On photographer Taha Ahmad’s website, three-four geopolitical maps of the Indian subcontinent appear. They feature scribbles by schoolchildren of Preet Nagar, a village in Punjab located 20km from both Amritsar and Lahore. On one map, a child has marked “My House” in Punjab and “My Uncle House” in Pakistan. A dotted road connects the two followed by the following words “Love=Peace”. For people residing in villages along the border in Punjab, Partition is not a distant past. It continues to shape identity, memory and everyday reality.
These scribbles are part of the lens-based artist’s project, Drawn into Two, Which Way Home?, a look at the contemporary ramifications of the biggest human displacement in world history. The collection of images is in the repository of the Penn College of Technology, US, where it was exhibited as an immersive art installation last year. Excerpts from the series are available on Ahmad’s website as living archives of Punjab’s constant search for its identity after 1947. The visual project has been inspired by the writings of Urvashi Butalia, Anis Kidwai, Anam Zakaria, Saadat Hasan Manto, Nonica Datta and Khushwant Singh. Ahmad, who is based in Delhi, hopes to bring parts of the project to India later this year to be showcased at art festivals and institutions.
The 31-year-old photographer has had an insider’s view into the events that unfurled in 1947. His grandmother’s family was divided during the Partition, with some members moving to Pakistan and others staying back in Uttar Pradesh. Ahmad wanted to create work based on the intergenerational trauma of Partition when he serendipitously came across a residency in Preet Nagar in 2018. It was started by the family of Gurbaksh Singh, the late editor and publisher of the first Punjabi magazine, Preetlari.
As part of the residency, Ahmad stayed in the villages of Kakar, Pul Kanjri, Lopoke and Preet Nagar in Punjab, meeting families impacted by Partition, “those who had been separated from siblings without any idea of what happened to them, those who had lost touch with extended family, and those who were yet to come to terms with similar losses”. These interactions culminated in the project showcased in the US last year. In the course of his research, Ahmad found links between Partition and modern-day issues in Punjab. “The Radcliffe Line in a way shaped the contemporary reality of the state. Families that live in the vicinity of the border, for instance, have farmlands that lie in the no-man’s land between India and Pakistan,” he says. One of the images shows a Sikh farmer standing at the edge of his land in Pul Kanjari. Some of his land holdings are on the other side of the barbed wire fence erected by the Border Security Force in the late 1980s to check smuggling of arms and drugs and infiltration.
Gender-based histories
As he interacted with people, Ahmad began to notice how the social fabric had changed in some of these villages. He met families whose members practised different religions. This resulted in a particularly poignant image: A Portrait of Zohra shows an elderly lady sitting with her three grandchildren in her house in Pakistan. This visual fragment from an old family album was sent by the woman to her brother’s family in India. “Her brother Daniel Masih, who stayed back in Preet Nagar during Partition, got converted to Christianity. Daniel’s family was originally Muslim practising Islam in Punjab before the partition in 1947,” writes Ahmad in the accompanying caption.
Among other things, the project focuses on the impact on women, many of whom were abducted and sexually assaulted at the time of Partition. One of the books that informed this part of the project was Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, which dwelt on the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Ordinance and Act 1949 signed by both nations to find and return women and children who were separated or abducted in 1947. “Somehow women’s stories have been invisibilised over time in this context. And that is a huge gap in the way we understand that period of time,” says Ahmad.
One such story that he has archived is of Noop Kaur, aged 77 at the time of the artist’s residency, who resides in Lopoke near Amritsar. She was separated from her brother in 1947. In a unique turn of events, she saw him on a TV programme, where he was selling watermelons on a bridge in Lahore. “Her brother, who changed his name…, got converted to Islam and settled down in Lahore, Pakistan. (He was) later reunited with his Sikh sister in 2015,” writes Ahmad in the accompanying note. Though the two have been writing letters to each other, the differences in the ways of living act as an invisible barrier. “Urvashi Butalia also mentions the term ‘resisting women’, or those who took up arms to defend their families from the violence,” says Ahmad.
A family in Pul Kanjri showed him a photo of two women wielding a gun. Their house was burnt, the men in their family were killed by a mob, but these sisters protected the elderly. “I created a double exposure image of the two sisters’ last photo together shot in 1995 along with a photo of their brother, who died in the violence of 1947,” he explains.
In some of the images, the female figures look like spectres flitting between shadows and light. Take, for instance, the photo of Sukhleen Kaur, who lives in Kawe village in Amritsar district. Before Partition, Kaur used to live in Gangal village of Rawalpindi district. However, as her family was moving from Pakistan to India, the nine-year-old was abducted and sold to a Pathan. She was brought back to India, three years later through the InterDominion Conference and The Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Ordinance and Act 1949. “Back in India, Sukhleen was not accepted back by her family. Facing this laceration, she took refuge in an ashram in Punjab, India, where she lived with other girls/women who resonated with her trauma. Sukhleen later in life was married to an Indian Sikh man from Kawe village with the help of the ashram authorities,” writes Ahmad. Today, she lives there with her children and grandchildren.
For Ahmad, it was important that each of the featured families was connected with the project at every step. “I would show them the photos after editing, and would take permission at every step. They knew what my intention was,” he says. He was also conscious that images such as these would not fit the conventional display of viewers entering into passive engagement with the visuals. For the exhibition at Penn College, he collaborated with filmmaker Shamsi Abbas to create an immersive experience spread across three rooms. Visitors entered through a transparent curtain featuring a portrait of a Partition survivor. As they passed through, the curtain would part, splitting the portrait into two parts— emblematic of the manner in which Partition distorted lives of generations of people on both sides of the border.
At upcoming iterations of the project, he plans to create a web on the floor with crochet. With every step, you will find yourself stuck in the web of this tumultuous history. “Like the exhibition at Penn College, one of the rooms will remain dark, and the floor sprayed with red colour. As viewers move from the dark room to the brighter one, they will leave several shoe prints on the floor,” says Ahmad. “The footprints and shoe prints on the floor represent the violence that took place in 1947 and how we are still metaphorically walking in the same shoes, not learning from history.”