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1. Oral history with Abdul Mateen, 2016 April 7
- Title:
- Oral history with Abdul Mateen, 2016 April 7
- Author:
- Mateen, Abdul, 1922-, Torwali, Zubair, Torwali, Mujhahid, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Author (no Collectors):
- Mateen, Abdul, 1922-, Torwali, Zubair, Torwali, Mujhahid, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Collector:
- Mateen, Abdul, 1922-, Torwali, Zubair, Torwali, Mujhahid, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Description:
- Abdul Mateen is of 95 years old. Born in 1922 Abdul Mateen spent most of his life in Habib Abad (Laambat) near Bahrain in the Swat valley in Pakistan. His clan, Chamot, is of the main tribes of Torwali, the Nared tribe. He has a large extended family. He had three wives from whom he got a large family. In his childhood he used to rear cattle such as cows, buffalos and goats. He used to spend his summer in the summer pasture with his cattle and family. He remembers the days when Swat was ruled by Badshah-e-Swat and later by his son Wali-e-Swat named Miangul Jahanzeb. Abdul Mateen also served in the Wali’s army in Swat. When Pakistan and India were divided in 1947 there happened a famine—which was mainly due to the confusion created in Swat whether it had to join Pakistan or not. The then traders of food exploited the opportunity and made a famine so that their stock might sell expensive. The famine was, however, short lived. People of upper Swat had to walk miles to the plains of Swat in order to bring food items. When Abdul Mateem was a child there were no roads in Swat. Tracks in lower Swat existed on which Tonga—horse driven chariots—were used for travel. The affluent in upper Swat—Bahrain and Kalam—also used horses for travel. He mentions that Jinnah and Gandhi fought a case with the British government to free India (and Pakistan) from them. He did not see Jinnah but remembers his stories from the newspapers available then. He saw Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan aka Bacha Khan when he came to Bahrain Swat. He fled the torture of the then Pakistani government and took an asylum in Swat as the Swat State was autonomous enough to resist any pressure from the then Pakistani government. As for the origin of his people—Torwali—Mateen is of the view that they are Quriesh of the Arabs. Their ancestors fled the advent of Islam and came to this area. Here they were converted by a Pushtun mullah named Mian Qasim who is known among the Torwali people as Mian Qasim Bawa. Abdul Mateen also served in the army of the Swat State for 17 years. They were sent to Kashmir to fight the Indian army during the war of 1965. Mateen says he spent 40 days in Kashmir but did not experience any killing or casualties. 3500 soldiers were sent to Kashmir from Swat state and same number was also sent from the Dir state. When he was a child there used to be heavy snowfall in Bahrain and in his home village. It used to be six or seven feet one time. Now there is hardly half a foot snow in this area during winter. When he was a child main food was barley and maize. People used to stock these for winter. Bread was made of either barley or maize. Justice by Wali of Swat was fast and speedy. Government was strict. No woman or cattle was allowed to go out of Swat. After marriage Mateen says he went to Hyderabad and Karachi for earning a livelihood. There he could not make any progress and wasted ten years. He then came back and started his won shop in Bahrain which he had previously abandoned. In his youth Mateen used to run a shop where he used to collect ghee and grains; and sell these items later on. --Note: Qureish were the tribe the prophet of Islam, Muhammad (PBUH) belonged to. It was in Saudi Arabia about 1500 years ago. Mian Qasim was the grandson of Pir Baba. Mian Qasim came to Torwal—the areas of the Torwali people—about 400 years ago. The Torwali people do not know their history exactly. They relate themselves with Arabs or Pushtuns but researchers say that the Torwali people were among the ancient tribes of Swat even before the Buddhist period here. The researchers trace the origin of the Torwali people back 5,000 years.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Indic (Other)
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Swāt District (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Swāt District (Pakistan), April 7, 2017
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_3031
2. Oral history with Taj Begum, 2017 February 6
- Title:
- Oral history with Taj Begum, 2017 February 6
- Author:
- Begum, Taj, 1937-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Sachdev, Mankanwal
- Author (no Collectors):
- Begum, Taj, 1937-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Sachdev, Mankanwal
- Collector:
- Begum, Taj, 1937-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Sachdev, Mankanwal
- Description:
- Taj Begum was born in 1937 in Delhi to an Urdu-speaking literary family. Her father, born and raised in Delhi, was a landlord and her mother was a homemaker. Sharing the story behind her name, Taj Begum says, “My father says on my birthday King George VI was crowned in England, and therefore he’d decided that my name would be Taj.” Her parents’ marriage was set by her paternal grandfather in Delhi, when her mother was four and a half years old, and her father was six years old. “Several years after her marriage, my mother obtained an English education from Queen Mary School, and could read the English newspaper, and converse in English,” she shares.Taj Begum is the third of five sisters and one brother, and was raised at her paternal grandparents’ residence in Khari Bavla mohallah and their parents’ residence on Court Road (near Delhi Sabzi Mandi) before Partition. Her paternal grandfather used to own a horse cart, and her parents used to own a car. Her father was avid hunter, and would often to go to Delhi for hunting tigers and deer, and had a great collection of guns for hunting that he’d keep hidden at the basement of the house. “Every week we used to watch him disassemble his guns, clean them, and reassemble them,” she remembers.Her father had recently built their house on Court Road before her family moved into it in 1944. It had a lawn with a swing for children, a kitchen, and five rooms, with curtains. The rooms of her house were divided into zenana (female-only) and mardana (male-only) sections. Cooking was done by the male cooks in copperware and brassware utensils. “The male cooks were forbidden to enter the living and dining areas without their heads covered,” Taj Begum remembers. “My grandmother had not once heard the crackling of cooking utensils nor had seen cooks make food in the kitchen,” she says. Taj Begum recounts only the elders in her house were allowed to listen to the radio. “In our father’s absence, we would switch it on and listen to songs on it. As soon as he’d return, we’d switch it off, cover our heads, and go back to reading our books,” she recalls.The police station and vegetable market was close to their house. During Diwali and Gurupurab, Taj Begum and her family used to get sweets from their neighbors. During Eid, Taj Begum would visit her paternal grandparents’ home at Khari Bavla, where the entire family would get together for Eid prayers, and katchoris and vermicelli with milk was made and distributed in the mohallah. In 1942 Taj Begum joined her elder sister at the Saint Mary’s School in Delhi. She says that it was a school run by the nuns. Her most vivid memory from that school was standing in a queue outside the canteen to get their share of breakfast – biscuits and an apple.At the time of Partition Taj Begum was in 3rd grade at school, and she recounts way the neighborhood changed. “I used to rely on the elders to understand what was going on. There was a family at the vegetable market, close friends of my father’s. The women of that family had not once stepped foot outside their house. One day, they were forced to flee their home, with their children and some of them came to our house for refuge. I used to see them cry and narrate stories of how the English killed one of their sons, and how they saw his dead body on the streets. From the lawn of our house, we could see fireballs flying all over the place. It felt like we were in the middle of some kind of war. The fighting lasted for three days,” she shares.She remembers that her father asked her mother to cook and gather as much food as possible, as they prepared to leave their home for Purana Qila when neighbors had warned them of a police raid. “Being few in number, the neighbors told our father it would not be possible for them to protect us if such a raid took place,” Taj Begum says.Taj Begum, her immediate family and her cooks moved on to the Old Fort, while her uncle stayed behind at their home on Court Road. “He had hoisted the flag, and luckily, our house was spared from the violence and destruction we’d feared.” The refugee camp was miserable: “There was no food getting distributed there, and no roof on top of our heads. It was raining. Once we hid under one of the army trucks to avoid getting wet from rainwater. It was the heaviest rainfall I’d seen in Delhi.” Her father had plane tickets to Lahore, but the earliest flight for Lahore was not for another 15 days. “The living conditions at the Old Fort were getting worse, we couldn’t wait that long, so my father wasted those tickets and bought train tickets to Lahore instead.”Taj Begum remembers the train ride to Lahore. “The berth was literally stuffed with people, and the windows were sealed shut. My baby cousin’s mouth was stuffed with a cloth so that he may not make a sound. Our uncle told us insurgents are sharpening swords on the platform, if we make a sound, they would massacre the entire train,” she shares. It was a 36 hour journey to Lahore via Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Her paternal aunt was living in Lahore, as her husband was posted as a civil surgeon there. After crossing the border at Wagah, Taj Begum stayed with them for a few days, and then moved on to Karachi and settled temporarily with her maternal aunt at a two-room flat on Jacob Lines. Her father was offered an evacuee property in Karachi against their residential property in Delhi. “My father saw that house and noticed half-eaten stale roti and a plate of rotten daal on the table, with a glass of water half-empty, as if the person left his home in the middle of lunch/dinner. He refused to take that house as we also had left ours in a similar state,” she says.It was difficult to adjust to their new home in Karachi. There were no fans, and the bathroom was filthy. After living at Jacob Lines for three years, Taj Begum and her family moved to a guest house at Pakistan Chowk, and eventually her father built their own house at Nazimabad in Karachi. Taj Begum’s mother struggled in Karachi to find a suitable school for her daughters, and eventually had them admitted to Government School on Jacob Lines. After matriculation, Taj Begum obtained her intermediate and bachelor’s degree from Frere’s College in Karachi in English, Urdu Advanced and political science in 1957, and B.Ed in 1958 from Karachi University. She took up lectureship in Urdu at the Government School on Jacob Lines in 1959. She also taught Urdu and English at the Government School in Nazimabad for a decade. In 1967 she studied for her master’s in Urdu from Karachi University. In 1989 she joined the Government College for Women at Korangi in Karachi as principal, and served there until her retirement in 1997.She married her husband, author and broadcaster, Dr. Aslam Farrukhi, in 1955 in Karachi. The couple has two sons. Her husband passed away in August last year due to heart-related complications. Currently she lives with one of her sons and his family in Karachi. Since Partition, Taj Begum has not visited her birthplace in Delhi, though she shares her late husband has made sixteen trips to Delhi, particularly to attend the Urs of Nizamuddin Auliya. “More than the love for my birthplace, I have fear of it. I can never forget those awful days of Partition.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 1 video file
- Publication Info:
- Karachi (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Karachi (Pakistan), February 6, 2017
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2886
3. Oral history with Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh, 2016 January 1
- Title:
- Oral history with Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh, 2016 January 1
- Author:
- Singh, Baljit Dhillon Vikram, 1940-, Afroz, Farhana, and Ghani, Imran
- Author (no Collectors):
- Singh, Baljit Dhillon Vikram, 1940-, Afroz, Farhana, and Ghani, Imran
- Collector:
- Singh, Baljit Dhillon Vikram, 1940-, Afroz, Farhana, and Ghani, Imran
- Description:
- As a little girl, Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh would accompany her father to the India-Pakistan border where he would stand and weep silently by the rail line. He would point towards the west and say, "Oh! Everything is over there, on the other side. Lahore, Lahore! Nanikie, Nanikie!" Mrs. Vikram Singh was born Baljit Kaur Dhillon in the early 1940s in the village of Nanikie near Lahore. Her father was a prominent landlord. The family owned horses, cattle, sheep, goats, chickens as well as mango groves. Mrs. Vikram Singh was a fair girl and was lovingly referred to as "Cheena Bawa" (Chinese Doll). She was the eldest of the three children, with two younger brothers. She attended the Queen Mary School for a few months in 1947. But the social tension in Lahore kept growing. One night she was woken up by her mother putting all her jewelry, money, and valuables in a vault that was located between the walls. She put all three children in the family jeep and they headed for Amritsar.On the journey, Mrs. Vikram Singh saw the dead lying in ditches along the road and floating in the canals. She clearly remembers the limbs of the butchered bodies. Even now, she says, the images are vivid. Her mother tried to cover her daughter's eyes with her dupatta to protect her from the scenes. They reached her maternal grandparent's house in Amritsar safely. Later, the family settled in Chak 5A, Sri Ganganagar, Rajasthan. Her father had left everything in Nanikie, her ancestral village, expecting to return in a few days. But that day never came. Her father was allotted a small amount of barren land in the Punjab, in lieu of the hundreds of acres left behind. Overnight her family became refugees living off the land, eating turnips and saag, wearing simple clothes and riding bullock carts and camels instead of in jeeps and cars. The family worked very hard to make ends meet. Her father was a great believer in education and sent all three of his children to boarding school in Nainital. Mrs. Vikram Singh completed her matriculation from All Saints School in 1958 and was married in 1959. The match was made by her parents. Mrs. Vikram Singh and her husband have four daughters and migrated to United States in 1969 when her husband, who was a researcher, lost his job. Mrs. Vikram Singh babysat for 50 cents an hour while living in California with her daughters. Today, she continues to reside in California, working in home renovation, running her businesses and caring for her ten grandchildren. Her father, a strong proponent of education for all, would have been very proud, she says, to know that all four granddaughters have graduated from top universities. All ten grandchildren continue to pursue higher education and professional careers.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English and Hindi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Los Altos Hills (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Los Altos Hills (Calif.), January 1, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2081
4. Oral history with Barbara Anne, 2016 April 27
- Title:
- Oral history with Barbara Anne, 2016 April 27
- Author:
- Anne, Barbara, 1939-, Hassan, Fakhra, Harbir, Gunwant K., and Bhatia, Jasbir S.
