Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  sura to pehchaniye

  jo lade din ke het

  purza purza kat mare

  kabhi no chode khet

  know him as the brave one

  who fights against the enemy

  let his body be cut into a hundred pieces

  but never will he give up his faith

  The ceremony continues as other tales of death are told, deaths that are valorized, shorn of violence and presented as martyrdom. Over the years as the number of the survivors of Rawalpindi has decreased, the gap between the teller of the stories and the audience has increased: young people and small children now sit in the audience, listening, often rapt, for the stories are told with skill and passion. The women’s martyrdom conceals the men’s complicity. It was through attending this ritual and listening to the stories of survivors that I learnt that in several villages there had been protracted negotiations with the attackers. Money had changed hands. Weapons had been given up. And through all of this, the women had sat together, sometimes alone, sometimes with the men, plotting their own deaths, their martyrdom.

  For the community of survivors, the remembrance ritual works at many levels. It helps keep the memory alive, and at the same time, it helps them to forget. They remember, selectively, in order to forget. For what is remembered is what is described as the women’s heroism, their bravery. There is no talk of the many who must have refused, who did not wish to thus give up their lives, none of those who were abducted. The two sisters from Thamali, known to have disappeared and in all likelihood, to have been abducted, find no mention here. Nor do the many other women who figure in the list of missing persons from these villages. With each passing year, a further resolution is put on the hundreds of deaths, the massive loss of life: memory is simultaneously preserved and limited. The community of survivors of the Rawalpindi massacres has chosen to present, in this ritual, their own version of the history of March 1947. They have limited, as have all others, the memory of rape and abduction, and have transformed their history into one of valour and heroism.

  Once we enter the difficult and troubled terrain of memory then, the history of Partition presents us with different kinds of memories. We have, for example, memories of the State, professional, or historical memory, the memories of survivors, whether they are victims or aggressors or both, and the memories that we, as the generation born after Partition, have inherited. How can these be used? Do they, can they, work in tandem or do they have different rhythms? And how do we then reach into those deeper memories, which lie far below the initial layers of silence? For me, this search has only just begun, but in the course of seeking out these stories I have learnt that the exploration of memory can never be separated from the ethics of such an exploration, both for oneself as researcher, and for the subject one is researching. In my work on Partition, I have been constantly aware of this, and although, at the end of more than a decade of researching, reading, questioning, I am more than ever convinced that it is necessary, and important, to explore Partition memories, I am also convinced that this is not a search that can be taken on without the researcher constantly being faced with questions of its ethicality. It is a search on which the researcher must impose her own boundaries, her own silences but, in the end, it is a search that allows us access to a wealth of information and a different kind of knowledge. When combined with what we already know from the histories that exist, I believe this can only take us further forward in our understanding.

  I would like to end this work, as I began it, with two stories. Throughout my exploration, I have looked, by and large, at stories of loss, violence, division. There was, however, more to Partition than that: there were also innumerable stories of how people had helped each other, stories of friendship and sharing, stories where the borders laid down by the British to keep the two countries apart, were crossed time and again, and stories where the trauma and upheaval of Partition actually resulted in opening up opportunities for people to make something of their lives. It is two such stories that I would like to tell.

  In 1989 I learnt that in the terminology of the Indian State there was a category of women known as Partition widows. At the time, the People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), a civil rights organization based in Delhi, had commissioned a group of people — of whom I was one — to carry out an investigation into a strike being staged in Delhi. The strike was an unusual one. Not only were all its participants women, but every single one of them was above sixty or sixty-five years in age. Equally unusual was the issue they were striking for: not an increase in wages for none of them was ‘working’ in the strict sense of the term but instead, an increase in pensions. As Partition widows these women had been taken on by the State as its permanent liability and had been provided training and work of different kinds so that they could earn a living. The idea was to enable women who had thus been rendered alone by Partition to work, to become economically independent, and to acquire a sense of ‘dignity and self worth’. When this group of Partition widows had became too old to work, they retired on a small pension from the State and it was in this that they were now demanding an increase.

  The increase was small, and at the end of a few days of protest, the State sanctioned the required amount. In actual money terms this amounted to a mere Rs 250,000 a year, and that too for the years of life that remained for these women. But what was significant was the women’s determination to place their demands before the State and their strong belief that this was their right: ‘I walked all the way from Pakistan. I’ll walk here every day if I have to until our demands are met’, said one, while another pointed to the house of the Home minister and said, ‘he is our mai-baap, our parent, and we will place our demands before him.’

  There are any number of questions that can be raised about the State’s patriarchal, yet benevolent intervention into the lives of these women, but that is not my intention here. I tell this story merely to point to a lesser known fact of the trauma and upheaval of Partition, that in many ways, out of the tragedy, grew a sense of independence and opportunity for many people and particularly for women. If widows learnt to stand on their own feet, other women came into professions such as teaching, nursing, different kinds of business and, importantly, social work. For many middle class women particularly, social work became a real career option, as well as a way of involving themselves in the making of the new nation, and, as in the case of Anis Kidwai, putting their own grief and sense of loss to rest. Mridula Sarabhai, Kamlaben Patel, Premvati Thapar, Anis Kidwai, Damyanti Sahgal — all women we have met in this book — gave their lives to working with and for the new nation, and for its women. The work was not without its dilemmas: at times the agenda of the State conflicted with the interests of women, but all of them made the best of the opportunity Partition gave them to make something of their own lives, as well as the lives of the women they worked with.

