THE MAKING OF EXILE

by NANDITA BHAVNANI

  The volunteers sent us to the Bombay Central railway station. Back then, as today, it had huge platforms, but it lacked the cleanliness and glamour of today. There were plain and simple platforms, with lights – an open area, without rooms or buildings.

  When we reached the platform, the shewadharis didn’t behave properly with us. There were far too many people who had arrived, and the volunteers could not manage.

  We asked the shewadharis: ‘What do you have in mind, now that you have brought us here?’

  They said: ‘There are camps, but it will take a day or two for us to arrange for your departure; please stay here for some time.’

  In an open area, on the platform – how were we to live? There were ladies as well as gents, entire families – it wasn’t as though we were on our own and could do as we pleased. We kept asking the volunteers for status updates.

  We stayed at Bombay Central, on the platform, in the open. We arranged the luggage in the shape of a square and made the ladies lie in the middle. We slept along each of the four sides, so that no rascal could do anything to the women at night.

  One day went by, then a second, and a third. Just like that. After four days, we got fed up and finally asked, ‘What is all this? Every day you tell us we will get free railway passage. When will it happen?’ We went to a senior officer; we were growing restless and aggressive. ‘This won’t do, how can we manage?’

  Finally, on the sixth day, the officer told us, ‘You will get free railway passage. You select the camp that you want to go to from our list.’ They named Daund, Deolali, and a couple of others. We chose Daund because it was relatively closer to Poona and Bombay. Deolali was further off.

  We took the luggage on our own shoulders – no coolie, no shewadhari, no help whatsoever. Even as we left, the shewadharis ran away, as though they could not get rid of us fast enough. We felt like they had dumped us.

  At that point, I recall, I felt really bad. What sacrifices we had made in Sindh! Yet what value did we have here, in Hindustan?9

  Kodandas Gopalani subsequently resettled in Gandhidham.

  In 1947 Nathurmal Chotrani was a young man of 22, from Deparja in Central Sindh. He sailed to Bombay with his family of six – his mother, his wife and his infant son, his brother and his brother’s wife. He recalls that when they arrived at the Alexandra docks, they initially planned to visit his cousin who had settled in Bombay well before Partition. They were, however, summarily told by the police and the Congress volunteers at the docks that they were not allowed to enter the city; they could only go straight from the docks to the railway station. After being given a full meal, the Chotranis were taken to the station, where they were asked where they wanted to go. Chotrani asked a few Sindhis nearby who said they were going to Ajmer, so he too told the volunteers that he and his family would go to Ajmer. He resettled there permanently.10

  Many respondents, such as Rochiram Godhwani, report that they had no idea where they were being taken; they were simply put on a train, and discovered their destination only when they reached it. Still others – like Nathurmal Chotrani – describe how arbitrarily they decided on their initial destination. In some cases, even if they did not want to go where the local authorities intended to take them, they were nevertheless taken there forcibly. Rita Kothari also reports:

  The refugees from Bhavnagar were asked to go to Palitana, but they did not want to. According to a Gandhian social activist in charge of organising voluntary services, “We had to forcibly send them to Palitana. We threatened to discontinue their rations.”11

  U. T. Thakur also arrives at similar conclusions from his analysis of the Sindhi Hindu refugee township of Bairagarh, which had earlier been a large British prisoner-of-war camp outside Bhopal. According to him, the population of the town in 1954 was 12,000. Of these, 80 per cent did not choose to come there; they were sent by the Government of India ‘in pursuance of its policy of dispersal of the displaced population from camps.’ The remaining 20 per cent went to Bairagarh either looking for business or jobs, or because their relatives had already gone there.12