- Author (no Collectors):
- Anne, Barbara, 1939-, Hassan, Fakhra, Harbir, Gunwant K., and Bhatia, Jasbir S.
- Collector:
- Anne, Barbara, 1939-, Hassan, Fakhra, Harbir, Gunwant K., and Bhatia, Jasbir S.
- Description:
- Barbara Anne was born [Antoinette D’Souza] on April 17th, 1939 in Karachi, Sindh to a Konkani speaking family hailing from Goa. Her father was a revenue officer with the Sindh Lands Department, and her mother was a homemaker. Barbara is the third of four sisters and five brothers. “I was delivered by Dr Himal Das at his hospital in Karachi,” she recounts. She was raised in Karachi and in Goa, before Partition. Two of her brothers died in their infancy.Barbara shares that her paternal grandfather, one of the early settlers in Karachi from Goa, was the first town planner of the Soldier Bazar. “He was born in 1865. His name was Pedro D’Souza. The Portuguese were peaceful people but not progressive. Many Goans therefore moved to Bombay and Africa for better livelihoods. My grandfather opted for Karachi. He came here with a few of his Goan friends towards the end of the 19th century,” she says. “Karachi used to be a dense jungle in those days. He decided to clear some of the area and build a colony there. It was called the Cincinnatus Town. He also laid the foundation for St Lawrence Church in that town. The road that leads to the town was named after my grandfather, after his demise in 1912, in recognition for his services. We used to have our own little house there. My grandfather had a large family of seven boys and three girls that were living there. My grandmother sold that house after his death, and we moved to Saddar where I spent most of childhood years,” Barbara shares.Her mother used to live in Goa before her marriage. “In those days, the boys in Karachi would travel to Goa to find a bride. They felt their roots were there and fathers would be eager to have their daughters married off to men working in the cities. That’s how my father was married to my mother and they came to Karachi, and settled here permanently.”Her mother used to take her to Goa to be with her grandparents and extended relatives. “Whenever there was a new baby expected in the family, she would take us to Goa. There were no permits in those days. We would get the ship tickets in the morning, and get on it in the evening. My parents made a lot of new friends in Goa, and they would also visit us in Karachi from time to time [before Partition]. On one occasion, we saw the colorful festival of Holi in Goa, and remember that I was scared of the colored powder people were throwing at each other.”In Goa, Barbra used to hear conversations of older people, and picked up Konkani from them. “I’m able to converse in the language and sing songs, but cannot read or write it. One of the Konkani devotional songs for the Church she still remembers is “My love, my love, don’t be afraid, I’m not going to leave you.”Barbara obtained her primary education from St Vianney’s school and high school education from St Joseph Convent for Girls in Karachi. She recounts the system of education at school was based on old-fashioned disciplinarian practices. “They would use the cane if you didn’t study, but it was accepted. The handwriting had to be perfect. You had to be on time and regular. Whatever our teachers said was accepted. Our parents would not take up for us, they would take up for the teachers,” she says.English, Religion, Geography, Art were curricular subjects she enjoyed whereas Needlework, Sports, Debates and Music lessons were regular co-curricular activities. She borrowed books from her high school library. “The British Council library was at a small distance from school but we didn’t need to go there because the school library had ample number of good books.” At home, DAWN, Morning News and Evening Star were widely read newspapers. Barbara says her father was an avid reader.Barbara took piano lessons, participated and won in debating competitions. She remembers her father’s help with academics had a major influence on maintaining good grades in school. “He was a strong believer in our education. He would help us with homework and trained me to be a good debater,” she says. Mr Mobad, a Zoroastrian gentleman living close to their school used to arrange movie nights for students of Catholic families at the Paradise House Cinema in Karachi. Some of the films she remembers seeing at the cinema are Heaven Knows Mr Aniston, The Bells of St Mary, Joan of Arc and the Ten Commandments.At the time of Partition, she had just been promoted to 6th grade, and had started studying History. Barbara recounts that period as ‘the takeover’. “We got these new history books in our class with simplified biographies of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi. There was a whole lot written about independence in the book but it was too much for us to grasp, because these leaders had just taken over. I was eight years old. Independence was a big word for me. I grasped some meaning of it when I saw a big procession of Muslims on [Victorian] carries wearing big garlands. Then there was the takeover in Karachi. The British were lined up and handing over administrative affairs to the Pakistanis. Then I saw the coins coming out with the Pakistani flag on them. Before those, we used to have portraits of King George the VI on the coins. I grasped through it all. But I could feel a certain amount of fear, and a certain amount of nostalgia, and a certain amount of people missing something, because they were happy with the British,” she recounts. “I didn’t experience much of the British rule but got feedback very vaguely, and I took it in.”After Jinnah’s demise in 1948, Barbara witnessed the procession of his burial in Karachi, from her school. She also remembers the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan the following year, became sensational news at her school and a holiday was declared at the school the next day. “That was very sad.”After Partition, her mother’s house in Goa was converted into St Xavier School. “It was handed over to Church authorities by one of my uncles, when my mother was no longer living there. I went to see it once. It’s a grand building now but the school administration still calls it Mrs D’Souza’s house.” In 1973, her entire family migrated to Canada and live there nowadays.In 1961, Barbara joined the St Joseph Convent as Sister. “In those days, it was considered a privilege amongst Goan Christian families to have one or two members become a priest or a nun. Nowadays there is so much of materialism that families are not very happy to part with their children, for religion, because it is a kind of permanent separation from them. I saw my parents for 12 years after joining the Church ministry, and then they left for good,” Her mother passed away in 1992, and her father passed away in 1997.Barbara also saw the Queen of England taking a walk by herself in Karachi in 1961, during her visit to Pakistan, with General Ayub Khan. “She was just passing down the road in Karachi alone and I caught a glimpse of her, and waved at her. She waved back at me.”Her final message to everyone is: “Be happy, think positively, and take things in your stride, remembering what you have learnt by way of values, spiritually and culturally.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and English
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Karachi (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Karachi (Pakistan), April 27, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2493
5. Oral history with Kalipada Malakar, 2016 December 18
- Title:
- Oral history with Kalipada Malakar, 2016 December 18
- Author:
- Malakar, Kalipada, Hossain, Dilwar, Malabar, Mrittika, and Shroff, Sudnya
- Author (no Collectors):
- Malakar, Kalipada, Hossain, Dilwar, Malabar, Mrittika, and Shroff, Sudnya
- Collector:
- Malakar, Kalipada, Hossain, Dilwar, Malabar, Mrittika, and Shroff, Sudnya
- Description:
- Mr. Kalipada Malakar was born in 1922 (approximately) at Thanaghat, Saatkhira, in the district of Khulna presently in Bangladesh. He belonged to prosperous family which owned more than 12 acres of land. They were also entitled to collect taxes from the local Local ‘Haat’ or the weekly marketplace as the ‘Haat” was taken in lease by them from the Jamindar of Satkhira for 100 rupees a year. Their house was situated almost on 3 acres of land surrounded by pond, gardens, etc.Their village was named Thanaghat because earlier the police station or ‘Thana’ was situated at their village, however it was was shifted later to the local town of Saatkhira. There were two High Schools at Saatkhira- one for the boys and one for the girls. Students from distant places used to come to school; some of the girls used to attend the School travelling by bullock-carts. Mr. Malakar’s father died at an early age. He was an amateur clay artist. Kalipada had learnt the basics of idol- making and other handicraft from his father.The village where was Mr. Malakar grown up was inhabited by the upper caste Hindu. However there were some families from the lower caste community like Pramanik (barber) at the village. The Muslims lived at the bank of a lake adjacent to Mr Malakar’s residence. All the communities used to live in harmony and peace; however the inter-community interaction was very formal as the members were conscious of their social/religious status. The ‘Haat’ was the place of social and economical interaction of the people coming from different strata of society. Being the so-called collector/ owner of the ‘Haat’ the family members of Mr. Malakar were respected by the merchants and common people.Common festivals that were observed at their village are Durga Puja, Kali Puja, Swraswati Puja, Lakshmi Puja etc. Mr. Malakar narrates that Satyanaryan Puja was observed, without failing, on the very last day of every Bengali calendar-month in their household. He remembers that there was no temple/place of worship at their village.There was a great craze for performing plays amongst the youth at that time in village and its surrounding regions- almost every village had a troop of play, performed at various occasions. The troop of the village where Mr Malakar had grown up was very active and enthusiastic. They used to hire makeup artist and Dresser from the city of Calcutta for performing plays. Most of the plays performed by them were mythological and few were historical. At the age of sixteen Mr. Malakar acted in his first play named “Sita”; it was a mythological play and he acted in the role of ‘Kush’- the son of God Rama. He, still, can utter the dialogues of the play in a ‘full throated ease.’ He was awarded with a silver medal by a local barrister for his performance in his debut play. Latter in his life he has portrayed characters of various shades in different plays.After a family-trifle during 1942-43 he left his house and came to stay at Beleghata in Calcutta. While staying there for two years he earned his food by working at a Hat Factory. Later he went back to his home and 1945 he was married to Kankprava Malakar. He remembers his experience of riding in palanquins while returning back for his in-laws house for the first time.After the Partition, he never intended to migrate from his homeland. But his other relatives and his cousin migrated to West Bengal leaving almost nothing for him in Bangladesh. He came to India taking only rupees 250 with him. Moreover the growing conflict and violence among the communalities after the Partition compelled him to settle in India.Coming to India in 1949, he had stayed a few months at some of his in-laws house and then had moved to refugee camp at Beleghata. While living at the camp he took up job of assisting idol-making at Kumartuli- the famous idol crafting area of Calcutta. Later West Bengal Government allotted him a certain area of land at Subhaspur, Kankinara in the district of North 24 Parganas where he settled thereafter.He managed to run his family but making clay-idols of various God and Goddess and by crafting different handicrafts. He improvised the artistry made from sponge wood or sola. In his struggling days he used to supply topor (a conical sola coronet worn by the bride and groom during Hindu marriage ceremony) and some other handicrafts from shop to shop. Later his crafted idols of Goddess Durga and Swraswati made of sponge wood make him earn the honor of an artist. Now sponge wood idols made by him have been shipped to Dubai, London and even to USA.Mr. Malakar feels Partition has taken away a innumerable things and friends from him. However he consoles himself saying that new country has given him the opportunity to improve in his artistry in sponge wood which has given him standard livehood and great honour.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Bengali
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kolkata (India)
- Imprint:
- Kolkata (India), December 18, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2791
6. Oral history with Kesho Mal, 2016 October 15
- Title:
- Oral history with Kesho Mal, 2016 October 15
- Author:
- Mal, Kesho, 1940- and Hassan, Fakhra
- Author (no Collectors):
- Mal, Kesho, 1940- and Hassan, Fakhra
- Collector:
- Mal, Kesho, 1940- and Hassan, Fakhra
- Description:
- Baba Kesho Mal [name at birth Vishnu Mal], was born in 1940 in Rohri, Sindh to a Sindhi speaking family. Father was a dry nuts and sweets shop owner in Rohri and his mother was the homemaker. He is the youngest of an elder brother and sister. Muslims and Hindus were living together in Rohri, he shares. There were 250 Hindu households in the area. Mr. Mal was raised in a joint-family system. His extended relatives lived in Sukkur, and they would frequently visit them. There were several temples in Rohri, Mr. Mal shares. As a child, used to play gilli danda, and flock to his father’s shop in the morning.They had electricity in Rohri’s commercial areas. At home, they used kerosene lamps and oil lamp. The stars and constellations were used to tell time [sun during the day and stars in the evening].Partition only reminds him of the fear, panic and emptiness that took over Rohri all of a sudden. “Within days, the city was practically deserted. Nearly all the Hindus in Rohri migrated to India.”Mr. Mal relocated to Sukkur after Partition, permanently and gave up himself for service to the maintenance and management of Jhulay Lal Mandir in his early 30s. Before that, he served as cook for pilgrims at the temple. Apart from Sindh, he has gone on pilgrimage to Nankana Sahib for Gurupurab.. He has been living at the temple since Partition, and has never married.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Sindhi and Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Sukkur (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Sukkur (Pakistan), October 15, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2653
7. Oral history with Khalida Ghousia Akhtar, 2016 February 25
- Title:
- Oral history with Khalida Ghousia Akhtar, 2016 February 25
- Author:
- Akhtar, Khalida Ghousia, 1937- and Saleem, Sobia
- Author (no Collectors):
- Akhtar, Khalida Ghousia, 1937- and Saleem, Sobia
- Collector:
- Akhtar, Khalida Ghousia, 1937- and Saleem, Sobia
- Corporate Author:
- California Humanities
- Description:
