Active Stocks
Mon Mar 18 2024 15:55:53
  1. Tata Steel share price
  2. 149.60 5.69%
  1. Tata Motors share price
  2. 972.20 2.75%
  1. ITC share price
  2. 417.40 -0.51%
  1. State Bank Of India share price
  2. 730.70 -0.18%
  1. ICICI Bank share price
  2. 1,082.00 0.32%
Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  My memories of partition
BackBack

My memories of partition

I was born many years after the Partition of India and I can look back at the event with some detachment, I hope. My father could never do that.

Photo: MintPremium
Photo: Mint

My memories come entirely from my parents and my grandparents. They saw Partition in 1947 and were evicted. They lived the Partition and built a new life—not because they wanted to, but because they were forced to do it. They had no choice.

Both my parents were (my father passed away in the year 2000) refugees. Two of my grandparents stayed on for some time in East Pakistan, refusing to believe that everything—everything—would be taken away from them. They couldn’t grasp the idea.

The last few years of his life, when my father was with me for six months of the year, we would only argue. We would be angry with each other, and we would go to bed still feeling angry.

I would tell him to forget, and he would insist that I remember.

What was I asked to remember?

I come from Sylhet. I can’t speak Sylheti but I understand the dialect well enough to get by. Sylhet was a thriving town and a district. And it had a strong cultural quotient. In the 1930s, it had the highest readership, after Calcutta, of Prabashi, the leading literary Bengali magazine.

The Sylhetis are all over the world now. They are some of the most in-demand cooks on Earth. Chances are that in any Indian restaurant you go to in London, the cooks are all Sylheti. The same holds true for cruise liners. I have met Sylheti cooks relaxing with a cricket bat and a tennis ball in New Orleans harbour—they were enjoying their off-hours from their jobs in a super-luxury liner that hovered over us like a horizontal King Kong.

Sylhet had a unique role in the story of Partition and the story is not well known. It was the only province where a referendum was held—do you want to stay with India or go to Pakistan? The pencil drawing the Radcliffe Line shook a bit when it came to Sylhet.

The Radcliffe Line. In July 1947, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, flew in Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a college mate of his, to draw the borders between the proposed new India and the proposed new country of Pakistan. Radcliffe was an eminent barrister but knew nothing about India. He was given five weeks to draw up the borders. To help him in this important task, he was given some maps, some data about rivers and populations and an unlimited supply of whisky.

Radcliffe submitted his report and the new maps on 12 August 1947 and took the first flight home. He lived for 29 more years, becoming a viscount, but never again did he visit the Indian Subcontinent. We do not know whether it was out of guilt or whether because he did not want to revisit what was just one of the many assignments he undertook in his long career.

On 15 August, or rather on the midnight of 14-15 August, Jawaharlal Nehru gave his immortal “tryst with destiny" speech which all of us have heard or heard of or are familiar with to some degree. What is not so well known is that while he was reading out his speech, the borders between India and Pakistan had not been delineated. Millions of people did not know which country had been imposed on them.

The borders were announced on 17 August. And all hell broke loose.

To go back to Sylhet, the referendum was held in July 1947, and the ayes for Pakistan won by a razor-thin margin. There were allegations of rigging and bogus votes, but that was only to be expected, whichever side won. Sylhet went to Pakistan, except for a little bit of it—one part of the Karimganj sub-division, which was appended to the Indian state of Assam (Karimganj, since then, has become a district in Assam).

My mother’s family used to live in Karimganj, while my maternal grandfather looked after his land and property in an area that had now become Pakistan. My father’s family had their roots in Habiganj, now a part of Bangladesh, and my paternal grandfather, who had taken early retirement from the civil service, had settled in Sylhet town. My father, then 21 years old, had just joined the Reserve Bank of India in Calcutta.

I grew up listening to—and listened to even as an adult—to my father’s memories of loss. Decades after Partition, he had not lost his anger about what he had lost. I would often argue with him, and perhaps hurt him. I did not want him living in the past. I wanted him to let go, and I was frustrated that he couldn’t. The Partition was a given fact, and it was time to move on.

The only link I had with Partition, other than my father’s anger, was a strange incomprehension I felt as a child and as a teenager when my classmates told me that they were going to their village/ancestral home for their vacations. I had no such place to go to. We were not allowed there.

I grew up in Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay. The apartments there were the only homes I knew.

My paternal grandfather could not believe that Sylhet was now part of a Muslim nation called Pakistan. When, finally, he came to terms with that notion, he refused to leave, even though his daughters and son were living in Calcutta. Even if this is now a Muslim state, all the Muslims I know are my neighbours and friends, was his reasoning. This is my house; why should I leave?

