Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  It struck me that identity is a peculiar thing. My family is half Sikh: my grandfather (my father’s father) wore a turban, had a Sikh name, and practised the Sikh religion. Like a good wife, my grandmother, a Hindu, followed suit. Then, as with many mixed Punjabi families, the eldest son is ‘given’ to Sikhism, while the others have a choice — whether to become Sikh, or remain Hindu. My father, being the eldest, thus had Singh attached to his name, while all his brothers had the more Hindu, Chander. But, if the family was religious at all, it was the Sikh religion they practised or, more correctly, remembered to practise on the odd ritual occasion. Even this is not strictly correct: marriages in the family took place according to Hindu custom; death rituals were more Sikh, being followed, usually, by the forty-eight hour akhand path which involves reading the entire Guru Granth Sahib. And we, my generation, had always grown up with a sort of subliminal awareness of both religions, but also with a distance from the practice of religion. We thought of ourselves as secular beings.

  Then, in 1984 Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards; this was a signal for reprisals on the Sikh community — nearly three thousand Sikhs were killed in and around Delhi alone; and suddenly everyone who had a Sikh name, or looked Sikh, became painfully aware of their vulnerability. By this time, my father no longer wore a turban, and did not have long hair, but we did, and do, have a Sikh name. This was the first time that we — my siblings, our cousins, our Sikh friends — began to get a glimmering of what fear meant, of what our parents and grandparents had gone through. Later, in the relief camps where we worked, I found myself again and again asserting my ‘Sikh’ identity — somehow I felt it gave me a legitimacy, a closeness with the victims of the riots, that it helped me to understand something of what they had been through. I told myself that as children (and this was the truth, but it somehow became invested with a greater moral force at the time) we had spent a great deal of time in gurudwaras, hardly any at all in. Hindu temples; that even in our home, the prayer room (actually a room used more for storage but that was quickly transformed into a prayer room whenever my grandmother came to stay with us) had had a picture of Guru Nanak, not of any of the Hindu gods. Suddenly, many of us, non-religious at the best of times, began to feel Sikh.

  By the time, eight years later, when the Babari Masjid was destroyed by right wing Hindu hordes, my sense of ‘Sikhness’ had once again become subterranean. Things had, ostensibly, gone back to normal. I did not feel the same need to assert my Sikh identity. But when the mosque fell, I remember — and I was not alone in this — a distinct sense of shame at being Hindu. And also a resentment: this was an identity I had not chosen, but one I had been born with, an identity that, until it became necessary to separate ‘Sikhness’ from, had actually encompassed both. Like many other Hindus at the time, I felt a need to apologize to my Muslim friends; a need to dissociate myself from the communal Hindus who had destroyed the mosque, even a sense of guilt at being ‘of the majority community’ and, simultaneously, a sense of outrage at myself for this guilt which would not allow me to be critical of Muslim communalism, even though rationally I knew it to be as dangerous as its counterpart, Hindu communalism.

  The borders of Hindu and Sikh identities are, of course, more fluid than those that lie between Hindus and Muslims. But, in Punjab at least, while religion may have divided Hindus and Muslims, there was a great deal they shared culturally as Punjabis. Even today, when Punjabi Hindus and Muslims meet, there is an immediate sharing of, a reference to, a Punjabi identity. Where then does one draw the borders of religious identity and how are these then transcended and therefore blurred by cultural identity?

  And if Partition was not only about Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, how then, had others felt about it and indeed, how had their lives been affected by it? Christians, for example, occupied a rather ambiguous space. A small community in numbers, they had no special identity in terms of their work, as Harijans had. And because of their supposed ‘closeness’ to the colonisers, they were not really seen as ‘acceptable’ figures in the nationalist discourse, because this discourse itself was seen in terms of particular identities. Nonetheless, how had they felt? Was Partition, for them, simply a war between Hindus and Muslims, or was it more? Did they feel involved? In Delhi I spoke to Lakshmi Fenn, widow of an army officer who was involved in keeping law and order in Delhi after the 1947 riots. For her and her husband, the question of being anything other than Indian did not arise and, she added, they were not alone in this. But this was not the expectation people had of them.

  She tells a story of two young air force officers (Christians) who were forced to crash land in the Rajasthan desert close to the border. Immediately they came out of their aircraft, they were surrounded by the local people. What are you, they wanted to know? Are you Hindu or Muslim? When they tried to explain that they were neither, that they were, in fact, Christian in terms of religion, and officers of the Indian Air Force otherwise, no one understood what they were talking about. And the two men came very close to being killed. This kind of questioning did not only come from the ‘other’ community. Jean Simeon, now in her eighties, recalls that as a young woman she felt very involved in the nationalist movement: ‘but I was really ostracized within my community for this. What is all this to you, people would say, why don’t you leave those Hindus and Muslims to sort out their differences?’ When Partition happened, Jean was in Belgaum with her husband, living in a Christian college with an uncle. ‘On one side of us was a Muslim mohalla, on the other a Hindu. It was quite frightening.’ But seeing them as somehow ‘different’, people of both communities came to them for help and shelter. Clearly, the expectation was that the violence would somehow not touch them — although violence hardly plays by such rules.

