Ladies First
A significant number of Hindus who migrated in these early days were girls and young women. This is also mentioned in the narrative of Shyam Hiranandani, whose elder sisters, aged 13 and 18, had been sent to Bombay by train earlier. They were saved by a Sindhi Muslim sitting in their compartment, who claimed them as his sisters when a Muslim mob entered the compartment looking for kaffirs, non-Muslims.19
Given the numerous reports of rapes and abductions, many minority communities feared that their women would be targeted first by the ‘other’ community. Many Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women in Punjab or Bengal suffered terrible violence: ‘stripping; parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing foetuses’.20
Yet, there was comparatively very little violence against Hindu women in Sindh. According to Kamlaben Patel, who was a senior social worker with the Office for the Recovery of Abducted Women, the ‘number of women abducted [in Sindh] was negligible.’21 Out of the 9,032 women and children ‘recovered’ from Pakistan between 6 December 1947 and 31 August 1955, only 84 were from Sindh; these were mostly Punjabi women who had been brought to Sindh so as to hide them from the notice of the police, and avoid ‘recovery’.22 Many personal narratives of Sindhi Hindus who lived through Partition do not mention abductions and rapes.
In a patriarchal and feudal society, where women were considered the repository of the honour of the family and community, many cases of abduction and rape were committed to ‘teach’ the other community a lesson, or as an act of revenge. As the historian Yasmin Khan puts it, ‘Rape was used as a weapon, as a sport and as punishment.’23 Given that communal hostility in Sindh during Partition was of a far lower magnitude as compared to other parts of Northern India and Pakistan, say Punjab or Bengal, this could be one possible reason why there was a low incidence of rapes and abductions in Sindh.
However, despite the low occurrence of actual abductions and rapes, Sindhi Hindus feared greatly for their women. As mentioned earlier, some Sindhi women were given instructions – and sometimes even vials of poison – to kill themselves if they were attacked. However, not all Sindhis were sanguine about recommending suicide to their daughters.
Mira Advani, then a young girl living in Karachi, recalls that a prominent Hindu leader advised her mother to ‘give a bottle of kerosene and [a] matchbox to each of your daughters to use in case their honour is attacked, and let them go about their work as usual.’ But this only infuriated Mira Advani’s mother. As Advani says, ‘Her daughters were not brought up with her life’s blood and sacrifices for burning. Her protective umbrella opened up instantaneously and her decision to save her offspring at all costs was firm and final.’24
Many families with relatives in India sent their womenfolk there, often escorted by a male member of the family. Mohan Makhijani was a young bachelor of 27 in 1947, and a valued employee of the Karachi Port Trust. He lived with his large family in a 10-bedroom house in Bunder Road Extension; he had three unmarried sisters at the time. He recalls:
In September, there were some bomb explosions in Karachi. Our house was searched. Actually the police wanted to search L. K. Advani’s house (which was near ours) but they came to us instead. They came at about 2 or 3 am and the search went on till 7 or 8 am. They found nothing. In the morning, my mother made tea for the policemen.
The police officer was a Punjabi Muslim, a decent fellow. Plus he felt sorry that he had searched our house. So while having tea, he told my mother, ‘I don’t see any signs of your packing.’
She said, ‘What packing?’
‘You are not packing?’ he asked.
‘Why should we be packing? This is our home. We live here,’ my mother replied.
So the police officer said, ‘No, no, no. I am a family man myself. You have three young daughters. If I were you, I would do something about it. I would not keep them here.’
That had us worried. When a policeman said that, it had us worried.
So the very next day, I went and obtained four tickets on Air India. I managed to buy four tickets in the black market, so I could bring the three girls to Bombay. The official plane ticket was only Rs 125 or 150, but in the black market I paid Rs 300 or 400 per ticket.25
Popati Hiranandani also recounts how she, her sisters, her mother, her aunt and her female cousins left Hirabad, a Hindu-dominated suburb of Hyderabad, literally overnight, in September 1947:
We had all come home, except for my brother Hashu. It was nine o’clock but Hashu had not returned. The doors on the upper floors of the house opposite were also shut. It was silent outside.