  The second story (which appeared in the News in Pakistan) I want to tell relates to a different reality. In 1947 twenty-four year old Iqbal Begum lost many members of her family in the violence of Partition. Like many others, she too was forced to leave her home in a small village, Kher Dikki, near Amritsar, and move to Pakistan. The horrors of Partition remained with her all her life. Many years later, when her grandson wanted to go on a peace delegation to Amritsar, she advised him against it. ‘Don’t go to Amritsar,’ she said, ‘they will kill you.’ But, while for Iqbal Begum, Partition called up stories of violence and loss, her daughter, Kulsoom, had a different experience. She too married into a family from Amritsar: Chaudhry Latif, her father-in-law, was a Partition refugee who had moved across to a house in Islampura (earlier Krishan Nagar) in Lahore. When Chaudhry Latif had moved into this spacious, elegant house in 1947, he had little idea of who the original owner was. One day, he received a letter from Jalandhar addressed simply to ‘The Occupant’. Opening it, Chaudhry Latif read in Urdu:

  I write to you as a human being. I hope you will not be put off that a Hindu has
written to you. We are human beings first and Hindu and Muslim only after that. I firmly believe you will oblige me by answering this letter in the name of the human bond we have.

  The letter went on to describe how its writer, Harikishan Das Bedi, who had earlier lived in the house Chaudhry Latif now occupied, had had to leave suddenly when Partition became a reality. Bedi, a teacher at the Sanatan Dharam High School in Lahore, had loved nothing more than his books and papers. Forced to move without much notice, Bedi had left behind everything including an incomplete manuscript of a book on geometry that he was writing, which lay on his table at home. Shortly after Partition, in September of 1947, Bedi came back to his home accompanied by the police but he was not allowed to take anything away from there. Later, after Chaudhry Latif moved in, Bedi wrote to him describing in detail where this or that book or paper or document was kept. From across the border, he directed the new owner to his almirahs, his tin trunks, asking if his precious papers and books could be kept carefully. The ‘things you don’t need, put them in a bag ...’ he said, and established his credentials by telling Chaudhry Latif a little about himself: ‘My students included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. In my eyes there was no difference between them. You can ask Chaudhry Siraj, my Muslim neighbour, Deena Nath and I guarded his house during the riots. He was not in Krishan Nagar at that time but we did not let anybody harm his house.’

  Equally carefully, Chaudhry Latif followed Bedi’s instructions. He collected every bit of paper, Bedi’s books and documents and, over time, made up small parcels and sent them across to Jalandhar. Chaudhry Latif’s son described how his father ‘replied to all of Bedi’s letters and even sent parcels of his belongings to Jalandhar. They had developed a special relationship.’ For many years, the two friends maintained a correspondence across the border, and it was only much later, after Chaudhry Latif had died, that his daughter-in-law, Kulsoom, found all Bedi’s letters neatly tied up and kept in one corner of his cupboard. No one knows if Harikishan Das Bedi is alive or dead, but his letters to Chaudhry Latif provide a moving testimony to another side of the history of Partition. In his second letter to Latif, Bedi said:

  I read your letter over and over again and felt that it had been written by a true friend. I also read it out to many of my friends. All agree that had all Hindus and Muslims shared the feelings which you have expressed in your letter, the bloodbath would never have taken place and we, living in India and Pakistan, would have taken our countries to great heights. But God had other plans. I shudder to think of what Hindus and Muslims have done to their fellow countrymen ... And the worst part is that it was all perpetrated in the name of religion. No religion allows such bloodletting.

  Whether or not Bedi’s hopes would have been realized, the correspondence between him and Chaudhry Latif will remain, evidence of the fact that borders can be crossed and friendships built and maintained. When — and if — I come back to Partition, it is this aspect of it that I would like to explore.

  Footnotes

  1 Beginnings

  1. James E. Young: Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, Introduction.

  2. James Young, op. cit.

  3 ‘Facts’

  1. AICC papers. F no-CL 9 (part 1)/1946, Punjab. I have kept to the original text and spelling of this letter.

  2. After Partition, Modern India Series, Delhi, Publications Division, 1948, pp. 20–21.

  3. After Partition, pp. 50–55.

  4. Ibid., and H. Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, Delhi, Department of Rehabilitation, 1967.

  5. Armed Forces Reconstruction Committee of the ten committees set up to deal with ‘The Administrative Consequences of Partition’.

  6. Navtej K. Purewal, ‘Displaced Communities: Some Impacts of Partition on Poor Communities’ in international Journal of Punjab Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Jan-June 1997, 129–46.

  7. See Kirpal Singh, The Partition of the Punjab, Patiala, Publications Bureau, 1972.

  8. Kirpal Singh, Select Documents on Partition of Punjab, 1947, India and Pakistan: Punjab, Haryana and Himachal — India and Punjab — Pakistan, Delhi, National Bookshop, 1991, pp. 144–46.

