The Great Partition (32 page)

Luggage was very often confiscated or looted along the way or simply abandoned as people became too weak to carry it; sores developed on bare feet; women gave birth to babies
en route
; and people died of starvation, exhaustion, cholera and grief. It must have seemed as if all the fates were conspiring against the refugees; to make matters worse the infernal temperatures on the Punjabi plains in June were followed by dust storms. A thick pall of dust caked the refugees and flies were omnipresent. ‘We went on with the convoys week after week’, later wrote the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, ‘until our hair became stiff and grey with dust, our clothes felt like emery boards, my cameras became clogged with grit …’
⁶¹
These were followed by unusually heavy storms and torrential rains in Punjab at the end of September. The countryside was suddenly awash with mud. These rains burst the banks of the Beas River, destroying railway bridges and roads, washing away camps and belongings, soaking and drowning some of the refugees who became caught in the currents. Fear of the descent into a bitter winter followed, and there were concerns that families would freeze or succumb to disease if living out in the open, badly dressed in thin cotton clothes or rags.

Both states snidely criticised the facilities provided for ‘their’ refugees and the treatment they received in transit camps and
en route
. Hanging over all this was the question of national belonging. This difficult question was grossly complicated by the influx of refugees. Who should have priority access to housing and accommodation? Should refugees or the remaining minority populations be given the same rights and protection as other citizens in India and Pakistan? This issue urgently needed to be clarified by the central leaderships. Some did speak out for liberal, plural, secular, multi-ethnic states but they were not the loudest voices. At the crucial moment, numerous leading politicians and their parties hesitated and dodged the question of citizenship – or actively promoted the idea of India for Hindus-Sikhs and Pakistan for Muslims. This bullishness of the top branches of the political networks intersected with, and was influenced by, the gravity of violence. Confusion about who was a legitimate citizen of each state was endemic. Disagreement sliced vertically through society from cabinet-level indecision, especially in conflict between Nehru and his Deputy Prime Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, to uncertainty about who was a compatriot among ordinary people in the smallest villages and towns.

What of the experiences of the refugees themselves? Many refugees did feel, superficially at least, patriotic on reaching the new states simply because of their relief on reaching a place of safety. Crossing the border was a momentous act. Breaching the border became a spur, and something to aim towards for those who had lost all motivation, and is remembered in a remarkably similar way in refugee accounts. One convoy pitched camp ‘with much more cheer than usual’ on an evening when they knew that the border of Pakistan was only 50 kilometres away.
⁶²
On crossing into India at the Wagah border post another convoy was momentarily united in relief as people called out, ‘
Bharat Mata Ki Jai
’ (Long Live Mother India). In 1947, Kuldip Nayar, who later became a distinguished Indian journalist and parliamentarian, crossed at the Wagah border post on foot, on his long and painful journey from Sialkot to India, and remembered that there was nothing there on the windswept Punjabi plain, just a solitary Indian flag flying on a wooden pole and some overturned drums, partly painted white, partly black. ‘And I just crossed. Nobody checked to see if I had any documents, nothing.’
⁶³

Ironically, those who had been living with ambiguous and multivalent ideas of ‘Pakistan’ ‘India’ and ‘Freedom’ were being remade into loyal citizens. Passengers arriving by boat at the port of Karachi cried ‘
Allah-O-Akbar
’ when they first sighted the unfamiliar Pakistani coastline. ‘The engine driver started blowing the whistle,’ Khushwant Singh writes in his fictional but evocative novel of the time, as a train steams through the Punjabi farmland, ‘and continued blowing till he had passed Mano Majra station. It was an expression of relief that they were out of Pakistan and into India.’
⁶⁴
Nasreen Azhar, a Pakistani feminist, was a child when she crossed the border into Pakistan on her journey from the imperial hill station of Simla, and similarly remembered ‘we felt very safe because we arrived in Multan and it was the day after Bakr Id … and people were sacrificing goats openly … people were being Muslim openly, so that was a very wonderful feeling.’
⁶⁵
Crossing into the new country was marked with its own symbolic significance.

