by Yasmin Khan
7
Blood on the Tracks
By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarised police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Force, and a petrified, well-armed population. The violence which preceded Partition was grave, widespread and lethal. After 15 August 1947, it took on a new ferocity, intensity and callousness. Now militias trawled the countryside for poorly protected villages to raid and raze to the ground, gangs deliberately derailed trains, massacring their passengers one by one or setting the carriages ablaze with petrol. Women and children were carried away like looted chattels.
The British evacuation was in full swing by this stage. Far away in Bombay, British soldiers were parading through the monumental Gateway of India and boarding their troopships, kitbags slung over their shoulders, guns still in hand as crowds cheered from the shore. They were waved on by nationalist leaders and the imperial withdrawal meshed conveniently with the nationalistic stance of the Congress and League leaderships. ‘Foreign armies are the most obvious symbol of foreign rule,’ Nehru allegedly told the first contingent of British troops before they sailed away from the Indian coastline just two days after Independence Day in 1947. ‘They are essentially armies of occupation and, as such, their presence must inevitably be resented.’1 His viewpoint neatly overlapped with the interests of the British establishment which was eager to bring its war-weary and homesick soldiers back to Britain.
The terrorised public in the polarised atmosphere of Punjab might not have agreed. Instead of using these troops to quell the trouble, the British command confined them to barracks and evacuated the men as quickly as they possibly could. Mountbatten's instructions confidentially stated that British army units had no operational functions whatsoever, could not be used for internal security purposes and would not be used on the frontier or in the states. There was only one exception: they could be used in an emergency to save British lives.2 The Punjabi Boundary Force – a toothless and dreadfully inadequate response to Partition's violence – was the alternative British initiative to protect life and limb in Punjab.3 It was in existence for just thirty-two days. At its peak, the Punjab Boundary Force, in which Delhi's administrators had ‘remarkable faith’, covered only the twelve most ‘disturbed’ districts of Punjab and included, at most, 25,000 men. This meant that there were fewer than two men to a square mile. Sharing a train compartment from Delhi to Bahawalpur at the end of July with a young Sikh army major who was about to join the Boundary Force, Penderel Moon recalled that, ‘He was himself about to join it, but was utterly sceptical of its capacity to maintain order.’4 As a cartoon at the time expressed it, showing a goat sliced in two by a knife, ‘You asked for it.’ The message from London seemed to be that this was the price of freedom.
Violence must sit at the core of any history of Partition. It is the phenomenal extent of the killing during Partition which distinguishes it as an event. It affected women, children and the elderly as well as well-armed young men.5 Grisly scenes of violence in Punjab have been better described in fiction, poetry and film. Children watched as their parents were dismembered or burned alive, women were brutally raped and had their breasts and genitals mutilated and the entire populations of villages were summarily executed. Eyewitnesses in Punjab reported the putrid stench of corpses and the crimson bloodstains on walls, station concourses and roads. After an atrocity in Hasilpur in Bahawalpur state, in August, when approximately 350 people were gunned down by rifle fire by a gang of Pathans, Penderel Moon groped for an analogy. ‘Men, women and children, there they were all jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures, some of them so life-like that one could hardly believe that they were really dead. I was forcibly reminded of pictures that I had seen as a child of Napoleonic battlefields…’6
Broken bodies lay along roadsides and on train platforms, while charred wood and rubble were all that remained of large quarters of Amritsar and Lahore. The two cities were de facto war zones: barbed wire had to be coiled along the length of station platforms in Lahore to keep people apart, looted objects lay abandoned in deserted streets, vultures perched on walls, broken and grotesquely splayed carriages and rickshaws lay at jarred angles, large suburban areas of bustling jewellers, bakeries and bookshops were now reduced to voluminous debris which took many years to be bulldozed away. Human figures in photographs of the time look pitifully small against the mountains of rubble left behind.
