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156 pages

English

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The Partition of India in 1947 caused one of the great human convulsions of history. The statistics are staggering. Twelve million people were displaced; a million died; seventy-five thousand women are said to have been abducted and raped; families were divided; properties lost; homes destroyed. In public memory, however, the violent, disturbing realities that accompanied Partition have remained blanketed in silence. And yet, in private, the voices of Partition have never been stilled and its ramifications have not yet ended. Urvashi Butalia's remarkable book, the outcome of a decade of interviews and research, looks at what Partition was intended to achieve, and how it worked on the ground, and in people's lives. Pieced together from oral narratives and testimonies, in many cases from women, children and dalits marginal voices never heard before and supplemented by documents, reports, diaries, memoirs and parliamentary records, this is a moving, personal chronicle of Partition that places people, instead of grand politics, at the centre. These are the untold stories of Partition, stories that India has not dared to confront even after fifty years of independence.

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India

History of Asia

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184753141
Langue	English

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URVASHI BUTALIA
THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

Voices from the Partition of India

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
1 Beginnings
2 Blood
3 Facts
4 Women
5 Honour
6 Children
7 Margins
8 Memory
Footnotes
1 Beginnings
3 Facts
4 Women
5 Honour
6 Children
7 Margins
8 Memory
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
The other Side of Silence
Urvashi Butalia is co-founder of Kali for Women, India s first feminist publishing house. She has been active in the women s and civil rights movements in India, and writes on issues relating to women, media, communications and communalism. She is co-editor of Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays and In Other Words: New Writing by Women in India.
For my mother Subhadra And my father Joginder Who taught me about Partition For Ranamama, my uncle Who lives the Partition from day to day And for my grandmother Dayawanti/Ayesha Whose life Partition shaped As it did her death
1 Beginnings
T he political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history. Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan. By far the largest proportion of these refugees - more than ten million of them - crossed the western border which divided the historic state of Punjab, Muslims travelling west to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east to India. Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned. Astonishingly, and despite many warnings, the new governments of India and Pakistan were unprepared for the convulsion: they had not anticipated that the fear and uncertainty created by the drawing of borders based on headcounts of religious identity - so many Hindus versus so many Muslims - would force people to flee to what they considered safer places, where they would be surrounded by their own kind. People travelled in buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot in great columns called kafilas, which could stretch for dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 400,000 people, refugees travelling east to India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route.
This is the generality of Partition: it exists publicly in history books. The particular is harder to discover; it exists privately in the stories told and retold inside so many households in India and Pakistan. I grew up with them: like many Punjabis of my generation, I am from a family of Partition refugees. Memories of Partition, the horror and brutality of the time, the harking back to an - often mythical - past where Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs lived together in relative peace and harmony, have formed the staple of stories I have lived with. My mother and father come from Lahore, a city loved and sentimentalized by its inhabitants, which lies only twenty miles inside the Pakistan border. My mother tells of the dangerous journeys she twice made back there to bring her younger brothers and sister to India. My father remembers fleeing Lahore to the sound of guns and crackling fire. I would listen to these stories with my brothers and sister and hardly take them in. We were middle-class Indians who had grown up in a period of relative calm and prosperity, when tolerance and secularism seemed to be winning the argument. These stories - of loot, arson, rape, murder - came out of a different time. They meant little to me.
Then, in October 1984, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her security guards, both Sikhs. For days afterwards Sikhs all over India were attacked in an orgy of violence and revenge. Many homes were destroyed and thousands died. In the outlying suburbs of Delhi more than three thousand were killed, often by being doused in kerosene and then set alight. They died horrible, macabre deaths. Black burn marks on the ground showed where their bodies had lain. The government - now headed by Mrs Gandhi s son Rajiv - remained indifferent, but several citizens groups came together to provide relief, food and shelter. I was among the hundreds of people who worked in these groups. Every day, while we were distributing food and blankets, compiling lists of the dead and missing, and helping with compensation claims, we listened to the stories of the people who had suffered. Often older people, who had come to Delhi as refugees in 1947, would remember that they had been through a similar terror before. We didn t think it could happen to us in our own country, they would say. This is like Partition again.
Here, across the River Jamuna, just a few miles from where I lived, ordinary, peaceable people had driven their neighbours from their homes and murdered them for no readily apparent reason than that they were of a different religious community. The stories of Partition no longer seemed quite so remote: people from the same country, the same town, the same village, could still be divided by the politics of their religious difference, and, once divided, could do terrible things to each other. Two years later, working on a film about Partition for a British television channel, I began to collect stories from its survivors. Many were horrific and of a kind that, when I was younger and heard them second or third hand, I had found hard to believe: women jumping into wells to drown themselves so as to avoid rape or forced religious conversion; fathers beheading their own children so they would avoid the same dishonourable fate. Now I was hearing them from witnesses whose bitterness, rage and hatred - which, once uncovered, could be frightening - told me they were speaking the truth.
Their stories affected me deeply. Nothing as cruel and bloody had happened in my own family so far as I knew, but I began to realize that Partition was not, even in my family, a closed chapter of history - that its simple, brutal political geography infused and divided us still. The divisions were there in everyday life, as were their contradictions: how many times have I heard my parents, my grandmother, speak with affection and longing of their Muslim friends in Lahore, and how many times with irrational prejudice about those Muslims ; how many times had I heard my mother speak with a sense of betrayal of her brother who had married a Muslim ... It took 1984 to make me understand how ever-present Partition was in our lives too, to recognize that it could not be so easily put away inside the covers of history books. I could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else.

I began, like any other researcher, by looking at what had been written about Partition. And there was no dearth of material. Yet, as I read my way through it, I found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied, sometimes even angry. If the books I was reading were to be believed, the Partition of India was something that happened in August 1947. A series of events preceded it: these included the growing divide between the Congress and the Muslim League, the debates between Jinnah and Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and a host of other developments on the political front. And a series of events accompanied and followed it: violence, mass migration, refugeeism, rehabilitation. But the history of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it. These other aspects - what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the human dimensions of this history - somehow seemed to have a lesser status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture factually . Yet, could it really be that they had no place in the history of Partition? Why then did they live on so vividly in individual and collective memory?
I looked at what the large political facts of this history seemed to be saying. If I was reading them right, it would seem that Partition was now over, done with, a thing of the past. Yet, all around us there was a different reality: partitions everywhere, communal tension, religious fundamentalism, continuing divisions on the basis of religion. In Delhi, Sikhs became targets of communal attacks in 1984; in Bhagalpur in Bihar, hundreds of Muslims were killed in one of India s worst communal riots in 1989; a few years later, the Babari Mosque was destroyed in Ayodhya by frenzied Hindu communalists (supported, openly and brazenly, by political parties such as the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Shiv Sena), and later, thousands of Muslims were again targetted in Surat, Ahmedabad and Bombay. In each of these instances, Partition stories and memories were used selectively by the aggressors: militant Hindus were mobilized using the one-sided argument that Muslims had killed Hindus at Partition, they had raped Hindu women, and so they must in turn be killed, and their women subjected to rape. And the patterns were there in individual life too: a Muslim and a Hindu in independent I