Historians race to preserve memories of Partition
KARACHI: Sitting in her Karachi home, Jamshed Jahan Ara looks straight into the camera as she explains in a trembling voice how her family fled India during Partition in 1947.
Just six years old when she boarded an overcrowded train bound for the newly-created Muslim state of Pakistan, Ara recalls watching armed Sikhs approach, then hearing her father tell her brother to kill the women of the family if the convoy was attacked.
“One is my wife, another is my sister and one is my daughter,” she recalls him saying. “So, dear, be a man. I can’t shoot them. You must kill all three and we will fight (the Sikhs) till the last before we surrender.’
“I asked, ‘Why would Neeam kill me. I have done nothing wrong,’“the 76-year-old tells the camera as she remembered her father’s reply: “A bullet is better (than being captured)”.
On both sides of the border that divided the subcontinent 70 years ago, historians are racing to record the accounts of the last living witnesses to one of the largest, deadliest human migrations of all time.
In August 1947 the British Raj was dismantled, creating a newly independent India, though with chunks of its western and eastern regions hurriedly amputated to create Pakistan.
In Pakistan’s southern metropolis of Karachi, students and volunteers are transcribing fragments of oral history collected across the country by the Citizen Archives of Pakistan.
“History for the longest amount of time has been limited to the people who were the rulers or the winners but history has a larger scope. It has individuals who get affected. It has cultures that get affected,” said Aliya Tayyabi, director of the archives. AFP