Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  This book then attempts to interweave stories and histories. Let me try to illustrate this point with a story. One of the facts of Partition that I have referred to earlier relates to the division of the Armed Forces. Properties, moveable and immoveable, were divided, and people were given the choice of joining the Pakistan army or staying with the Indian army. On the face of it, this is just information. But I was intrigued by it: what was it that guided people’s decisions to go to one or other side? Was it only religion? How was this division played out in life? Abdul Shudul, serving at the time at the lowest rung of the ladder in the army, had a choice in this matter like his other colleagues. He exercised it by staying in India. Appearing before a board of army officers — one from Pakistan and one from India — Abdul Shudul confirmed that he wanted to stay on in India. His home and family were here, and although there had been some rumblings of discontent in his village, Begumpur (which was fairly close to Delhi), he felt he had little to fear from his neighbours. He had a good job, had just started a family, and it seemed much easier to stay on.

  But then, his life took an unexpected turn. Concerned at the possibility of trouble, he sent his wife and two-month-old daughter away with his brother — who had decided to move to Pakistan. They were to go and stay with his in-laws, on the other side of Delhi, before the brother left for Pakistan. On the way, they met with trouble. They never made it to their destination, and instead, found themselves in the refugee camp at Purana Qila, where people were housed, waiting — for the most part — to be sent to Pakistan. A week after they reached the camp, they left for Pakistan. Unaware of all this, Abdul Shudul set out one day to fetch his family back from his in-laws and got there to find they had never arrived. He then scoured the Purana Qila camp, and learnt that they had left for Pakistan a week ago. He feared they had all been killed: ‘I knew that several trains to Pakistan had been stopped and the people in them murdered. I was sure this had happened to my family too.’ Distraught, he came home, prepared now to live his life alone. Some weeks later, quite by chance, he found an address label inside one of the trunks his brother had kept at his home, and on it, an address of the place in Peshawar to which his brother had planned to go. Shudul prepared to go to Pakistan. ‘At the time,’ he said, ‘there was no passport system, so it was not so difficult to go.’ In October of 1947, he left for Pakistan.

  His first stop there was at the army headquarters. Here, he was fortunate to find one of his old officers from India, who promised him that he would have his old job back. ‘Are you sure you want to stay in Pakistan?’ he asked Shudul. ‘Earlier you had chosen India.’ But Shudul reassured him that he did want to be in Pakistan, now that his family was there, there was nothing to take him back to India. The officer said he would do all he could to help. The next few months were spent in sending letter after letter to the Army Headquarters in India, requesting that Shudul’s file be sent to Pakistan so that he could be properly tranferred into the Pakistan army. The officer, a refugee himself, went out of his way to help other refugees. This wasn’t, of course, liked by others who weren’t refugees, and Shudul suspected that it was one of those clerks who perhaps blocked any replies from India. Or perhaps India simply could not be bothered to send them. His papers did not come. At the army headquarters in Pakistan, according to Shudul, it was generally believed that India was not at all keen to transfer the papers of those who had opted for Pakistan, and all kinds of blocks and obstructions were put in the way. He became an unwitting victim of the tussle for petty power between the two countries.

  Meanwhile, he had managed to track down his brother and family. They came to fetch him, and he went for some time to Peshawar. ‘But we were not happy,’ he said, ‘we knew no one. People did not mix much with refugees, and my wife kept saying let’s go back to India. So I thought, since I’m not getting a job here, I may as well go back to India and get my old job back.’ In February of 1948 they returned. Their home in Begumpur was now occupied by a Hindu refugee. They applied to get it back. Shudul went back to his old office, and asked if he could have his job back. It took him several months of making applications, but finally, nine months later, he rejoined the army. And shortly afterwards his house was vacated by the people living there. ‘Actually, they had been asked to vacate, but they themselves were waiting to get a house. So they requested me for a little time, they promised they would return the house, and ensure that I was actually installed in it when they moved out, and sure enough, they did.’ Today Abdul Shudul continues to live in his old home in Begumpur with three generations of his family, almost the only Muslim family in that village. ‘The people have changed,’ he said, ‘most of the old ones have gone. But still, we have never had any trouble here.’