Then the riots happened in 1950. Hindus were killed, their houses looted and torched, while the Pakistani police looked on benignly. My grandfather suddenly realized that this country was not his anymore. The people did not want him there. He would have to sell his house and go to India.

My father went to Sylhet and negotiated the sale of the house. A neighbour bought the house, but when handing over the money, told my father that he was a thousand rupees short—a fairly large sum then—and that he would be sending that amount very soon. Everyone knew that he would never pay up, and he never did.

My maternal grandfather stayed on, innocently trusting the Pakistani government. He owned a lot of land and he needed to look after his holdings. He got a rude shock when he was put in prison during the 1965 Indo-Pak war—all well-to-do Hindus were taken into custody. That was when he figured out that he would have to push off too, and he would never get his land back. Once released from jail, he came—penniless —to Karimganj, where his family had been waiting for him for years.

I have read many articles that speak of how resilient the refugees from Pakistan were, how they took charge of their destinies, and built their fortunes, and how some of them went on to become millionaires and billionaires. The writers of these articles miss a vital point—there was a vast difference between what happened post-Partition in Punjab and what happened in Bengal.

In Punjab and Delhi, there was exchange of property between people moving to Pakistan and people coming in from Lahore and Karachi. In Delhi, large swaths of land were given to the refugees to build new homes and start businesses. Prosperous localities like Rajendra Nagar and Lajpat Nagar are testimony to that. Nothing like that happened in Bengal.

The only land that the Bengali refugees got was in Delhi—in what is now known as Chittaranjan Park. But all that land went to people who were already in Delhi, most of them having jobs in the central government. The really needy, who crossed the East Pakistan-West Bengal border with whatever they could rescue of their lives’ savings in a bundle that they could carry on their heads, got nothing.

When I read some people writing that their parents who were refugees never looked back at the past but looked forward and worked hard to build a new life, I feel disappointment and anger. For the East Bengal refugees, the past was their cursed present, and their future was—and proved to be—a ghastly plague.

Nehru’s government did nothing at all for the eastern refugees. A million of them arrived, and had no choice but to become squatters in the outskirts of Calcutta (today these areas are very much part of the city). They built shanties and they made do with whatever they could scrape and scrounge. They fought disease and hunger and eked out an apology of a living.

The government resettled some of them in the totally arid Dandakaranya area in what is now Chhattisgarh. These people soon found that they were worse off than those in Calcutta. In 1979, 22 years after Partition, hundreds of these refugees travelled to the Sunderbans in West Bengal and decided to live there. The state government, under chief minister Jyoti Basu, responded with unheard-of brutality. Their food supplies were cut off, and when they tried to come to the mainland, the police opened fire, killing dozens of the helpless refuge-seekers who wanted nothing more than a life of a little dignity.

Afterwards, all of these people were forcibly packed into special trains and sent back to where they came from (Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide provides a deeply researched and heart-rending account of what is now known as the “Marichjhapi incident").

Partition destroyed the entire economy of Bengal and the state has still to recover from that catastrophe. West Bengal was industrialized while all the raw material came from East Bengal. The whole supply chain went kaput. Communist vultures swooped in and shed crocodile tears for the refugees. They built a vote bank. When the boys and girls who had been born on railway station platforms or on a street right next to a drain came of age, they voted for the Left, which harnessed their anger expertly. But the Communists’ gameplan was to keep these people poor and angry—anger meant votes and power for themselves.

Partition sent Bengal, the most affluent region at the time of Independence, to the dogs. Nothing positive has come out of it, other than the searing films of Ritwik Ghatak, who spent his life grieving over a divided Bengal.

And Sylhet, that most cultured of towns where my father spent the first 21 years of his life, is today the hub of obscurantist Islamism in Bangladesh.

I have never been to Bangladesh and I have no intention to. The house that my grandfather built still stands. My cousin from Kolkata, who visited it some years ago, was received with great cordiality by the people who live there now, who insisted that she and her husband stay for dinner.

I was born many years after Partition and I can look back at the event with some detachment, I hope. My father could never do that, and this used to irritate me sometimes. But as I grew older, and now that he is long gone, I can understand the pain he felt.

How would you feel if you spent the first 21 years of your life in a town that you considered home, and then were summarily told that you have to go and you cannot ever come back again?

I very much regret the arguments that I had with him, when I told him that he was a communal person. I think I am a different man now.

Sandipan Deb is the editorial director of swarajyamag.com.

Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!

Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
More Less
Published: 15 Aug 2017, 07:26 AM IST
Next Story footLogo
Recommended For You
Switch to the Mint app for fast and personalized news - Get App