Hirabad… where records played on phonographs outside hotels till twelve or one at night… where ice-sellers were summoned from afar, ‘Hey darkie! Come and give us eight annas worth of ice’… where young men standing outside shops placed bets with each other about who could eat more bananas… where grandmothers told midnight stories… where tonga drivers hummed and sang on their late journeys to and fro… today it was a ghost town!
There was a knock at the door. All of us were alert. Ammi didn’t let anyone step forward. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, Hashu, open the door.’
Hashu was quiet. We found this extremely strange. Ordinarily, he would start chatting as soon as he entered. ‘Rajab ate six raw eggs today! Faqiro held a piece of ice on his palm for half an hour! The Shidi26 gave the Salato such a beating that he was left reeling. Nanu wielded the lathi so well that we were all laid low.’ But today his face was sad. He said: ‘Refugees are settled all around Hirabad. Muslims from Lahore slaughtered a cow in the middle of the market.’
It was as though our entire bodies had become ears. Hashu lowered his voice and said, ‘They have decided that all women and girls should leave Hirabad. Arrangements will be made to evacuate unmarried girls first. Tomorrow itself, in the middle of the night, a lorry will leave from here for Mirpur Khas. There, the girls will board the train!’
‘But where will they go?’ my mother asked.
‘That will be arranged. I sent a man to Jodhpur this evening. He will rent a house over there. Popati and Kamla will have to be sent off from here first,’ he said looking at me. ‘First, meaning tomorrow night. Take only very few necessary belongings.’[…]
I tossed and turned the whole night. What would my friend Kala say, ‘You didn’t even tell me [that you were leaving]!’ Hari had said earlier, ‘My brother is out of town, I have nobody with me. If there is any cause for fear, Bhabhi and I will come and stay with you.’ Would Hari also say, ‘You ran away secretly’? If Kamla and I happened to leave, and something happened [here at home] later, what would happen to us?
My elder brother had been transferred to Karachi. Apart from Hashu, we had a few other younger brothers too. We went to have a photograph taken. God knows where we would end up after being separated; at least we would have each other’s photographs with us. I had a photo taken with Ammi, and Kamla with my younger brother. Ammi was crying, ‘What sin have I committed?’
My younger brother kept trying to explain to her, ‘Hindustan is like our elder mother. Just think that the girls are going to her.’
Ammi said, ‘To hell with the elder mother, damn the wretches who are separating us from our homeland.’
In the evening, when we went to our masi’s house, they were putting utensils into gunny bags and stitching the bags up. When we told them that we were leaving Hyderabad that night, they informed us that they were also preparing to migrate. My masi, her daughter-in-law, two unmarried daughters, three married ones, their children: All were getting ready to leave. My masi said, ‘You also leave with us, let Menghi (Ammi) also come along with us.’
On returning home, Ammi got ready as well. As she put her paros [skirts] and chadars [cloth used as a head covering] in the small bag, she started crying intensely! All the family members were sobbing. That night, no one
ate anything or slept a wink.
We went from room to room, looking at every object with longing in our eyes. Standing in the courtyard, I bade farewell not just to the house but also to the patch of sky above. The walls of the neighbourhood, the sparrows sitting in their nest, the cool breeze from the hill, the white dog in the lane, the water-trough for the horses, the birdhouse for the pigeons, I remembered them all. Seventeenth September! My birthday! But it was like the day of my death. At 2:30 am we left the house. Three of my brothers and the three of us. Coming out of the lane, we kept looking back, ‘God knows whether we will able to see these things again or not.’
My masi’s house was nearby. The lorry was standing outside the house. First the luggage was loaded. Everyone’s small bags and trunks and two gunny bags of utensils, and then we got on. The men said, ‘Hurry up, anything could happen on the way. Go, do your crying in Mirpur Khas.’