  The Sindhi Hindus also had no choice about when they could leave for the refugee camp. Often, like Kodandas Gopalani and his family, they would spend a few days in the transit camps, or have their whole families sitting grouped around their luggage on pavements, station platforms or docksides, until social workers could organise their departure. Not all Sindhi refugees went meekly, however. Papan Panjabi was a young boy of 21 in 1947, studying at the S. C. Shahani Law College in Karachi. He migrated to Bombay with his mother and elder brother in January 1948 after the Karachi pogrom. He recollects living in a transit camp in Bombay, called Kanji Khetwadi. It was full of Sindhi refugees and their possessions. At night, since there was no place to sleep inside, Panjabi and other men would sleep on the footpath. One or two months after arriving in Bombay, Papan Panjabi became a welfare officer, and was assigned two volunteers, also Sindhi refugees, to help him. These volunteers escorted trains, with about 1000-1200 Sindhi refugees each, to various refugee camps across Western India. Since the trains usually departed from the docks early in the morning, Panjabi and his helpers used to sleep near the docks, in the open. In four months, they escorted about six or seven trains. These trains did not follow specific timings. Regular trains would get preference, thus delaying the refugee trains. A journey that normally took 18 hours would get stretched to 28 hours. Papan Panjabi recalls:

  We would carry water and food for the Sindhi refugees with us, but would inevitably run out of supplies. The refugees thought that because they were ‘refugees’, they were VIPs. They would get angry and frustrated. They would demand: ‘Why are we not getting food?’ At one small station, they threatened to loot the food stalls, and they actually did so!13

  By mid-March 1948, the inflow of Hindu refugees from Sindh into India had intensified, with 2,000 Sindhis leaving daily by ship and train; this number would rise to 3,000 by mid-April. By the end of 1947, however, the refugee camps in Bombay had already become full, and Sindhi Hindus headed for Bombay found themselves shipped out to other camps nearby in Deolali, Pimpri and Daund. Ships sailing from Karachi were often diverted to Kathiawar ports such as Okha and Porbandar. When Kathiawar, too, was deemed to have ‘reached saturation point’, the Sindhis were diverted further to the Central Provinces.14

  Thanks to the ‘saturation’ of Bombay, many were not given the freedom to enter the city, as Nathurmal Chotrani and others testify. It is not clear whether there was an official decision taken to bar Sindhi refugees from entering the city of Bombay when they disembarked at the docks. It appears that, unofficially at least, there was a consensus among various authorities, such as the municipality, the dock authorities and the ministry of relief and rehabilitation that, in order to avoid the concentration of large numbers of refugees in Bombay, they should be dispersed further afield.

  Refugee Camps

  Many of the camps used to house Partition refugees were erstwhile military camps set up by the British during World War II.

  In mid-January 1948, the Government of India had also requested princely states like Baroda, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Bikaner, Udaipur and Indore to set up refugee camps for the incoming Sindhi Hindus; the costs of these were to be reimbursed by the centre. Later, other princely states such as Bhavnagar and Jamnagar also pitched in by setting up camps. According to Atmaram Kulkarni, the princely state of Jodhpur was assisted by the RSS in helping to resettle the Sindhi refugees.15 According to the Sindhi sociologist, U. T. Thakur, refugee camps were opened in Marwar, Pali, Ahmedabad, Ratlam and Khandwa in addition to those in the princely states.

  In many cases, these refugee camps were located outside the cities, where large tracts of open space were available. This was also done with the intention of reducing the chances of the Sindhi Hindu refugees (several of whom were already communally charged) influencing the local population or coming into conflict with local Muslims, as also diminishing (to a certain extent) the strain on
the city’s amenities by the sudden jump in population.

  Accommodation in these camps was in the barracks, generally large long halls, which were then subdivided into 12 spaces, with each space earmarked for a family. Initially, there were no walls to subdivide the barracks, and the refugees were obliged to use curtains of saris or gunny bags as screens, which afforded scant privacy or security.

  Moreover, most of the British troops had departed by the middle of 1946, which meant that, by the time Sindhi Hindu refugees arrived at these camps in late 1947 or early 1948, the buildings, which had not been maintained in the interim, were in a sorry state. Dilapidated as they were, these barracks became overcrowded.

