Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  In 1947, to Jinnah’s distress, religious violence, not triumphant celebration, inaugurated Independence. As he sat in the Governor General’s house in Karachi, each new day brought fresh tales of bloodshed from the Punjab. Ten million men and women walked out of their ancestral village homes, forced east or west by the fact of their religion. Between 200,000 and one million people died in the ensuing religious frenzy–an official body count was never made, and thus the figures vary widely, with the British at the time estimating up to 500,000; Winston Churchill accusing Mountbatten of killing ‘two million Indians’ and later commentators in India and Pakistan putting the tally as high as two or even three million dead.

  Nobody since has been able to explain the gargantuan scale of the tragedy; why Sikhs and Hindus slaughtered Muslims, why Muslims butchered Hindus and Sikhs, why villagers who had lived peacefully as neighbours turned on each other, why women were raped and abducted, why children were separated from their parents. In 1947, with the help of sectarian volunteer armies–Muslim, Sikh and Hindu storm-troopers secretly trained and drafted in for the purpose–massacre spread like contagion. Every refugee who survived had a terrible tale to tell, and a deadly grudge to bear.

  The stories told by those who lived through 1947 are generally difficult to relate and painful to hear but they have become integral to Pakistan’s image of itself. And so, one evening after iftar, I take a taxi north from the sea, to meet a woman who survived the carnage of the Punjab Partition. Zohra Begum is an old woman now, who sits surrounded by her daughters and grandchildren in a large, cool house on a quiet street where boys are playing cricket. She came to Karachi in 1947 as someone who had lost almost everything–family, possessions, peace of mind. Her memories of that time are vivid and agonizing, and as I listen to her speak, and then hear her protest, ‘Why are you asking all these questions?’, I remember the importance of forgetting, if grief is not to be overwhelming. ‘But it is also important for us to hear these things,’ her daughter tells me later.

  In 1947, Zohra was just sixteen years old. One evening, she came in from the fields to find her girl cousins lying dead on the floor, their tongues and breasts lying beside them. She allowed her Hindu servant to take her by the hand, and left the village for ever. At the time, Zohra was, by her own admission, ‘an uneducated village girl’. Married at fourteen, widowed at fifteen–now with a six-month-old baby–she had no idea what was happening when Partition was declared. In fact very few Muslims in Jalandhar expected that this district of the Punjab would go to India: Radcliffe’s Boundary Award took them by surprise. Prakash, the family’s Hindu servant, saved Zohra’s life by smearing sindoor in her hair as if she were a Hindu bride, binding the child to her chest, and professing to be her husband.

  Barefoot, covered in dust, with no headscarf, Zohra was delirious by the time they arrived at Atari station on the border. ‘The world had gone mad,’ she says. ‘Muslims were fighting each other to get on the train; mothers were throwing their babies on to the tracks and escaping.’ Prakash found a space for them both next to the scalding engine. The twenty-minute journey took two days; Hindus kept stopping the train and killing Muslims; there was no food, no water. ‘It was like Karbala,’ she says.

  Like a miracle, Zohra’s brother was waiting for her at the station in Lahore. He had been coming there every day since 15 August, calling his sister’s name in the hope that she might have made it through the mayhem. He took her to Karachi, where they lived in tents on the edge of the city. Prakash converted to Islam.

  Later, Zohra’s brother made enquiries about the fate of the extended family. The men had been killed; the women had either been killed or abducted. He even made the difficult trip to India to try and bring the abducted women ‘home’–but they were Sikhs now, married with children. It was too late for reunions: Pakistan was a foreign country.

  For women like Zohra, who had witnessed hell, Jinnah became a hate figure. He had forced Pakistan upon them; he had flown to this ‘jungli’ (uncouth, dirty) new country in the comfort of an aeroplane; he had allowed all the best places to go to India. And he had wrenched women like Zohra apart from the Hindu-Muslim culture she loved–on this point she is insistent–and into the arms of this miserable, overcrowded city.