- Mrs. Khalida Ghousia Akhtar was born on November 7th, 1937 in Jammu, Kashmir. Mrs. Akhtar’s family can trace their family history at least a hundred years back to her grandparents. Mrs. Akhtar’s family is of Rajput descent: her grandfather and his brothers were warriors. Mrs. Akhtar’s Rajput ancestors, descendants of royalty and known for their bravery, had helped the British beat the local people, and in return, they had been given huge lands that they had willed to their descendants. They were the type of people who valued history and bravery more than wealth. Mrs. Akhtar describes an indepdent in which her ancestors, four brothers, had been told to race their horses as far as they could from dawn to dusk, and all the lands that they traversed would be their property. They weren’t very religious people and didn’t want their father’s lands. When someone came to have them sign papers to give away their lands to her, they asked her servant where the rifle on his shoulder came from. He said he found it on the land, and they recognized it as belonging to their ancestors—this rifle is still in Mrs. Akhtar’s family’s ownershipd. They signed away this enormous property simple to retrieve this ancestral rifle. Moreover, Mrs. Akhtar’s grandmother was from Tashkent, Russia from before WWI. During the first World War, they moved to the state of Kashmir. Mrs. Akhtar’s grandfather was from Jalinder, Punjab, but he was posted in Jammu in the legal department. At the time, Kashmir had two capitals: Jammu, which was the primary capital, and Srinagar, which was the summer capital. Kashmir was a Muslim majority state with a Hindu king, Maharaja Hari Singh. This was a king that everyone respected, Mrs. Akhtar recalls. They felt honored to have him as a king because he seemed to truly care for his people, even if it put himself at risk. Mrs. Akhtar shares that two of her grandparents died of the black plague, which was common and quickly spreading I the area from lack of hygiene and disease carrying vermin. Maharaja Hari Singh would go through the back alleyways and small streets himself, on foot and on horse with his pant legs rolled up to his knees, to see how people were doing and if the hygiene of his kingdom was being properly handled. His advisors would repeatedly caution him not to go, lest he get the plague himself, but he was concerned more about his people than himself. He personally made sure that the streets were sprinkled with a layer of limestone to counteract the plague. Other than standing with his people during difficult times, he also joined peoples of all faiths during times of festivities and holidays; Mrs. Akhtar remembers that he would stand with the Muslims during their Eid prayers and celebrations. Kashmir seemed be happy and well cared for under the Maharaja Hari Singh.Mrs. Akhtar’s own family was also quite strongly involved with the politics of Kashmir: her father’s older brother, her thaya, was Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, the man who would eventually become the Supreme Head, the akin to the Governor General, of Azad Jammu and Kashmir after the 1947 Partition and the struggle that would ensue in trying to allocate Kashmir. Mr. Abbas was very well known in the political circles of South Asia at the time—he was good friends with Jawahar Lal Nehru, Liaqat Ali, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the two men who would become the leaders of the new states of India and Pakistan respectively. Mr. Abbas was good friends with another political leader of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah; however, soon, the friends and political allies founds themselves on the opposite side of a major issue that still sends ripples of political turmoil and violence in the area: Which new country should Kashmir join? While Kashmir’s leader was a Hindu, it was a Muslim majority state, and Muslim majority states that bordered the soon-to-be Pakistan area were generally joining Pakistan; conversely, Kashmir also bordered India, and it had a Hindu leader, so what would be his place in a Muslim-led country? Sheikh Abdullah was of this latter view, believing that Kashmir should go to India; whereas, Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, Mrs. Akhtar’s thaya uncle, was of the view that Kashmir should join Pakistan. When Mr. Abbas was released from jail, despite their political differences Mr. Abdullah was the one who helped him get into Pakistan: he would be taken safely with military personnel; however, he would have to be blindfolded.Mrs. Akhtar shares the poignant and personal story of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas’s daughter, Mrs. Akhtar’s own cousin, and her abduction. A few weeks before the Partition, Mrs. Akhtar’s family members realized that the political tensions in Kashmir were increasing daily and that it might be safer for them to leave the country. Several of Mrs. Akhtar’s family extended family members were escorted with Sikh army trucks to Pakistan—but only 12 or 13 miles from the border, everyone from all of these trucks was unloaded. All the men on the trucks from the ages of 14 to 50 are slaughtered right then and there; all the girls from the ages of 10 to 40 are abducted, including Mrs. Akhtar’s Rahat, the daughter of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas. When his 17-year-old daughter was abducted, Mrs. Akhtar’s uncle was in jail because of his political views. When he got out of jail, Mr. Abbas did everything he could to retrieve his daughter, and although his friend Mr. Nehru was his political opponent, he would still call and apologize to Mr. Abbas about his daughter’s abduction. He also helped in the efforts to retrieve Rahat, saying that these types of things were not supposed to happen. Once Rahat’s kidnapper, a Hindu man by the name of Jagdeesh, realized that she was the daughter of a political honcho, he decided to marry here. It was eight long years before Mr. Abbas’s family was able to locate their precious Rahat, but by that time, she was living in an Indian village with her husband as the mother of three Hindu children. In fact, she had been re-cultured as a Hindu woman as well. She told her family, “I don’t want to go back. I am settled here. Jagdeesh is taking care of me and my kids. I can’t leave my kids behind.” Still, some of her family insisted on at least being allowed to visit her—and they did. She welcomed them but begged, “Please don’t touch this subject of me returning anymore. I know this culture now.”Mrs. Akhtar’s thaya, Mr. Abbas, wanted to meet Jagdeesh, but he feared that he’d be shot; Mr. Abbas, however, wanted integrate Jagdeesh into his family. Mr. Abbas said, “No, I don’t want to shoot you—I want to bring you and your family to Pakistan,” where they had migrated by the time, “so my family can be all together again.” In 1955, Pakistan offered open visas for Indians to attend a cricket match in Lahore. Mr. Abbas told Jagdeesh and his family to take advantage of this visa and come to Pakistan—ad they did. First, Rahat came, then her children, and finally Jagdeesh. She was sort of made Muslim again. Her children and her husband were given Muslim names: Jagdeesh became Khalid. None of the family, however, was happy in Pakistan. As former Hindus, they weren’t accepted as truly Muslim; even Rahat herself was no longer accepted, and she cried all the time. During the wars of 1965 ad 1971 between Pakistan and India, Jagdeesh was under constant observation; because no one trusted him and his loyalty to Pakistan, it was difficult for him to get and keep a job. Rahat and Jagdeesh had three more kids, but two of their six children went crazy because no one in their society accepted. People accepted the songs, eager to marry their daughters into good families, but no one wanted their sons to marry to daughters from a former Hindu family.In that convoy of twenty trucks protected by Sikh soldiers transporting Muslims from Indian to Pakistani territory, there were two more members of Mrs. Akhtar’s family that survived: her uncle and his wife—who was also Rahat’s mother sister. Mrs. Rahat’s aunt, who was 22 or 23 three at the time, was abducted by a person who took her to his home. As she sat there, his father walked by and he recognized him. The kidnapper’s father was a friend of her own father—they book did decorative paintings together. From that point onwards, her father’s friend treated her like his own daughter, and he made sure that she was safely taken to Lahore. Once there though, she had no way of reaching her family, but she was a smart young woman, and she announced her name and location on the radio a few times—“I am so-and-so. Where is my husband? I am in the Jesus-Mary Convent”—until a family friend was able to alert her family to come fetch her. When that refugee truck convoy was attacked, Mr. Akhtar’s uncle, ran and hid under a nearby bridge. He said he stayed there for a day or two; he would spend all night walking way from the bridge, but still wake up under it, in the same place. A former servant of Mrs. Akhtar’s family found him and took him to join the rest of his family in Pakistan. By the time they reached there, they were in terrible shape, but slowly Mrs. Akhtar’s family would reach Pakistan.Mrs. Akhtar is very attached to her extended family because they lived together for many years before (and eventually after) the Partition; her family divided its time between three main cities in Kashmir. Mrs. Akhtar’s father was an inspector of police, and he and his six brothers all lived together in the same house, maintained by her uncle who was a foreign-educated, well-off engineer. As a child, Mrs. Akhtar spent much of her time between Bhadarva, Ranbeer Singh Pura, and Hiranagar. Bhadarva is were she spent a majority of her childhood; in order to reach Bhadarva, which was 200 miles from the main capital of Jammu, her family would rent a bus to a middle city, Batowt, where they would sometimes spend the night. From Batowt, once the path got too narrow, they would take horses on a 12-hour journey. Ranbeer Singh Pura was only 12 miles from Jammu, and Mrs. Akhtar studied there in third grade. Hiranagar was a three-hour bus ride from Jammu; in order to reach it, they had to cross a large river by going around it.Mrs. Akhtar was Batowt when, at the age of nine, she heard that the Partition had occurred, and her family began their migration journey. Although she wasn’t very political conscious at that time, she remembers that it was after the announcement that people in their region started to turn against each other. The Sikhs in the region attacked their house in Jammu. Because they were a part of Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas’s family, they were under strict observation and not supposed to leave the kingdom state—but they new that they would danger if they didn’t. Mrs. Akhtar’s family took their bus to Jammu, but they didn’t go to their Uncle Abbas’s house, where they usually stayed—they went to a hotel instead. One of their Hindu servants/friends, Mouni, came to their hotel room. Panicked, he told them, “They’re watching you. On the side of your house, it says, ‘Your house will be raided, and you will be killed.’” Mouni told the Mrs. Akhtar’s family to leave the city and go to Ranbeer Singh Pura, which was only 12 miles from the Pakistani border. They stayed there for a week. Her whole packed their few belongings in only four suitcases and packed into four tongas to go to the Pakistani border, which was only two hours away.Once there, in the middle of the night, Mrs. Akhtar’s father and uncle patrolled and scouted the area to figure out how to enter Pakistan undetected. The best time to cross the border would be between 10 AM and 2 PM, when some of the officers took their lunch. During that time, the whole extended family ran the three miles to cross the border and reach the closest village on the Pakistani side of the border. Mrs. Akhtar remembers that all the women were crying, and her father and uncle were telling them to save their tears for later and just run; everyone was carrying children who were too young to ran fast enough, including herself. Mrs. Akhtar was carrying her one-year-old sister while others were carrying her five-year-old brother and her six-and-a-half-year-old brother. On the way, they drank dirty pond water to survive. Mrs. Akhtar’s father and uncle paid three months rent upfront to a landlord to get a place to stay for their family. Mrs. Akhtar recalls that banks were still accepting checks at least two months after the Partition because that was the currency that her family used to pay people and to withdraw money. To avoid arousing suspicion from their neighbors that they were political refugees on the run, they acted like they lived there. They had no food, so they boiled black stones in clay pots. A few poor land tillers came forward to offer them blankets and food. When an army truck passed through the area, full of ammunition to transport to Kashmir in the ensuing battle to follow for ownership of this northern state, Mrs. Akhtar’s father and her uncle managed to convince the truck divers, after paying them handsomely, to let their family board their empty trucks. The trucks took them to Sialkot, where Mrs. Akhtar’s family would stay for in a hotel for a few days before all 25 or so of them would move for 6-8 years to a villa in Sargoda, given to them in exchange for their lost properties and homes now in India Occupied Kashmir. (Note that Pakistanis now call their portion of Kashmir Azad (Free) Kashmir and the India part of Kashmir Occupied Kashmir—and Indians similarly call their portion of Kashmir Azad Kashmir and the Pakistani portion Occupied Kashmir.) Mrs. Akhtar’s thaya Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas would be moved to Rawalpini, the army headquarters of Pakistan, where he would be make the Supreme Head of Azad Kashmir, Pakistan.After the Partition, Mrs. Akhtar would spent much of her time living her uncle and his British, Jewish wife, Olga, because their home was closer to better school—this couple would become like a second set of parents for Mrs. Akhtar. Ogla Auntie, especially, was like a second mother to Mrs. Akhtar, who calls her a Sufi saint; she would always encourage the girls in their family to student to their heart’s content. Mrs. Akhtar’s mother and father also supported her a great deal, by providing her with resources and strong character traits. When she was a child, Mrs. Akhtar’s father would bribe her to do things by offering her short, ten page long stories to read. Mrs. Akhtar realls a Kashmiri folk tale about “Lil Dilli,” a patient, saintly woman. When she got married and when to her in-laws, her parents would ask her, “What did they give you to eat?” When she wouldn’t answer, they would lift her stomach flap and see nothing. The pious woman that Lil Dilli was, she prayed and asked God to make the stomach flab smooth and un-openable, so that her mother-in-law wouldn’t be dishonored because of how little she had been able to feed her. By the age of 16, she had read through her father’s library, and so he began teacher her to use a revolver, how to fire, and how to ride a horse, the police offer that he was. Mrs. Akhtar says that her mother taught her compassion while her father taught her confidence and courage.Perhaps as a result of Auntie Olga’s support, Mrs. Akhtar went on to complete medical school, with an emphasize in gynecology and surgery, and open her own clinic in the Korangi area of Karachi, the city she moved to after she married her husband. After she got married, Mrs. Akhtar put all the wedding got she had received as a part of her dowry and as presents into the bank, and she took a loan against it. She remembers that people cried at her doing this, but she said the gold did not matter—she needed the capital to create her clinic in this underserved part of Pakistan. Mrs. Akhtar’s clinic, named Khalida Hospital after her, soon became quite popular in the area, and she would see upwards of 200 patients a day. Although she had three doctors working with her and a staff of 37 personnel, including nurses and others, under her, her patients and community only wanted to be treated by her. Soon, people in her community were coming to her not only for medical matters, but social and economic ones as well, writing her letters from as far as Dubai to seek her advice and opinion on personal matters. In the beginning, before she was able to afford a car, she commuted 2.5 hours daily by public bus to reach her clinic. She was the first lady doctor in a ten-mile radius in that region. Although she worked there for 11 years, she had to stop because she couldn’t afford to pay political parties, like the MQM, the bribes they demanded to keep from harassing her clinic. When she finally had to give up her practice, she donated her clinic to Al-Shifa, a hospital and organization dedicated to handicapped children in Karachi.These days, Mrs. Akhtar lives with her daughter in the U.S. Here, she spent her time volunteering at Kaiser Permanente and John Muir Hospitals. She also enjoys her time painting, writing poetry, making pottery, reading, drawing/sketching, playing piano, among other activities—she says she’s finally able to do all those things that she wanted to do when she was ten and couldn’t because the Partition, that she personally believes never should have happened, made her grow up too fast. “United,” Mrs. Akhtar says, quoting the first President of India, “South Asia could have been the largest democracy. The people there have lived together for at least 1000 years, and religion shouldn’t be the basis for nationhood because it allows for the possibility of extremism to creep in.” Even now, Mrs. Akhtar’s family cannot return to India Occupied Kashmir, although they can visit India. Mrs. Akhtar truly hopes she is allowed to return to her homeland and visit it one day. She shares a message for future generations in memory of her own parents: “Live your life every day with courage, confidence, and compassion. They are the three things that have helped me all my life. Keep your mind open, and never fear what tomorrow brings—refine yourself and all of humanity.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu, Hindi, and English