All this has been written about in lurid technicolour and from jarring perspectives. Partition stories of Punjab in 1947 are marked by specific details and are layered in unique and entirely individual family memories. Yet these descriptions are also shot through with generic imagery and the haunting motifs that have entered the popular imagination of South Asia: the corpse-laden refugee train passing silently through the province, the penniless rows of refugees streaming across new international borders, which submerge individual tragedies in wider community histories. Generalisations do not do justice to the multiple atrocities. Poets and novelists offer more carefully calibrated, fragmentary insights into personal agonies and ruinous dilemmas of the time. The best have turned the emptiness of this moment into poetry, and grown new creative life into the hollow abyss of Partition's worst moments. The sound of silence in Punjab remains resounding, however. Partition is both ever-present in South Asia's public, political realm and continually evaded.
How to record these acts and disentangle rationality from madness, political intent from momentary insanity? In the sheer diversity and density of the violence, killers acted out of fear or in self-defence, were swept away on a buoyant tide of killing-induced euphoria, felt the intolerable pressure of their peers or found themselves conditioned by the conformity and regulations of institutions such as the police or by the inducements of their friends and colleagues in armed militias. One devout Khaksar, Mujahid Tajdin, who later stormed the gurdwara on Temple Road, Lahore, remembered being trained for the task for four days by a local police sub-inspector. The men in his gang were promised martyrdom or heroism, depending on whether they lived or died, and he remembered how they were told tawdry stories about the massacres of Muslims elsewhere in the country. They set up defence posts and stormed the walls of the gurdwara in the middle of the night, with cries of ‘Pakistan Zindabad.’ Someone took a petrol canister along. At least twenty to thirty Sikh men and women burned to death in the inferno that followed. Today the former Khaksar bakes naan bread on a street in Lahore and prays for forgiveness for his part in the murders.7 Sometimes such actions are inexplicable, even by the perpetrators.
At the time, testosterone-fuelled ideals of martyrdom, bravery, honour and heroism sanctioned the killings. The spoils of looting attracted others who mopped up after the murderers, acquiring land, jewels and houses from the detritus of massacres. Even those untouched by ideological concerns were able to seek opportunities in the aftermath. Maya Rani, a young sweeper at the time, was not involved in the fighting but accrued valuable dowry goods in the wave of looting which followed, almost as if it was a game. ‘From one shop we stole pure ghee and almonds; at other places we found cloth, we collected so many utensils that we filled up a room as large as this one.’8 Harcharan Singh Nirman who was a child of just six at the time recalled people looting and carrying things from houses, in heaving gunny bags and on their heads. ‘I also brought out a small chair … I could lift only this thing because it was very light … the impression in my mind was people are taking things, I should also take something.’9 Explaining actions long after the event is sometimes impossible. Many memories become shrouded with the overcoat of regret and cold reason.
Others killed members of their own family and community, or committed suicide, preferring an ‘honourable’ death to the shame of rape or conversion of their loved ones, while it is impossible to know how many people eliminated romantic rivals or mu
rdered long-standing adversaries with impunity while disguising their actions behind the façade of Partition's carnage.
This was war by any other name, and the principal aggressors were paramilitaries composed of former soldiers and well-trained young men working hand in glove with the armed forces of the princely states. Young men stood on the front lines. Political interpretations of freedom, self-rule and power gave these men credibility and a sense of legitimacy. As Ram Dev, a young man working at a university in Lahore in the spring of 1947, who was arrested and detained for rioting, later recalled in an evasive, implicit acknowledgement of his own personal role, ‘there was no tradition of fighting or killing in my family, but I wanted to keep Punjab together at all costs’. He claimed he acted to give a ‘warning signal’ to the ‘other’ side but also remembered ‘a lot of milkmen and wooden sheds, and a lot of haystacks, there were thousands of tons of wood; someone threw kerosene, someone threw a bomb, it was set on fire and for twenty miles you could see the smoke; there were thousands of thousands of buffalo there, the entire milk supply of Lahore came from there; it was a milkmen's colony – all Muslims.’10
This was not haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systematic ethnic cleansing. Large groups of men, with their own codes of honour, and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other. It is no coincidence that it is a war veteran who organises the defensive preparations of the village depicted in the novel Tamas: ‘he had taken part in the Second World War on the Burmese front and he was now hell-bent on trying the tactics of the Burmese front on the Muslims of his village’.11 In Punjab these gangs used military tactics, mortars, bombs, traps and automatic rifles. They covered large distances in formation and cut off supply routes and exit points for the fleeing refugees.