  Descending on Karachi from north India in 1947, Jinnah’s central government made an unpleasant discovery–Pakistan had drawn the short straw. India had inherited the imperial capital, grand buildings and a robust political infrastructure. Karachi was a provincial seaside town in Sindh, British India’s smallest state. It had so little Muslim history that when, five days after Independence, the new nation celebrated its first Eid-ul-fitr (marking the end of Ramzan) the government realized to its embarrassment that while the city boasted a Parsi fire temple, Jewish synagogue, churches of most Christian denominations and some of the oldest temples in the subcontinent, there weren’t enough decent mosques to accommodate the immigrant aristocracy (the mosques in the filthy labourers’ slum of Lyari were out of the question). In August 1947, the ruling class squeezed into the Eidgah (where Muslims assemble for Eid prayers). By 1948 the Eidgah had become a refugee camp. That year, Eid prayers were held in the park.

  Pakistan really was ‘starting at zero’ (as Jinnah’s Times obituary later put it). According to the terms of the Partition divorce settlement, the spoils of British India–money and arms, paper clips and pencils–were to be divided three to one, with Pakistan receiving the smaller share. But after Delhi was convulsed by murder and looting, the clerks who should have stayed behind to divide the spoils fled for their lives. For years, Pakistan battled India (with mixed success) to be granted the food, furniture and files that were its due. In 1947, with next to nothing from which to build a nation, the government cashed in its foreign reserves and was bailed out in gold bullion by the Nizam of Hyderabad in south India. The central government ministries were housed in barracks and hastily constructed hutments; memorandums were written along the edges of newspapers; thorns were used for paper clips; ministers voted for a reduction in their salaries. The Muslim League newspaper, Dawn, spoke of ‘an inevitable period of austerity’. But morale was high, and the patriotism needed to build a country from scratch invigorating.

  In 1947, Hameeda Akhtar Husain Raipuri was a young mother whose story, I find when I meet her, illustrates well the noble ambitions of the Pakistan movement. Today she lives ten kilometres north of the sea, in a large post-Partition housing colony–impenetrably large, its tree-lined streets numbered according to an idiosyncratic system that even my taxi driver cannot fathom. He stops, reverses, and swears under his breath several times before we reach our destination. At last a servant comes to the gate, and leads me through the house to a room at the back overlooking the garden, where Hameeda Begum is sitting on her bed, writing; she is composing her memoirs in Urdu. A servant is despatched to bring me tea and biscuits. I sit on a long, low wooden divan, and listen as she reminisces.

  She came to Karachi at Partition with her family from Aligarh–that bastion of Muslim scholarship in northern India. Her father wrote popular Urdu detective novels; her husband had a PhD in Sanskrit drama; her family is the quintessence of India’s Urdu-speaking elite ‘with its famous syncretic culture, neither wholly Muslim nor Hindu…floating upon society like an oilslick upon water’, as the historians Ayesha Jalal and Anil Seal describe it in an essay entitled ‘Alternative to Partition’. Why did she leave her pluralistic life in India? Was she spurred on by Muslim League rhetoric, or disturbed by Hindu sectarianism? ‘Neither,’ she says. ‘The time came when our Hindu neighbours felt they could no longer protect us, and so we were left with no option.’

  As the wife of a civil servant in the Education Ministry, Hameeda’s introduction to Karachi was comparatively orderly. The train that brought her from Delhi was one of the first to be attacked; but it was full of government employees, and thus was well defended by the army. ‘A gentleman was waiting at the station in Karachi with the keys to our flat in Na
pier Barracks,’ she says; ‘another was holding out a ration card.’ So the family settled into their new country, full of hope.

  Then the refugees began arriving–physical proof of the stories of murder, rape and looting which had filtered through from the Punjab, of the ‘madness that the two countries did to each other’. Leaving her young children at home with the servants, Hameeda Begum enrolled in the women’s wing of the Pakistan National Guard. She was given a course in nursing by the army and put to work in the emergency first aid camps. She ministered to the semi-dead–the refugees who arrived without clothes, without food, without limbs; some came on stretchers, others limped in on foot. With up to a thousand new patients a day, ‘there was no time to think.’ For a young mother in a new town it was hard work–but at least she was doing something.

