By Dr Ishmeet
Kaur Chaudhry
Ishmeet Kaur Chaudhry |
Innumerable interviews recorded by the archives[i]
illustrate the vast numbers effected by the violence around partition. The
individual experiences chart new histories. Unfortunately, the official
documents fail to record the intensity and the degree of assault met by the
people but oral narratives testify the individual experiences. Urvashi Bhutalia
in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
refers to James E Young who suggests that the holocaust is known:
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, how they represent them. (Butalia 9)
Similarly, the refugee identities have been defined by
their rootedness to the place of their belonging. With the nostalgia of the past emerges a new
sense of the place or the village from where the people were displaced. At the
same time, these accounts deal with the devastating stories that reveal
ideologies of hatred and separatists’ identity. With partition emerged a
discourse of identity where communal identity became the major insignia of
marking people and categorizing them as minority or majority. Places where
Hindus were in majority, Muslims and Sikhs were designated as minority and
visa-versa. At the same time, it would not be wrong to suggest that material
gains also perpetuated violence. In the words of Nandita Bhavnani, “…Partition
violence was also motivated by material ambitions, especially a cutthroat
competition for property, in many parts of the subcontinent” (139). Moreover, honour killings during partition
imply the further categorization on the basis of gender. Many accounts suggest
how the survivor families refrained from mentioning events around partition as
the women were either abducted or left behind, and restored and in many cases
had a narrow escape from being abducted. Some women were even killed by their
own family members. This had a strong influence on the mind of the survivors. Mohinder
Kaur narrates her experience of probably escaping death, being hit by her own
elders. She was 9-10 years old during partition. She has a scar on her head and
neck that carries with her the history of the gruesome times.
The scar along with another one made by sharp-edged
weapon on her neck are signs of the gory tale. These were inflicted by the
sword of some elder male in the family as they slaughtered all women and girls
of their clan after mobs abducted a few women of Hindu families of Guru Nanak
Pura in Jhang area. “Perhaps their hands wavered as they attacked their own and
wounds were not deep enough to kill instantly” (Times of India, 14 Aug, 2017, 6).
Mohinder Kaur narrates how her blind great grandmother
was picked up and taken by Muslims. She reported of feeling cold and asked the
men to put her near the fire. Having done so, she burnt herself alive, as was
narrated by the Muslims to her family members after the army arrived. Mohinder
Kaur for all these years has been haunted by these events in her dreams when
asleep and remembrances when awake. The likes of Mohinder Kaur have never been
able to forget their past. With new generations and entry into the new century,
things might have changed but past has made a continuous presence in their
life. Similarly, the famous Punjabi writer Mohinder Singh Sarna narrates the
impact of partition on him. He writes:
I was an eyewitness to those massacres and those acts
of fanaticism and barbarity. The blows of barbarism fell more on my soul than
on my body. I saw the blood spurting forth from the jugular vein of humanity; I
saw humanity sobbing as it breathed its last. It shook my faith in mankind and
in life. Deep inside, my resolve and direction wavered and my ideas dimmed. The
earth had slipped from under my feet, the universe seemed in disarray. Joys and
smiles were wrapped up in a shroud and buried in the soul’s grave. Stories and
verses made no sense. I did not want to do anything, write anything, be
anything (Sarna, xv).
Those who had witnessed the bloodshed were overweighed
by its impact to the effect that the creative energies refused them. The times
had impacted the psyche of the witnesses and the survivors. To have survived,
was perhaps, more difficult than to have died. The survivors continued with a
guilt of having survived, having killed their own people, of not being able to
control the situation and to be embroiled in remembering the past that perhaps,
seemed to be the most difficult thing to do. My 99-year-old grandfather,
Harbans Singh, who moved from Kahuta (in Rawalpindi district, now in Pakistan)
to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh refrains from narrating the events of partition
and refuses to authenticate several accounts that he had narrated to us in the
past. He refuses to return to those unpleasant memories at this age though he
acknowledges that he has seen innumerable people being killed and murdered. On
my inquiry about the past, he suggests that there is no need to remember, “…the
past is done and over, focus on the present” (Singh. “Interview”). Having said
that, he walked away only to return after two-days and talk again of whatever
he remembers. What the third generations (like us) produce is a “memory of
another memory”. Harbans Singh’s memory
fails him, yet he remembers what he voluntarily wishes to forget. This attempt
at forgetting is primarily a refusal to remember that which is unpleasant and
disturbing. The whole operation of recalling and forgetting is an “enigma” as
suggested by Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur examines forgetting in terms of happy memory
and unhappy memory. He says:
For meditating memory…forgetting remains both a paradox and an
enigma. A paradox,… how can we speak of forgetting except in terms of
the memory of forgetting, as this is authorized and sanctioned by the return
and the recognition of the “thing” forgotten? Otherwise, we would not know that
we have forgotten. An enigma, because we do not know, in a phenomenological
sense, whether forgetting is only an impediment to evoking and recovering the
“lost time,” or whether it results from the unavoidable wearing away “by” time
of the traces left in us by past events in the form of original affections. To
solve the enigma, we would have not only to uncover and to free the absolute
ground of forgetting against which the memories “saved from oblivion” stand
out, but also to articulate this non-knowledge concerning the absolute ground
of forgetting on the basis of external knowledge—in particular, that of
the neurological and cognitive sciences—of mnestic traces. (30)
Whether forgetting is a voluntarily act or unintentional wearing
of age with time, one thing is sure that Harbans Singh refuses to revisit the
unpleasant experiences. At the same time, he lives through the same experiences
that may have haunted him for years and recalls them. In a way remembering and
forgetting are corresponding acts with him as he continues to return to his
past and locates me to narrate his remembrances of the past, of the relatives
he has not seen in years and of his aloofness and alienation in the present
city of Shimla away from his family members in Patiala and Chandigarh.