- Physical Description:
- 10 video files
- Publication Info:
- Walnut Creek (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Walnut Creek (Calif.), February 25, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2142
8. Oral history with Mai Taji, 2016 January 16
- Title:
- Oral history with Mai Taji, 2016 January 16
- Author:
- Taji, Mai, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Author (no Collectors):
- Taji, Mai, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Collector:
- Taji, Mai, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Description:
- Mai Taji [name at birth Taj Din] was born in 1941 to a Punjabi-speaking family at Daleri town in Amritsar District, Punjab. Their father Muaaz Din was a farmer, and their mother Fazal Bibi was a homemaker. Taji is the youngest of two brothers and four sisters, and grew up at Amritsar before Partition. Sharing their earliest recollections of childhood, Taji says that the agrarian families in their town were engaged in the barter trade where wheat and rice were exchanged amongst them quite often.The family diet was vegetarian, and brassware was used for cooking and consumption. They used to play the game of Kokla Chapaki with friends in the mohallah from all faiths quite often. The clothing worn at home was plain khaddar, stitched by their mother and sisters at home.Taji says they must have been six or seven years old when they had to leave their homes at Daleri. “There was an announcement in our area. We were told that anyone who wants to leave for Pakistan should do it now or living conditions could get worse in Amritsar,” They recounts.Taji says that their family moved to Lahore via the Wagah Park immediately after that announcement. “It was two months before riots broke out in Amritsar and everywhere else,” They says. Taji did not witness any violence and killings himself but recalls hearing stories from elders about what was happening. From Lahore, Taji’s family went to Kana village in Kasur where they settled permanently. Neither Taji nor their siblings obtained any formal schooling, and Taji’s elder brothers became daily wage workers to support the family. Taji’s father died eight years after Partition. After reaching teens, Taji switched to silk wear for attending special occasions like village festivals, melas and weddings.During the same time, Taji met their first guru. “I found him while buying vegetables at a market near the Kot Lakhpat railway stop. His name was Safdar. He was veterinarian doctor specializing in livestock and cattle, and an army officer. He hired me as his assistant and taught me how to prepare injections for the animals,” Taji says. After spending some years at their clinic, Taji started work at a tandoor where they kneaded dough for rotis, for two decades. They quit the job after developing a form of vision impairment, and have been at their parents’ home in Kasur ever since. They have many followers from the khwaja sira community in Lahore. Taji depends on them for their daily living expenses nowadays. Their mother passed away in the early 1970s. Taji continues to live at their parents’ home in Kani, Kasur, and reverted to male clothing in the late 90s.Taji believes that the generation today is suffering from a culture of individualized lifestyles. “The isolation and the restlessness we have comes from that culture. We need to bring back the days when it was considered normal for people in one mohallah to get together in one place and share their happiness and sorrows like a joint family system.”On nostalgia concerning their childhood at Amritsar, they say: “There is nothing compared to memories of one’s birthplace, the home one grows up in, and friends from the mohallah one used to play with. No one wants to be forced out of their houses all of sudden. The pain of losing home is unbearable, especially when we really had no choice in the matter. It makes me very sad to think of our lost childhood, even today.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), January 16, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2058
9. Oral history with Malika Ali, 2016 March 4
- Title:
- Oral history with Malika Ali, 2016 March 4
- Author:
- Ali, Malika, 1945-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Author (no Collectors):
- Ali, Malika, 1945-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Collector:
- Ali, Malika, 1945-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Description:
- Malika Ali was born Malika Hafiz in 1945 at Hyderabad Deccan to a ruling class family hailing from Lucknow. Her mother was the first Muslim woman member of the Hyderabad State Assembly, and daughter of the Nawab of Lucknow. Her father, was a prominent journalist in India before Partition, carried on the same profession after his migration to Pakistan. He was also an advisor on political affairs to the Nizam of Hyderabad. Her maternal grandfather, besides being the Nawab, was a leading lawyer in British India, famous for winning a case against the British defending the Maharaja of the Princely State of Oudh, Mrs Ali recounts. Mrs Ali’s paternal grandfather was deputy commissioner working directly for the British Viceroy.“In those days, no paper currency was used. Both my grandfathers were paid large sums of money in coins. The coins used to come on donkey carts, and stored in the basement of my grandfather’s palace in Lucknow. The workers would count them all night,” she shares her mother’s memories.Her mother, she says, was driven to politics and philanthropy from a very early age. “In front of our grandfather’s palace in Hyderabad Deccan, there was Hyde Park which was a popular place for activists to rally together during the Independence movement, and give fiery speeches. In Lucknow, there was a Zenana Park [Ladies Park], where women would gather for political speeches. My mother’s grandmother used to take her to the parks in the evening. The ladies from the leading political parties in India at the time used to be there for meetings and discussions. My mother would sometimes would run to the stage and start speaking. The ladies in attendance were very impressed by her talents.”“At the age of seven years, she would buy sweets from her pocket money and distribute them to the workers in her house, instead of spending it on herself like the rest of her siblings,” Mrs Ali recounts.Sharing the unusual causes of her mother’s success in politics, Mrs Ali shares: “My father was the main person to have brushed up her skills. She was engaged to him at the age of seven years, and her rukhsati took place when she was 12 years old. My father was two decades older than her. He refined her public speaking skills and would sometimes write the speeches for her. With her husband’s efforts and help, she had won many admirers before she reached her teens. She was homeschooled and had a great command over the Persian language,” Mrs Ali says. Her mother is also known to have been one of the main speakers at the March 1940 rally at the Minto Park [now Iqbal Park] in Lahore.Mrs Ali is the youngest of four sisters and four brothers. She was raised at her parent’s home in Hyderabad Deccan before Partition. She migrated to Karachi with her family in 1949, after the police action in Hyderabad Deccan.“One of my maternal uncles was appointed as the Minister for the Princely State of Patiala, just before Partition. He helped us a lot in moving to Karachi safely,” she says.In Karachi, they were temporarily settled in the Victoria Chambers on Victoria Road [now Abdullah Haroon Road]. Her mother worked for the homeless refugees coming from India and raised funds to help them resettle in Karachi. “When they used to visit my mother, she used to cry over their sufferings. She went door-to-door meeting with every affluent woman she knew, and with their help, she set up the Women Refugees Rehabilitation Association and helped thousands of people acquire housing, education and jobs. The government had no role in supporting her efforts,” she says.In 1951, Mrs Ali’s school life began at a Methodist Convent in Karachi. She suffered an unexpected meningitis attack during the course of her studies, and was hospitalized for several weeks. She developed severe visual impairment as one of the side effects. She continued her schooling like any other normal child under her parents’ guidance, and went on to completing her bachelor’s education in 1969. The same years, she was married to her husband, a chartered accountant from Karachi, educated in the UK. The marriage took place in Karachi. They have one son, after Mrs Ali survived eight miscarriages. “I am a miracle of God,” she says lightheartedly.She accompanied her husband on his official trips to Egypt, Holland, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia. In 1984, she performed Hajj with her husband at Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Her husband passed away in 2011. Mrs Ali lives in Karachi with her son nowadays. She is engaged in various fundraising activities for the repair of ancient mosques in Kashmir, and planning to open a trust in the near future.Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, Mrs Ali says: “Pakistan came forth because of contributions from the rich families of Jalandhar and Amritsar. As Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs although we visit different places of worship, we seek the same God. We should fight the devil out and love the humanity, because it’s better to forgive and forget rather than remember and regret.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and English
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Karachi (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Karachi (Pakistan), March 4, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2262
10. Oral history with Manika Banerjee, 2016 July 25
- Title:
- Oral history with Manika Banerjee, 2016 July 25
- Author:
- Banerjee, Manika, 1942-, Das, Udayan, and Afroz, Farhana
- Author (no Collectors):
- Banerjee, Manika, 1942-, Das, Udayan, and Afroz, Farhana
- Collector:
- Banerjee, Manika, 1942-, Das, Udayan, and Afroz, Farhana
- Description:
- Manika Banerjee was born on January 6, 1942 to Dr. Usha Ranjan Bandopadhyay and Mrs. Uma Rani Devi in Kolkata. Her father was a Doctor who worked for the Indian Railways and her mother was a housewife. Her paternal family belonged to Comilla while her maternal family traced its roots from Faridpur. Due to the transferable nature of her father’s job, Mrs. Banerjee had spent her childhood across multiple cities. While she was almost three years old, the family moved from Kolkata to Faridpur for two years. From there, her father was transferred to Chittagong. Mrs. Banerjee remembers Chittagong to be a magnificently enchanting city. “Even though I was very small, Chittagong is so beautiful that I can recall it by closing my eyes”, she says. Mrs. Banerjee along with her family lived in the railway quarters. She distinctly points out that the quarters differed on the basis of ethnicity. The Englishmen would have large luxurious quarters with gardens while the smaller and relatively less equipped quarters were reserved for the natives, even if they were of higher ranks in terms of service. When the August of 1947 arrived, Mrs. Banerjee was in Chittagong. “I was just above five. More than the idea of a nation and its Partition, what caught my eye was the fact that we were not independent”. She recalls that her grandfather, who was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha and follower of Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, was charged of sedition and he had to flee to Tripura leaving his huge property at Comilla in a span of few hours. A month later, Mrs. Banerjee with her family migrated to Ranaghat, near Kolkata. “We were always on the move from one city to another, hence the attachment to the land never quite grew within me”, she mentions. She understood the implications of the Partition later while they were at Ranaghat. The railway quarters were very close to the station and everyday she would see trains filled with people heading towards Sealdah. People travelling with their families and baggage barely contained in the compartments, the sight repeated itself every day. Once, Mrs. Banerjee accompanied her father to Sealdah station. The station was overcrowded with the refugees then. She remembers that her father would wipe his tears while she looked at the families who were scrambling for food and shelter. The sight of the station moved her to the core. Years later, she penned down her memory in a poem describing the state of refugees who were in dire straits. Adjusting to the new atmosphere was not difficult though people who already belonged to West of Bengal were not entirely welcoming, she mentions. Often insulted as “bangal”, a pejorative term used to describe people from the East Bengal, she remembers how people would taunt her regarding her accent. With time, she says, the discrimination faded. Mrs. Banerjee also recalls the year of 1971 when Bangladesh got its independence. She mentions that through the year, Kolkata would light up to the speeches of Mujibur Rahman. She even once travelled to the Airport to get a glimpse of Rahman while he was going to Dhaka via Kolkata. However, a last moment change in the schedule saw Mujibur Rahman going straight to Dhaka and the crowd returned disheartened. After graduating, Mrs. Banerjee was married to Mr. Dilip Kumar Banerjee, a high ranking official at LIC of India. Incidentally, after marriage she again put her travelling shoes on due to the transferable nature of her husband’s job, travelling and living across multiple cities in India throughout the rest of her life before settling down in Kolkata after retirement. She mentions that throughout her life, music and literature had been her two companions. She is a trained vocalist and writes occasionally.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Bengali
- Physical Description:
- 12 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kolkata (India)
- Imprint:
- Kolkata (India), July 25, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2606
11. Oral history with Muhammad Saleem, 2016 December 9
- Title:
- Oral history with Muhammad Saleem, 2016 December 9
- Author:
- Saleem, Muhammad, Abtahi, Arham, Shahbaz, Waqas Ahmed, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Author (no Collectors):
- Saleem, Muhammad, Abtahi, Arham, Shahbaz, Waqas Ahmed, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Collector:
- Saleem, Muhammad, Abtahi, Arham, Shahbaz, Waqas Ahmed, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Description:
