by Raza Rumi
On the other side of the border, those who lived in Delhi never imagined that they would live anywhere else. Shaista Ikramullah wrote, ‘For millions of people like me, to whom Delhi was synonymous with Muslim culture, a Pakistan without Delhi was a body without a heart.’2 How could she ever have dreamt that she would have to leave the city that she adored? Many of the 3.3 lakh Muslims who left Delhi did not ever dream that either.
As in Lahore, the phantom of violence nurtured by the memory of Partition continues to haunt Delhi. Decades of progress and entrepreneurship may have dumped old skeletons inside closets. But the closets are shaky. Press the button of ‘Lahore, Rawalpindi’ in Delhi and the door flies open! Punjab’s sense of identity was rooted in the village, mohallah or even the tree. All else came later. In Delhi, therefore, talking to Pakistanis is a catharsis of sorts.
Perhaps this is why the Punjabi poet, Amrita Pritam, did not wish to leave Lahore even when her community was attacked. The year 1947 rather unwittingly added the Lahori Amrita Pritam to Delhi’s distinguished list of residents. Once in Delhi, she personified the lifelong anguish of one whose folk-apples of belonging were sliced through their cores by distant hands soiled by power.
Amrita Pritam lived and worked in Lahore at the All India Radio (AIR). Events took her away from her beloved Lahore when the family forced her to migrate. But she made a strange vow—if forced to leave Lahore, she would never visit the city again. And she lived by this vow even unto her last breath in 2005.
In Lahore, she played the sitar for the AIR, composed verses and published her first collection of poetry. Riding her horse-drawn buggy, she would frequent Lawrence Gardens. Her failed marriage with Pritam Singh happened in Lahore. And ironically, she also discovered her lifelong passion for the poet, Sahir Ludhianvi, in a Lahore literary gathering.
As she travelled from Lahore to Delhi amidst the horror, she composed her well- known incantation addressed to Waris Shah, author of the Punjabi epic of immortal love Heer Ranjha. Her question, Aaj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I say to Waris Shah), was a heart-wrenching poem that created a new sensibility on the sub-continental literary landscape. Stoking the anguish of millions, particularly Punjabi women who bore a disproportionate share of the tragedy, Amrita cried:
I say to Waris Shah today, speak from your grave
And add a new page to your book of love
Once one daughter of Punjab wept, and you wrote your
long saga;
Today thousands weep, calling to you Waris Shah;
Arise, o friend of the afflicted; arise and see the state of
Punjab,
Corpses strewn on fields and the Chenab flowing with
much blood.
Someone filled the five rivers with poison,
And this same water now irrigates our soil.
Where was lost the flute, where the songs of love sounded?
And all Ranjha’s brothers forgot to play the flute.
Blood has rained on the soil, graves are oozing with blood,
The princesses of love cry their hearts out in the graveyards.
Today all the Quaidos have become the thieves of love and
beauty,
Where can we find another one like Waris Shah?3
It was not only Amrita Pritam who never wished to visit Lahore again. There were a number of prominent writers from Lahore who, after migration, never came back for a visit to the city of their past. These included Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Balwant Singh, Balwant Gargi and so on. They could not possibly face the change that was bound to occur in a post-Partition world.
Once in Delhi, Amrita did not push a claim for allotment of evacuee property there or elsewhere. She struggled at the Delhi station of the AIR as a scriptwriter and newscaster. Later, when her arranged marriage with a conventional man finally crumbled, she lived alone until Imroze moved in with her, heralding perhaps, the first publicly acknowledged live-in relationship of modern India. For forty years she lived in rented homes and only towards the end of her life did she build her own house in Hauz Khas. From Lahore to the new ‘home’ was a journey of forty years that nearly consumed her life.
