaffarabad,’ he tells me. ‘She was in Srinagar at that time but her brother, Avtar Singh, was with her parents. He got displaced amidst the butchery and it was only hours later that he found his mother, lying dead under the bridge. He kept trying to wake her up, he even dragged her body around, hoping she’d wake up, but she was long gone. The tribals then picked him up along with other young boys and kept them for days. They would make the boys dance around the fire as they cooked their food. The boys would have to take care of all their needs. It was only a month later, once the tribals’ personal objectives were met, that they left and the boy was freed. But the trauma was so severe that he could never move on. Avtar Singh couldn’t ever do anything with his life after that; he just wrote poetry and lived in poverty. There are many other stories of people living in trauma for the rest of their lives after they witnessed the massacre that day, on 22 October. My aunt’s husband committed suicide a month after coming to Srinagar, because of what he had seen. All of these people were coming from well-settled, well-to-do families which were uprooted all at once. It was too much to bear for most of them.’

  But not everyone from Amardeep’s community died or escaped to the other side. Some were left behind. One such person is a distant relative of Amardeep’s. At the age of seventy-five, she continues to live in Pakistan, in the city of Rawalpindi. ‘She is my distant bua. She was only five years old when the massacre happened. She was sitting on the windowsill when the raiders entered their home in Muzaffarabad and beat her parents with the butt of their guns. They were asking them for money, jewellery. There was blood spilling everywhere, and out of terror, my bua fell from the window. She ran and hid somewhere for a couple of hours before returning. When she came back, there was no one there, only bloodstained tiles awaited her. She lay in the corner and waited and waited for someone to come home, to give her food. Eventually, she fell asleep. The next morning, she walked towards Dumel Bridge and found her mother’s body there. She sat by it for hours and cried. It was while she was still sitting there that a Muslim man happened to see her and gave her his hand. In a state of utter shock and despair, she held on to it and walked home with him. He was reciting the kalma and encouraged her to do the same. Later, when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, he married her off to his son, who was suffering from TB. She says she never liked the man but she had no choice. They had five children together and then he died.

  ‘Many years later, while she was raising her children singlehandedly, she met a man called Mushtaq Bashir (the name has been changed to protect his identity), who was previously known as Veer Singh (the name has been changed to protect his identity). He had converted to Islam before Partition and had been shunned by the Sikh community. His son, a little too self-conscious of his Sikh heritage, grew up as a junooni (fiery) Muslim, constantly trying to prove himself as a pure Muslim. Though extremely helpful, he refused to walk with me in his hometown in Pakistan because he was afraid to be seen in the streets with a man wearing a turban,’ Amardeep lets out a curt laugh, before continuing. ‘As part of his religious journey, he joined the Tableeghi Jamaat (a puritanical revivalist Sunni movement) as well. It was through the Jamaat that he went to India, to attend a course at Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, and asked people if they knew anyone who had migrated from his area at Partition. He was able to identify my bua’s brother, who had survived the attacks and escaped to India. Through him, she was able to reunite with her brother momentarily.’

  It is ironical that Mushtaq Bashir’s son, who was so self-conscious of his Sikh ancestry in Pakistan, openly asked questions that were bound to give away his Sikh lineage in India. Being born in a country where nationalism and religion are interwoven in a potent embrace often means that religious minorities have to exert their ‘Pakistaniyat’ over and over again. When anti-American protests were carried out after the release of the movie The Innocence of Muslims, which thousands of Muslims found blasphemous, several Pakistani Christians came out to condemn the movie vigorously.2 When India-Pakistan relations turn for the worse—as they did over Kashmir in 2016—at times the Hindus in Pakistan come out to condemn the Indian government before anyone else.3 The minorities want to assure the rest of the country that they are with them; they want to protect themselves from any backlash, from becoming s
capegoats for actions by the ‘enemy’ nation. Muslims have to do the same in India, I am told, in order to prove their allegiance to the state. To have one’s patriotism questioned, whether it is in India or Pakistan, is dangerous, often resulting in mob violence, charges of treason and public shaming. Unconsciously or consciously, Mushtaq Bashir’s son was perhaps dealing with the same identity issues. He must renounce his Sikh past to be a true Pakistani. He may have felt that there was no room to talk about such matters in his home country. Across the border, in a country that is often perceived in Pakistan as synonymous with Hindus, and to some extent Sikhs, such talk may have seemed more acceptable to him.

