Daily Times

There cannot be a more haunting expression of shared tragedy than a poem, ‘Laliakhiaan di payee dusdi aye’ (The Bloodshot Eyes Bear Testimony of Many a Tear), written immediately after Partition by Ustad Daman (1911–1984), a Lahore-based proletarian poet. It described what happened to Punjabis during those bloody months. It is a poem that was oft- recited in Old Lahore’s busy streets and baithaks. My father would read about these perfidious times to us:

None of us may utter

but you know and so do we

a great deal have you lost

and so have we;

who was to foresee this struggle for freedom would tear things apart, destroy so heavily much pain much suffering have you borne and so have we;

Yet there is hope

regeneration and new life awaits us

though many a death you died

and so did we;

Those who were awake and alert

robbed, exploited, emasculated us

while for centuries you slept in stupor and so did we:

These bloodshot eyes bear testimony many a tear

you did shed and so did we.

Some years after Partition, this poem was recited at a mushaira in India. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was present at the occasion and he is reported to have cried when he heard this poem. Ustad Daman was asked twice to relocate to India but he did not. As he remarked to Ali SardarJafri, he feared that in Pakistan he would be killed by the mullahs while in India he would be eaten alive by the pundits.

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

Following the tradition of Bhakti poets which entails living a simple life closer to ordinary folk, Daman was a tailor by profession and remained a wage earner all his life. In 1947, he lost his wife and child only to find and lose them again, this time to disease. The treatment was costly and his friends bore the burial expenses. Since he sympathised with the politics of Indian nationalism, the mobs burnt his house, his books and poetry. This was when he shifted to the outer part of the Badshahi Mosque where he lived for the rest of his life. An extraordinary life disrupted and fractured. A migrant in his home country, he did not have to go anywhere to suffer the pain but understood it well.

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.” 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, SahirLudhianvi, 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, Aajaa khaan Waris Shah nu (Today I say to Waris Shah), was a heart-wrenching poem that created a new sensibility on the subcontinental 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?

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, BalwantGargi 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 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…

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.”

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 immortalised the particular moment of Partition, a winding path of the past that continues to twist and meander into our present…

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 continues 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.

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. 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.

This article is part of a series on partition called the Partition Diaries. It will include a piece related to partition every day from the August 1 to 15

Published in Daily Times, August 3^rd 2018.