The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  Almost all Sikhs are Punjabi but not all Punjabis are Sikh. Punjab was the heartland of the Sikh Empire. The Sikh religion is incredibly proud of its history of valour and defending the weak, and Sikh soldiers have a formidable reputation. Punjab was one of the last states in India to be annexed by the British. Punjab couldn’t be touched while under the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a brilliant warrior and strategist who grew the Sikh Empire from the Khyber Pass in the West to Tibet in the East. It was a religiously diverse, secular state. But the Sikhs were known for their military prowess, even now Sikhs make up around 20 per cent of the Indian army and only 2 per cent of the Indian population and they would have defeated the British were it not for them being convinced to betray their own people. Over a million Indian soldiers enlisted for World War I, over two million for World War II.

  Then in 1947, well over 300 years after first setting foot in India, Britain departed and left a deep bloody scar in the land in the process. The State of Punjab was severed in two, creating two independent states of India and Pakistan: East Pakistan and West Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh. This division saw the largest recorded migration in human history. Fifteen million people were displaced and one million people were killed. Including members of my family. All my family were affected.

  Punjabis don’t do anything by halves, including trauma. Alcoholism, male suicide, forced marriage, domestic violence, female infanticide, drug addiction . . . have I missed anything? Mental health, Obesity and Type 2 diabetes maybe. We have it all, in buckets.

  Hidden away in every family are our dark secrets. But nobody discusses trauma, ever. And it shows – in the rates of alcoholism within the Punjabi community, the rates of suicide, the prevalence of domestic violence, we know there is a problem and yet we won’t know the true extent of the problem because it’s all hidden. Every Punjabi I know has experience of one or all of these. My aunt’s husband took his own life, leaving behind my mum’s sister and my cousins, his two teenage sons. My cousins are beautiful, tender and kind men, as was their dad. I don’t know the full story of what happened but sons in Punjabi families can feel a great deal of pressure and there really is no space for anyone, particularly men, to talk about mental suffering. In my experience, they usually hit the bottle and/or are really, really angry. I lost this uncle to suicide and I then lost two others to alcohol abuse.

  * * *

  To truly understand our trauma, we must understand our history. My own family history was intertwined with England long before I was born. The British have been puppet masters of my family’s fates for at least four generations. All of them serving the needs of the Empire, the needs of Great Britain.

  My nan’s father, my maternal great grandfather, was highly educated and got a job as a civil engineer on the railways in Burma. The British needed labour so employed the people they ruled over to serve the needs of the mothership, this tiny little green and pleasant land far, far away. The Indian experience in Burma is a piece of forgotten history. My nan and her 11 siblings were all born in Minbu in Burma, now Myanmar. From the conversations I had with my nan before she died, she had an idyllic childhood. They lived a comfortable middle-class existence. Separate from the wealthier, ruling white community, but in a nice house for her and her 11 siblings. Then, in 1942, when the Japanese invaded Burma, the Indians wanted to get out and back to the safety of their own land. The British organised a few boats and planes but nowhere near enough. Most escaped on foot, on a treacherous trek through the jungle, on ‘The Road of Death’. Hardly anyone knows the story even though it was one of the most difficult mass evacuations in human history.

  Families had to leave everything they had behind to get back to India. My nan told me this story when I was young, how my great grandmother had packed metal containers with water and rice for the children. Because they had a bit of money, they were able to get a cart and horse. My nan was 13 at the time and she remembers lighting fires at night in the jungle to keep tigers away. She told me about the dead bodies she saw lying on the side of the path; one woman dead, with a baby in her arms, still trying to suckle at her breast. It’s harrowing and unbelievably tragic. Thousands didn’t make it. Terrified and hungry, my nan and her siblings eventually made it into India, only to be faced with the horror of Partition five years later in 1947.

  What a strange and surreal place Punjab must have been at the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947. When Pakistan celebrated the birth of a nation and India their new freedom from colonial rule. When both flags were flown, as blood-soaked streets were being washed, as millions of people became refugees in their own country, were they cheering, were they flag waving? Partition was a plan of division that suited politicians and was a messy, hurried, slapdash exit. Britain drained India for nearly 300 years and then cut and run. There was no policing, no Partition management strategy, no soldiers left to ensure smooth transition. The thing was a God-awful mess, with the border not even finalised, with the gaping, seeping wound of Kashmir left to keep both nations at each other’s throats for years to come. I can’t believe that a nation as organised and strategic as Great Britain would have done such a shambolic job, had they cared a jot about India or its people.

  All but one of my grandparents witnessed the Partition. The only one who didn’t see it with his own eyes was my maternal grandad. He was away with the British Indian army and was scarred by it the most. While away, he lost all the family he had. His father, wife, son and daughter all killed in what became Pakistan. He was left totally alone until he remarried my nan, whose life had also been upturned by war and Empire.