- Muhammad Saleem was born in Gurdaspur. His father, Sufi Abdul Aziz had a business of construction materials in the city but they lived in a village of Gurdaspur. They were well off in India. His mother’s name was Rehmat Bibi. Mr. Saleem believes that he was 8 to 9 years old when Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place and he was a witness to it. He was in Jallianwala Bagh with his father when the shooting started. Mr. Saleem and his father hid inside stairs near which they were sitting. They stayed there all night. Next day, his elder brother who was in army came to get them.In Gurdaspur, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs lived together but there used to be a lot of conflicts on festivals like Holi. Mr. Saleem also discussed different Hindu festivals and killings of people. His area was called Abdullah Pur as it was a Muslim majority area. Now the name has been changed and Sikhs live in that area as he discovered on his tour to India after Partition. He visited India twice and stayed with the Sikh family in Koocha Pundit, Delhi which had saved their lives during Partition. This Sikh family was a friend of his grandfather and so they helped them reach River Beas safely. They called the father of that family Bapu which was used for all the elders in India.On his way to Pakistan, Mr. Saleem has seen a lot of bloodshed and looting which is a painful memory. He is still homeless in Pakistan and adores the freedom that Pakistan has for Muslims.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), December 9, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2844
12. Oral history with Muhammad Yousuf, 2016 May 12
- Title:
- Oral history with Muhammad Yousuf, 2016 May 12
- Author:
- Yousuf, Muhammad, 1941-, Shaheen, Taha, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Author (no Collectors):
- Yousuf, Muhammad, 1941-, Shaheen, Taha, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Collector:
- Yousuf, Muhammad, 1941-, Shaheen, Taha, and Sadarshi, Shivajee
- Description:
- Muhammad Yousuf was born to Mian Imamdeen and Noor Bibi in 1941 in Kotkapura, Faridkot. Mian Imamdeen was a farmer. He owned land. At the time, Muhammad Yousuf had only one younger brother.He used to go to a madrassa for religious studies. They learned the basic prayers and how to offer the Salah. After that he and his friends would run after wheels that had been taken out of cycles. To make the wheels go faster they would be hit with sticks.The city was a Muslim majority city. Friday prayers were held in the mosque and Eid prayers would be held in the Eid-gah.His memories of the Partition start with hearing of violence. When this started people from the surrounding villages came to the city seeking safety. The population of Kotkapura suddenly grew. He recalls that at this time police were doing regular raids in the neighbourhood and confiscating anything that could be considered a weapon.He shares that the Raja of Faridkot wanted his people to make it to Pakistan safely. Some from the Sikh community forced him to choose one city between Faridkot or Kotkapura to save. He chose Faridkot. Faridkot was emptied and its people reached Pakistan without any problem. The kafla that left Kotkapura was 20 miles or so in length. They encountered no attackers on the first day. On the second day, Muhammad Yousuf remembers seeing people hiding in the fields. He asked his father why they were there and his father told him that they were harmless onlookers. An hour or two later there was an explosion and a lot of people died. The people hiding in the fields also attacked the kafla. The kafla was divided in two with Muhammad Yousuf and his family in the front half. They escaped.A girl that his mother knew came running to them. She told them that the attackers had killed everyone (her family). Muhammad Yousuf remembers looking back and seeing the attacking mob cutting down people.The kafla rested that night next to a large body of water. There was blood in it, shares Muhammad Yousuf. They were attacked that night as well. The kafla was there for three days and it rained all the time. Those that drank that water got sick with cholera.The third day military from Pakistan came. They announced that the original plan of crossing over from Head Sulaiman was no longer possible and they would be crossing from Head Ganda Singh. This meant going back from the way they had come. The sick and elderly were loaded into trucks and brought to Kasur. The rest walked to Kotkapura. They stayed one night there.He shares that they had left behind a buffalo with their neighbors in Kotkapura. Muhammad Yousuf’s father went to pay them a visit. The buffalo had not given milk since they had left. Imamdeen milked her and gave it to the neighbors.The next day the left the village. At the Indian side of Ganda Sigh, they stayed the night. They were fed cooked wheat by the locals. It was poisoned and a lot of people died. He also speaks of corpses piled as high as houses on the side of the road. Muhammad Yousuf shares every time he goes to a funeral, he sees the mountains of the dead and thinks of how lucky the deceased is. He has a hundred or so people praying for him and is buried respectably. No one had held any funeral services for the dead he had seen, no one had buried them. They had been tossed into piles.They crossed over to Pakistan at Head Ganda Singh. Rain and cholera killed more people there. The four of them lived in a tent. A few days later a train came. It took everyone directly to Lala Musa. They came then to Gujrat. The government announced that there was no space in the city. New arrivals would be accommodated in the villages and given houses and land.Muhammad Yousuf and his family walked to Jalalpur Jatta. From there they rode donkeys to Tandamota near Kashmir. Whichever house you liked you would point to it and the officials would break the locks for you.The family lived for a month or so in Tandamota. Then a war broke out in Kashmir. Dying and mutilated people escaping the carnage started pouring into Tandamota. Muhammad Yousuf shares that he and others were afraid of what might come next. They had barely escaped from India and now they would be caught up in a new conflict. The police wouldn’t let them leave because if everyone left, the city would be become abandoned. The family left it secretly at night. They had no baggage. They first came to Jalalpur and then to Gujrat. From there they took a train to Lahore. From there they came to Dunga Bunga. He joined school and did his matriculation from here.They were allotted part of their land in 1958. The rest of the land Muhammad Yousuf had to go to great lengths to get. He had to deal with red tape and bribery for years. He received the land in late 1960s. He shares that his father, till his dying breath, believed that they would return one day to Kotkapura. He never tried to claim the land they had left behind.He married in 1958 or 1959 to his cousin. He has eight sons and two daughters. He has never been to India. He believes that there is no point in going back. He believes that it is good that they came to Pakistan where they are free to follow Islam.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 15 video files
- Publication Info:
- Bahawalnagar District (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Bahawalnagar District (Pakistan), May 12, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_3262
13. Oral history with Naseem Mirza Changezi, 2016 October 23
- Title:
- Oral history with Naseem Mirza Changezi, 2016 October 23
- Author:
- Changezi, Naseem Mirza, 1910-, Popli, Ritika, Parashar, Jayant, and Singh, Gurparkash
- Author (no Collectors):
- Changezi, Naseem Mirza, 1910-, Popli, Ritika, Parashar, Jayant, and Singh, Gurparkash
- Collector:
- Changezi, Naseem Mirza, 1910-, Popli, Ritika, Parashar, Jayant, and Singh, Gurparkash
- Description:
- Naseem Mirza Changezi was born in the year 1910 in his ancestral home at Pahari Imli, near Churi Walan in Jama Masjid, in Old Delhi and was a freedom fighter, and fought alongside the likes of Bhagat Singh and Rajguru for Independence from colonial powers. He has been profiled and documented numerous times, by leading scholars and academics of history owing to his deep knowledge and memory bandwidth about his Persian roots and the Mughal history of Northern India. He says, “The study of my genealogy tells me that successively 23 generations of mine hail from the family of Genghis Khan, the founder of the great Mongolian empire. My ancestors travelled from Mongol to Iran, and then to Afghanistan. By that time Babur, who lay the stone of Mughal empire in India, asked his ancestors to leave Afghanistan within two or three months. The two clans were both Mughals but Babur’s side was Timuri Mughals and we were Changezi Mughals, so Babur did not want a fight and loss of soldiers, hence, he asked my ancestors to peacefully leave."He then adds that, his family left Afghanistan and moved to the area of Sindh and as they settled there, the forces of Mirza Jaani Beg Khan and Mirza Ghazi Beg Khan attacked the region of Sindh, which was being ruled by Jam Feroze, who was the last ruler of Samma dynasty. Simultaneously the region of India and neighbouring states (Hindustan) had just started to be ruled by the Mughal ruler Humayun. Then, by the time Akbar’s rule came about and he asked his ancestors to become equal stakeholders in ruling Hindustan, but his ancestors refused. Then Akbar preceded to send an army of two lakh personnel under the leadership of Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khana and they fought for almost a year, and his ancestors lost the war. His ancestors were then brought to Akbar and he dismissed them to stay in Agra. He recalls, “When Shahjahan, in the early 17th century decided to shift his capital from Agra to Delhi, my ancestors also came along. They built a palatial palace right in front of the Delhi Gate of the majestic Red Fort (Lal Quila). And since then, we have lived in Delhi.”He says with utmost pride, “My family fought for the Independence of this country and has been doing so for the last 150 years.” His great-grandfather was the deputy collector working for the British crown, but, he participated in the first revolt of Independence in 1857, and in turn was awarded life imprisonment. He says, “There had been various wars for Independence prior to 1857, within the kingdoms, but the reason it is known as the First War of Independence is because this was the first time that the masses at large took part in it.” He also adds that, today the Hindu dominated area like Sitaram Baazar in Old Delhi, was earlier a Muslim area with many old palaces that were of the Muslim feudal landlords, which was later vacated. His mother passed away when he was just 2 years old, but his father decided to never remarry. He recalls an interesting a very interesting incident about the religious relations between the two communities prior to the Partition through the motif of parrots. He says that keeping parrots as domestic pets was a very widely accepted norm during those times, and the Hindu women would teach Urdu poetry and couplets to the their parrots, whereas the Muslim women would teach poetry and couplets from Hindu literary texts to their parrots. When he was four years old, he remembers going to the Ganges river with Hindu families and would also celebrate Holi and Diwali with them, and would be done so respectful of each other’s boundaries.He remembers the Indian lawyer, and philanthropist Rash Behari Bose, who was the key person in organising the Indian National Army. His work was to organises and agitate the young revolutionaries against the colonial power. He says that, “In those times, the young men of the historic Anglo-Arabic school of Ajmeri Gate would participate heavily in this movement initiated by the Indian National Army (INA). May father was one of them and I clearly recall that he would tell me how he was taught to make explosives and bombs that could be used for revolts. My father along with Rash Behari Bose would be on the forefront of such activities, and I grew up amongst all their idealism and members.” He recalls the interesting Delhi Conspiracy Case which also involved his father, “When Lord Hardinge’s howdah, the then governor-general of India, was passing through the streets of Chandni Chowk, Bose was dressed in the garb of a woman, and my father had put his ladder on the backside of Company Bagh. Bose then took out a homemade bomb and threw it on Lord and Lady Hardinge but it only ended up injuring them through splinters.” He says that they were told not to come under the scanner of the police, and he and his contemporaries all hailed from Anglo-Arabic school, who participated actively in the freedom movement. He says they worked under the leadership of Jugal Kishore Khanna, who lived in Dariba Kalan, and was associated with the Congress and later the INA. He says, “We would work as secret messengers and would take old cloth bags and tie it around us with some pieces of silver and gold and then walk on the streets pretending to be sellers, and shout out aloud if anybody had silver to sell. The person would then come down and take away the message from us, and that is how we would not get caught.” He recalls that the Congress workers who were under the leadership of Asif Ali, later came under Brahma Prakash who went onto become the first Chief Minister of Independent India.He has continued to live in his ancestral home for 106 years now, and was in that same house when the Partition took place. At the time of the Partition, he was 37 years old, and had an illegal pass by a Hindu name ‘Ram Kishan’ which helped him to travel around the city and not be contained by the curfew that would be put on the Muslims in Delhi. He says, “Many killings took place during that time. My work would be to make a daily trip to Nizammudin station where the trains would be leaving for Pakistan, and people would travel from Delhi, and they would get injured during those travels so I would escort them till the camp at Jama Masjid so that they could be quickly treated. The trains would leave from Old Delhi railway station, and the Muslims were treated very badly. The wagons that were provided by the Corporation to transport cattle, were used by the Muslim refugees to load their own belongings and they would pull it themselves and go to camps at Purana Qila.” He says that Partition was solely a result of various political forces, and stresses on the love both the religious communities had for each other before the Partition took place.Post Partition, he says that in Old Delhi the refugees who came later put up their own businesses on the pavement right in front of the shops, and started selling the same products at a lesser cost which affected their business. This was one of the major points of discord. He says, “The decision to stay on in India, and not migrate to Pakistan was very simple for me and my family because my ancestors had through the generations fought on this land. My father fought for the Independence of this country, so there was no question of leaving our own home. Although, my father did receive many persuasive letters from authorities in the newly formed Pakistan to come there. However, his father sat him down and asked him to write a reply, in which he clearly recalls that he wrote, ‘Do rivers like the Ganges or Yamuna flow in Karachi? Does Lal Quila stand on that land? Is there my beloved Jama Masjid there? If yes, then I will come in a jiffy. If no, then don’t ever write to me again.’ Although, his father never stopped him or any of his siblings from migrating but none of them did. But today he is pained at the current state of affairs, and completely opposite to what they had hoped for when fighting for Independence. He angrily adds, “The nation today might be independent, but it is not even close to what we had dreamed of as young revolutionaries.”He completed his matriculation from Punjab University. He was an ace hockey player and was selected by Delhi Hockey Association in 1942, played with Dhyanchand and participated in various tournaments, and visited Karachi and Lahore before the Partition took place. One of his friends named Qayyum, who was also a great hockey player migrated to Pakistan after the Partition. He says that all his friends and contemporaries who passed away and today, he is the only now left who saw all the incidents unfolding in front of him. Today, he lives with his son and wife.He relays a very important and historical memory of his life wherein he was given the task of providing food and shelter to Sardar Bhagat Singh for two months, when he had in the process of planning to explode bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly. He says, “There are many who laid down their lives for the country, but there are few like who had the grit and determination of Bhagat Singh. He always wanted to be a martyr for the country and was ready to lay down his life in a matter of minutes if it would get freedom from the colonial rulers.” He then pauses to sadly reflect and says, “But this is definitely not the freedom which any of us wanted. I never wanted to die, because I wanted to live and work for Independent India.” He says that Partition shouldn’t have taken place as both the countries would have been stronger united in all spheres of development.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and Hindi