Certainly, some of the new arrivals, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, were met with hospitality. Arrangements were made along the tracks and at stations to greet Pakistani clerical staff passing through their new home – at Bahawalpur, ‘to cheer them on their way and offer them refreshments’.
⁶⁶
The Mayor of Lahore later claimed that the inhabitants of the city baked
naan
bread for the displaced and gave ‘a right royal reception to the newcomers. Cauldrons of rice could be seen cooking all over the place for distribution among the refugees.’ Radio appeals were broadcast for donations for the hungry and shopkeepers, housewives and bakers delivered food parcels to the refugee camps.
⁶⁷
In Delhi, the local population baked 280
maunds
of chapattis when news spread of two stranded and starving foot convoys, one of 30,000 people and one of 60,000, moving southwards from Punjab, and the Indian Air Force airlifted the food parcels to the refugees the following morning.
⁶⁸
Newspapers in Punjab demanded charity from the prosperous and, in the language of the London Blitz, asked, ‘Have you done your bit?’ In all these ways, the refugees were being encouraged to see themselves as welcome citizens of either India or Pakistan, to submerge their other identities and to embrace their new nationality unreservedly.

It is doubly ironic then, that, taken as a whole, the refugees themselves completely rejected any simplistic affinity with their new national governments. They were experiencing unimaginable hardships and daily difficulties; their experiences were entirely at odds with the lip-service and promises of the politicians; and there were manifold political problems caused by the difficulties of assimilating new refugees at the crux of Independence. In reality, a definite tension was already emerging between the new national characteristics that were being imposed from on high, and the sub-identities of region, caste, class and community. Fleeting moments of
imagined
unity and camaraderie were almost immediately undercut by the
real
experience of the refugees and migrants.

The ordeal of the refugees on the trains did not end when they reached the inhumanly packed platforms of their new homelands in Delhi, Calcutta, Lahore or Amritsar, and their experiences clashed with the language of national solidarity. Greeted by scenes of misery, they had to pick their way through the crowds camped on the railway station concourse, cramped with their ragged belongings, lying or sitting in every available space. Pimps and brothel owners, gang leaders and paedophiles were not easily distinguishable from legitimate refugee camp workers who came to collect the new arrivals, and women and children were bewildered by offers of adoption, marriage or positions as domestic servants. ‘All these brothel people used to stand at the platform trying to grab them, and we had to make sure that they are not taken away,’ remembered Khorshed Mehta, a voluntary worker who looked after distraught women arriving at New Delhi's main railway terminus in 1947.
⁶⁹
Able-bodied young men and united families were at a distinct advantage, as they could elbow their way to the front of queues, find information and watch each other's luggage while the frail, single women and the orphaned young were the most vulnerable. The weakest ended up in camps.

Refugee camps were ubiquitous and the crisis rippled out across the rest of the subcontinent. It could not possibly be contained in two corners of the former British India. The Indian government constructed more than half its camps outside Punjab, including thirty-two in the Bombay Presidency and even three in the most southern state, Madras. The largest and most notorious camp in India, Kurukshetra, was a proto-city, built over nine square miles in East Punjab and housing over a quarter of a million refugees. Hospitals and kitchens were established, cholera inoculations and cooked food were distributed. And yet, despite the war footing of the operation and the organised dispersal of quilts and tents, lentils, rice and flour, the camp buckled under the weight of the sheer numbers of people still moving across the border. Kurukshetra grew ten times in size in just six weeks from mid-October to the end of November 1947. Sometimes as many as 25,000 people would arrive, unanticipated, in the middle of the night – and even receiving them and guiding them to a suitable space was a difficult task because of the shortage of electric lighting. The Indian government resettled some as far away as the remote Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.