  Where barracks were either not available or not sufficient, the government was obliged to set up tented camps, as did the various princely states. The camp at Pimpri, outside Poona, was a combination of barracks and cowsheds. Other camps, like the one at Powai in Mumbai, were a combination of barracks and tents. These tents offered little protection against the winter cold (especially outside Bombay city), and were extremely hot in summer. But what the refugees dreaded most was the monsoon. Where tents proved to be inadequate, refugees were compelled to sleep out in the open. Bathrooms and toilets were common, and several refugees were obliged to use the jungles nearby. There were no kitchens, and cooking was often done outside, in the verandas.

  There is considerable silence on camp life in the autobiographies and memoirs of various Sindhi writers who lived through Partition, especially among those who later moved away from the camps. Most writers have chosen to mask their personal experiences through fiction. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan also writes about her Sindhi Hindu respondents’ ‘urgent desire to distance themselves from the refugee camps’ during her interviews with them.16

  The writer, Motilal Jotwani was a young boy of 11 at the time of Partition. In his autobiography, Jotwani refers to various incidents that took place while he was living in refugee camps at Deolali and Dhulia, but does not describe the camps themselves. He sums up camp life in one sentence: ‘Can the whole truth about how we lived our lives in the purusharthi camps17 at Deolali and Kumarnagar Dhulia ever be conveyed?’18

  After Partition, the writer Arjan ‘Shad’ Mirchandani migrated from Karachi to India in search of Mohini, then his fiancée, and later his wife. Although Arjan ‘Shad’ started life as an excise inspector, he ultimately became a college professor. When asked about his experiences in Kalyan camp, Arjan ‘Shad’ changed the subject several times. Finally he described it as ‘hell’. The camp was for him, ‘terrible, horrible, shocking.’ Arjan ‘Shad’ describes briefly his time in Kalyan camp, which later became known as Ulhasnagar:

  We came here, to Ulhasnagar. I became a professor in Khalsa College [in Matunga]. I had to get up very early in the morning. Lectures would begin at seven o’clock in those days. I would have to leave at five by train. But I needed a couple of hours to get ready. I would take a lot of time. So when would I wake up? You can do the maths.

  You must remember, at night, when I’d come back, I’d have extracurricular activities to participate in; I used to direct plays. So I would get just two or three hours of sleep.

  To reach the station in the morning in the monsoons would be especially dangerous. There’d be rain all around. There used to be a small bridge on the Ulhas river, but it used to get completely submerged. And there wasn’t anything, no railings, to hold on to with one’s hands, nothing at all. And there was a crematorium next door… such was the life I saw.

  Then my son was born, after about a year or so. The moment he was born, I said, ‘Nothing doing. What kind of life is there in this camp for children? What kind of habits will he pick up? What kind of atmosphere will he grow up in?’ Do you understand? Everything was common, shared! The outhouse was common and we were all dumped in one room. The room was very big. But not big enough for a whole family! My family – my parents, my brother, his wife and their son – later got another room nearby, after two or three years. But at that time, we were all in the same space.

  I did not like to bathe in the common bathrooms with half-doors. So I used to bathe in my own room, with curtains, etc. It was terrible, there was no privacy, you cannot imagine… anyway, I was terrified at the prospect of my son being brought up here in this atmosphere.

  So I went one station further away, beyond Ulhasnagar, to Ambarnath. A nice suburb.19

  Arjan ‘Shad’ later moved with his family from Ambarnath back to Ulhasnagar only when he was able to rent a bungalow, where he and his family stayed for a year. Subsequently, they shifted to Bombay.

  After the Karachi pogrom, the writer Mohan ‘Kalpana’ came to live at Kalyan camp, where his father had set up shop a few years before, selling provisions to British troops. He witnessed the transformation of an erstwhile garrison town into a refugee camp. Mohan ‘Kalpana’ describes the reality of Kalyan camp:

