Other Side Of Silence Read online

  URVASHI BUTALIA

  THE OTHER SIDE

  OF SILENCE

  Voices from the Partition of India

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  1 Beginnings

  2 Blood

  3 ‘Facts’

  4 Women

  5 ‘Honour’

  6 Children

  7 ‘Margins’

  8 Memory

  Footnotes

  1 Beginnings

  3 ‘Facts’

  4 Women

  5 ‘Honour’

  6 Children

  7 ‘Margins’

  8 Memory

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The other Side of Silence

  Urvashi Butalia is co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house. She has been active in the women’s and civil rights movements in India, and writes on issues relating to women, media, communications and communalism. She is co-editor of Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays and In Other Words: New Writing by Women in India.

  For my mother Subhadra

  And my father Joginder

  Who taught me about Partition

  For Ranamama, my uncle

  Who lives the Partition from day to day

  And for my grandmother Dayawanti/Ayesha

  Whose life Partition shaped

  As it did her death

  1

  Beginnings

  The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history. Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan. By far the largest proportion of these refugees — more than ten million of them — crossed the western border which divided the historic state of Punjab, Muslims travelling west to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east to India. Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned. Astonishingly, and despite many warnings, the new governments of India and Pakistan were unprepared for the convulsion: they had not anticipated that the fear and uncertainty created by the drawing of borders based on headcounts of religious identity — so many Hindus versus so many Muslims — would force people to flee to what they considered ‘safer’ places, where they would be surrounded by their own kind. People travelled in buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot in great columns called kafilas, which could stretch for dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 400,000 people, refugees travelling east to India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route.

  This is the generality of Partition: it exists publicly in history books. The particular is harder to discover; it exists privately in the stories told and retold inside so many households in India and Pakistan. I grew up with them: like many Punjabis of my generation, I am from a family of Partition refugees. Memories of Partition, the horror and brutality of the time, the harking back to an — often mythical — past where Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs lived together in relative peace and harmony, have formed the staple of stories I have lived with. My mother and father come from Lahore, a city loved and sentimentalized by its inhabitants, which lies only twenty miles inside the Pakistan border. My mother tells of the dangerous journeys she twice made back there to bring her younger brothers and sister to India. My father remembers fleeing Lahore to the sound of guns and crackling fire. I would listen to these stories with my brothers and sister and hardly take them in. We were middle-class Indians who had grown up in a period of relative calm and prosperity, when tolerance and ‘secularism’ seemed to be winning the argument. These stories — of loot, arson, rape, murder — came out of a different time. They meant little to me.

  Then, in October 1984, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her security guards, both Sikhs. For days afterwards Sikhs all over India were attacked in an orgy of violence and revenge. Many homes were destroyed and thousands died. In the outlying suburbs of Delhi more than three thousand were killed, often by being doused in kerosene and then set alight. They died horrible, macabre deaths. Black burn marks on the ground showed where their bodies had lain. The government — now headed by Mrs Gandhi’s son Rajiv — remained indifferent, but several citizens’ groups came together to provide relief, food and shelter. I was among the hundreds of people who worked in these groups. Every day, while we were distributing food and blankets, compiling lists of the dead and missing, and helping with compensation claims, we listened to the stories of the people who had suffered. Often older people, who had come to Delhi as refugees in 1947, would remember that they had been through a similar terror before. ‘We didn’t think it could happen to us in our own country,’ they would say. ‘This is like Partition again.’

  Here, across the River Jamuna, just a few miles from where I lived, ordinary, peaceable people had driven their neighbours from their homes and murdered them for no readily apparent reason than that they were of a different religious community. The stories of Partition no longer seemed quite so remote: people from the same country, the same town, the same village, could still be divided by the politics of their religious difference, and, once divided, could do terrible things to each other. Two years later, working on a film about Partition for a British television channel, I began to collect stories from its survivors. Many were horrific and of a kind that, when I was younger and heard them second or third hand, I had found hard to believe: women jumping into wells to drown themselves so as to avoid rape or forced religious conversion; fathers beheading their own children so they would avoid the same dishonourable fate. Now I was hearing them from witnesses whose bitterness, rage and hatred — which, once uncovered, could be frightening — told me they were speaking the truth.