  It took Maya Rani’s interview to make me realize how much I too had taken for granted about Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs being the primary, indeed the only, identities at Partition. Yet, as even this one interview showed, Partition had also been about many other things — in this case caste, and equally, class. I decided to look deeper into this question, and to go back to Maya’s interview. Had she said more about her identity as a Dalit that I had missed? Revisiting the text, I was astonished — and ashamed — at what I had missed. Asked if she or her friends had had any Muslim friends, Maya had responded:

  No, I didn’t have any Muslim friends of my own, but my mother had a friend whose condition was so bad that it made me feel very sad. My mother didn’t have a sister so this friend was like a sister to her, and she cried for her. We cried too. My mother said: ‘your masi’s condition is very bad. She had daughers and she pleaded with my mother to keep her daughters. But my mother said, how can we, the police don’t allow us to do so. Hindus don’t allow us to do so. How can I hide your daughters? My hands are tied.’ You see, the Hindus kept a watch on everyone and if you hid anyone they would come immediately and make you take the people out. (my italics)

  Hindus were powerful enough to ensure that the Dalits did not offer protection to Muslims. It was perhaps this common perception of oppression at the hands of the majority community which made for a greater closeness among the Muslims and the Dalits in Punjab. Maya described a time, some years after Partition, when her mother, concerned for her Muslim friend, went to Pakistan to find her. The roads were opened for a few days. Once there, she met all her Muslim friends who, according to Maya, were happy to see her. Why should they not be, she said, when asked, ‘the fighting was between Muslims and Hindus. We didn’t fight with the Muslims. It had nothing to do with us.’

  Time and again Maya said she and her friends did not feel any danger. Could this be true? I have asked myself this question repeatedly. Yet, Maya was sixteen at the time, not a child. Her sense of non-involvement in the tension came as a real surprise to me. She remembers how scared people were; her memory of the time is graphic, almost visual in its detail. Yet she had no fear herself. Instead, in hindsight, she had a sort of pride of achievement at having am
assed so much wealth as a result of being in a situation of conflict. She said:

  ... there was no danger for us. Because we are Harijans. Whether it had become Pakistan or Hindustan, it made no difference to us. We would stay where we were born. Our elders felt that whatever happened, we wouldn’t move from this place. This was our home. If anyone had tried to make us leave, we would have shown our strength. After all, Harijans are not just anybody. We’re also a very powerful group. If that had happened, we would have asked for a separate state and they would have had to give it to us. We felt strong in this knowledge.

  Feeling strong in the knowledge of your strength, a sense of being a ‘powerful group’: this was a sense that had been building up among the Dalits for some time. Of the 12.6 million people who comprised the population of East Punjab, some 6.9 per cent (approximately 869,400) were Harijans. Since numbers were clearly so important — for they would make a difference in which community would be seen to be in the majority, and which in the minority — in Punjab, this could clearly have been a weapon of strength. Perhaps it was this awareness that led Maya and others to describe themselves as a ‘powerful group’.

  As I began to look, I found curious paradoxes in these stories — Maya and her friends had not been alone in being ‘invisible’ or ‘untouchable’ in the violence in their village. Shortly after the Rawalpindi riots in March 1947, P.N.Rajbhoj, then general secretary of the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, visited the area and said: ‘During my tour everywhere I learned with gratification that the scheduled caste people were little affected by the riots. If at any place any man has suffered, it was because he was mistaken for a caste Hindu. Otherwise, when a man told the rioters he was neither Hindu nor a Muslim he was left untouched.’4 Several questions remained unanswered, however: did this same invisibility/ untouchability — despite Maya’s experience — prevent Harijan women, and indeed their children, from being raped and abducted? And how could anyone tell the rioters that he was ‘neither Hindu nor a Muslim’? If it was indeed true that many Dalits escaped violence because of who they were, it must then follow that the aggressors knew the people they were killing: something that throws out of the window the received wisdom that many scholars of communal conflict cherish — that the aggressors are always outsiders, that they come in and disrupt the world of the victims. And if it is true that the aggressors often knew the people they were attacking and killing, could we then speculate that another source of the Dalits’ non-vulnerability could be that they were perhaps seen as too low, indeed too abhorrent to both communities, to be killed in a confrontation which, then, seems to be perceived by both as a contest between social equals? Yet, in many ways, Muslims and Hindus were not social equals, although they were certainly more equal to each other than Dalits were to them. And further, if we are to come back to the question of the rape of Dalit women, why is it then that in this most intimate of contacts, questions of untouchability, of ‘lowness’, do not arise? Could the answer lie in the fact that rape is a different kind of exercise of power than loot and murder?