  In his narration, nation and country seemed to have meant little to Shudul. The important thing was to be where there was work, and family. If that took him to Pakistan, he would go, and if that brought him back to India then that was what he would do. I asked him, time and again, why he had chosen to return to India, what life was like in Pakistan, hoping perhaps for some insight into feelings of nationhood and homelands. But his answer was no nonsense, direct: ‘I came back because there seemed to be no chance of getting my old job back there. The Indian government just wasn’t sending my files. And my wife thought, let’s just go back to our old home, at least we have a place to live. [my italics] So we did.’

  It is stories such as Abdul Shudul’s which lie behind the ‘facts’ of Partition, and it is stories such as these that enable us to look beyond what the facts reveal. For armed forces personnel to opt for one or other country was not such a simple decision after all, and opting was not the end of the story. It was only the beginning.

  My uncle’s story. Abdul Shudul’s life. The stories you will encounter later in this book — for me, it is these experiences, the perceptions they contain, the feelings they reveal, that make up the meaning of Partition. From where I stand today — a woman of the post-Partition generation, born to refugee parents, a feminist, a middle class Indian committed to the ideals of secularism and democracy, it is these perceptions and histories that allow me to go back and arrive at a different view, a different interpretation. This is what Partition looks like, to me, when you put people — instead of grand politics — at its centre. In what follows I explore this further by looking at the histories of three of the most marginalized groups of actors in Indian history: women, children, and Harijans, the lowest of the low in Hindu society.

  Part II

  RAJINDER SINGH

  Which nagar? Which side? Which direction?

  In 1990 Sudesh and I began to speak to Rajinder Singh, a three-wheeler scooter driver in Delhi. We boarded his scooter, to get from one part of the city to another. Somewhere along the way, because he looked the right age, we asked him where he was from. He suggested we come to his home and he would tell us his story. The story took us to Gandhi Nagar, a resettlement area on the outskirts of Delhi where Rajinder Singh and his family lived in a small house set deep in a narrow, crowded lane. As with all the families we visited, they welcomed us into their homes as if we belonged there. The several sessions during which we interviewed him and his brother, Manmohan Singh, were interspersed with long conversations with neighbours, who dropped in and out, curious to see what was happening, and who had their own stories to tell. Stories were begun, only to be left halfway as people interrupted; sometimes a sudden thought would break the narrative as Rajinder or Manmohan asked themselves if they should be telling us this. As always in family situations, we seldom got to speak to the wives, except in snatched moments when we were able to get them alone. Initially concerned at this, we later decided not to attempt to speak to men and women at the same time, but to do so separately.

  Partition meant many different things to different people. For Rajinder Singh, his most powerful memory is not of the event itself but of something that took place a few years earlier when, as a young boy, he ran away from home to join a group of
street singers and prostitutes in Hira Mandi in Lahore. Four years after his disappearance, his father managed to track him down and came to the kotha to fetch him back. The young Rajinder watched from the roof of the kotha as his father walked through the marketplace, he listened to the jibes and taunts directed at the old man, and then saw him being deliberately tripped by a flower seller at the foot of the stairs of his ‘home’. As he fell, Rajinder’s father’s turban came loose and rolled off, the ultimate loss of honour for a Sikh. Broken, the old man gathered up his turban and walked slowly away. Torn between his wish to stay on in a place which he loved, and compassion for his father, Rajinder followed him to the railway station, and thence to his home where he then began a job in a utensil factory in Daska.