Like Khushwant Singh, Amrita had an emotional connection with Pakistan. She encouraged many Pakistani Punjabi writers and published their work in Nag Mani, the magazine that she edited. Her house was almost a family home, a familiar space, for several Pakistani writers. She would not even mind when some of the male writers would return and pen nasty profiles of her given that she was a bit of a bohemian and defied conventional lifestyles. Tender and embracing, Amrita lived with her Lahore-Delhi multicultural vision where forgiveness was a way of life.
Much as I tried to reach her, I could not meet her in Delhi. When I finally managed to connect with her, my trip had to be cancelled. She was in a semi-conscious state. In those months between my first and second sojourn to Delhi, Amrita Pritam died.
Perhaps I will meet her again in another realm as I think of a later poem that she wrote for her partner, Imroze:
I will meet you again
Where? How? I don’t know
Perhaps as a figure
Of your imagination
I will appear on your canvas
Or perhaps on your canvas
Appearing as a mysterious line
Quietly
I will keep staring at you.4
One of Amrita’s best-known novels is Pinjar (Skeleton). A saga of the lives of kidnapped girls of rival communities, Pinjar relives the woes of the female victims of Partition. The story revolves around Paro, who, abducted by a Muslim man, Rashid, becomes the rejected property of a Hindu household when her family disowns her for having lived with a Muslim. Against her wishes, Paro therefore has no choice but to live with Rashid and becomes a mother to his son. Following 1947, haunted by her own plight, she rescues Hindu and Sikh girls and sends them to the camps. The other character, Lajo, reunites with her family but Paro stays back with her kidnapper turned saviour. Paro and Lajo represent thousands of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh women who were defiled by rioters and rejected by their families.
Amrita Pritam has immortalized the particular moment of Partition, a winding path of the past that continues to twist and meander into our present.
Ustad Daman wove elegies in Lahore. Amrita could not get Lahore out of her system. Khushwant reconciles with memory time and again. Prem Kirpal, a Lahori migrant to Delhi, wrote these lines to sum it all up:
My beloved City of Lahore
Still Standing not far from Delhi
Within quicker reach by air or train,
Suddenly became a forbidden land
Guarded by a sovereign state
Of new ideologies, loves and hates.5
Kirpal’s poem is befittingly entitled ‘Spirit’s Musings’. A spirit will break free of limits. These individuals, some, members of literary and other establishments, were not locating themselves in the politics of Partition per se. This was the personal that got submerged in the cruel and indifferent political.
The brutal political divisions in South Asia during the twentieth century have not been accorded due importance as a psychological phenomenon. Partition in India, Pakistan, and especially in Bangladesh have not undergone the much-needed healing process. Truth and reconciliation of the South African type still remains a vague dream perhaps never to be realized. Conversely, the postcolonial culture of closed-door secretive commissions exacerbates the grief and means nothing to people. In South Africa, politicians arrived at a resolution and only then could truth and reconciliation begin. In South Asia, there has been no political resolution.
Who will exorcise the ghosts of the past? It might be too late. The victims were also the perpetrators or at best, silent participants in the 1947 violence. What does it mean to inherit these ghosts and blood stains? They have so far, clouded rational judgments in the new states. The rewriting of history by victors is routine. In this case, there are no victors, yet the rewriting of history conti
nues apace.
Centuries of coexistence was destroyed overnight by new definitions of ‘we’ the harmless and ‘they’ the harmful, hence ‘they’ should be attacked, raped and killed. Over time, violence lives on, sometimes in wars, at other times in the form of India’s communalism and Pakistan’s sectarian bloodbaths. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ shrink further and the circles of inclusion and exclusion diminish, assuring ultimate self-annihilation. Nations, like individuals, can become suicidal too.
Born well after Partition in Pakistani Punjab, the Partition’s brutality still remains an enigma to me. How could violence emanate so suddenly? As a Pakistani, I believe that there were cogent reasons, economic and political, for Partition to have occurred. But for the communal particularism, where communal identity gained ascendancy over humanistic values to flow within rivers of blood, that remains a question never really answered.