  I was lucky enough to film an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? and learn all about my grandfather Sant Singh, who my mother idolised. He was apparently the kindest, most thoughtful and generous man, with not an ounce of hate in his body, even though he certainly had a right to feel it. Filming the programme really did change my life and my connection with who I am and what it means to be from that region of India, the Punjab. It also made me begin questioning the history I knew, or rather didn’t know, about Empire and colonialism. Why don’t we talk about British history, warts and all? Why leave out the gory details?

  Filming the programme also connected me to my grandfather who, as it turns out, was a total dude: forward-thinking, educating his daughters. He also wrote a memoir, his life story, in beautiful poetic English and Punjabi. The section I have is typed in English on a typewriter. I don’t understand why it wasn’t kept in a glass cage under lock and key as the family treasure it is. Apparently, it was in a storeroom for years in the village and got damaged by damp. He must have been writing it for his children and grandchildren, such an important historical document, this precious heirloom. I wonder what he’d make of his granddaughter reading it, or indeed telling his story on the BBC. He loved listening to the BBC World Service – he believed the BBC was the best news source in the world.

  ‘Did you ever read it, Mum?’

  ‘No, we never asked.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We just knew not to ask and I wasn’t really interested, I was too busy being a kid. We didn’t ask as many questions as you.’

  None of his children had ever read it. I suspect it’s because my nan was quite strict, her husband was away with the army and she was at home, essentially a single parent. Mum and her brother were the two naughtiest and were often chased by Nan with a big stick. Sounds brutal, but Mum laughs about it. Maybe they also knew that some things were not to be spoken about. I believe the pain of Partition was too much for anyone to speak about. It would take another generation before questions were asked. One of the most positive outcomes of those TV shows is that they sparked conversations in families who had never spoken about their past.

  It’s difficult to write about my paternal grandparents as there’s only so much I know about them. Mysteries, the pair of them. They were both teenagers in 1947 when Partition took place, Grandad was 19 and Grandma around 15. They may have already be
en married. I did ask Grandma once if she had seen anything during that time. She didn’t say much but what she said explains so much, almost too much to bear. ‘Bodies lying everywhere,’ is what she could recall, and then an image so savage I will never get it out of my head: ‘Dead women with their breasts cut off.’ Gran said it so matter of fact. Such gruesome, base level, animalistic violence towards women. But then, as I discovered much later, there was a huge amount of violence towards women during the Partition. They were raped, abducted, stripped naked, paraded down streets, they were branded, forced to convert, forced to marry, forced to kill themselves, murdered. My entire body is weighed down by that last sentence.

  I feel the pain of all the women in my ancestry, of all the women I never met who had no choice in their life. Is this how trauma travels through generations? I feel a deep, burning, screaming rage. The same women who were the lynchpin of every family, who gave birth, nurtured, fed, grew, loved, worked, toiled, the most powerful force on earth reduced, shamed, humiliated, suppressed, owned, controlled. If you watch the episode you will see a change, a shift in the tone and direction of the programme. It goes from an historical journey of discovery to the moment when I become invested and connected to what happened and is still happening to the women in my past. I feel it like it’s happening to me.

  For the programme, I met an elderly Sikh gentleman in a small and peaceful Gurdwara, in Amritsar. I had no idea what he was about to tell me. Everything on the programme is kept secret so, as I was learning the story of Partition, the viewer could experience it along with me. He told me how he overheard his father, the eldest in the family, take the decision with the other men to behead all the women and girls in their own family, rather than risk them being abducted or murdered by Muslims. As a small child, he witnessed the women, one by one, his aunts, his sisters, cousins, pull their long, plaited hair to one side and, as he put it, ‘bravely step forward reciting Sikh prayers’ to receive their fate. The tears came from somewhere deep inside me, in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t control them. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They each came forward ‘courageously’ to be beheaded. Did they really step forward with courage, or were they forced, kicking and screaming? Were they screaming for their lives, screaming at their fate, screaming at the barbarity, screaming at the world? When I’ve heard people talk about the women who decided to take their own lives by jumping in village wells, another common atrocity of Partition happening across Punjab, they say how they all went ‘bravely’ to their deaths. Is this a survival mechanism? To remember the women going willingly and fearlessly, that it was their choice to die, that there was no alternative? I wasn’t there but I can see their faces and given the option, I think they would have wanted to live.

  Something else I discovered while making not only my Who Do You Think You Are? episode, but later during the filming of my programme, My Family, Partition and Me, was how women were also abducted by all sides. Forcibly taken from their families, sometimes given away as a bargaining chip, to ensure the rest of the family was kept safe. If this had happened in the UK, there would be so many programmes and books and documentaries to discover all these stories, these hidden family secrets.

  What is the meaning of a woman’s life? The girl is a burden. Infanticide is criminalised in India but that doesn’t stop it from happening. Once, when backpacking across India, I met a pregnant woman on a bus, travelling with her little daughter. We got chatting while I played with her little girl and she told me she was going to see a doctor in her hometown, who would tell her the sex of the child. If it was another girl, she would have it aborted. Not because any part of her wanted to do it, but because of the pressure being put on her by her in–laws to produce a son. My God, it’s so exhausting and draining writing this, but write it I must.