The result was terror. Krishna Baldev Vaid, a youth at the time, later a distinguished writer, lived through a prolonged, and life-threatening ordeal, and had to wait over a day and night for rescue with his family after they escaped from Dinga, a small town near Amritsar which fell under siege:
we were numb … we were six of our family … and three more people … it's an awful feeling … we could hear the gunshots, we could guess from the shouting that people were being killed, that several houses were on fire … and we were numb with terror … my father was quiet, but my mother was constantly mumbling something, prayers … everyone was tense and short-tempered … this man he wanted to smoke … and he was very curious as to what was happening … and peeped out … partly out of idiocy, and everyone would snap at him.
After Krishna Baldev Vaid was rescued, one of his most graphic memories was of arriving at a makeshift camp in an office compound in the early light of dawn and the horrible sight of the survivors, bandaged in every way imaginable, and the traumatic process of counting the victims. It was here that he discovered who was alive, dead, raped or injured.12
The poet Louis MacNeice witnessed similar scenes. He was part of a British BBC features and news team sent to the subcontinent to record the imperial transition. The team drove out from Delhi on 26 August in a BBC van, heading for Peshawar. En route they passed overspilling kafilas making their treacherous journey across the Punjab. Somehow, the BBC team found their way to Sheikhupura, a satellite town of Lahore, which had been badly devastated by violence during the preceding weeks. The hospital held eighty seriously injured Sikhs and Hindus, covered with flies and attended by one doctor, with little or no equipment. A further 1,500 were packed into a nearby schoolhouse. The scene carved itself deeply into the minds of the helpless onlookers. ‘A v. large number of these had been wounded with swords or spears & their white clothes were covered with rusty-brown blood. Some with their hands cut off etc. & again the hordes of flies. But hardly any moaning – just abstracted, even smiling in a horrible unreal way.’13
Breaking bodies
Of all the horrors of 1947, the experience of the women who were raped is the most difficult to write about. It is a history of broken bodies and broken lives. Rape was used as a weapon, as a sport and as a punishment. Armed gangs had started to use rape as a tool of violence in Bengal and Bihar in 1946 but this now took on a new ubiquity and savagery in Punjab. It sparked the deepest feelings of revenge, dishonour and shame. Many women were silent about what had happened to them: ‘in most households the woman said no, no, I was hiding in the jungle or I was hiding in the pond, or I was hiding in a neighbour's house,’ recalled Ashoka Gupta, a volunteer who worked with distraught women in the aftermath of attacks in Noakhali; ‘they will not declare, or they will not confess, that they have been raped or molested … because it will be a confession of shame, and once confessed there will be quite a possibility that they will not be taken back in their own homes.’14
Rape was the unspoken fear at the back of many minds by the summer of 1947. News had been circulating of the atrocities committed against women – indeed, these were the most powerful and graphic rumours reaching the villages. Women feared for themselves and their own bodies. Their brothers, fathers and husbands feared for the shame and honour of their family and the wider community. The women themselves now became mere shell-like repositories of the new national identities when attacks on them – or threat of attacks – were used to prise families from their homes, to punish, mark out and terrify. The voluntary and enforced suicides of women and the murder of relatives by shooting, poisoning or drowning was not uncommon as it was, in some cases, regarded as preferable to the life worse than death which, it was believed, was certain to follow after rape. Other families faced with the choice of life or death traded their young daughters in return for the safe transit of the rest of the family. A Sikh woman, Taran, told her story to the writers Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin:
One night suddenly we heard drums and our house was encircled. A mob gathered outside. I was 16, brimming with vitality. My two sisters were 17 and 14, and my mother was sick with worry. She trembled with fear. She took out all her gold, tied it up in handkerchiefs and distributed it among different family members for safekeeping. She made us wear several sets of clothes each, one on top of the other, shoes, socks everything and she asked us to hide the gold. We did not know where each of us would end up – this gold was our security. She kept crying and kept giving us instructions.15