My memory is scarred and my history garbled. Amrita Pritam felt the yearning and sense of suffocation as do all the children and grandchildren of Partition:
Today I have erased the number of my house
And removed the stain of identity on my street’s forehead
And I have wiped the direction on each road
But if you really want to meet me
Then knock at the doors of every country
Every city, every street
And wherever a glimpse of a free spirit exists
That will be my home.6
Identities change but rarely vanish.
When another Delhi writer, Ajeet Caur, visited Lahore in 2004, she was taken to Fleming Road. As her fellow writers from Lahore related, she was walking in a trance. She broke down when she identified her house—the house that was hers and not hers. The city was once hers and now she had a different address, a different city and even a different country. Before her visit, writing about the room she was born in and lived in until she had to leave Lahore, she wrote, ‘Some are born in gypsy families and others become gypsies through a conspiracy of circumstances’. Her poignant conclusion was, ‘Poets are free to make the elements—the earth, the air and the sky—as romantic as they like, but I assure you that these elements are not only deaf and dumb, they are also blind.’7
Elements are indifferent, sometimes deaf and dumb. Hearts are not.
I am not sure how I met Bunty. It was perhaps through a reference from the office during one of my early work-related visits. Bunty Singh, brother of Sunny Singh and Goldie Singh, became my guide and companion. Sunny and Bunty have set up a mini empire of rental cars through investments made by Goldie who lives in Germany and is married to a ‘good’ German girl. Bunty, a boisterous, internet-savvy young Sardar, found me to be somewhat like him. We spoke in Punjabi, often using lines that would quite miss those outside the ‘Punju’ realm. And we both were equally fascinated by each other—the thirty-something grandchildren of Partition.
So after an hour of awkward client-service interaction, Bunty decided to befriend me. It was just the right thing to have happened I guess. How else would I know a real Sardar? Most of my Sikh interactions took place as a student in the UK decades ago.
However, as soon as there was mention of Partition, there was a palpable unease. It was only after a day or two that he confided how half his family was butchered at a railway station. To use Amrita’s words:
Who can guess
How difficult it is
To nurse barbarity in one’s belly
To consume the body and burn the bones?
I am the fruit of that season
When the berries of Independence came into blossom.8
Bunty was a classic mixture of family oral histories and textbooks. The textbook narratives were humanized by real accounts of co-existence. But the confusion remained. For instance, when the familiarity deepened, he would talk of ‘Muslims’ who cut up Sikhs and Hindus near Aimanabad, now in Pakistan. Yet these tensions were not enough for him to resent me as an individual. I too shared my narrative of Sikh brutality and also mentioned various characters and incidents from the Urdu stories of Manto. He was bewildered. The loss of humanity even in a fable can be unnerving. Bunty wants to hate me but cannot. He does not take money from me at the airport a few days later. Perhaps he finds in me the humanized phantom of the ‘other’.
Bunty accompanies me to the Purana Qila that I have seen from the outside, time and again, as I pass by on the busy Mathura Road. It is exceptionally quiet, except for a few students with their books and an odd couple or two seeking intimacy in its not-so-dark corners. This is the landmark of ancient Delhi. The Mahabharata tells us that Indraprastha, Delhi’s ancient name, meaning the ‘abode of the king of the gods’, was the great capital city which the five Pandava brothers created on the banks of the river Jamuna. The veracity of such a claim is disputed. Archaeological excavations show that there was indeed a township here but what sort of a settlement it was is not known. Fifteenth century BCE, I tell Bunty, and he stares at me in disbelief.
I try to imagine King Yudhisthira but cannot conjure up a figure. All I know are the popular representations of gods, often aesthetically challenged, so I avoid those images. I resolve to find out more. But the horses and chariots do come before my mind for a split second and I smile at how history plays tricks with us—Aryans, Turkish chariots, Mughal caravans and now the bustle of urban Delhi, all jumbled here.
