The train to pakistan 194711/6/2022 ![]() ![]() Only the engine driver was spared, so he could take his grisly cargo to its destination. Trains filled with refugees crossing the border were stopped and every man, woman and child on board slaughtered. The figures speak for themselves, but it was the barbarity that was unleashed that was terrifying. As historians and writers such as Nisid Hajary and Saadat Hassan Manto have noted, it was a time when the normal mores of civilisation were suspended and neighbours massacred each other without a thought. ![]() But the suddenness, scale and ferocity of the violence that erupted in 1947 was still shocking. True, political tension had been rising inexorably in the two decades preceding partition, as leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League bickered over the terms of the bitter divorce. “There were more cows in the school dairy than boys in the classroom,” he remembers. The school had also lost many of its staff. When my father returned to school in September, he was one of only 30 of the 300 boys who had left in April. “There was no intermarriage between the communities and we tended not to eat at each other’s houses, but we were fast friends,” recalls my mother’s brother, Syed Babar Ali, now 91. This closeness was not unusual in pre-partition Punjab. ![]() Yet my father’s grandfather had been on good terms with his Sikh and Hindu neighbours. “Wild bands of marauding men armed with sickles, axes and swords roamed the open countryside, killing and mutilating anyone they found of the opposite faith.” Once killings began, the villagers braced themselves for an attack every day. Shergarh was surrounded by Sikh villages. “I have never known a period of greater fear and uncertainty,” he says. Nonetheless, three months of pure terror followed. My Muslim father had the great fortune of not having to flee his ancestral home. Luckily, the line that was drawn two months later, severing Punjab in two, allotted Shergarh to Pakistan. “Since he could not guarantee our safety, our headmaster had decided to send us home.” My father took what he thought was temporary leave of his many Hindu and Sikh friends and left for Shergarh, his village in Okara district, 70 miles south-west of Lahore. “Partition was expected in 1948, but the date had been brought forward and riots had already erupted in parts of the North-West Frontier province and some areas of Punjab,” recalls my father. School usually broke up for summer holidays in the first week of June, but the headmaster announced that, this year, term would end sooner – in fact, the school would close the following day. My father, who was then at Aitchison college, an elite boarding school, remembers being summoned by the English headmaster to an extraordinary assembly in April 1947. Moni Mohsin’s father, Syed Mohammed Mohsin. In the sectarian violence that ensued, 2 million people were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped and abducted, homes were plundered and villages were torched. More than 12 million people were displaced as Muslims in Punjab and Bengal fled across the hastily drawn borders into Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs made the opposite journey into India. It was one of the most painful births in modern history. ![]() Seventy years ago, on 14 August 1947, as 200 years of British rule came to an end, India was divided into two independent states, Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. Whenever Lahore gets mentioned, they all burst into tears together.” Is it still there?” “Do the fireflies still dance on the canal on summer nights?” “Do you ever go to Faletti’s hotel? And its famous cabarets?” When I told the late writer and historian Khushwant Singh – a Delhi wallah who was once a Lahori – of my encounters in Delhi, he smiled and said: “You should see them at the cinema. It had a semicircular driveway and black, wrought-iron balconies. Others asked after childhood haunts they hadn’t seen for almost 50 years – Anarkali Bazaar, Shalimar Gardens, Mayo School of Arts, Model Town. In the 90s, many of those elderly migrants were alive whenever I bumped into them and they heard I was from Lahore, they crowded round, asking me to speak in “real Lahori Punjabi”. Some moved on to other parts of India, but most stayed and put down roots. At partition, Delhi received a huge influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The GuardianĮverywhere I went in Delhi I heard similar stories, but that is not surprising. ‘It was a time when the normal mores of civilisation were suspended’. ![]()
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