This query raises some fundamental questions as to
“Why remember?” | “Why should the present be effected by the past?” and “What does
remembering contributes too?” It would be appropriate to quote Suvir Kaul at
this point who opines:
…our memories of Partition are fragmented and painful.
Yet Partition and its known and unknown legacies have played, and continue to
play, important roles in the constitution of collective identity and thinking
in India. In spite of the efforts of a number of writers and filmmakers the
work of some scholars and analysts, we remain a national culture, uncertain and
anxious about the place of Partition in our recent history. In many ways,
Partition remains the unspoken horror of our time (3).
Therefore, the impression of partition in constituting
our present cannot be overlooked. Thus, remembering and revoking the past so
that it never repeats itself is extremely essential. Ruchika Sharma opines that
in the Post-Independence era “women’s bodies did not just represent their communities,
but also the new nation” (The Wire).
Also, how the new generations live with these memories and how they become “a
part of …family’s lived history, and mentality” (Sharma, The Wire).
India has not been witness to a single partition but
many partitions. The state conundrums around borders like Haryana-Punjab, Gurgaon-Delhi,
or Karnataka-Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand-Bihar, Uttarakhand-UP, Chhattisgarh-MP and
now the newly bifurcated Telangana-Andhra Pradesh have their own tales to tell
and even though one continues to be in modern India such disputes have not gone
without experiences of protests, violence and riots. The memories of the past
can never be erased as the present is dependent on what has happened in the
past. The past also provides lessons to be learnt from, so that the future can
be secured but unfortunately that seldom happens.
The present-day discourse of the nation relies much on
differences on various parameters ranging from communal to linguistic and
regional. The communal differences may have been old and even before the
colonial period but the larger differences apparently visible in the present
were largely affirmed with the differences created during the colonial rule and
at the time of partition. The communal identities confirmed themselves largely
during the tension in 1947. With this emerged a rigid sense of Hindu, Muslim,
Sikh and other identities. Somehow, those differences have continued over years
and our present, 70 years after, still projects them. Sabiha Farhat in an essay
– Partitioning “Us” and “Them”: The Politics of Othering – brings out “how
Partitions act upon one’s physicality and psychology.” She talks about the
impact of staying on the border of Gurgaon and Delhi and living on with this
complexity, where she continuously experiences the confusion caused by the
divide in Modern India. She appropriately explains the relationship of borders
and partitions as follows:
Borders and partitions define each other. To me their essence
is negative, at least in the human world. I wonder if there are places where
one would willingly embrace partitions – of mine or space. Why do we keep the
partitions alive if they are painful? Why don’t we bury the past and move on?
Why do they become a wound that refuses to heal? What would it take to heal
these wounds so that no scars are left, so that awe can move on free and
unhindered? (Farhat).
She further brings out the complexity of carrying a
name of a minority community in a country that seems to be more polarized and
compartmentalized.
The sliding away of the minorities in a country that
wears the garb of a secular nation seems to be compromising the existence of
the diverse groups than accepting their right and the willingness to be a part
of an integrated nation whose strength lies in the slogan “Unity in diversity”.
Would these slogans continue as hollow words or do we mean to keep struggling
to find the spirit of these words even after 70 years of Independence and
Freedom?
Notes:
Works Cited:
·
Bhavnani,
Nandita. “Property, Violence, and Displacement.” Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and
Politics. Eds. Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola.
Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2016.
·
Butalia,
Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence:
Voices from the Partition of India. Gurgaon: Penguin Books, 1998.
·
Farhat,
Sabiha. “Partitioning “Us” and “Them”: The Politics of Othering”. Caf├й Dissensus. Issue 38.
·
Kaul,
Suvir. (Ed.) The Partitions of Memory:
The Afterlife of the Division of India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2001.
·
Ricoeur,
Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting.
Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004.
·
Sarna,
Mohinder Singh. Savage Harvest: Stories
of Partition. Trans. Navtej Sarna. New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2013.
·
Sharma,
Ruchika. “Coming to Terms with my Grandparents’ Trauma of Partition” The Wire. 14 Aug, 2017. Accessed: 15 Aug, 2017 < https://thewire.in/167106/coming-terms-grandparents-trauma-partition/>
·
Singh,
Harbans. Interview with Ishmeet Kaur. 15 May, 2017. 19:15 hrs. Shimla.
·
“70 years
on, Scars Remain- On Body and Soul” Times of India. 14 Aug, 2017, 6. Accessed:
14 Aug, 2017.
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/70-years-on-scars-remain-on-body-and-soul/articleshow/60050491.cms>
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