- Physical Description:
- 4 video files
- Publication Info:
- Delhi (India : Union Territory)
- Imprint:
- Delhi (India : Union Territory), June 5, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2527
14. Oral history with Nirmala Dandekar, 2016 February 15
- Title:
- Oral history with Nirmala Dandekar, 2016 February 15
- Author:
- Dandekar, Nirmala, 1933- and Luthra, Simran
- Author (no Collectors):
- Dandekar, Nirmala, 1933- and Luthra, Simran
- Collector:
- Dandekar, Nirmala, 1933- and Luthra, Simran
- Corporate Author:
- Silicon Valley Community Foundation
- Description:
- Home-maker Nirmala Dandekar was born Sudha Sridhar Gadgil. Her life began in Mumbai and she lived with her parents, paternal uncle and three siblings – two brothers and a sister. She grew up in a chawl – the Pradhan Building – with a boys’ school, public library and the busy Tilak bridge in her immediate surroundings. She remembers her mother feeding the cats that hung around the chawl. Her experience of Mumbai paints a picture devoid of all the development that we now associate with the city. She remembers the isolation of places in Mumbai that are not bustling centers of activity.As a young child living in Mumbai at the time, she witnessed the plurality of the city. She talks about the Chinese and other northern traders who came to the city. She talks about the harmony in the plurality of Mumbai with religions and castes living together without trouble. She specifically mentions how her mother, who was a Dalit from a small village in Ratnagiri, would sometimes need to buy wares from traders of higher castes. Although the refused the tea her mother made them, she would ensure that she gave them some money to buy a cup of tea for themselves from a place of their choosing. But the Dalits that came from the village would treat her mother, Yamuna Sridhar Gadgil, like a sister.Her mother would cook and clean everything but the vessels for which she had help. Her mother was also well versed in household remedies for common ailments and visits to the local Christian doctor were only in cases of emergencies. She has grown up hearing historical stories. Her school – General Education Girls’ High School – promoted the spirit of the nationalist movement. The school’s Principal was the wife of B. G. Kher, solicitor and social worker, who became the first Chief Minister of Bombay Sate. Political leaders of the day were regularly invited to address the students. These personalities included Pandurang Sadashiv Sane (Sane Guruji), an author, teacher and freedom fighter and social activist. She recounts her proximity to the freedom struggles – having seen Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in person. She remembers that in 1942, the independence struggles had really begun. She remembers the guards outside her home on the night of the night of the Navy revolt in Mumbai in 1943.At the time of the Partition, in 1947, Nirmala was 14 years-old. While her age didn’t cause her to think too much about the event, she was affected by the sight of a refugee camp that her teacher organized a visit to. Her teacher, she says, wanted the students to know the plight of the refugees. She recounts how the refugees were brought to a school in Dadar and she talks about how some schools were made temporary refugee camps and how she saw and heard of the conditions in those camps. She recounts that a majority of the people were Sindhis. There were a few Punjabis among the people in the shelters too. Mumbai became a place of fear. In Mumbai, conversations became hushed. Refugees were relocated around Mumbai, to Kalyan, Badlapur and Ulhasnagar in a few months’ time.She remembers how the schools had not yet shut for the summer, one year, and the news of Subhash Chandra Bose’s exit from the country had caused unrest and a ‘bombing’ in Kolkata.When everything settled down, routines resumed. School resumed and soon, when she was in the eleventh grade, she was married. A relative had found a match for the young girl and on the 10th of February, 1951, a fortnight away from her 18th birthday, Sudha Sridhar Gadgil was married and was to be known by a new name – Nirmala Vasudeo Dandekar. She smiles as she shares how her wedding was conducted in two rooms of the chawl where she lived. The wedding itself was short and sweet as both, the bride and the groom, had exams they needed to appear for. After the wedding, the newlyweds moved to Kolhapur, where the groom worked as a college lecturer. The couple has two daughters and a son. As a home-maker, hers were the shoulders on which the responsibilities of the household were placed. The mother of three recounts that though her parents-in-law were around, it was her brother-in-law who was the closest to the family.Now, the 83 year-old spends her time reading the paper and exercising. Her old entertainment of watching plays, listening to lectures and going out is now rendered difficult by her health. Now, the 83 year-old believes that the killing of a good many people who would have been killed in the violent Partition were saved and have lived full lives because they moved to a new place. She believes that the governments of the time did think of the people. They did do what the people demanded and that their efforts for a united country went largely without support.She concludes with the thought that women’s empowerment, with the help of people from the outside. She hopes that young people participate and take initiative in being respectful to each other. Each gender needs to make a conscious effort to keep the other happy.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Marathi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Pune (India)
- Imprint:
- Pune (India), February 15, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2125
15. Oral history with Salima Hashmi, 2016 January 18
- Title:
- Oral history with Salima Hashmi, 2016 January 18
- Author:
- Hashmi, Salima, 1942-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Author (no Collectors):
- Hashmi, Salima, 1942-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Collector:
- Hashmi, Salima, 1942-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Description:
- Salima Hashmi [name at birth Salima Sultana] was born on 14th December 1942 to an Anglo-Indian family in Delhi. Her father, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, was an army officer, poet, political activist, editor of the Pakistan Times, and founding editor of the Daily Amroze. Her mother, Alys Faiz, was a political activist, writer and homemaker.Narrating the story of her name, Mrs Hashmi says: “The surname is a very Western idea. In our family, we had the tradition of giving a complete name, a first name followed by the second name. My mother liked Rehana, and Sabiha for the first name but my father didn’t approve. He named me after Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, his friend who was a scientist and also an artist. Hence I was named Salima with Sultana as my second name, and my sister was named Moneeza Gul,” she says. Mrs Hashmi dropped her second name, after the expiry of her second passport.Her father’s family was from Kala Qadar, a village in Sialkot. Her mother’s maternal family was from France, and paternal family is from London, England. Sharing a family lore about her paternal grandfather, Mrs Hashmi says that after a chance encounter with an Afghan trader in Lahore, he rose to prominence from being a peasant of Kala Qadar, to an educated, well-respected and envied treasurer of financial affairs at the Court of the King Shah Abdur Rehman the II, in Kabul, Afghanistan. “There were many controversies and conspiracies cooking up against him. There was an Englishwoman, a doctor, who was in charge of the women of the king’s harem and introducing the small pox vaccine. Rumor has it that she was in love with my grandfather and when she heard about the controversies and conspiracies against him at the harem, she informed him immediately, and he fled to India. Later on, he went on to England to study law at Cambridge. During this time, the Afghan King sent him a proposal to take up ambassadorship of the Afghan government at Queen Victoria’s court in England, which he accepted.One of the women her grandfather married was a princess of the Hazara tribe. “The novel Vizier’s Daughter by Lillias Hamilton is actually based on the life and character of my grandfather. After completing his studies, he returned to Sialkot and started his law practice. He was a close friend of the poet Muhammad Iqbal,” she says. “My grandmother was the only Punjabi woman my grandfather had married. She hailed from a village in Sialkot, near Kala Qadar. The rest of his wives were Afghans.”Mrs Hashmi says that her mother’s maternal family had settled in England during the 17th century. Her great grandfather used to own a posh bookshop on Swallow Street near Piccadilly. “The Prince of Wales used to sit there, and buy books from him. After the economic depression of World War I, they moved and settled in East London, where they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. During that time, my mother joined the Communist Party and became involved in the Freedom Movement for India.”She left London for Amritsar in 1938 where husband of her elder sister M. D. Taseer was posted Principal of the M.A.O. College in Amritsar. “My father was an English teacher at that College,” She says. Mrs Hashmi’s parents were married in 1941.Before Partition, Mrs Hashmi and her younger sister Moneeza [born in Simla] were raised in Delhi, Rawalpindi, Quetta, Simla, Lahore and Srinagar as a result of their father’s various postings in the army.Sharing her earliest memories from childhood, Mrs Hashmi says she was two years old when she was with her family in Rawalpindi. “I remember that because I fell and had hurt my head. I was taken into a hospital and given stitches. It was a military hospital. Parents weren’t allowed to stay with the patient but the maids were. My mother asked my paternal aunt to pretend to be a maid, and then she was allowed to tend to me for the night at the hospital. I almost died of blood poisoning because of that injury. In those days, Penicillin was newly invented. My father being in the army had some privileges, so I was given Penicillin and survived.”Mrs Hashmi’s first spoken language at home is Urdu. “My parents had decided that their child should grow up on one language and that would be Urdu. My mother had learnt Urdu, and she taught me to read and write at our home in Delhi. When my English grandparents visited us in 1947, I couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand me. It was at the age of four and a half years, I started learning my grandparents’ native language. My grandmother was fun. She used to tell us stories, and would act for us. She came fully prepared with puppets and things to entertain the children,” she recounts.In early 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at a nursery school in Lahore. “I remember my mother telling me it was a Hindu school. Of course I never knew what that meant at the time. I remember going in and playing there. I used to weep copiously every morning when I was sent to school and that continued for most of my life,” she says.Describing herself as an introvert and quiet person, Mrs Hashmi’s closest friends from childhood were her cousins Mariam, Salma, and Billu [the late Salman Taseer].At the time of Partition, Mrs Hashmi, her mother, sister, grandparents, maternal aunt and uncle were in Srinagar. “My father, a Lieutenant Colonel in rank, had resigned from the army in February of 1947 and moved to Lahore to set up the Pakistan Times and Amroze newspaper offices. My grandparents had just arrived from London so we had decided to spend the summer in Srinagar. We celebrated Eid there and afterwards, our father sent us a message from Lahore to leave Srinagar immediately as the situation was getting worse,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.They took a bus from Srinagar to Murree. On the way to Murree, Mrs Hashmi says she saw a bus at Thrait that was full of Sikhs who had been massacred. After reaching Murree, her mother organized the women in a procession to stop the rioting and bloodshed. “I remember she sat me down on a donkey and handed me a white flag. I was the leader of the procession waving my white flag. I was scared of the donkey but at the same time felt proud to be leading a rally of women. There was a certain performance to the role and I really enjoyed it,” she says.After a day or two in Murree, Mrs Hashmi and her family continued on to the Rawalpindi Railway Station on the bus, and took the train to Lahore. They shared the compartment with another English woman, the artist Anna Molka Ahmed [who founded and headed the department of fine arts at Punjab University] with her daughter.“There were so many people on the roof of the train. They were from Rawalpindi trying to crossover to India. There was mayhem and crowds, and there was no light in the train compartment,” Mrs Hashmi recounts. “We arrived at the Lahore station, which was under curfew at the time. There was a terrible hush in the city. My father had a curfew pass, so we managed to leave the Station and stayed with Begum Shah Nawaz at Lawrence Road for a while and in the meantime my parents started looking for a place to stay,” she says. They found a grand house not too far on Lawrence Road which is now a Government Office Building. Sharing her memories of her mother’s reactions on visiting that house, Mrs Hashmi says: “The lawn was completely dug out. The house was in bad shape, ruined by the miscreants. The electrical sockets had been pulled out, fans were taken off. There was a prayer room in the house that was defaced and badly desecrated. I remember picking up a children’s comic book from the rubble and my mother snatched it from my hand and threw it down yelling at me: we are not to touch anything here,”Mrs Hashmi and her family settled in an undamaged upper portion of a well-known doctor’s house on Empress Road and began rebuilding their lives. Recalling sights from the damaged lower portion of the house Mrs Hashmi says that she saw a refrigerator slashed by an axe. Her paternal grandmother had migrated to Gujranwala from Gurdaspur barely escaping the violence, and was eventually allotted residential property in Lahore against the lands she owned in Gurdaspur.In late 1947, Mrs Hashmi was enrolled at the Convent of Jesus & Mary where she wasn’t allowed to speak Urdu because everyone at the Convent was encouraged to speak English. “The nuns were aghast that I was an Englishwoman’s daughter but didn’t know any English. They refused to let me speak in Urdu and I used to weep and would sit at the edge of the door waiting for school to end. My grandparents used to pick me up in a tonga. I used to rush at the sight of them, I hated that school so much.” She says. 104/2, U B;pvk Ph 2, Street 3,At home, Mrs Hashmi says that daal chawal had always been her favorite dish cooked by her mother, and mangoes are the love of her life. “She also used to make Irish stew and Shepherd’s pie that I loved. Her specialty was homemade ice-cream, which she made using an icebox when we didn’t have a refrigerator. My mother was always particular about hygiene. I remember she used potassium permanganate to wash the dishes and the clothes to keep epidemic diseases like cholera and dysentery at bay. She was very particular and strict about table manners. That