  After Partition, in 1949 the Indian government passed a law called the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Bill, which gave the government the power to remove abducted women in India from their new homes and transport them to Pakistan. The government could use force against abducting families and it could also hold abducted women in camps, if needed. The official estimate of the number of abducted women was placed at 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan. Until December 1949, the number of recoveries in both countries was 12,552 for India and 6,272 for Pakistan. The maximum number of recoveries were made from Punjab.

  These women often did not want to go home as their families would not accept a ‘fallen woman’. There were those who didn’t want to return to the families who had traded their daughter’s life for their own safety. There are thousands of women of my grandmother’s generation who would have converted to Islam and remained in Pakistan, or converted to Hinduism or Sikhism and stayed in India. These stories are hidden deep within families. Maybe some know the truth, but so many will have kept their secret to themselves. If you know your granny converted, you also know your family abducted her and were complicit in the chaos and brutality. History is complex, history is devastating, history is vital to understand. Exploring my own family history, I never was able to learn categorically what happened to my Nanaji’s first wife. Was she murdered? Did she jump in a well? Was she abducted? Is she still alive somewhere in Pakistan, with a family, her family?

  My grandparents and others in their generation, who first came to the UK, brought with them the trauma of Partition etched into their souls. They never spoke of it. How do you? Where do you begin? There is no commemoration for the dead in India or Pakistan either.

  When Who Do You Think You Are? came knocking, I was thrilled, but I really didn’t know what light it could shed on my life and experiences. I believed that I was a product of my parents. That they were the only ones responsible for how I turned out. What a naïve fool I was! As a woman with ancestry in India, I feel inextricably connected to the place and to the women who came before me. I am them. They are me. The women India has lost fuel me and I owe it to the memory of all those forgotten and discarded, tossed into the dark well of history, whose names have never been spoken, whose memories are kept embedded in the hearts of the ones who knew them, but never mentioned – I won’t let them be forgotten. My family, who I love dearly, never spoke of Nanaji’s first wife. I never knew her name until 2015, when I discovered it was Pritam Kaur.

  PRITAM KAUR

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  Often, when growing up, I’d hear family members talking about how grateful we need to feel for the opportunity of coming to the UK to make better lives for ourselves. I’ve started to learn that I don’t need to be too grateful too much of the time. I’ve spent so long being told I should be grateful that it has made me feel servile. Being told to feel grateful makes me feel like I’m in a place I don’t really belong. That I should recognise that I’m being given opportunities where others aren’t and I should bow down in gratitude about it.

  I’ve entered so many meeting rooms throughout my life laden with gratitude, like a nasty stench I can’t get rid of. Living in this country, your place is to be grateful and never criticise or comment. Just keep your head down and get on with it. Work twice as hard but don’t expect to get twice as far. My grandparents came here for economic reasons and my own parents wanted both social and economic status for their kids. So, we did what we should. We worked really bloody hard with no let up. We educated ourselves, learned everything. Figured out what we needed to do, how we needed to shapeshift to progress. I can move with effortless skill and charm between worlds, but I am not a gatekeeper.

  I am angry, and I’m entitled to my anger. Young Anita, walk into those spaces like you own them, like you belong, like the rooms are yours. It won’t come naturally, because those spaces alienate you, they isolate you. In those spaces you are visible and different and all that you want to do, all you believe you need to do, all you’ve been told you have to do, is try and blend in, to speak the language, to understand the cut of their jib. But blend you can’t.

  Really, all
you want is to be seen. Seen for who you are. To have the space to express your true self. You will become sick of adapting to what you think is required of you. Changing to suit everyone else’s needs. Making yourself small when you know you are big, bigger than them. Not saying what you think, second-guessing what they want you to say.

  You will be told to be dutiful, to be calm, to be quiet, to be respectful, to be humble, to let things wash over you. Do yourself a favour: rip it all off. Strip it off and run for the hills. Let it out. And then empower yourself. Find your force. Turn down the noise in your head. Dismantle the oppression. Find your true self, your true voice. The world is not fair. The system stinks to the gods. But you can’t live a half-life. You only have this one shot, let’s make it the best life we can possibly have. Keep going. Even when you’re tired. Find your allies and keep going.

  Let it out, little girl. Be you. Rage Rage Rage. You are brilliant and they can’t see that yet, maybe they’ll never see, but don’t hide away. Don’t shrink, because it will mean they have done what they set out to do from the minute you were born. Rise Rise Rise.

  Conclusion:

  The Right Sort of Woman

  When I was a child, in moments of introspection alone in my room, I’d write diaries. I’d feel ashamed of my writing and petrified someone would read my words, so I chucked most of them away. (I admit, I even went through a phase of writing spoken word poetry.) And I’ve never regretted it, until now that is. Now, in my forties, I’m trying to remember the girl who wrote. I’m giving her a hug (even though she’d try and squirm out of it), I’m listening to what she has to say and I’m encouraging her. I’m allowing her to be vulnerable. I’m explaining to her the importance of being kind to herself. I’m giving her the language of the 21st century. Language she has never heard. Empowerment, representation, vulnerability, compassion, self-love.