Taran escaped. But many others in Punjab were snatched from their homes and villages by marauding gangs or literally carried away from the slow and under-protected kafilas that made their way on foot towards the border: ‘when we were travelling in a caravan we had some people who had guns, four or five guns among us … but women or children would trail behind, after all, travelling 150 miles some people would get tired, they never rejoined us so we believe somebody kidnapped them and took them away’. As another young woman at the time, Durga Rani, recalled, ‘The Muslims used to announce that they would take away our daughters. They would force their way into homes and pick up young girls and women. Ten or twenty of them would enter, tie up the men folk and take the women. We saw many who had been raped and disfigured, their faces and breasts scarred, and then abandoned. They had tooth-marks all over them. Their families said, “How can we keep them now? Better that they are dead.” Many of them were so young – 18, 15, 14 years old – what remained of them now? Their “character” was now spoilt.’16 As vessels of the honour of the whole community, the shame and horror fell on everybody associated with the girls: these were not individual tragedies.
Women's bodies were marked and branded with the slogans of freedom, ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ and ‘Jai Hind’, inscribed on their faces and breasts. Those who survived were often humiliated and grossly scarred. They had become symbols of terror. Even worse, many of these victims were not really ‘women’ at all. Girls under the age of twelve made up at least one third of the women recovered in the state-sponsored recovery operation that followed. The rest of the women tended to be under the age of thirty-five and from villages. T
hey were not then, most tellingly, members of the political classes who had fought for, or who had rejected, Partition. Instead they were victims of political debates that had, up until now, barely impinged on their lives. At the worst extreme women were traded on a flesh market, ‘in the same way that baskets of oranges or grapes are sold or gifted’, in the words of Kamlaben Patel, an Indian social worker who was stationed in Lahore as part of the recovery operation for five years after 1947 and saw the bleak and complex aftermath of these attacks and abductions.17 Policemen and soldiers, as well as men of their own community, sometimes colluded.
After their ordeals, the women suffered the fears of unwanted pregnancies, tried to induce miscarriages or sought out illegal abortions. But above all, many women feared that their families or husbands would not be able to accept them or welcome them again. These fears were not unfounded. The old taboos and rigid social customs of marriage and purity had been shattered. For those who had never been married there was the fear that they were ruined and now placed beyond the social pale. They believed that their families might be better able to rebuild their lives without them. Prostitution, life on the street or in a state-run home became the grim options if women were rejected by their families, and many preferred to convert or melt into the society of their abductor, becoming a new ‘wife’ or a family servant, rather than openly admitting the shame of rape. Ironically, the misogyny and patriarchal values that cut across North Indian society at the time meant that Indian and Pakistani men had much more in common in their attitudes and actions than they ever would have admitted. Women became, as Gandhi later described them, ‘the chief sufferers’ of 1947.
Rather than being raped and abandoned, tens of thousands of women were kept in the ‘other’ country, as permanent hostages, captives or forced wives; they became generically known simply as ‘the abducted women’. Official government figures spoke of 83,000 women kept back, taken away from their families, on both sides of the border.18 Why did men keep the women they had attacked? Some became servants, forced into unpaid labour, and converted and were assimilated into a new family; others replaced sisters and wives, who had themselves been taken away. Others became ‘wives’ and started a new life with their abductor or captor, with the full knowledge of others, who were complicit or who at least turned a blind eye to the new arrivals in the family. In all these different ways, the driving force was the impulse to consume, transform or eradicate the remnants of the other community.