was her Englishness that used to persevere. We always had napkins on the table.” Mrs Hashmi recounts.In 1948, she was enrolled at the Queen Mary Convent where she studied for three years then moved on to the Kinnaird High School in Lahore from where she completed her matriculation. Despite her inclination towards the arts, Mrs Hashmi derived inspiration from the sciences, particularly Physics.In 1951, Mrs Hashmi’s father was incarcerated by the Pakistan government. Recalling an incident of her final year at Queen Mary’s, Mrs Hashmi says that she was invited by one of her school fellows to her birthday party. “I hated going to parties but since I had become reclusive after my father’s arrest and no news on his whereabouts, my mother insisted that I should go. I was eight years old at the time. There were some men sitting on the table at the party who started asking me questions about my father’s whereabouts which turned into a kind of interrogation. I started putting on a bravado act despite not having heard from him in three months. I told them my mother has just received a letter from him. I knew I was doing the wrong thing but I was so scared at the way they were interrogating me I told them what they wanted to hear. My mother found out about the incident. She called my school fellow’s family and gave them hell for it. I still remember the way she yelled on the phone,”In 1956, she opted to study at the Lahore College for Women for her intermediate degree in fine arts and in 1962, she completed her intermediate certification course on design from the National College of Arts in Lahore. In the same year, she travelled to London and studied for a three-year diploma in art education at the Bath Academy of Art in Bristol majoring in photography and painting. In 1990, she completed her MA honors in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.In mid-1965 Salima was married to playwright, writer and artist Shoaib Hashmi whom she’d met on several occasions in Lahore and London, due to their overlapping interests in the performance arts. Sharing the tale of her marriage, Mrs Hashmi says. “Our marriage took place after my grandmother’s approval. She had no idea that Shoaib and I already knew each other. She looked at him once and said that he is a nice boy and I should definitely marry him.”The marriage took place in Karachi were Mrs Hashmi’s parents were living at the time. Mrs Hashmi moved to Model Town in Lahore with her husband after marriage, and lives there today with her immediate family. The couple has one son, Yasser Hashmi and a daughter, Mira Hashmi.Soon after their marriage the 1965 war had broken out, and Lahore was under curfew once again. “The whole of Gulberg was empty. Most people had run for their lives but we stayed behind. Shoaib used to have a curfew pass. He was doing a program called Parakh, and I was doing a puppet show called Babloo aur Naazi for PTV. During the war, we used to go and do those, and I still enjoy doing that.” she says. “We used to walk around in the darkness with the curfews going on and the noise of sirens. It was a short war but a lot of people died because of it. During this time my father wrote the poem called Blackout.”In 1966, Mrs Hashmi returned to London where she joined an infant school and invested most of her time on art education for children. In the meantime, her husband took up his studies at the London School of Economics. The couple stayed there for three years. In 1969, Mrs Hashmi took up teaching Fine Arts at the National College of Arts in Lahore whilst continuing to build her team of artists for television shows Mr and Mrs Hashmi were producing together. She also served as the Principal of National College of Arts for four years. She’s organized, curated and implemented several art exhibits and design projects, conferences and seminars in Pakistan and around the world. She also has several publications to her credit.In 1981, Mrs Hashmi’s husband was arrested and jailed at Kot Lakhpat with 400 people for their progressive views. “It was déjà vu for me at many levels. My daughter was the same age I was when my father had been arrested and the superintendent of the Kot Lakhpat jail where my husband was, was the same jailer during my father’s tenure in prison,” she says.In 1955, Mrs Hashmi visited her birthplace Delhi with her father during the Asia Writers’ Congress organized by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Her father was the head of the Pakistani delegation. “I remember we went across Wagah on foot and then went on to Amritsar by train where we had lunch. We arrived in Delhi and met with friends from pre-Partition days. I also remember meeting Nehru,” she says.In 1962, Mrs Hashmi revisited Delhi with her mother to watch celebrations of the India Republic Day. “It used to be celebrated with royalty and pomp, with elephant processions and fairs during Nehru’s time,” Mrs Hashmi recounts.Sharing her final thoughts on Partition, she says: “There is no closure because people’s stories have yet to be properly documented and understood. They were the ones who had to pay the price for a decision in which so much was left to chance, and neither side envisaged what they were unleashing. It was a terrible carnage which was totally unnecessary. The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the 3rd and 4th generation today who don’t have those immediate memories but they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.There are a million ways to look at Partition. Over the years I have heard stories of bitterness, of great optimism, of loyalty and of gratitude. As a child, I’ve heard stories from my parents who witnessed it. My mother worked in the refugee camps. I was at the Lahore Railway Station when a train full of dead bodies had arrived and my mother had yelled at our driver to take me away from that carnage. There was a deathly silence on the platform in Lahore which I understood years later.My father, even though he was from this side, could not reconcile all his life with the biggest bloodbath in the history of this region. It is evident in the fact that he managed to write only one poem on Partition. It’s these stories that lead us to know why it happened the way it happened.The fact remains that the British set this up to drive the point home. This was their last good bye to the Sub-Continent. It could’ve been nipped in the bud very easily but they chose to look away when they had the means not to. I feel we really have to accept that there was this separation and we need to come to terms with it if we want to move forward. Otherwise, we are only going to trivialize all the carnage that has happened and it will weigh on our shoulders if we don’t find a way to cope with it.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), January 18, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2056
16. Oral history with Shafi Refai, 2016 March 13
- Title:
- Oral history with Shafi Refai, 2016 March 13
- Author:
- Refai, Shafi, 1942-, Saleem, Sobia, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Author (no Collectors):
- Refai, Shafi, 1942-, Saleem, Sobia, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Collector:
- Refai, Shafi, 1942-, Saleem, Sobia, and Qureshi, Nayeem
- Description:
- Mr. Shafi Refai was born on May 27th, 1942 in Surat, Gujarat, India. His ancestors hail from the region of Iraq. In the 18th century, the migrated towards the South Asian Subcontinent, and since then, his family has always been in the Gujarat region—until some of them more recently migrated to the United States. Mr. Refai shares that his ancestors may have migrated to the Subcontinent because under the Mughal Empire, the region was a melting pot for different types of people. Once Mr. Refai’s family migrated to India, they established the Refai Sufi Order based on tasawwuf, or spirituality rather than mere physical rituals and practice. His family can trace 40 generations of their forefathers directly back to the Prophet Muhammad; they keep this history of the names of their links to the Prophet within their family and they carry it within their historical family name: Syed. Mr. Refai’s family received the name from their famous 11th century Sufi forefather: Ahmed Kabir Rifai. Ahmed ar-Rifai was a humble man, despite his wealth, and he was known for founding the Refai Sufi Order in present-day Iraq.Mr. Refai’s paternal grandfather’s untimely death is what made his own childhood more than of a prince than of a Sufi scholar. Mr. Refai’s grandfather, the household patriarch, was a Sufi leader and scholar. In fact, Mr. Refai’s home was a Sufi khanqa, a school of sorts for lay people; however, Mr. Refai’s grandfather passed away when his son, Mr. Refai’s father, was only five years old. After the death of his father, Mr. Refai’s father was raised by his grandmother. Mr. Refai’s great-grandmother was the daughter of the navaab, the Muslim king, of Surat, Gujarat. Because of his father’s upbringing in a navaab house, Mr. Refai’s own childhood was spent playing with Surat’s royalty—his cousins and second cousins—when the navaab at the time would visit their family. Mr. Refai’s maternal grandfather also had links to royalty: he was the secretary of the maharaja, the Hindu king, of Baroda (present-day Vadoda). His mother’s side of the family were Syeds and mirs. Mr. Refai shares that when the maharaja of Baroda wanted to marry the maharaja of Maysur’s daughter, he had Mr. Refai’s maternal grandfather send the proposal to the family.Mr. Refai grew up in a joint family with his parents and his three siblings as well as his uncles and aunties. The men generally worked outside the home while the ladies took care of the housekeeping. Mr. Refai is the oldest son in his family; he has an older sister, and two younger brothers and a younger sister. Because of their shared home, Mr. Refai grew up in a warm, close-knit family environment. He shares that even though they were from Gujarat, Mr. Refai’s family was Urdu speaking at home. The children learned several languages at school: Urdu, their native language; Gujurat, the state language; Hindi, the national language; English, the global/colonial language; and their choice of Persian or Sanskrit, traditional/historical languages. Mr. Refai shared that he and his siblings took Persian because when their family migrated from Iraq, they transitioned from Arabic to Persian before eventually speaking Urdu. He discovered this while examining the books that his family kept with them throughout the years, although he confesses that many of them are now lost, disintegrated due to bookworms, or indecipherable because no one in his family speaks that level of Arabic. As a young man, Mr. Refai especially enjoyed the Urdu poetry of Iqbal and Ghalib.As a child, Mr. Refai would enjoy many activities and holidays with his friends, family, and family friends. As a young man, for example, he particularly enjoyed played cricket outside their home. He would occasionally visit a few mosques with his family for daily prayers and weekly Friday prayers. Sometimes, his family would visit Doomas, a seaside city eight miles from their home where they would enjoy the water and play in the side. Eid was Mr. Refai’s favorite holiday. On this far, Mr. Refai’s family would make biryani, goat curry, tikka, and seekh. Family and friends would visit their home to share in the food and festivities. The children received small cash presents. Another holiday Mr. Refai enjoyed celebrating as a child in India, although he shares that he hasn’t celebrated it since arriving to the U.S. in ’71, is Diwali. On this celebrative day marking the Hindu new year, firecrackers were lit, and people enjoyed themselves. Mr. Refai would visit his grandfather’s Hindu friends with him on Diwali; they would be given firecrackers to light and sweets to consume. Surat was actually known for its sweets like ghaani and barfi. Mr. Refai also loved the kite-flying holiday of Utraaon on January 14th, when the city would be filled with young and old flying kites. Movies though, Mr. Refai explains, were the main source of entertainment for his family and young people in those days, and his family loved going to the cinema.Mr. Refai’s family home was rather large. Besides the khanqa, the lay people’s Sufi school, Mr. Refai’s family’s grounds also included a family cemetery. Near their home was the River Tapti, although the received water from a pipe based water supply system. Sometimes, they had to collect water in an underwater tank for emergency purposes, just in case the pipes were blocked or clogged. Mr. Refai’s family home itself had huge courtyards; the home really consisted of four home together, so that each of Mr. Refai’s paternal grandfather’s sons had their own home. For transportation, Mr. Refai’s family either used the French car that his father bought or the Buick that his grandfather would later purchase. Other times, they used their horse and tonga to get places. At one time, all the people who lived in the home and at the khanqa kept up the tradition of preserving the Refai Sufi Order and school in India; however, Mr. Refai explains, as time when on, people lost touch with being fulltime Sufis. More and more people left home to work and even went abroad, like him. These days, Mr. Refai cherishes the rituals of rational thought more than religious dogma.In those days, Surat was a small town of only 250,000, but these days Mr. Refai says, the city has changed and grown to a bustling city of five million. Before the Partition, Mr. Refai’s grandfather had been interested in politics, so he had gone over to a small town near by, Randair, where he served as their mayor, but these days, Randair has been incorporated into the larger Surat. Most people in Surat followed the Gregorian calendar, but at home, people might also follow their own religious or ethnic calendar, much in the way that Mr. Refai’s family followed the Hijri Islamic calendar in their homes. They used this calendar to mark and celebrate people’s birthdates. For their birthdays, Mr. Refai’s family would get people cake, flowers, money, and gifts. Surat was a modern enough town with electricity and movie houses. Seller would go through the streets and sells fruits, vegetables, chocolates, and biscuits. The majority Hindu town had good interfaith relations before and after the Partition. For example, the school that Mr. Refai attended with Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim boys began as a madrasa school in a mosque until it eventually became its own entity and transformed into a government sponsored school.In Mr. Refai’s childhood home, the food that didn’t come from the markets and mundis came from his grandfather’s farms. Mr. Refai’s grandfather owned quite a great deal of land and several properties. He would lease them out to farmers and others, but he also kept some farmland for himself. He particularly enjoyed growing mangos, although he also grew javaar, a grain. Mr. Refai’s family no longer owns these lands though because his grandfather has long since sold them and given up the farms with the grains and fruit that would be directly delivered to their home. In fact, these fresh and homemade traditional foods are what Mr. Refai revealed that he missed most when he first came to the United States; although these days, they are easily accessible.The Partition was something that Mr. Refai and his family barely noticed. As a child of five, the only strong memory or impression he has from during those years is that his grandfather and his father would sit with friends close to the radio and would listen to news about the Partition and the split that would soon take place in the South Asian Subcontinent. Mr. Refai isn’t aware of any political movements, social upheaval, or chaos in his area of the Gujarat at that time. He does remember that Ghandhi assassination came as a bit of a shock to everyone at his school.Much has changed since the Partition for Surat and for Mr. Refai as well. Surat no longer has a navaab. All of the children in his immediate and extended family went abroad to the U.K. and the U.S. to study, and so they no longer maintain the old kingdom. As he grew older, Mr. Refai knew that he wanted to go to a country that was more based in rationalism and thought than religion and tradition. After studying civil engineering in India, Mr. Refai applied for an American visa and waited. During this time, he married and moved to Dubai for work, but soon, his visa was accepted, and he left his job in Dubai for San Francisco, where his wife soon joined him as well.These days, Mr. Refai works as a civil engineer for the City of Oakland, California; when he’s not working, he enjoys reading books in history, politics, and religion—or texts that intersect these three areas. He also enjoys attending events sponsored by the Urdu Academy in the Bay Area, where they hold mushairas, or poetry events focusing on a single poet, their life, and their poetry. He still enjoys the poets from his youth: Ghalib, Iqbal, and Mir.Mr. Refai’s philosophy, in the words of one he admires, is that “no single people have a monopoly on truth—it is spread everywhere.” Although, Mr. Refai reflects, the goal of the Partition for some was to unite the Muslims into one country, they are now instead divided amongst three countries in the Subcontinent: Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Mr. Refai believes that Jinnah himself did not expect that those in power would agree to divide India into two countries; as Mr. Refai sees it, Jinnah simply approached Parliament at the time to ask for rights for Muslims in the new nation that was to be rather than to create a separate nation. Mr. Refai leaves future generations with the following: “We should try to rationalize the world and follow it—not towards our own self-interested but for the interest of all of humanity. […] Most problems in the world today are not God-made, but man-made, and them come from our own selfishness.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu, Hindi, and English
