It is an invitation to a function on August 15, the Independence Day of India. But what puzzles one is the picture accompanying it. One would have thought that such an event would be illustrated by the unfurling of the tri-colour. But the picture here is of a train on fire and desolate forlorn refugees sitting by the path and some survivors moving in carts with sorrow writ large on their faces. The caption of the event baffles one further. It reads “Pachtava Divas (Day of Penitence)” and comes from the progressive organisation of the city: Kendri Guru Singh Sabha.
Gurpreet Singh, spokesperson of the Sabha, elaborates that it is part of their effort as a community to express remorse for the communal excesses committed during the Partition riots. “Six years ago, we wrote a letter of apology to the religious organisations in Pakistan saying that we as Sikhs were guilty of violence against innocent and Muslim neighbours and our religion does not allow us to attack unarmed persons,” Singh explains. The Sabha has since been organising a lecture series every year on Independence Day.
Train to Pakistan
For families uprooted from one side to the other, what existed for the generation that was born after the great divide was silence on what had happened with a view to spare the young from gory tales. And what comes to my mind is that we are on the platform of the Amritsar railway station all set to take the train to Pakistan. Immigration officers sit on tables with files, papers and passports scattered before them.
{{/usCountry}}For families uprooted from one side to the other, what existed for the generation that was born after the great divide was silence on what had happened with a view to spare the young from gory tales. And what comes to my mind is that we are on the platform of the Amritsar railway station all set to take the train to Pakistan. Immigration officers sit on tables with files, papers and passports scattered before them.
{{/usCountry}}The year is 1959 and I am all of four years old, dark and skinny, clutching onto my mother’s hand half-excited and half-afraid about my first train journey to a place my mother called her Pindi. Suddenly a sight scares me stiff. A ghostly figure covered from top to toe with a meshed window covering the eye space. “What is this? My mother did not understand me until I pointed to the figure in black. My mother laughed and said, “She is a lady!” Then she took me to meet her and I shook hands with what I thought was an apparition. It took me many years to realise that the Indian side of Punjab had been so cleansed that children born in Chandigarh had not seen a burqa.
Of course, I did know of a country called Pakistan, which had somehow belonged to my mother. My aunt, uncle and sister still lived there, but we could not meet them. Their photograph was placed on the table and my mother often listened to Radio Pakistan. Ever since I was a precocious child of two plus, my mother would dress me and send me with the babysitter saying, “Go take a walk to Pakistan where your aunt lives”. Not too far from our home in Chandigarh was a makeshift sub-consulate of Pakistan in a Barrister Colony home with a green flag with a crescent moon and a star in white. I would look at it and return home and report, “I am back from Pakistan,” I thought it was a game that my mother played with me about her imagined country.
Other side of silence
It took me many more visits across the barbed wire over the years with my mother to know of the inter-community massacre and loot of all kinds. The first to break the silence were the poets and the storytellers on what freedom from Colonial rule had brought for the Indian people.
Amrita Pritam’s ode to Waris Shah remains the first dirge to the largest Partition in the world, with the Radcliffe Line running amok cutting one country into two. The happenings were so horrific that silence became the only shield from the madness. But there writers who had borne it on their souls told the inhuman stories of humans with Urdu writer Sadat Hasan Manto leading the way with “Toba Tek Singh”, “Khol Do” and many others, which were eye-openers on what atrocities could be committed on the other in the name of religion of othering that raises its ugly head some 76 years later, far away from Punjab in the state of Manipur in independent India.
In fact, even the historians and political scientists of the time were baffled into silence. Later many historians used the fiction of those times to get to the fact. Later feminist writers like Urvashi Butalia, Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon and others collected oral histories on the lives of women who were among the worst sufferers of the battle being fought on their bodies and souls.
Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan who edited a collection of poems in a book titled “San Santali” says: “In September 2012, newspapers in east Punjab were awash with pictures of Mohammad Khursheed Khan, the then attorney general of Pakistan. He could be seen cleaning shoes of devotees of the Golden Temple Amritsar to atone for the killings of innocent Sikhs in Peshawar, in present-day Pakistan”. Chandan adds: “It is time for Punjabis to atone for the sins of 1947”.
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