  Their stories affected me deeply. Nothing as cruel and bloody had happened in my own family so far as I knew, but I began to realize that Partition was not, even in my family, a closed chapter of history — that its simple, brutal political geography infused and divided us still. The divisions were there in everyday life, as were their contradictions: how many times have I heard my parents, my grandmother, speak with affection and longing of their Muslim friends in Lahore, and how many times with irrational prejudice about ‘those Muslims’; how many times had I heard my mother speak with a sense of betrayal of her brother who had married a Muslim ... It took 1984 to make me understand how ever-present Partition was in our lives too, to recognize that it could not be so easily put away inside the covers of history books. I could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else.

  I began, like any other researcher, by looking at what had been written about Partition. And there was no dearth of material. Yet, as I read my way through it, I found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied, sometimes even angry. If the books I was reading were to be believed, the Partition of India was something that happened in August 1947. A series of events preceded it: these included the growing divide between the Congress and the Muslim League, the debates between Jinnah and Gandhi, Nehr
u, Patel, and a host of other developments on the ‘political’ front. And a series of events accompanied and followed it: violence, mass migration, refugeeism, rehabilitation. But the ‘history’ of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it. These other aspects — what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the ‘human dimensions’ of this history — somehow seemed to have a ‘lesser’ status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture ‘factually’. Yet, could it really be that they had no place in the history of Partition? Why then did they live on so vividly in individual and collective memory?

  I looked at what the large political facts of this history seemed to be saying. If I was reading them right, it would seem that Partition was now over, done with, a thing of the past. Yet, all around us there was a different reality: partitions everywhere, communal tension, religious fundamentalism, continuing divisions on the basis of religion. In Delhi, Sikhs became targets of communal attacks in 1984; in Bhagalpur in Bihar, hundreds of Muslims were killed in one of India’s worst communal riots in 1989; a few years later, the Babari Mosque was destroyed in Ayodhya by frenzied Hindu communalists (supported, openly and brazenly, by political parties such as the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Shiv Sena), and later, thousands of Muslims were again targetted in Surat, Ahmedabad and Bombay. In each of these instances, Partition stories and memories were used selectively by the aggressors: militant Hindus were mobilized using the one-sided argument that Muslims had killed Hindus at Partition, they had raped Hindu women, and so they must in turn be killed, and their women subjected to rape. And the patterns were there in individual life too: a Muslim and a Hindu in independent India could not easily choose to marry each other without worrying about whether one or the other of them would survive the wrath of their families or communities; if such a marriage broke up, or for some reason ended up in court, you could be sure that it would be accompanied by public announcements, for example on the part of the judiciary, about those who had accepted the two-nation theory and those who had not.

  All of this seemed to emphasize that Partition could not so easily be put away, that its deep, personal meanings, its profound sense of rupture, the differences it engendered or strengthened, still lived on in so many people’s lives. I began to realize that Partition was surely more than just a political divide, or a division of properties, of assets and liabilities. It was also, to use a phrase that survivors use repeatedly, a ‘division of hearts’. It brought untold suffering, tragedy, trauma, pain and violence to communities who had hitherto lived together in some kind of social contract. It separated families across an arbitrarily drawn border, sometimes overnight, and made it practically impossible for people to know if their parents, sisters, brothers or children were alive or dead. A mother and daughter, separated in the violence of Partition, found each other fifty years later through the agency of a newsmagazine when, in search of stories to mark fifty years of independence for India, a reporter and a photographer went looking for families divided at Partition. A brother and a sister were brought together after fifty years at the border by the same newsmagazine. A father whose thirteen-year-old daughter was abducted from Pakistan by Hindu men, made several trips to India to try and track her down. On one of these, he was arrested on charges of being a spy and jailed. His daughter was never returned to him.

  These aspects of Partition — how families were divided, how friendships endured across borders, how people coped with the trauma, how they rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experience of dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns and villages they settled in — find little reflection in written history. Yet, increasingly after 1984, I began to feel that they were essential to our knowing of Partition. What then, I asked myself, were the tools I had to hand to begin this search, what were the ‘sources’ I could turn to? Writing on holocaust memories and testimonies, James Young poses the question: how can we know the holocaust except through the many ways in which it is handed down to us?1 He answers it by suggesting that as much as through its ‘history’, we know the holocaust through its literary, fictional, historical, political representations, and through its personal, testimonial representations, for it is not only the ‘facts’ of any event that are important, but equally, how people remember those facts, and how they represent them. The question might well be extended to Partition, for how do we know this event except through the ways in which it has been handed down to us: through fiction, memoirs, testimonies, through memories, individual and collective, through the communalism it unleashed and, only as one of these aspects, through the histories it has produced. Perhaps more than any other event in modern Indian history Partition lives on in family histories particularly in north India, where tales of the horror and brutality, the friendship and sharing, are told and retold between communities, families and individuals. A Punjabi refugee only has to meet another Punjabi refugee and immediately stories of ‘that time’, of home and country, are exchanged. Or, an Indian refugee only has to meet a Pakistani refugee for the same process to begin. This collection of memories, individual and collective, familial and historical, are what make up the reality of Partition. They illuminate what one might call the ‘underside’ of its history. They are the ways in which we can know this event. In many senses, they are the history of the event. It is to these, then, that I decided to turn.