Quintessential to the Delhi experience, this site mixes time and memory. From 1450 BCE to the present day, the monument tells various stories. The standing walls that we see today are most likely the work of the unfortunate Emperor Humayun who chose this as a residence in Delhi and added many structures to the ruins. Proximity to the Jamuna must have played its part—in hot Hindustan, water and breeze were essential for survival.
The large fortified city of Purana Qila was symbolically named ‘Din Panah’ and by 1538, much of the work was completed. However, the rise of Sher Shah Suri halted the process. Sher Shah Suri took over Delhi and ousted the feeble Humayun (known for his proclivity for opium and indecision). Sher Shah added a lot here—a stunning mosque and the octagonal Sher Mandal. Of course Din Panah became Dilli Sher Shahi. Sher Shah’s reign, brief as it was and not of the Mughal ilk, has not been closely studied. The construction of the Grand Trunk Road that is shared by India and Pakistan is attributed to him. However, most notably, Sher Shah was a secular Pathan who was a true forerunner of Akbar in that he believed that religious freedoms and a discrimination-free regime were essential for effective governance.
In 1555, Humayun regained control of Delhi and he returned to his Din Panah. In a year’s time, he tumbled down the stairs of Sher Mandal with books in his hand, thereby ending his tumbling life. Not far away from this place lies his magnificent tomb reflecting the grandeur of Gur-e-Amir of Tamarlane in Samarkand. He was succeeded by the greatest of emperors, Akbar. Little did Humayun know that three centuries later, his descendent, Bahadur Shah Zafar, would escape from the Red Fort to take a boat down the Jamuna and reach Purana Qila to go to Hazrat Nizamuddin’s shrine. Also, Humayun would have never imagined as he was dying, that the last Mughal emperor would be captured by the British at his tomb.
Bunty tells me in chaste Punjabi, ‘aais jaga tay badi history haygee’! (‘too much history in this place’!) We walk around a huge well and cross the royal baths until we find a little tea-stall. Bunty is amused with my ramblings. He is also interested in the Sikh shrines in Pakistan. These are well looked after, I reassure him and inquire why his family has not yet visited Pakistan.
The Mahabharata tells us that Delhi was founded on a jungle inhabited by ancient tribes. The Pandava brothers cleared the jungle and eliminated all its inhabitants to build Indraprastha. Thus, primordial Delhi set the pattern for violence—it has always marked the city’s existence. Small wonder that all the Delhis that were to follow faced political upheaval involving a fair amount of violence. The first recorded war for the throne of Delhi—mythological as it might be—is narrated in th
e Mahabharata.
The events of 1947 added another life to this monument. Purana Qila was used as a vast refugee camp. Violence on the streets of Delhi had forced thousands of Muslim families to leave their homes and prepare for a long journey to Pakistan. The conditions of this refugee camp, where up to 100,000 people may have taken shelter, were appalling. Dr Zakir Hussain, later the president of India, bemoaned that those who had escaped sudden death came here to be ‘buried in a living grave’.9
I am completely confused… shall I appreciate the beauty of the ruins or the syncretic architecture of Sher Shah or its pre-historic significance? Or shall I search for traces of the blood of those who must have died here? Accidents of history can be deaf and dumb. Like Ajeet Caur’s interpretation of the elements, history is alive yet indifferent to individual tales and personal suffering. I still have to probe into these difficult questions.
In September 1947, Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Delhi to take stock of the violence and ease communal tensions. A shaken, nonviolent Gandhi visited Purana Qila to witness the conditions of dispossessed Muslim exiles—refugees in their own city. I can hear him making his appeal to Hindus by comparing the predicament of the Muslims to that of the five Pandava brothers who were exiles in their own kingdom for twelve years, ‘It is said that in the Mahabharata period the Pandavas used to stay in this Purana Qila’. Thus Muslims ‘are under your protection and under my protection’. Gandhi’s tireless efforts in Delhi that included visits to the Jama Masjid, Old Delhi, as well as his rounds of fasting, brought a tenuous peace back to the city. But what a price he paid for attempting to clear the poison in the air!