  9. After Partition, pp. 28–29.

  10. After Partition, p. 30.

  11. Kirpal Singh, Select Documents on Partition of Punjab, p. 744 (author’s interview with Cyril Radcliffe).

  12. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Tryst with Destiny — free but divided’, in India! Special issue on 50 years of independence published by The Hindu, August 1997.

  13. Sumit Sarkar: Modern India 1885–1947, Madras, Macmillan India, 1983, ‘Introduction’.

  14. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, London, Virago, 1986, pp. 5–6.

  4 Women

  1. I have pieced together this account from newspaper reports, books and an unpublished manuscript: Lahore: A Memoir by Som Anand. There are many different versions to the Buta Singh-Zainab story now, particularly as it has acquired the status of a legend, so details vary in each. I believe too that the film of this story, Kartav Singh, has recently been released on video in Pakistan.

  2. U. Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, Delhi, Department of Rehabilitation, 1967, p. 30.

  3. The Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949 (Act No. LXV of 1949).

  4. Damyanti Sahgal: Personal interview

  5. Anis Kidwai: Azadi ki Chaon Mein (Hindi) Delhi, National Book Trust, 1990, p. 131.

  6. Kirpal Singh: The Partition of the Punjab, Publications Bureau, Punjab University, Patiala, 1972, p. 171.

  7. Anis Kidwai, Azadi ki Chaon Mein, p. 142.

  8. Sixteenth Meeting of the Partition Council, 1948.

  9. Published as an appeal in The Hindustan Times, Janauary 17, 1948. Quoted in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 5, Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru Fund, 1987, p. 113.

  10. Quoted in G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading upto and Following the Partition of India, Delhi, Oxford University Press,1949, rpt 1989, p. 75.

  5 ‘Honour’

  1. Kirpal Singh, The Partition of the Punjab, p. 171.

  2. India: Constituent Assembly of India (Legislative) Debates, 1949. Unless otherwise stated, all further references to the debates in this section are taken from the Debates of this year.

  3. Organiser, July 10, 1947.

  4. Organiser, December 14, 1949.

  5. Organiser, December 14, 1949.

  6. Organiser, December 14, 1949.

  7. Organiser, Novermber 30, 1949.

  8. Organiser, July 10, 1947.

  9. Organiser, November 13, 1948.

  10. Organiser, September 25, 1947.

  11. Organiser, August 19, 1948.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Some Reflections on Urdu’ in Seminar 359, July 1989, 25.

  6 Children

  1. Anis Kidwai: Azadi ki Chaon Mein. Both the above stories are from this book.

  2. Damyanti Sahgal: Personal interview.

  3. Dawn, 12 May 1948.

  4. Constituent Assembly Debates, 1949. All quotations relating to the debate are from here, unless otherwise stated.

  5. U. Bhaskar Rao: The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 77.

  6. Ibid.

  7. India Today, special issue to mark fifty years of Indian independence, August 1997.

  8. Dawn, August 1956.

  7 ‘Margins’

  1. Anis Kidwai, Azadi ki Chaon Mein, pp. 80–82.

  2. Ambedkar to Nehru, December 18, 1947.

  3. AICC Papers, Relief and Rehabilitation, F. No. 9–26 (II)/1947.

  4. AICC Papers, F. No. G-19 (KW-I) Harijan Sewak Sangh, 1946–48.

  5. All India Depressed Classes League, Karol Bagh, in AICC Papers, F. No. G-19 (KW-I) Harijan Sewak Sangh, 1946–48.

  6. AICC Papers, Punjab, F. No. G-26, 1948.

  7. Ibid.

  8. AICC Papers, F. No. G-19 (KW-I
), Harijan Sewak Sangh, 1946–48.

  9. AICC Papers, Punjab, F. No. G-26, 1948.

  10. AICC Papers, F. No. G-19 (KW-I) Harijan Sewak Sangh, 1946–48.

  11. Bhagwan Das, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, Selected Speeches, Vol. II, 1969, Bhim Patrika Publications, Jalandhar, pp. 31–42.

  12. Ambedkar to Nehru, December 14, 1947.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Hindu Mahasabha Papers. F.No. C-168/1947.

  8 Memory

  1. Annarita Buttafucco, ‘On “mothers” and “sisters”: Fragments on women/feminism/historiography,’ in Nuovo DWF (Italian), no. 15, 1980.

  2. Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, ‘Learning to Listen: Interview Techniques and Analysis’, in Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (eds) Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 11.

  3. See James E. Young: Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, op. cit.

  Acknowledgements

  More than at the thought of writing this book, I have balked at the thought of writing the acknowledgments. How will I thank the many friends who have held my hand and been more than just supportive throughout this exercise? How will I even remember them? And what will I do if I forget? It has been so many years since I embarked on this project. I did not know then that it would eventually turn into a book, but now that it has, I need to cast my mind back many years to remember the different ways in which this work has been influenced by my friends — although of course, I must make the usual disclaimer that the mistakes are all mine.