  Hameeda’s husband, meanwhile, was growing increasingly disillusioned by the corruption involved in rehousing the refugees. Within a few months of Independence it became clear that Karachi’s population had doubled in size. Rich industrialists and bankers–those whom Jinnah had personally invited to help launch the nation–flew in from Bombay. Businessmen, craftspeople and entrepreneurs arrived en masse from India’s United Provinces. Some 44,000 Muslim government employees–tea boys and peons, civil servants and politicians; their spouses, parents and children–took the train from all over India and came to Pakistan. Naturally, they hollered for housing, they camped in Karachi’s schools, they filled up its lovely green spaces with their clamorous existence.

  Rumours began circulating of the dishonesty and sleaze emanating from the Rent Control and Rehabilitation Department. Government servants had been caught taking bribes; rich citizens were buying accommodation chits off desperate refugees; Muslims were living in houses from which Hindus had been forcibly evicted. A marital as well as national crisis was brewing. Hameeda had brought their residency papers with her from India–the family had owned a large house in an upmarket area of Delhi and was due something of equivalent size in Karachi. She presented her papers to the housing authorities, and they gave her the right to a commodious residence on Bunder Road. But when she returned home and showed her husband the family’s rightful compensation, he was furious. The corruption in the housing authority, he felt, was compromising the integrity of Pakistani society. He ripped up the paper and, like many other decent and worthy Pakistanis, sacrificed his family’s comfort to the ideal of a high-minded nation.

  Sixty years later, almost all of Hameeda’s descendants have spurned the chaos of her adopted homeland for the relative safety of Dubai, the United States or England. As I leave that evening, she is sitting serenely with her silver paan box on her knee, listening quietly as her son practises the sitar.

  For five months following Partition, Pakistan’s leaders consoled themselves with the fact that Karachi had not seen any of the rioting that had disfigured Delhi, India’s blood-soaked capital. Sindh had been allocated to Pakistan undivided. The Hindus hadn’t left. The outlook seemed peaceful. There was one intractable problem. The city was brimful with people. Something had to give.

  On 6 January 1948, nearly two hundred Sikhs arrived in Karachi en route to India, by train from Nawabshah, a small town in Sindh. The Nawabshah administration sent a message to Karachi: the Sikhs were to be transported directly to the docks. In the confusion somebody forgot to relay the communication; or maybe the error was deliberate. That morning, the Sikhs–wearing the bright turbans distinctive of their faith, and thus for many Muslim migrants symbols of the terrible Punjab riots–were taken to the gurdwara, the Sikh temple in the centre of Karachi. It was the chance the refugees had been waiting for. They surrounded the gurdwara, stoned it, and set it on fire. Throughout the city, massive, apparently spontaneous rioting erupted. Hindus–hitherto secure in their homes and mixed-faith neighbourhoods–now took refuge in their temples; Muslim refugees, on many of whom the same experience had been visited a few months before in India, occupied their abandoned houses. M. S. M. Sharma, Hindu editor of a Karachi paper, claimed that the rampage was organized by disgruntled Pakistan Secretariat clerks. Whoever was responsible, wrote Sri Prakasa, first Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, from now on ‘no Hindu had the courage to continue there.’

  Sindh had been championed as a paradigm of inter-faith harmony. Following the riots, the government estimated that three thousand Hindus a day were taking their belongings down to the docks, and purchasing a passage to India. The Indian Government launched ‘Operation Evacuation’. Jinnah, who had witnessed Nehru’s sense of disgrace at the carnage in Delhi, admitted that the ‘refugees have blackened my face’. He was ‘the most shocked individual in Pakistan’, Sharma wrote later. But Sharma also knew that Jinnah had to be careful: Partition had visited tragedy on countless Muslims, and many refugees read his conciliatory words to the ‘minorities’ as betrayal. The government issued statements lamenting the Hindus’ departure, but it did little to stop them going.

  Pakistan had been viewed by many north Indian Muslim businessmen as a golden opportunity; if Sindh’s famously rich and ‘venturesome’ Hindu mercantile class left for India, they could fill the vacuum. Hindu moneylenders were hated by Sindhi Muslim landlords (a Sindhi version of The Merchant of Venice, written in 1890 by Mirza Qalich Beg, cast Shylock as a Hindu). For both the opportunistic business class and the indebted landed gentry there was much to gain from Hindus leaving. The riots of 6 January–intentionally or not–provided the answer.

