Partition of India & My Lost Identity
Partition of India and My Lost Identity.
“Don’t say that 100,000 Hindus and 100,000 Muslims have been massacred. Say that 200,000 humans have been massacred.” Wrote the famous writer Sadat Manto and it sums up the absurdity of dividing a country on religious grounds.
I was born long after Sadat Manto and the Partition, I was born in a divided land and for a long time until I was 18, I believed that I was “safe” because Muhammad Ali Jinnah created a country just for Muslims where we were safe from harm by the Hindus. I was taught in schools about only the Muslim invaders who conquered India and Muslim rulers, there was no mention of moderates like Dara Shikoh who was spiritual and more inclined towards religious harmony. There was more emphasis on people like Dara’s brother Aurangzeb, who promoted Sharia and more strict interpretation of Islam. There was not much on Akbar, The Great, who created a short lived religion called Din-i Ilahi meaning Religion of God. It was created to bring people together and elements were primarily drawn from Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism and also some of Christianity, Jainism and Buddhism.
Until I left Pakistan and moved to the United Kingdom, I never learnt about Mahatma Gandhi and his message of non violence and Satyagraha. I learnt nothing about the ‘Quit India Movement’ or the role that Indian Congress leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru played. I had no idea that they spent time in prison. I did not know what Gandhi stood for. All I heard and was taught was that Gandhi did not mind the Muslims as much and Nehru hated them and as a result Islam was going to be in danger under the Hindus. From childhood, there is this hatred towards non Muslims and in particularly Hindus and India which is is taught in Pakistan in schools to literature and media.
When the 70th anniversary of India’s Partition came, I watched a short documentary about an elderly man on a news channel, who was in his 90s and had been born in Lahore and fled for his life during the Partition riots. It was the first time he had returned to see his home city and the pain on his face, the sorrow really hit me. Even today, thinking about him, makes me emotional. When he arrived in Lahore and young kids realised that he was visiting from India, they immediately shouted “What is the meaning of Pakistan? That there is no God but one and Long Live Pakistan”. The elderly gentleman just gave a smile. He was so emotional and I could feel his pain of leaving behind his home and life and returning 70 years later to see strangers living in his ancestral house.
After living in United Kingdom, coming face to face with so many different types of people, thought processes, ideas, ethnicities, I have come to realise how poor I had actually been for so long. They say in Pakistan that Jinnah was a secular man, but how can a secular man bring religion into politics? A secular person would fight to keep religion and politics separate. He would fight for everyone. He has never been on record in any of the historic papers condemning communal violence. I have been reading about the history of the creation of Pakistan, and there are reports after reports by the then Punjab Governor Sir Bertrand James Glancy about the silence by Jinnah and the promotion of religious hatred by Jinnah’s party Muslim League. Here on the 16th of August 1945 he wrote:
‘Muslim Leaguers have been indulging in much propaganda, wholesale vilification of Congress and of the Union’s Government of Punjab. Jinnah and his supporters are clamouring for general elections…I must confess that I am gravely perturbed about the situation, because there is a very serious danger of the elections being fought, so far as Muslims are concerned, on an entirely false issue…The uninformed Muslim will be told that the question he is called on to answer at the polls is — Are you a true believer or an infidel and a traitor? Against this slogan the Unionist have no spectacular battle-cry…If Pakistan becomes an imminent reality, we shall be heading straight for bloodshed on a wide scale: non Muslims, especially Sikhs, are not bluffing, they will not submit peacefully to a Government that is labelled ‘Muhammadan Raj’. Hence it appears to me to be to be of vital importance to take action, before it is too late, to deflate the theory of Pakistan’ (Carter, Lionel, Punjab Politics 1 January 1944–4 March 1947: Last Years of the Ministries — Governor’s Fortnightly Reports and other Key Documents. New Delhi: Manohar (2006).
The politics described above is not by a secular man. It is by someone who is using any means necessary to get a slice of power and it left me, the people who were born on the other side of the divide, poorer. I have grown up watching Indian movies, I understand the language but I cannot read it. I know about the festival and traditions through those films, but I have never experienced them. In Pakistan, I never came across a Hindu or a Sikh, never met a Jew or a Parsi. The only religious minority I ever saw or met were the poor Christians who were forever confined to a life of poverty. There was no mention of Partition, no mention of the massacres of Sikhs and Hindus. It was taught as if Pakistan was created and the Hindus, Sikhs and Parsi just left because they just preferred India. As if someone just gets up and leaves their home behind? I was too young to question that then but I now know what happened.
Once I started to notice what I had not been told, I went out and educated myself on Indian Partition and the creation of Pakistan. The books I could not read or the questions I could not ask openly in Pakistan, I was able to do here in UK. What I have learnt about the treatment of minorities has sickened me. There are reports after reports of forced conversions, murders, kidnappings, attacks on the homes of Christians. Some of it was going on when I lived in Pakistan and yet I never heard about it or was told about it. Ahmedi Muslims live in fear, Imran Khan did not even hire a top Economist from Princeton because of his faith. I read about the story of one Jew (some called him the “The Last Jew”) in Pakistan. I learnt about the Genocide in Bangladesh, again, that war is taught as if Pakistan was betrayed by India and the activists in Bangladesh. There is no mention of the genocide against them or the reporting by brave Pakistani reporter Anthony Mascarenhas who wrote in the Sunday Times in 1971 about the genocide that had taken place in Bangladesh. He had to leave Pakistan with his family in order to report the truth. I had never heard his name and his bravery until I came here. He wrote:
“Abdul Bari had run out of luck
Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake, the fatal mistake of running within sight of a Pakistani army patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling, because he was about to be shot.”
“‘Why kill him?’ I asked with mounting concern. ‘Because he might be a Hindu or he might be a rebel, perhaps a student or an Awami Leaguer. They know we are sorting them out and they betray themselves by running.’”
His article played a crucial role in getting the truth out to the world, but it seems in one part of the world, Pakistan, that truth is still hidden. The men who committed that genocide ended up getting promoted in military and had a rewarding life.
I have seen India from afar, from across the border. The land looks the same, people look the same and yet just because I was born on the other side of the border created by Cryil Radcliffe, am I meant to see the people on the other side as foreign? Am I meant to look at them as the enemy? Sadat Manto and many others, including my grandparents, were able to travel freely across the vast sub-continent, they were richer in terms of their access to cultures, heritage, languages, people. If one comes across more people with different views and beliefs, it enriches them, not makes them poorer. When people segregate themselves and build walls around themselves, they don’t become safer, they become weaker, lonelier and lost.
Ever since learning more and reading more about the creation of Pakistan and the Partition of India, I have felt a strange pull towards India for that history is my history too. I would love to visit the land of my forefathers, learn the languages, its various customs, visit the vast and different States of India. It is as if India calls me and as if she understands my lack of identity. She knows I have been lost and she understands my pain. In Pakistan, everyone has a different idea of what Pakistan is. People in India and many parts of the world have an identity which is part of their fabric, even people from Bangladesh have their Bengali identity, but people in Pakistan, well, we are lost. We have been lost since 15th of August 1947.
Happy 75th Independence Day India. I hope one day we meet in person.