My heart was weeping, but no tears could flow from my eyes. With the windows closed, the lorry left at high speed. We were leaving our own country like thieves in hiding.27
These departures were not necessarily final in all cases. In May 1947, my mother, Nirmala Bhavnani, her two sisters and their brother’s wife were also packed off by their parents by ship to Bombay, where their eldest sister had settled after her marriage. Her two older sisters were 19 and 21 respectively; my mother, however, was then just a 12-year-old – she sorely missed her parents and her home. After a few weeks, she managed to fly back to Karachi with a relative who was travelling in that direction; after a short while, soon after Independence, her parents found another relative to escort her by air back to Bombay. Her parents decided to migrate only in October 1947.
As mentioned earlier, 2,50,000 Hindus and Sikhs had left for India by mid-November 1947. This number included Hindus and Sikhs who had left Quetta, as well as non-Sindhi immigrants from Kutch, Gujarat, the United Provinces, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, etc. Considering Sindh’s Hindu and Sikh population at that time was estimated at approximately 14,00,000, this initial departure involved only a small percentage of Sindh’s minorities. Yet these fleeing Hindus and Sikhs were to face more difficulties in the act of departure.
Searches and Seizures
The writer Popati Hiranandani continues her narrative:
The sun had barely risen when we reached Mirpur Khas. In Mirpur Khas my cousin’s husband had a lot of influence. He said, ‘I will book an entire carriage, but take my wife’s gunny bags along with you as well.’ The next day, my mother’s cousin’s daughters and daughters-in-law also reached there. We left Mirpur Khas at three o’clock in the night and climbed into two compartments standing on the sidings in the dark.
The train left, but after half an hour, Muslim officers stopped the train and got into our compartments. One of my relatives had taken a fan. She was sitting on top of the fan’s blades and she had kept the base in the bathroom. Two sewing machines, the handles of which had been removed, had been put in a box. The officers poked everything with their sticks and unloaded all the bags and took them away. They took away the box as well. Now we had neither clothes left nor food!28
Given the high opportunism that flourished at the time of Partition, those who left had to pay exorbitant rates to carriage drivers, or camel cart drivers, and subsequently to coolies at the docks or the railway station, at the time of their departure. Then these departing Hindus were searched, on railway platforms, in train compartments and on quaysides, and often their belongings were confiscated. In September 1947, The Times of India, Bombay, received an indignant letter from one P. Vaswani which reported that Hindus taking the train from Hyderabad to Jodhpur were searched ‘rigorously’ at the railway station by the Muslim National Guards as well as the local police. Articles of value, such as silk saris and sewing machines, not to mention gold and jewellery, were liberally confiscated. In the rare event of a receipt being issued, it was sketchy and casual. According to Vaswani, on one occasion the officials confiscated about a hundred sewing machines; on another occasion, the officials were able to fill nearly 25 lorries with the confiscated goods.29
Attacks on trains and foot convoys in other parts of India and Pakistan had clearly proven that the process of migration itself was fraught with danger. Consequently, passengers departing by train from Hyderabad and sailing by steamer from Karachi were searched for weapons, especially Sikh kirpans. These searches soon extended to ‘essential’ items as well, such as foodgrains and unstitched cloth, which had been in short supply since the years of war. The unauthorised removal of these items from the country was considered smuggling in Pakistan, as it also was in India. There were plenty of instances of the Indian government conducting such searches and seizures of departing Muslims. And the ‘searches’ of Hindus departing from Sindh were often motivated by reports that Muslims leaving India had been similarly ‘searched’ and deprived of their possessions. These searches in Sindh were carried out more often by the Muslim National Guards (the ‘militant service-oriented youth wing of the Muslim League’30), a non-governmental body, and not by police or government officers.