  Dawn, by now Pakistan’s foremost English-language newspaper and the government’s media mouthpiece, played a major role in fomenting a climate of suspicion and ill-will, causing Hindus to feel like outsiders in their country, which in turn hastened their departure. In January 1948, it complained that Hindus were seen on the decks of their departing boat, shouting ‘Jai Hind!’ (Long Live India) and flinging their Jinnah caps into the sea. In February, it bemoaned the government’s policy of restoring stolen property to Hindus: ‘the only chance they will avail of,’ it whined, ‘is to fleece the Muslims.’ In March it gave a sinister gloss to Jinnah’s request that Hindus must ‘cooperate as Pakistanis’. In April, it successfully backed a motion to overturn the statute enshrined in Karachi Corporation’s pre-Partition Convention, that the mayor should be elected alternately from among the Muslim and non-Muslim communities. In May it endorsed the sacking of the Hindu editor of the Sind Observer. In June it maintained that Hindus were emigrating ‘only to spite Pakistan’. In July, when Hindus began returning–Sindhi refugees having found themselves unwelcome in many areas of India–it questioned the government’s ‘wisdom in letting these non-Muslims’ back into the country. In August it alleged that Hindus were ‘pouring’ across the Sindh border to disrupt Pakistan. In September it termed the refugees ‘Hindu deserters’.

  Many of these tactics mirrored those being employed by provincial Indian newspapers. But Dawn–founded by Jinnah and representing the views of national politicians–should have been more circumspect. By the end of 1948, four-fifths of Sindh’s Hindu population–up to a million people–had emigrated to India.

  Within a month of the riots, the government realized to its alarm that something entirely unexpected was happening: among the fleeing Hindus were the city’s sweepers and sewer cleaners. Dawn began publishing letters and articles by outraged residents of Karachi, who regretted, cajoled and complained: ‘Asia’s cleanest city’ had become an unhygienic disgrace. The streets–washed every day during the British administration–were littered with stinking rubbish; the nalas (streams), which once ran with such clear water that young boys could swim or fish in them, were becoming rancid sewers. There were enough jobs for two thousand cleaners, and not enough people to do them.

  Throughout February 1948, the Government of Pakistan printed a daily three-page review in Dawn of the policies and achievements of each of its ministries since Independence. It was the turn of the Interior Ministry on 23 February:

  Lately, in view of the apprehended blow to the social a
nd economic structure of the province as a result of the wholesale migration of depressed classes, the Government of Sind have [sic] been compelled to take legal powers to slow down the migration of such persons who in their opinion constitute the essential services of the province.

  ‘Depressed classes’ meant low-caste Hindus and Christian converts. ‘Essential services’ meant sweeping and sewer cleaning. Pakistan was not living up to the purity of its name, so the government was answering the chorus of demands for a cleaner capital city with a form of social apartheid.

  In 1948, Hindus reacted with horror. Sri Prakasa, the Indian High Commissioner, scheduled a meeting with the Prime Minister of Pakistan to complain: ‘surely God did not create the Hindus…to clean the roads and latrines of Karachi!’ But ‘who,’ the Prime Minister purportedly replied, ‘would clean the streets and latrines of Karachi in case they did not come back?’ One of Gandhi’s major campaigns had been for every class and caste to clean their own toilets. But in Pakistan, the attitude of the ruling class appeared to be that huge swathes of the population were second-class citizens.

  The fast has not yet broken when I arrive at a government-built accommodation block in Saddar, home to many of the Hindu sweepers who opted to stay in Pakistan. By chance, by mistake, I arrive in the middle of a funeral. The body of a ninety-year-old sweeper, cloth wrapped, marigold strewn, is lying under a fan in a room on the ground floor, where a priest is singing prayers. Outside, sitting under a cloth canopy in the courtyard, are his friends and relatives–all of whom worked, or still work, for the government as sweepers, sewer cleaners or sanitary inspectors.