  It was here that he first came across evidence of the divisions that became much more visible after Partition. The factory owner, a Hindu, employed Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims and as Partition drew closer, fights began to break out between them. Rajinder has no special feelings of enmity or hatred towards his Muslim co-workers. He tells his story — of which I reproduce only a part here — with a matter-of-factness and realism which runs through all descriptions. Like many people who did not have a ‘profession’, Rajinder turned his hand to different things after he crossed over to India: he worked in a halvai shop in Amritsar, later set up his own halvai shop, drove a tonga for a while, and when we met him, was driving a scooter which he owned. I have chosen to include a section of Rajinder’s interview here because he describes how people from his family and his village came away on foot, in a kafila that grew as more and more people joined it. Upto a certain distance the kafila was accompanied, and presumably protected, by the Pakistani army, and then, the Indian army took over. He said he had never really told this story to anyone before. His grandchildren were too young, and his children too busy making their own lives to be bothered to listen. Yet, as we sat and spoke, family members came in again and again and asked us to replay this or that incident, as if listening to his voice on tape somehow invested it with a greater authority. Rajinder’s narrative here recounts how unprepared people were to move, how they had to be convinced to do so, and, once they did, the enormous hardship and suffering they faced on the way. He tells the story of a woman who gave birth to a girl (she was born by the river Dek, he told me later, and all her life she was called Deko), of an old man who offered her support because he had left his own granddaughter behind. We are not told whether the granddaughter was abducted, killed or given away, but the help offered to the pregnant woman now seems almost a sort of penance. I find Rajinder’s account moving, for its sense of inexorable, slow, tortuous movement as people headed, as he said, from a life shattered by forces beyond their control, into an unknown future. In his words, ‘Our hearts were full of fear — where were we headed? Where would we end up?’ — a question that runs through virtually every Partition narrative that I have heard.

  RAJINDER SINGH

  My bua’s older son’s in-laws lived in a village called Richade. My brother went there with my bua’s younger son. He thought, we have to go out this way anyway, so let’s go little by little, so that everyone does not get killed all at once. We sort of knew we would have to die anyway, so we thought that if we spread ourselves out, then we could perhaps see if one or the other could be saved. I went to fetch my wife ... but I was worried that my brother would get left behind. So we all came to a place called Baba Lakhan, we came there and people from that village stopped there. I said to them, there are so few of you, why don’t you also include people from this village. There are many Sikhs, include them and our kafila will grow large and become strong. As it is there are only a few people from this one village, why not increase the size of the kafila? In this way we kept progressing and others joining up and the kafila kept growing. We went to another village and found that everyone there was sleeping comfortably. It was about nine at night. They were all asleep, they had no worry about anything. When we went and told them, they said, no, can these sorts of things ever happen? I said to them if they have not happened before, they have happened today. If you think these kinds of things will not happen, you are mistaken, they are happening. So some of the older people started to pay attention. They asked, are you speaking the truth? I said, yes, go outside and look, go to Baba Lakhan. There are many people there, waiting ... When we came back to Baba Lakhan we found people from two more villages had collected there. Now there were some thousand people or so ... earlier there had only been four or five hundred ... Hindus, Sikhs ... Whatever people could pick up, big things and small, they put clothes on top of those they were wearing, and threw a khes or sheet over their shoulders. They picked up whatever they could and then they joined the kafila. Who could take along heavy things?

  And the kafila began to move. The next village on the way was Katiana. There, there was a marriage, a Musalmaan’s wedding, and there were a lot of fireworks and things going on. We thought there was firing and guns, so we stopped the kafila some distance away from the village. Some people said they would go and find out ... as they were leaving people said to them, you should be careful, don’t go openly. It shouldn’t happen that you have gone to find out and you just get killed yourself ... they went and looked and they heard music and realized it was a wedding!