  There was another side to this invisibility. In most places where communities live, practical arrangements settle into certain kinds of patterns. Different people perform different tasks, all of which go together to make up the business of living, as individuals, families, communities. In western Punjab, as in many other parts of India, lower castes and Dalits provided many of the ‘essential services’ necessary for daily life. A violent rupture of these life patterns, a tearing apart of the social fabric, such as Partition represented, left many of these ‘arrangements’ unsettled. People fled, they moved at random, they tried to stay together as communities, but all the systems did not necessarily get replicated in their new homes. In many places Dalits, performers of such essential services, invisible by virtue of their presence, now became visible by virtue of their absence. Where were they? Who would perform all the menial tasks that needed doing — the swabbing, the sweeping, the sanitary services? How would people live? Caste Hindus now began to ‘see’ Dalits. Dalits acquired an identity.

  An identity that, I discovered, had been forming for the Dalits for some considerable time. Gandhi and Ambedkar had both, in their different ways, focussed attention on Dalits and scheduled castes. But the Dalits rejected many of the things Gandhi had campaigned for as mere window dressing — entry into temples, drawing water from the same wells. Instead, what they wanted was political clout, political power and representation, and, most important of all, equal citizenship. On June 10, 1947, shortly after the Partition Plan was announced, H.J.Khandekar, President of the All India Depressed Classes League sent a representation to Mountbatten asking that adequate representation be given to people of the ‘Depressed Classes’ in the Boundary Commission for marking boundary lines in the division of Bengal and Punjab, ‘in order that the rights and privileges of the scheduled castes may not be crushed or overlooked’. Scheduled castes were a sizeable proportion of the population in Punjab — if others groups were being consulted in the drawing up of boundaries, they too needed to be asked what they felt. He attached the text of a resolution to this letter, a resolution which had been passed by the All India Depressed Classes League at its meeting earlier in the month. It read as follows:

  I. This meeting of the All-India Depressed Classes League feels that the Depressed Classes of the Bengal and Punjab will be greatly affected by the division of these two provinces and it is feared that there will be forcible conversions of the Depressed Classes in the Muslim Predominating Provinces and to stop this, it is vitally necessary that the boundary commission to be formed under the H.M.G.’s Plan, must include the representatives of the Depressed Classes.

  II (a). This committee deplores that due to the absolute lack of representation of the Depressed Classes in the last Punjab Ministry it could not do any constructive work for the Depressed Classes in the province. The Committee appeals to the Congress, Hindu and Sikh Leaders to give accurate representation to the Depressed Classes in the regional ministries, to be formed in the province in the near future.

  III. The Committee views with great concern the growing activities of the Muslim, Christian and Sikh missionaries for the conversion of the Depressed Classes to their respective faiths with a view to increasing their number solely for political purpose. These activities, if not checked in time, will not only reduce Depressed Classes to a non-entity but will also affect Hindu Society in general and will create fresh political problems and complications in every province.5

  In their fear of being used to increase the numbers of this or that community, or their concern at being forcibly converted, the scheduled castes were asserting their difference, and seeking to assert their strength. Scheduled caste groups were not alone in wanting a voice in political power. In November 1948 the Simla Branch of the All Christian Welfare Society expressed concern at ‘the manner and the mode in which the Christian interest has been scandalously ignored in the so-called sub-committee for Minorities Rights convened by the Premier and the Speaker of the East Punjab Provincial Assembly.’6

  A sense of separateness seemed to have become essential to establishing a sense of identity. Thus the fear of conversion at the hands of ‘others’ — Muslims, Sikhs, Christians. (Among the scheduled castes, there were different groups. The Scheduled Caste Federation was, in some senses, closer to the Muslims while the Depressed Classes League was closer to the Hindus) Conversion was suspect because it was done, clearly, ‘with a view to increasing their number solely for political purpose’. A demand for separate electorates, for proportional political representation, for a presence in the important decision making bodies, these were some of the broader realities that underlay the sense of difference, of separateness that Maya Rani had expressed and that, since my encounter with her, I have heard articulated several times over.

  Not all those who belonged to the ‘depressed classes’ subscribed to this particular sense of separateness, and there were groups who propagated organizi
ng on the basis of ‘economic interests’ rather than caste. But broadly speaking, a sense of separateness was building up. On the same visit to Punjab mentioned earlier, P.N. Rajbhoj is reported to have said: ‘The scheduled castes have nothing in common with caste Hindus. While the Sikhs, on the other hand, are practically the blood and bone of caste Hindus. The number of Scheduled Castes, including the Mazhabi Sikhs, is equal to the Sikhs. Hence if the Punjab is to be partitioned, it must be into three parts, namely the Muslim Punjab, Sikh-cum-Hindu Punjab and the Scheduled Caste Punjab.’7

  Here, then, was a parallel text on Partition. While Hindu and Muslim leaders argued and fought over weightage, representation, political power and, later, after Partition, over properties, monies, people (mainly women and children), another community of people — if one can use that term — fought to insert their voices and selves into this battle. Recognize us, they seemed to say, we too are a minority, we too fear for ourselves, we too have our own demands, our own rights and needs, we too want to carve out our own land. And lest this seem like a chimera, they had provided a rationale, and invented a name for this imaginary homeland: Achhutistan, the land of the untouchables. This, then, was what Maya Rani was talking about when she had said: ‘we would have asked for a separate state, and they would have had to give it to us.’