Very soon, however, searches of passengers departing either by train from Hyderabad or Mirpur Khas, or by boat from Karachi degenerated into an excuse for corrupt officials to confiscate whatever they felt like. As Roger Pearce, a British ICS officer who spent about 10 years serving in Sindh, explains in his memoir:
Supposedly they were stopping the Hindus from looting Pakistan, but in fact it was for profit, or from petty spite: books and toothbrushes were taken, gramophones and cooking pots, bags of spare clothes.31
In Nawabshah, departing married Hindu women were distraught when they were forced to give up their nose rings, a precious symbol of their husbands being alive. Occasionally, even smaller items like doctor’s stethoscopes, fountain pens or cooked food, taken for the journey, were confiscated.
Following many complaints from emigrating Hindus, senior Congress leaders, including J. B. Kripalani and Dr Choithram Gidwani, as well as Sri Prakasa, turned their attention to this issue.
Kripalani had toured Sindh for 10 days in August 1947 with his wife, in order to both assess the degree of communal discrimination prevailing there as well as to reassure the Sindhi Hindus and persuade them to avoid migrating. He had remained silent in his statements to the press about what he had seen on this tour, as he didn’t want to exacerbate the situation. He intended to obtain some redressal through informal and friendly negotiations with the Sindh government. However, his public silence had been interpreted by the Sindh government as his approval of the way things were going. At the end of September 1947, Kripalani felt obliged to clarify that he was witness to:
[the] hardships of the minority community in Sind, the general insecurity of their life and property, the arbitrary and illegal way in which their houses were broken into and forcibly occupied, their luggage at the ports and at the railway stations searched and their belongings confiscated, etc.32
He maintained that this harsh treatment meted out to the departing Hindus only encouraged other Hindus to leave Sindh as well.
By late September, the governments of India and Pakistan reached a mutual agreement to not search emigrants. But even at the official level, the Sindh government sent out mixed signals regarding the ‘searches’. N. A. Faruqui, the chief secretary, promised that the government would soon issue orders to stop the searches of both men and women, but Khuhro defended his government, saying that smuggling could not be encouraged and that the searches should continue. The Sindh government did, however, concede that the government itself should conduct the searches, and not the Muslim National Guards. Faruqui promised the emigrating Hindus that the confiscated items would be returned to them, if claims were submitted before the district magistrate of Karachi. But, as Dr Choithram Gidwani pointed out, this promise was fundamentally unworkable since no receipts had been issued for the confiscated items, and besides, the owners were now untraceable and scattered in various parts of India. Unofficially,
in both India and Pakistan, Muslims migrating to Pakistan and Hindus migrating to India continued to be searched on their departure.
Yet some of the emigrants were able to circumvent these searches, sometimes by bribing the officials conducting the searches, and sometimes through other means. Since unstitched cloth was one of the items banned for export, many Sindhi Hindus recall that their families sewed unused cloth into garments or blanket covers, or used it as dupattas or turbans. According to Aruna Jethwani, then a girl of seven, her family’s trunk was left undisturbed by the Pathan who opened it at the Hyderabad railway platform, after he saw the photo of Sai Sayed Malik, a Muslim pir, placed right on top of the clothes packed within.33 Navalrai Bachani was then a young man of 20 living in Hyderabad. Recently married, he had received a carpet as part of his wife’s dowry. The newly-weds rubbed dirt into the brand new carpet to make it look old and soiled, so as to evade the customs checks.34
At the time of Partition, Nari Hingorani was a 16-year-old schoolboy from Nawabshah. Given the unsettled circumstances in Sindh, his family decided to send him and his elder brother to Bombay to continue their education there. Hingorani recalls how he and his brother, together with their guardian and his family, left Karachi:
We had heard of horror stories about the cruel treatment of passengers and their baggage by the dockworkers. The dock porters were robbing poor families with meagre belongings of their prize possessions. If people argued or pleaded with them they would throw the bags into the Arabian Sea. Our guardian and his wife had two small children. They travelled with three small trunks, bedding, a sewing machine and couple of small items. To this was added two banged up small steel trunks belonging to us two brothers containing mainly books and a few changes of clothes. All in all, when the entire luggage was stacked in a bunch on the dockside it made a pretty pathetic picture for the total life’s belongings for a family of [six].
THE MAKING OF EXILE Page 13