  Gradually, daylight came. This was the first night, and then it became morning and as the sun rose, it began to rain. It rained so much and our clothes became so heavy ... we could not even lift them. Our clothes got more and more wet, and people just left them there. Our stomachs were empty, we were hungry, our clothes were wet and sodden, our hearts were full of fear — where were we headed? Where would we end up? Our hearts were full of grief: what will happen? Where will we go? It’s like when you started from home today, you knew you were going to Gandhi Nagar. We did not even know this. Which nagar, which side, which direction ... we had no desire to eat, nor was there anything to eat. After all, when we left our homes, we did not carry out atta with us, we did not take the rotis from our tavas. We did not think that we will take atta and knead it and cook it. We just left, as we were, empty-handed. Then some people fell ill — some fell ill from grief, some got diarrhoea, some had fever ... so many people had left all of a sudden, they could not all be healthy and stay well. Some were ill from before, some fell ill from sorrow, and then there was rain and then the sun. The heat and cold made people’s bodies shrivel up, and from all these changes people fell ill. And what with all this, it was afternoon in Batiana before we knew it.

  There was one woman who was pregnant and about to give birth. The whole kafila began moving, but she was already a little upset and she said, you people go on ahead, I am prepared to die. In any case, I have no one to call my own. The hardship I have to face, I will bear, don’t worry about me ... the baba who was with me, I said to him, baba, it is given to some people to do good. Your granddaughter was with you and you decided to come with me. I kept telling you why bother ... but look at this poor woman, she is about to give birth, she is a young woman, and here she is lying in the road ... let us try to do good. We are all full of grief, we are all weeping. He said, what is it? I said, look at that girl, she has no brother or father, and she is alone, her man has been killed and she is about to give birth. There were some other women sitting with her, and when the kafila began to move, they too started to move. So my baba said, girl sit on my horse, and wherever we find someone who can help, we will take you there. But perhaps from fear, she gave birth right there, to a daughter. Out of fear. No one had a knife or anything, you know the instruments you need to cut the cord. There was one man, and he had a kind of sword, we asked him, baba, this is the thing, please help us. So he gave it to us and the women cut the cord, and we stopped the kafila for about three quarters of an hour. We said to them, you are leaving your honour behind to go to the houses of unknown people. Even if you get a little late, how does it matter? On the way there was a village called Pasroor. We had the Baluchi military with us. They
put us in a school there. They said, anyone who tries to get out of here, out of these four walls, we will cut him down. The school had a four foot high wall. They tried to be strict but we had nothing to eat or drink ... so people went, they broke into a shop and they brought some sacks of mungphalis, peanuts, so we roasted those and ate them. After all, what else could we do? Someone got this much and someone got that much. Then someone else jumped the wall and got to the sugarcane fields nearby to steal sugarcane. The military people killed some of them — in front of us they killed a Jat. His family had a cart, they had loaded things on to it and brought it, so they set fire to it and used it for the last rites of their man who was killed ...

  After Narowar, the Madrasi military joined the kafila ... they told the Baluchis to go away, that their duty had finished and they should go away ... the two militaries confronted each other. One said, it is our duty, while the other said, your duty is over, you should go away ... the wells had medicine and poison in them, there were dead people in there, there was no water to drink, we were hungry and thirsty ... nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Then our military brought two trucks to Narowar and they were filled with atta. They spread a tarpaulin and handed out atta to people, saying take as much as you want. They gave us corn, they kept giving it to us saying eat, destroy their fields. The Madrasi military really helped us. Everyone was grief stricken. Someone’s mother had died, someone’s father had gone, someone’s daughter had been abducted ... then we moved on. You know you feel some fear of a dead body, but at the time, we had no fear at all. ... From there we came to the bridge on the Ravi. There they told us, this is the limit of our duty, we are now going back to help the kafila that has come from Daska. We saw a trainload of Hindus had been killed and in Dera Baba Nanak, a trainload of Musalmaans who had come from the direction of Ludhiana had been killed ... they killed each other’s people. We saw bodies of Musalmaans, utensils lying in the mud, clothes ... some people buried under others, and disease and illness all around. When we got to Dera Baba Nanak they said to us, you have come home. But we thought, our home was over there. We have left it behind. How can this be home?