  Amardeep tells me that his bua eventually remarried and settled in Rawalpindi, where she continues to live. I ask him if I could speak to her but he is hesitant. ‘She is very old now and her family is reluctant to take her back into those traumatic years. They are also scared to speak in case of any backlash from the Muslim community. She has changed her name and lives as a Muslim now but her Sikh past continues to haunt the family. While I was on my way to her house in Pindi, I was enquiring about her whereabouts on the street. One man looked at my turban and then, completely avoiding any contact with me, said to the driver, “Yeh us bibi ko dhoond rahey hain jo inkey mazhab ki thi” (he is looking for that woman who belonged to his religion). That was the time it hit me hard that a child of five years of age, who was adopted by a local Muslim and grew up as a Muslim, still has to battle the stigma of being from another faith. So I’m sure you will understand that the family is very hesitant to talk about that part of their lives.’

  I tell him I understand. Seven decades after Partition, there are many people on both sides of the border whose religious heritage continues to colour their social standing and communal relationships in society. Amardeep tells me that his bua’s children, too, both from her first and second marriage, have grown up trying to shrug off the Sikh shadow, constantly trying to prove that they are true Muslims, and hence true Pakistanis.

  He says that if I really want to, I could speak to one of them. After our call, I reach out to Amardeep’s bua’s son who, after some persuasion, agrees to meet me in Rawalpindi. I meet him at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), as requested by him. He feels that a public place will attract less attention to our conversation. Amir (the name has been changed to protect his identity) walks in ten minutes late. He is wearing formal pants and a dress shirt and insists that we order something to eat before starting our conversation. We settle for Pepsi and French fries before I turn on my recorder. I notice that Amir keeps looking behind us, as if to ensure that no one is listening to our conversation. His shoulders are stiff, his voice low. He begins to tell me of how he first heard about his mother’s past, how she narrated the horror stories of her childhood. A moment later, he breaks down and starts to cry. I turn the recorder off. His silent cries are drowned amidst the loud screeches of children pushing and pulling chairs, of mothers yelling at the young ones and of men speaking loudly on cellphones while enjoying a late-afternoon meal. When Amir becomes quiet again, we return to our conversation and he tells me about his mother, about the strong, fierce personality she is. He tells me of the stories she shared with him: of her earliest memories of her family, of her growing-up years, of raising five children as a young teen, of being orphaned and then widowed. He tells me he would love for me to meet her, for he is sure I have never come across a woman like her. But then he explains his fears, his reluctance. ‘We are afraid of a backlash from both the Taliban (the conditions for religious minorities are precarious in Pakistan, and having a non-Muslim heritage can make one particularly vulnerable to religious extremists) and the state (non-Muslims are at times treated as suspects in the country, their allegiance and patriotism questioned). We keep a very low profile.’

  I sit in my car and say my goodbyes, promising not to share any of the personal details he disclosed to me. I look at him from the window, and though he is a tall, broad man, I see him recede into the crowd. It is almost as if he wants to hide, to go unnoticed. A family whose matriarch gave up her religion at the tender age of five, continues to hide its identity, continues to try and dissolve into the folds of mainstream society.

  ***

  ‘“We’ll celebrate Eid in Srinagar!” that’s what the tribals shouted when they entered Muzaffarabad in October 1947. I think Eid was meant to be in November and I am told that the tribals would have succeeded in occupying Srinagar by then but they made a mistake; they weren’t professional fighters and their personal interest came first,’ says Amardeep during our phone conversation. He tells me that he heard of several cases of rapes and looting by the ‘tribals’ during the course of his research for his book. ‘They started loading trucks with stolen goods instead of moving forward and this delayed their entry into Srinagar. My chachi (paternal aunt) was in Uri at this time, an area through which the tribals had to pass in order to get to Srinagar.