By the end of 1947 in South Asia there were perhaps three million refugees in refugee camps; over a million in the Pakistani camps of West Punjab alone.
⁷⁰
The camps ranged from small temporarily improvised shelters near the refugees’ own homes where people collected together for safety – in schools, temples, gurdwaras, mosques and municipal buildings – to vast state-run establishments which, in some cases, have not been dismantled to the present day. Some camps continued to exist in new incarnations in the 1950s. In Punjab many camps were wound up and dispersed within several years of Partition or deliberately transformed into more substantial housing colonies. In the western provinces, canvas was gradually replaced by bricks and mortar and refugee colonies emerged from the ashes of the camps. But in West Bengal, the phraseology of ‘camps’ does not do justice to the enormity of social dislocation and the scale of change instigated by the arrival of Bengalis from the east.

The refugees were frequently exposed to bullying, extortion and profiteering by each other and by opportunists in their new homelands. Although organised refugee camps may have provided shelter and protection from sectarian warfare, other dangers lurked within them. The sanitary conditions beggared belief and cholera broke out in numerous Punjabi districts, with particularly bad epidemics in Sheikhupura, Ferozepore and Lahore districts, while dysentery and smallpox also killed hundreds. Intimidating figures established themselves as camp leaders and preyed on the vulnerable by extorting money or running protection rackets. In Jullundur, people calling themselves ‘Barrack Commandants’ were organising the seizure of food from others. ‘I was pained to find that a certain section of evacuees grab the share of other less resourceful evacuees and sell it at exorbitant prices,’ reported one eyewit-ness.
⁷¹
Unsurprisingly, people tended to try and re-establish their own caste and community networks and bunched together – ideally with members of their old villages or, if this was not possible, at least with people of their own caste. There was safety in numbers. Families strung up ragged sheets and bits of cloth to separate themselves from those around them. Preserving old hierarchies and ideas of ritual purity was a struggle and it was impossible to avoid sharing space with other, less desirable, castes. Sanitation was poor, old customs went unobserved and taboos were broken.

In particular, Partition made the long-maintained seclusion of daughters unsustainable, and young people – especially those who stayed in the camps for months or years – struck up liaisons and affairs. Social workers arranged abortions for women, some of whom had been assaulted during the Partition violence or molested in the camps, but some of whom had illicit affairs and consensual relationships facilitated by the extreme and unusual conditions of the time. Despite all this, refugees started the long journey to recovery and adjusted to their new lives – that would never be the same again.

* * *

Begum Anis Kidwai was forty-five years old in 1947 and had, until that year, lived the genteel life of a woman born into a privileged and political North Indian family. The family staunchly backed the Congress, and her brother-in-law was a leading Congress politician. They moved in a broad social circle, were friendly with the Nehrus, and the extended family lived in a rambling house around a courtyard in the heart of the city of Lucknow. Kidwai opposed the Muslim League and she had worked for the Congress in the 1946 elections. In the autumn months of 1947 her life changed for ever as the violence of Partition started to surround her. Stuck in Lucknow, in September she started to worry intensely about her husband, Shafi, who was working in another part of the country, in the hills of Mussoorie, several hours away. As a civil servant he was charged with running the local municipal board, a run-of-the-mill post in the civil service which would normally have involved dealing with problems of sanitation and food supply. But conditions in Mussoorie were deteriorating and his letters, which were still arriving in the post, were beginning to show the signs of strain in the town. He was due back in Lucknow towards the end of September but postponed his return. He had started working with the Punjabi refugees who poured into the hill station, needing relief and shelter.

Before long, attacks on the local Muslim population in Mussoorie started. ‘While I am writing to you,’ Shafi wrote to his wife, a few days later, ‘I hear the din of the populace down below, the sounds of firing and the shrieks and wails of the victims. Houses and shops are on fire, shops are being looted and the police is watching the spectacle. This is happening in broad daylight.’ Soon he was informing her that the telegraph lines had been cut. ‘Both the telephone and telegraph are useless.’ In Lucknow, meanwhile, Anis Kidwai fretted about her husband's security, and agonised about whether to try and catch a train to go and join him.