Memoirs from the subcontinental split

It is thought that some 14 million people were forced to abandon their homes in the summer of 1947, when the British Administration dismantled the great South Asian Empire upon its exit. While the Hindus and Sikhs fled to India, Muslims ran the other way towards the newly created Pakistan, and in the process, took place the most violent separation history had ever known. However, while Independence Day celebrations are around the corner, those who lived through the events of the Indo-Pak split have more to recall than the merrymaking of freedom.

Sardar Mohammad, a resident of Manhala, a small border neighbourhood of Lahore, was 12 years old when he migrated from his village in Amritsar along with his nine brothers and sisters. Although there were no violent clashes in his own village, but the bloodshed the then 12-year old witnessed on his way Manhala continue to haunt him to this day, even after 73 years of partition. “When we crossed the border and reached the outskirts of Naroor village in Pakistan, I saw a group of Sikhs attacking a Muslim convoy. The raging men abducted young girls from the caravan and pulled away infants from their mothers’ laps. They threw the babies to the ground and smashed their skulls. It was a blood curdling sight and I still get nightmares about it. Some of them even picked up the bodies of the dead children and paraded them on the street, dangling from their spears like a trophy-hunt,” Mohammad recalled.

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According to Hidayat Ali, another resident of the same border town, Manhala village had a mixed population of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims before the partition. There were eight Zalidars (grand lords) of the village, seven of whom were Sikhs and Hindus while one was Muslim. “When they announced Independence and our village fell within Pakistan’s limits, it was initially decided that no Muslim here would harm the departing Sikhs and Hindus. They were instead safely escorted to the border, which was hardly a few kilometres away. However, when Muslim convoys from the other side started coming in, many of them were just bullock carts and trains full of dead bodies. That is what triggered the riots here and local Muslims too started plundering their Hindu neighbours,” he shared. Harking back to the days before the bloody partition, Ali said that he had spent much of his childhood with his friends from Hindu and Sikh communities, in the same streets he walks on today. “We used to play together every day but the events of 1947 changed everything. I haven’t had any contact with them ever since. I don’t even know if they are dead or alive today” he told The Express Tribune.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 11^th, 2020.