  ‘She heard of the massacres in Muzaffarabad and ran away to Srinagar. She is 102 years old now and lives in Dehradun. I spoke to her son and he told me he took her back to Uri a few years ago, where she had left her house and life behind. Unfortunately, her house was no more, for it had come to be situated in no-man’s-land after the line was drawn and was thus demolished. But they got special permission to go to the area, where she saw a banyan tree that was planted outside her house. Would you believe it, she called an official who was posted nearby and said, aide neechay bundooq ghari si, ainu khol (I had hidden a gun under the tree, dig it out for me). At that time everyone used to have a gun in hill stations, so it was no big deal, but the officer was dumbfounded. He kept saying, “How do I know where your gun is, Ma’am?”’ For a moment both Amardeep and I laugh as we imagine the official’s reaction to an aged woman claiming to have buried a gun under a tree. Such stories provide momentary relief from the harsh reminders of a brutal past. He then tells me of his father’s visit back to Uri.

  ‘My father had homes and shops in Muzaffarabad and Uri. He had moved away in 1944 but always spoke so positively about it. In fact, the only languages he knew were Urdu and Gurmukhi. Yet, he never went back, not even to Uri (which is in Indian-administered Kashmir), for so many years. I could never understand this—why wouldn’t he go back to the place where he grew up?’ Amardeep’s father, like so many other Partition survivors, could probably not bear to go back. The experience would have been too overwhelming, bringing back memories of loss and bloodshed.

  ‘It was only in 1978 that he went to Uri, where he had a lot of land. My mother was with him. Everything had changed, new markets had developed further away from the border. But one of the old gurdwaras was still there, near which my father had land. When they reached there, a Muslim man, with whom he had left his property, welcomed him and said, “Tu Sunder Singh hai? (Are you Sunder Singh?) You left your land with me; come take it back. My sons’ intentions are not good, they want to usurp it.” My dad told him to let it go, that he could do what he wanted to with it now, but that incident shows how much trust and friendship there was in the older generations.’

  Many other Partition survivors I had spoken to over the years had shared similar tales of inter-communal bonds. It was always moving to hear how people risked their lives to help those from other communities, or how they locked and left their homes, handing over their property to Hindu, Muslim or Sikh neighbours, trusting them with their lives’ earnings at a time when the same religious groups were slitting each other’s throats. Such were the dichotomies, the contradictions that Partition brought: on one hand rupturing all bonds and on the other, unable to create a divide between old friends and neighbours.

  Today, Amardeep regrets his father’s decision to not pursue the state subject document, which is issued to all residents of Jammu & Kashmir. As per law established under the Dogra regime, only those who have this document can purchase land across the state of J&K, on both sides of the LoC. ‘I think my father just wanted to move on and leave everything
in the past behind, but today, I can’t buy land there, I cannot even prove that I am from there. My chacha’s (paternal uncle) son went and tried to reclaim the state subject document. He was asked if he was Amar Singh’s son. But when he said yes, the patwari (the land records holder of the village) asked him how he would prove that. My blood flows from Kashmir but I have no evidence that we once belonged there, I have no proof of my past. The tribal raids in Muzaffarabad cleansed us out. The Hindus were not so visible and many of them ran away, but the Sikhs were targeted and eliminated one by one…’

  ***

  The raids did not only affect countless ordinary people like Amardeep’s family. They also shaped state policies over the following decades. The ‘tribal’ raids gave legitimacy to Indian forces to enter Kashmir and in many ways led to the first Indo-Pak war, a war that I shall return to later in the book. The 1947-48 war was the first of the several wars that were going to rock the region and it set the tone. After the war, General Akbar Khan stated that, ‘the only course left open for us was to help the people of occupied Kashmir with weapons, money and propaganda so that in due course they would be enabled to rise and fight for themselves’.4

  While other skirmishes and wars broke out between 1948 and the 1980s (to be covered later in the book), those were mostly fought between the Indian and Pakistani armies. In the late 1980s, however, it is alleged that the Pakistani state used the tactics identified by General Akbar Khan to sponsor non-state actors and spark an insurgency. Pakistan was accused of supplying money and weapons to Kashmiris and hundreds of young boys were allegedly trained in parts of Pakistan-administered Kashmir to wage a war against the Indian forces. This was one of the most violent decades in Kashmir’s history, with many ordinary boys turning towards militancy.