Have you every sat down with your grandparents and talked to them about their early years? Or their experience in British India and through the Partition? Many movies have been made on this topic and we have raved and raved about them when we had so many stories about it in the confinement of our own home.
My grandparents for instance, are very brave survivors of the Partition and whenever I look at them I feel immensely proud to be a carrier of their genetic order!
My maternal grandmother, Ved Kumari was 24 years of age when India was Partitioned in that fateful year of 1947.
She was studying in Lahore. Her parents, my great-grandparents, from the Sikh community, were settled in Delhi and had total 12 children, the youngest being only 4 at that time. On the eve of Partition on the 14th of August, 1947, my great-grandfather, while in the sabzi-mandi, read in The Hindu, about the Partition between the Muslim state known as Pakistan and Hindustan. He had a heart attack right there and died on the spot. This news came as a big shock to him and his body couldn't sustain his tension. After all, most of his children were spread in the un-partitioned Hindustan, either studying or making a living. some in Lahore, others in Karachi and so forth.
My naani and her siblings on the other hand, prepared themselves for their journey back to Delhi, still in shock from the news.
Why was this happening? Why can't we live like we were before? Why are people thrown out of their houses and being forced to re-locate on a completely new land? Isn't this all India? These were precisely her thoughts.
Partition didn't come up alone. It brought terror, riots, deceit, rape, murder along with it as baggage. Hindu dominated areas got themselves of the Muslims and the Muslim dominated areas got themselves rid of the Hindus.
It took my naani and hundred others like her to cover the distance from Lahore to Delhi a month in a train. There was a lot of mayhem and chaos and violence around everywhere. She still talks about it, with terror in her eyes. Even today, when she remembers the Partition she can't wrap up the story without tears in her eyes.
Thankfully, her brother was in the army, and with his help they could feel a little safe. On the journey back to Delhi, naani says, after every five minutes the train used to stop, and hordes of people with guns, and other weapons of destruction came in to check the religion of the people travelling. If a Muslim group raided the train, the Hindus weren't spared and vice versa. My naani saw so many murders in front of her eyes, so many rapes and torture of other kinds that she can't even speak of them. The only way she and her family were spared by either playing dead or hiding or pretending to be of a certain religious group.
My naani says that the independence was supposed to be granted from the British rule and if this was the outcome of the Independence then what was the point. The British had managed and managed very well, to destroy the unity in diversity of our country.
After a month of struggle with life, dodging death and terror in eyes, my naani and loads of people like her got home safely but what about those who were not as lucky as she was? What about those who had to be separated from their ones? If my grandma still has terror in her eyes remembering that month, what must those survivors who were separated from their families be going through?
A few days back, while on the way back from my friend Aashika's house, her father told us a story about this couple, who were the grandparents of his friend. They were separated from each other during the Partition and could not locate each other even after repeated extensive search and struggle. With great difficulty they moved on with their life, got married again, had children, grand children and very pretty content in their own respective house, until one day, they found each other back! What a twist of fate? Can we call it happy? Can we call it sad? What do we call it?
We, are rally lucky to be born into a generation who didn't have to see the Partition, but have we ever given much thought to it? For most of us, the Partition and our struggle for independence started and ended with our history textbooks. We never really gave much thought to it! To the people who died fighting for independence for us, to the people who won us independence, to the people who made our country what it is today and finally, to the people who survived, but at what cost? And most of these people live with us-our grandparents.
So, just go out their and share their pain and our land's cries over being torn apart.
My naani's story really moved me and got me thinking, now its your turn.