  The choice brought its own problems. Working with memory is never simple or unproblematic. I am deeply aware of the problems that attach to the method I have chosen. There has been considerable research to show that memory is not ever ‘pure’ or ‘unmediated’. So much depends on who remembers, when, with whom, indeed to whom, and how. But to me, the way people choose to remember an event, a history, is at least as important as what one might call the ‘facts’ of that history, for after all, these latter are not self-evident givens; instead, they too are interpretations, as remembered or recorded by one individual or another. Let me try to explain this with an example. One of the commonest responses I encountered when I began work was people’s (initial) reluctance to speak . What, they asked me, is the use of remembering, of excavating memories we have put behind us? Every time I was faced with this question, I came up with a question of my own: why, I wondered, were people so reluctant to remember this time? Surely this reluctance in itself pointed to something? Was it only to do with the horrific nature of events — sanitized into numbers and statistics in the pages of history books — or was it to do, at least in some instances, with people’s own complicity in this history? There had been, at Partition, no ‘good’ people and no ‘bad’ ones; virtually every family had a history of being both victims and aggessors in the violence. And if this was so, surely that told us something about why people did not wish to remember it, publicly, except perhaps within their families where the ‘ugly’ parts of this history could be suppressed.

  How then, we might ask, extending James Young’s formulation, can we know Partition except in the ways in which it has been handed down to us: not only in the texts and memories it has produced but even through people’s reluctance to remember it. In this kind of knowing then, what we know as ‘facts’ are not self-evident givens. So much of the existing history of Partition is made up of debates about these ‘facts’ — debates that balance one person’s interpretation against another — that I do not plan to repeat those or indeed to go into them here. Thus, although Partition is the subject of this book, the reader will not find here a chronology of events leading up to Partition, or indeed the many ‘political’ negotiations that followed it. Nor will he/she find much about the majo
r players of this history: Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Mountbatten. Their absence from my work is deliberate. Instead, I focus on the stories of the smaller, often invisible, players: ordinary people, women, children, scheduled castes. I do this principally through interviews and oral narratives.

  Immediately I say this I know that I am entering a problematic terrain. Oral history is a deeply contested area in historical discourse. I have no wish to pose people’s narratives, or even a notion of ‘raw experience’, against something that we might call history, for both are not unproblematic concepts. I am not a historian. History is not my subject. I have come to this work through a political — and personal — engagement with history, contemporary communalism, and a deep and abiding belief in feminism. All of these have led me to the realization that it is extremely important to be able to listen, to attempt to understand how and why religious difference, for example, has come to acquire the kind of resilience that it has. Why is it that so many second and third generation Hindus and Sikhs after Partition have come to internalize notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ when they have no reference of Partition — except through family and community memories? What is it about the selectivity of memory that, in this case, feelings of fear and hatred seem to have been nurtured, to have a greater resilience, while feelings of friendship and sharing are not allowed to surface? I am aware of the many pitfalls that are attendant on the method I have chosen: there is no way of knowing, for example, if the stories people choose to tell are ‘true’ or not, nor of knowing what they choose to suppress. How can we know that, four or five decades after the event, the stories are not simply rehearsed performances; or that they are told differently for different people, perhaps tailored to suit what the person thinks the interviewer wishes to hear? How do we reach beyond the stories into the silences they hide; how can we assume that speech, the breaking of silence, is in itself a good thing? There are a hundred such questions. But I am not making a claim for oral history as against what we understand as the disciplinary narratives of history; rather, I would like to ask if there is a way in which people’s stories, notwithstanding all their problems, can somehow expand, stretch the definitions and boundaries of history and find a place in it. Is there some way in which history can make space for the small, the individual voice?