Seventy years later, ghosts of Partition remain
The remnants of all four of my grandparents’ early lives are scattered across the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Growing up in the home they rebuilt in Karachi, Pakistan, a home they named after the village they left behind, we’d sometimes hear the echoes of their past lives, from a time when Pakistan didn’t exist.
Within the walls of their new two-storey home, they’d remember the seven-storey building in the village where they all lived in Bihar. The garden in front of their new home couldn’t compare to the courtyard they gathered in every evening for big communal dinners in India. The long walk or bike ride they took every day was forgone for a shorter walk to the neighbourhood mosque or the nearby market.
Monday marks 70 years since they migrated westwards to Pakistan. The future leaders of the Muslimmajority country demanded independence in 1947 just as colonialism was leaving India and a deepseated conflict between Hindus and Muslims was taking root, violently.
Seventy years on, their children and grandchildren would move westwards again, leaving everything behind once more, to suburban Canada — this time for reasons relating to social security and economic prosperity. We carry a legacy with us of a country the generation before struggled to live in, a legacy we’re just starting to understand.
After my paternal grandfather, S.G.M. Badruddin, died, my father found some unpublished essays of his — the personal experience of a journalist who had to flee from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the early 1970s, where he worked as a news editor, to West Pakistan (now just Pakistan). Therein was a story of a man I didn’t know — someone who had conversations with leaders, who escaped through secret paths and covert car rides with Christian missionaries across the subcontinent.
In a memorable essay, my grandfather describes the six-week journey he took from Dhaka in Bangladesh, to Kolkata and Patna in India, to Kathmandu in Nepal, and then to Bangkok in Thailand, all the way to Karachi. While reading it, I mapped out my own journey from Karachi to Riyadh, Al Khobar and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, to Mississauga.
His was a harrowing tale of struggle. Mine is less so. But we both lost homes. We both made new homes. We both changed our identities.
No one spoke of Partition when I was younger. My grandparents were quiet about the experience, and no one asked. Yet it was always a part of us.
Every Aug. 14, the televisions would be turned to the parade at Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s tomb — the burial place of the father of the Pakistani state.
We commemorated their migration by wearing green and draping flags on our cars, across our balconies, across our chests. Back then it was tradition, a fun thing to do that connected me and my sisters to my cousins in Pakistan.
It stayed a tradition until we immigrated to Canada more than seven years ago. The fact that we would start celebrating with red and white and not the familiar green and white suddenly made me hyperaware of the evolving fabric of my identity.
I wasn’t alone. Sarah Qidwai, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, has been hearing stories of Partition from her grandmother, Kamni Siddiqui, for as long as she can remember. But it took an undergraduate history course for her to sit down and record, in detail, her grandmother’s experience of it.
Siddiqui, a retired professor of chemistry, was 9 in 1947. Her father told her they were “going to a land where (you) will be free to practise your own culture and religion, but there will be hardships and surprises.”
Like me, Qidwai found parallels in this. “As a family, we moved to Canada in 2004 and it was a lot more peaceful than what Grandma experienced in 1947,” Qidwai said. And now that Siddiqui has applied for Canadian citizenship, the history seems more poignant — this time her choice had fewer hardships and surprises.
If the history of Partition is complicated, its legacy is even more so. Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi children grow up knowing the names of the leaders of Partition and their roles in the creation of the three countries. First came the British man who arbitrarily drew a border that separated India into East and West Pakistan. Second came independence, the constitutions, the death of a founder. And then, almost 15 years later, East Pakistan had another independence movement to become Bangladesh.
The fluctuating borders led to new identities that continue to be defined by the memories of their creation. To this day, the violent history is romanticized, the idea of a new state for Muslims to just be Muslims is lauded, the fact of indepen- dence is idealized.
The reality for our grandparents, however, was very different — and it took me 25 years and a journey to Canada to figure that out. As I became more comfortable in my hyphenated identity, I started asking more questions and reading more about the country we, metaphorically, left behind.
It was the same for Seemal Saif, an employee at the Ontario ministry of infrastructure, who was 19 years old, and studying in Canada, when she finally understood the weight of her grandmother’s history.
Before Partition, Saif’s grandmother lived in Jalalabad, India — a state right at the border with newly formed Pakistan. At 7 years old, Saif’s grandmother wasn’t aware of the severity of the riots between Hindus and Muslims — reports of rapes and murders of Muslim women were increasing rapidly.
All the women and children in the village, including Saif’s grandmother, were locked up as they awaited an opportune moment to escape. In the event that they couldn’t, if the riots reached their home first, the family would burn down these rooms, women and children inside. It was deemed to be more honourable for them to be killed by their family members than raped by a Hindu mob.
By 1948, more than 15 million people had been uprooted, and estimates suggest between one and two million died, with death and suffering on all sides. The 1951 census of Pakistan alone identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at more than seven million.
“These were communities that lived together for centuries, they had been neighbours for generations,” Saif said. “Being in Canada, there’s a lot of talk about diversity but it’s also a fragile concept . . . I value it a lot more knowing this history than I would’ve just living in Pakistan.”
There is a generation of new immigrants that is just starting to draw these parallels, myself included — a process complicated both by the deaths of our grandparents who experienced it and the fading memories of our uncles and aunts who moved with them, just children at the time.
Partition’s ghosts continue to affect us; our grandparents’ past continues to follow us. The legacy of their migration continues to influence the reasons we immigrate: the right to freely and safely be the way we want to be.
The one constant in both our journeys, though, as even my grandfather notes in his essay, is our personal identification with the places left behind. For him it was Dhaka and Patna. And while I may be building a life in the streets of The 6, I’m pulled to the lives that used to be in the streets of Karachi, the roads through India, and the journeys across new borders.
My experience of Partition is just starting.
“Being in Canada, there’s a lot of talk about diversity but it’s also a fragile concept . . . I value it a lot more knowing this history than I would’ve just living in Pakistan.” SEEMAL SAIF