  Having left behind their lands and properties, their businesses and their wealth, their loves and their attachments, their cities, villages, lanes, neighbourhoods, neighbours, clothes, wells, trees, their breath and their dreams, these people had been stuffed into this place where no building was more than 20 feet long; a jungle of melancholy, a city of stables, where there was only one main road, and the rest was desolation and ruins. There were no houses, no gardens, no cinemas, no post and telegraph offices, no railway stations, no buses, and no schools or colleges or gymnasiums. These people who, instead of taking knives in their hands, had taken their bags and had departed from Sindh – they were cloistered in barracks without dividing walls. Threading needles, they made curtains out of torn gunny sacks; their hopes and loves were exposed and aired through the rents and holes. When the British had their cantonment in the area, there were dance halls, clubs and cinemas; now in the fields nearby, there were smashed champagne and Black Knight bottles, broken guns, jeeps, cartridges, obscene pictures, cartoons, magazines, chairs, benches and torn pictures of Jesus Christ.20

  Kalyan Camp

  Possibly the biggest refugee camp for Sindhi Hindus, Kalyan camp was initially set up as a transit camp for the British military, 36 miles from Bombay. Although S. K. Patil, the president of the Bombay Province Congress Committee, had suggested that Kalyan be used to house refugees from Sindh in mid-January 1948, it was only in April 1948 that the central government handed over charge of this camp to the Relief and Rehabilitation Department of Bombay Province to house the thousands of Sindhi refugees that were still pouring into the city.

  The barracks at Kalyan camp were divided into six sections, using the old military names, which are still in use today: Sections 1 through 5, and the OT (Officers’ Transit) Section. According to one account, this last section, which had been used by officers and not by regular soldiers, was in a better condition than the others, and also contained some good-quality Burma teak furniture. Consequently, housing in the OT Section – and the furniture there – was quickly appropriated by influential Sindhis.21

  At the time of Partition, Chandulal Nagindas Vakil was a professor of Economics at Bombay University. In mid-1948, when T. M. Advani, the then acting principal of the D. J. Sind College in Karachi, was trying to set up Jai Hind College in Bombay, Vakil gave Advani and his new college a great deal of help and cooperation. Vakil also served as an educationist on the managing board of Jai Hind College for some years, and initially, while the college did not have any premises of its own, the board held its meetings in Vakil’s office at Bombay University. Vakil, together with Perin Cabinetmaker, then a lecturer in Sociology at Bombay University, conducted a survey of 240 families of Sindhi refugees at Kalyan and Punjabi refugees at Sion-Koliwada in 1952-53, on behalf of the Ministry of Education. The majority of the families interviewed were Sindhi.22

  Vakil and Cabinetmaker tell us that in Kalyan camp, there were 1,175 barracks for about 80,000 people. A camp which had been built for 25,000 persons now housed 25,000 families. Accommodation was either in the barracks, each of which was approxima
tely 20x20 square feet, or in halls (60x80 square feet), which were then sub-divided into individual spaces for each family. These divisions were made by hanging saris or gunny sacks on wires. Many families, with an average size of six persons per family, were living in one room of less than 100 square feet; often, these refugees had to share their accommodation with total strangers.

  Such congestion played havoc with the personal lives of the immigrants. There was no sense of seclusion for married couples, or for nursing mothers. The gunny bag and sari screens were hardly adequate for privacy or as security against thefts. As Vakil and Cabinetmaker put it, ‘[the] lack of privacy encourages constant quarrels and loose morals.’23 In some cases, given the shortage of space, families were obliged to break up, with different members living in different parts of the camp, or even across the length of Bombay.

  The camps were in poor-quality buildings, with broken walls, roofs without tiles, doors falling off their hinges, and damaged windows. Some tenements did not have enough windows , and a few, no doors. In other accommodations, like large halls, when charcoal fires were lit to prepare evening meals, the entire area would be enveloped in a cloud of smoke.

  Furthermore, the electrical fittings of many barracks were in a damaged condition, with several switchboards either loose or missing. Some roads were lit, while others were shrouded in darkness. Electricity supply was cut twice a week in various parts of the camp, in rotation. Even though ironing clothes was banned, since it consumed too much electricity, many refugees flouted this rule. Consequently, government officials came on regular rounds to check electric meters for the use of irons.

  Housing and living conditions were the prime source of the refugees’ stress: 70 per cent were unhappy with their accommodation because of the extreme congestion, and the lack of privacy, space, air, and light.