Lands Divided Hearts United

In this concluding part, we will explore some other shades of partition apart from the wreck and havoc in the lives of the people living through that epoch, with gratitude for those who painstakingly archived the oral history for us to revive. When the lands were divided, hatred was fuelled by fear and loss, and surviving was a die-hard situation, there were miracles of blooming love in the hearts of some young souls nurtured despite the bloodbath around.

The Exodus and Uprooting of Partition Source: The New York Times

If we continue with the stories of some warriors who are often categorized under common people we have to acknowledge a few who took up the quest to save these oral stories of etched memories from getting wiped out in the sands of death.

When Guneeta Singh Bhalla at nineteen, heard zubani from her Daadi in New Jersey, how she as a young Sikh mother of three kids had to abandon the estate at Lahore during partition and board a train to escape the shocking violence that had rendered the city into shards of broken faith. Kaur shared the story reflected in her shard of the mirrored memory before it got lost with age.

This made Guneeta realize the significance of these broken shards that may blur with time and become part of a lost historical treasure that still hurts and pines in the memories of the fifteen million refugees of partition crossing either side of the Radcliff line. She tried to capture many stories from both sides of her family tree, but when she lost the opportunity to preserve one such shard of memory of her great uncle before his demise, she was full of regret.

When she realized that there was no memorial or a museum like the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, she lamented the lack of it when she once spoke to NBC news. Thus, obsessed with the mission she created the 1947 Partition Archive which has recorded over ten thousand such oral stories. Her drive to create a space for preserving all those fragmented shards of postcolonial memories has today embalmed the one million souls lost during partition and those who survived the Holocaust.

He introduced her to the Professor who granted the B. A graduate girl has a chance to do her master's by offering a provisional admission as a student of master’s in social work. The provisional admission lasted for 2 years and by then she completed her master’s degree and also was miraculously united with her missing brother. After Sikander completed his degree both decided to flow into a new relationship on the bedrock of love.

Another miraculous story is of Paul. He was a part of the caravan from his village travelling towards the border along with his elder siblings, he heard a sudden commotion among a family group coming from another village. The huge joint family had forgotten a young girl behind in all their panic to escape the prevailing violence.

They had locked up the haveli not realizing that the adventurous girl had slept alone on the terrace and in all the hullabaloo nobody remembered to check on her. The girl was Sukrita, who woke up in the deserted haveli while she was locked behind the great door.

When Paul heard their panic-stricken ramblings and decision to move on because they could not risk the entire family by going back to the village in Lyallpur (present Faisalabad) of Pakistan. Sukrita decided to stay low till night and try to find some way out until she heard someone breaking into the house through a window and calling out her name.

A terrified Sukrita hid under a cot holding a kitchen knife. It turned out to be Paul who assured her of taking her to the family waiting at the border. That day these young hearts shattered the situation of terror and outsprung a spring of hope and love. Years later when Paul got his first job at the fresh Planning Commission office owing to his being a topper at the Delhi School of Economics, they got married.

There are thousands of such unheard stories, a few of which are still in inherited memories of family tales, while many have been documented as a part of our regretful heritage of partition. But, these oral stories are the beacons that pierce the brutal darkness of loss and trauma that may soothe or heal the wounds of sorrow. Though all the stories cannot be encompassed in just pages, we can work towards enriching the existing archives with more stories of such unhailed heroes and kind souls of hope in humanity.

On the other side of the border, Mariam S. Pal once wrote an article – Where are those heroes of Partition? for The Hindu. Her purpose was to search for the Sikh hero who had saved her Muslim family living in Amritsar at the time of partition. This anonymous kind soul knocked on the doors of Mariam’s great-grandfather one night to warn them of an impending attack by his community. The Pals packed and escaped the same night and a few years later her parents settled in Cannada.

Alas, Mariam still has not been able to pay her tribute with any information about the unsung human from Amritsar yet, she has recorded this memory in the archives of documented history for generations to come. But, the response to her article overflowed the brim of memories shared by thousands fr both nations. She was awed by the positive stories she received instead of the gory details of the shared history.

She shares the stories of these survivors or the inheritors of their memories such as the one shared by the son full of gratitude, whose twenty-two-year-old pregnant mother was helped by a Muslim friend to escape the wrath of the rampant hatemongers of partition. Another Muslim from Gujranwala shared how he managed to help a Hindu family to reach a Delhi-bound train despite the near-death situation.

History also witnesses miracles that have bloomed in situations where ‘hope is a thing of a feather’ and flies away just when you are about to grasp it. One such miracle is Love, which blooms in the most unexpected places and people. Partition too has witnessed a few such precious miracles of love which revives hope in the strife of human pathos.

One such story is of the twenty-one-year-old Santosh Sethi. One day when she was at wit's end in desperation searching for her missing brother and tending to her ailing father at the Kingsley Camp in Delhi, she met Sikander Malik. The young boy was also a refugee working for the Delhi School of Social Work, as a ward of Prof. Frank Thakur Das. Under the professor’s instructions, he was surveying the camp when he met Sethi who was trying hard to survive in the tough conditions of the camp.

When Historical sites turned into Refugee camps in 1947 Source: The Hindustan Times

GuneetaSingh Bhalla listeneing to one of the oral history Source: Tata Trusts HORIZONS