The story of India’s Independence Day is one of celebration and triumph, but it is also married to the tragedy of Partition and the exodus across borders.
In 2013, when I was on a research sabbatical from my Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, a writer friend and I visited my maternal grandparents’ home in north Delhi for a story he was writing on old houses. The conversation between my family and my friend mostly revolved around the construction of the house. But somewhere in the middle of it, a few old objects were brought out from the closets and shelves. Objects that had been carried by the family from Lahore to Amritsar.
Each item was visibly aged and possessed a unique history. And when they were picked up, grazed, studied, and situated in years gone by, they proved an effortless stimulus to memory.
Being the descendant of Partition refugees from both sides of my family, I began to think of the importance of material memory.
The mass migration of people was accompanied by the movement of objects, mundane and precious, and as I began searching for them across India and Pakistan. My research yielded stories of sorrow, loss, hope, and friendship, among others.
It might seem strange that I have written a book about objects carried across the border when I could have written about the enormity of memory and experience that survives. The book, my first, is called ‘Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory’ (HarperCollins, 2017).
I must admit I felt uncomfortable and even petty to be continually asking about things that people brought along when clearly, they had witnessed so much horror on the road to safety. What did you bring? How much did you bring? Why did you bring it? What did you leave behind? Why these things? I would ask.
Time travel
Often lamented over, their emotional weight outweighing the physical, objects have long been my way of arriving at the gateway of 1947.
My research soon expanded beyond the peripheries of familial relations to include complete strangers. It is not difficult to locate refugees, especially in Delhi — a city thick with Punjabi migrants, but finding objects was a laborious task. I was just 23 then.
My family became my main mode of forage, word of mouth became familiar means, and I began to find new contacts. My aunt, during her daily walks in Delhi’s Defence Colony, would fearlessly approach older men and women, armed with questions about their potential memorabilia. My parents, who run Bahrisons Booksellers in the capital, would do the same when they learned of a customer’s connection with the Partition.
Some families, I learned, travelled to what they deemed as safer places, locking their homes, hoping to return after the riots died down (a common mention in many stories).
I have seen many keys of erstwhile homes and heard stories of locked havelis. Several families carried valuables like jewellery, which could be sold or mortgaged until they found a footing in a new land; some carried ordinary kitchen utensils used till date in homes. I have also archived heirlooms and objects of cultural value that were passed down the generations — warm clothing that are repurposed as blankets, platters
to serve paan, books, nakshi kantha saris.
Assorted curios were abundantly found — old photographs, a membership to the Karachi Club issued before Partition, diaries and journals, old Re 1 coins, identification papers, silver items such as cigarette cases and soap dishes, a pair of scissors, folding knives, a drinking glass.
And even the head of a taxidermied crocodile! The story: One Khan Bahadur Faquir Hussain camped near the river Beas and shot the reptile that had allegedly consumed many washermen. Hussain became a local hero, and the taxidermied croc head became his prized possession. So his great-grandson carried it from Bharowal, their hometown in Punjab, to Gulberg in Pakistan.
Material memory becomes a potent trigger. Holding, caressing, smelling, and engaging with an object may often evoke memories of a time unmarked by borders when the object was bought, created, or used in everyday life. But it may also be triggering. A woman I interviewed wished to get rid of a sword that her husband had carried during their migration from Mirpur (now in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan) to Jammu because it reminded her of that horrific journey, and yet for her husband, it remained one of the only physical traces of the home he could not see again.
Yet another carried a chadar (shawl) soaked with the blood of her husband who had died in the riots during their journey from Delhi to Lahore. She buried the chadar in a grave once she arrived in Pakistan.
Survival strategy
The south of India was relatively unaffected by the Partition but the Sindhi settlement in Bengaluru is a consequence of that. I interviewed a venture capitalist based in Bengaluru, whose grandparents travelled to India from Sukkur district, Sindh. His grandmother carried a knife even while she was in her own neighbourhood during the days of unrest, for fear of rape or abduction.
This is a detail I have heard often, of women carrying small weapons or sleeping with knives under their pillows and mattresses, long after they survived Partition. My own grandmother revealed to me a small pocket knife that she had been instructed to keep on her at all times during her migration as a teenager from Dera Ismail Khan to Delhi.
My research also grew to include the testimonies of descendants. This eventually became my second book ‘In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition’ that came out in May this year (HarperCollins). The descendants would comment on the traits they had observed in their parents and grandparents that seemed to have developed as a result of surviving Partition.
An interviewee revealed how her nani would always keep food on the headboard of her bed — “boxes of dried fruit, biscuits. . . a bottle of water or two” — and she never questioned why, until she heard the story of her nani’s migration, hiding under the seat of a train from Lahore to Jalandhar, and how the kernels of corn that her mother had tied in her dupatta had fallen out. Starving, the child began to cry until her sister shared some of hers. “It is from this moment that the habit of hoarding food, or at least keeping it close, was born.”
My aunt had noted the same tendency in my grandmother. “[It] stems purely from lack of resources, because when you don’t have enough, you have a propensity to hoard what you do have, not let go of even the smallest thing — be it food or extra cloth or wool or even buttons,” she told me during an interview.
An interviewee, whose grandparents migrated in 1947 from India to East Pakistan, and parents migrated after 1971 from what became Bangladesh to Pakistan, discussed how these multiple migrations and the economic difficulties that resulted in their wake, have shaped parenting styles. “For my father, constant migration has moulded the idea of what a comfortable home, a safe family should look like. In that sense, there is compensation or perhaps overcompensation for the times that were difficult. For instance, we never have just one packet of sugar at home. We always have three or four. Whenever one gets over, it is immediately replaced, so you never run out,” the interviewee told me.
Shifting the lens
Seventy-five years on, Partition remains an enormously emotional topic in private lives, while it also holds geopolitical resonance in the subcontinent.
Gladly, in the last few years, I have seen the discourse on the Partition history go beyond the cliched dichotomies of Indian-Pakistani or Hindu-Muslim or us-them, an attempt by the descendants to understand the complex landscape of the time.
While compiling my first book, I also happened to start The Museum of Material Memory with my childhood friend Navdha Malhotra. It is a crowd-sourced digital repository that traces family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms and collectibles from the Indian subcontinent, extending beyond the premise of Partition.
More recently, the Hollywood series ‘Ms Marvel’ has depicted Partition through the lens of an heirloom cosmic bangle that was separated from the protagonist’s great grandmother during the crossover. Watching the scenes on screen felt like returning to my interviews — stories extending beyond the violence into tales of families being divided, friends parting at train stations, and some reunions.
Partition may have carved Punjab and Bengal in half, but many more lands were impacted and stories of many communities remain untold. The survivors have mostly either passed on or are in the twilight of their lives, and their children and grandchildren are inheritors of that memory. I hope the renewed interest in Partition also results in a more diverse landscape of storytelling and oral history.
(As told to Shakti Swaminathan)