Archived_Member16
SPNer
Lest we forget…. Partition of Punjab
There is nothing at the border that marks it as a place where millions of people crossed, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected.
Partition was the dark side of independence: the question then is, how can it be memorialized by the State without the State recognizing its own complicity?
It is true that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of Partition. A half century later, you might well be able to read them as martyrs to the cause of forging a new nation. But alongside, there is also the other, inescapable reality that millions of people were killed and in many families where there were deaths, there were probably also murders.
How do you memorialize such a history? What do you commemorate? For people, for the State, what is at stake in remembering? To what do you have to be true in order to remember?
It was not only that people killed those of the “other” religion, but in hundreds of instances, they killed people of their own families; it was not only that men of one religion raped women of the other, but in hundreds of instances, men raped women of the same religion.
What can you do to mark such a history as anything other than a history of shame? No matter how much Indian politicians, members of the Congress, tried to see themselves as reluctant players in the game, they could not escape the knowledge that they accepted Partition as the cost of freedom. Such histories are not easily memorialized.
In many countries in the world today, there are memorials to moments of conflict and upheaval. Either with State support or otherwise, scholars have painstakingly built up meticulous archives of people’s testimonies, of photographs, letters, documents, memoirs, books in which such historical moments are represented.
Very little of this exists for Partition. Until recently, little attempt has been made even to collect people’s accounts. Visual representations of Partition - despite the rich archive of photographs that must exist in many newspapers and magazines - remain limited, and while a half century of Indian independence has called for all manner of celebratory events, little has been done to mark this important event in the history of India.
But while there is no public memory of Partition, inside homes and families, the memory is kept alive through remembrance rituals and stories that mark particular events.
When Mangal Singh and his two brothers came away from their village, carrying with them the burden of the death of seventeen of their family members, they built a commemorative plaque with all seventeen names on it, and had it placed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. An annual forty-eight-hour reading of the Sikh scriptures was held to mark the occasion of their deaths, to commemorate their martyrdom.
For the rest of their lives, Mangal Singh’s brothers attended the religious ceremony with him each year. After their deaths, he went to it, usually alone, but sometimes accompanied by Trilok Singh, the sole survivor of the family deaths.
When I asked Mangal Singh, many years later, how he had lived with these memories, he pointed around him to the fertile fields of Punjab. He said: “All of us who came from there, Partition refugees, we have put all our forgetting into working this land, into making it prosper”.
Source: PunjabPartition.com
Punjab is regarded as as the agricultural bread basket of India. It is a prosperous state, despite the great trauma it and its people have suffered since 1947. This is when partition of this great state began to occur, with two thirds of the population being Muslim, moving to the Punjab state of Pakistan, and the remainder, 60% Sikh, 40% Hindu moving to the Indian state of Punjab.
The Partition of British India in 1947, which created the two independent states of India and Pakistan, was followed by one of the cruelest and bloodiest migrations and ethnic cleansings in history. The religious fury and violence that it unleashed caused the deaths of some 2 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. An estimated 12 to 15 million people were forcibly transferred between the two countries. At least 75,000 women were raped. The trauma incurred in the process has been profound.
In India, there is no institutional memory of Partition: the State has not seen fit to construct any memorials, to mark any particular places - as has been done, say, in the case of Holocaust memorials, or memorials for the Vietnam War.
There is nothing at the border that marks it as a place where millions of people crossed, no plaque or memorial at any of the sites of the camps, nothing that marks a particular spot as a place where Partition memories are collected.
Partition was the dark side of independence: the question then is, how can it be memorialized by the State without the State recognizing its own complicity?
It is true that hundreds of thousands of people died as a result of Partition. A half century later, you might well be able to read them as martyrs to the cause of forging a new nation. But alongside, there is also the other, inescapable reality that millions of people were killed and in many families where there were deaths, there were probably also murders.
How do you memorialize such a history? What do you commemorate? For people, for the State, what is at stake in remembering? To what do you have to be true in order to remember?
It was not only that people killed those of the “other” religion, but in hundreds of instances, they killed people of their own families; it was not only that men of one religion raped women of the other, but in hundreds of instances, men raped women of the same religion.
What can you do to mark such a history as anything other than a history of shame? No matter how much Indian politicians, members of the Congress, tried to see themselves as reluctant players in the game, they could not escape the knowledge that they accepted Partition as the cost of freedom. Such histories are not easily memorialized.
In many countries in the world today, there are memorials to moments of conflict and upheaval. Either with State support or otherwise, scholars have painstakingly built up meticulous archives of people’s testimonies, of photographs, letters, documents, memoirs, books in which such historical moments are represented.
Very little of this exists for Partition. Until recently, little attempt has been made even to collect people’s accounts. Visual representations of Partition - despite the rich archive of photographs that must exist in many newspapers and magazines - remain limited, and while a half century of Indian independence has called for all manner of celebratory events, little has been done to mark this important event in the history of India.
But while there is no public memory of Partition, inside homes and families, the memory is kept alive through remembrance rituals and stories that mark particular events.
When Mangal Singh and his two brothers came away from their village, carrying with them the burden of the death of seventeen of their family members, they built a commemorative plaque with all seventeen names on it, and had it placed in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. An annual forty-eight-hour reading of the Sikh scriptures was held to mark the occasion of their deaths, to commemorate their martyrdom.
For the rest of their lives, Mangal Singh’s brothers attended the religious ceremony with him each year. After their deaths, he went to it, usually alone, but sometimes accompanied by Trilok Singh, the sole survivor of the family deaths.
When I asked Mangal Singh, many years later, how he had lived with these memories, he pointed around him to the fertile fields of Punjab. He said: “All of us who came from there, Partition refugees, we have put all our forgetting into working this land, into making it prosper”.
Source: PunjabPartition.com