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Fremont (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Fremont (Calif.), March 13, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2199
17. Oral history with Shahryar Khan, 2016 May 31
- Title:
- Oral history with Shahryar Khan, 2016 May 31
- Author:
- Khan, Shahryar, 1934-, Hasan, Fakhra, and Bakshi, Zara
- Author (no Collectors):
- Khan, Shahryar, 1934-, Hasan, Fakhra, and Bakshi, Zara
- Collector:
- Khan, Shahryar, 1934-, Hasan, Fakhra, and Bakshi, Zara
- Description:
- Shahryar Khan was born on 29th March 1934 into the Ruling Family of the Princely State of Bhopal. Mr Khan's father, Sarwar Ali Khan, was the Nawab of Korwai State. His mother, Abida Sultaan, was an Heir Apparent to the State of Bhopal until her migration to Pakistan in 1950. In Bhopal, 90 per cent of the population was Hindu and 10 per cent were Muslims and other faiths. It was considered a haven of peace for people of all faiths and retained its peaceful status during the troublesome times of Partition riots and massacre in India.Mr Khan's maternal grandfather, the last Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan was an urbane, sporting, and fearless personality. He was the first scion of Bhopal's ruling family to receive a university education, and twice the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes. Of the six hundred princes in India at the time, he was one of the most educated and articulate ones at the upper echelons of the Viceroy's council. "He had very good relations with the Congress Party. He had very good relations with Jinnah," Mr Khan says.His grandmother, Shahzadi Memoona Sultaan was a direct descendant of Ahmad Shah Abdali, and the Afghan King Shah Shuja. "She had settled with her clan and brought her culture to Bhopal. She would speak in Persian with her clan, and converse in Urdu with us. She was fluent in French. She would play tennis and was adept at playing the piano and the violin. She was a well-accomplished woman."His mother, was the eldest of three daughters of his grandfather, and for 25 years, Heir Apparent to the State of Bhopal, being the eldest daughter. "She was the favorite of her grandmother. It was she who suggested that my mother be declared the Heir Apparent. The British were a bit cagey on this because my grandmother, was relatively a young woman and they anticipated that she could produce a son. My great grandmother insisted, and the British ultimately bent to her wishes and in 1928, she was declared the Heir Apparent, and remained so until she left Bhopal in 1949 for Pakistan," Mr Khan says.His mother had two younger sisters, Sajida Sultaan, married to the Nawab of Pataudi, Iftikhar Ali Khan, the famous Indian cricketer, and Rabia Sultaan married to Agha Nadir Mirza from the Bhopal Royal Family. Both of her sisters continued with their lives in India after Partition.Mr Khan's parents separated a year or two after his birth, and he was raised under the sole supervision of his mother, two English governesses and a governor. "Married life was not my mother's cup of tea. She was a very aggressive and outgoing person. She in fact had said to him to marry another woman. It was an amicable parting, and they remained friends for life. He really didn't have a role in my upbringing or made any decisions about my life. It was my mother who would make all the major decisions."Mr Khan was raised at the Noor-us-Sabah [Royal Palace in Bhopal] before Partition. Sharing early memories of his upbringing in Bhopal, Mr Khan says that it had about 54 rooms with 200 people living in it from family members to workers and security staff. "We mainly used to dwell in the main living room downstairs. My mother's study room was downstairs where she used to work. Next to it was the room where we were taught. Next to that was the dining room and next to that was a large forward drawing room. All around the house there was a lovely verandah with marbled floors where we used to play cricket." He remembers. Wheat and cotton were grown on the agricultural lands that were tilled by tenant farmers. The harvest was distributed amongst the farmers and sold in the market but never stored, Mr Khan says. Street salesmen were forbidden to roam around the palace compound by the security staff.The dress code for Bhopal was simplistic for both men and women. "We were strictly instructed from a very early age not to dress gaudily. All of our clothes were mostly made of cotton, and sometimes khadi," he says.Sharing his thoughts on the foods of Bhopal, Mr Khan recounts Rezala [chicken cooked with white gravy in oil] and Bhata [sweet dish made out of a cow's milk that had just given birth to a calf] to be his favorite delicacies.The rules of purdah were quite flexible in the State, Mr Khan remembers. "The women of Bhopal were much more advanced intellectually than their sisters elsewhere in India. They were active in sports like hockey, tennis and squash, and some of them were very good chess and bridge players. My mother was an All India Squash Champion," he says.Mr. Khan's early education started from home. By the age of four, his mother had adopted two boys, Sultan Mal, from a Hindu family, and Syed Farooq Ali, from a Muslim family to accompany in the spiritual and intellectual growth of her only son. In the morning, together they would take lessons in Urdu, Quran and Islamiyat with a Wahhabi scholar, followed by lessons in English, mathematics, geography, history, science, calligraphy and the arts with an English governess. The afternoons and evenings were reserved for sports, learning crafts and musical instruments."We had the same tutors, and the same governesses. We were brought up together and went to the same schools until my departure to England," he says. Both Sultan and Farooq became avid hockey and cricket players. Sharing two of his fondest memories from childhood, Mr Khan says that first was when he obtained his very first present, a 410 rifle, and the second was shooting his very first tiger at the age of nine years. "I severely regret it now but at that time it was culture, rite of passage that you became a man if you shot a tiger and you had to be part of that culture. I couldn't do that now."In January 1945, Mr. Khan was enrolled as boarding student at the Royal Indian Military College in Dehradun. "My mother wanted to toughen me up and decided to send me to a military school." He remembers that the first three years of schooling at Dehradun were a huge influence on him. "You learned to live with people from Bengal, Madras and Punjab and know their customs and ways of life. The Sikh boys in our dormitory, had to get up half an hour earlier than the rest of us, in order to shampoo and wash their hair and tie it all up. We would observe all the Hindu and Sikh festivals at the gurudwara and the temple just as they would observe Ramzan, Eid and Eid-ul-Azha with us. In short, different cultures were living with each other. There wasn't any hatred or anything like that amongst us."Mr Khan's schooling future at Dehradun became uncertain due to the surge in Partition-related riots across India. "Before that we had no interest in it. We would read highlights of it in the Civil and Military Gazette at school, and skip to the sports page for scores. We weren't very politically active at the time but I was definitely elated at the thought of Muslims having their own country," he remembers. "Then we started hearing news of trains arriving at Bhopal with mutilated bodies since it was one of the main railway junctions in India at the time."In June 1947, his mother withdrew him from RIMC upon the Principal Mr Prichard's advice. Mr Khan resumed his studies at the Daly College in Indore until the summer of 1948. Sultan, his elder foster brother stayed behind in Dehradun and joined the Indian army, while the younger foster brother Farooq Ali joined Mr Khan at the Daly College in Indore. "During this time, my mother had started mulling on migrating to Pakistan but kept those thoughts to herself, and some of her closest friends," he says.Sharing the first memory of Partition significant to Mr Khan, he shares: "On 30th of January 1948, we were at school [Daly College], playing cricket and hockey and suddenly the news came that Mahatma Gandhi has been assassinated. This was a huge shock. Everyone was stunned, even people like us who were carefree. Before that there were no tensions between Hindus and Muslims. There were only 12 to 13 Muslim boys in college. They hadn't announced the name of the assassin for six hours. During those six hours, there was always a possibility that a Muslim might have done it. If that had happened, then all hell would have broken loose against any Muslim. My mother got into a station wagon and drove straight hundred miles to Indore to the college. She told the principal B.G. Miller that she's going to take all the Muslim boys and the principal said he couldn't let them go without their parents' permission. To which she replied if something happened to them then he would be responsible for not letting them come with her back to the safety of Bhopal. He eventually allowed her to take us all. We were all packed into the station wagon like sardines and taken off to Bhopal. We drove for four hours and by then it was known that a rightwing Hindu had assassinated Gandhi. In a sense we were relieved but it was a very bad time for us."In the summer of 1948, Mr Khan's mother decided to migrate and settle in Pakistan after putting her son at a boarding school in England. They set sail for England from Bhopal on the ss Asturius via Bombay and Liverpool.He was boarded at the Oundle Public School while his mother waited to obtain a visa to Pakistan in England. "It was a bit of wrench because I was quite happy in my life at Bhopal. I'd had a fairly good time studying at Dehradun and Indore but going to England was a cultural shock to me. Studying the subjects was not the problem. The problem was studying with English boys and their culture. For example, to find a quiet spot to say your prayers was not easy because they would make fun of you. Another oddity was that the boys would undress in front of each other in a room full of people, and their hygiene habits were repugnant. On the other hand, I learnt a lot on how different cultures performed as a result of the effects of post-World War crises which drove them to conserve and give up on pleasures. My great bridge to culture was spanned ultimately through sports. I was a good sportsman. In my first year at school at the age of 14 years, I was selected to play cricket for the school and became a hero," he says.In the meantime, Mr Khan's mother was unable to get the visa to Pakistan after Jinnah's unexpected demise. In 1949, she returned to Bhopal after learning that her father was considering the Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's offer for help in running the country in Jinnah's absence. "He had been given the option to become the Defense Minister or Governor of East Pakistan," Mr Khan says.In 1950, she returned to England to meet with Mr Khan and was successful in getting a visa to Pakistan on her British Indian passport with timely help of Liaquat Ali Khan whom she'd met at the consulate as a matter of coincidence, he remembers. "After dropping me off at Naples, Italy by road, she took the plane to Karachi via Cairo. In August 1950, she was the first leading lady from the senior Muslim states to have migrated to Pakistan. It's only my mother from our family who had come and sacrificed everything that she had in Bhopal. She had the biggest claim for refugee compensation in Pakistan amounting up to Rs. 84 lacs."Mr Khan spent four years studying at England, completing his A Levels in 1952. Sharing his thoughts on discussions on Partition in the UK, he says: "There wasn't much discussion on the rights and wrongs of Partition. The feeling in England was that India had become an economic burden on the British people, especially after the war. The sooner that burden was released, the better. The fact that Pakistan was not on the map until 1947, tended to confuse people. They all thought we were Indians, and we would aggressively say I'm a Pakistani, and they'd say: where is that? Later on when Pakistan government became part of the pacts against communist economies, is when it came under the British radar, as an ally. The common person had no interest in it. I was too young to take a position on the horrifying riots in Punjab and Bengal since the only thing I knew was that a lot of unnecessary slaughter took place while people were crossing the borders."According to the 1950 Registration of Land Claims Act [for Refugees from India] introduced by Ayub Khan, refugees were not allowed compensation of more than Rs. 3 lacs, Mr Khan Shares. "Only the agreed areas of East Punjab and Junagarh were allowed full compensation. The people that my mother knew were getting massive amounts of money and mansions to occupy. No one had favored us."In August 1951, Mr Khan made his first trip to Pakistan to be with his mother for the summer break.From her savings, she'd built a house for herself and her son in Malir, Karachi. "She did it without anyone's help. It was poor compensation by Pakistan government to a woman who had sacrificed so much for the sake of Jinnah, for the sake of this country. When one makes these sacrifices, one doesn't look for profits and that is how she was. But, it hurts." In Karachi, they had no electricity and basic electrical appliances for eight years. "We used to sleep out in the open with mosquito nets, in the cool breeze," Mr Khan remembers.After completing his A Levels from Oundle, Mr Khan went on to Cambridge where he studied Law. He also became fluent in Spanish and French with deep appreciation for their poetry and literature. He graduated in 1956 and returned to Karachi for a longer period. After a brief stint at Burma Shell, Mr Khan took the exam for Central Superior Services and obtained fourth position across Pakistan. In 1957, he joined the Foreign Service and stayed with them until his retirement in 1994.From 1994 to 1996, he was in Rwanda as special representative to the UN Secretary General overseeing peacekeeping operations. "It was a nightmarish experience, as Rwanda was being subjected to genocide. A million people were killed in three months." Mr Khan has authored a book called the Shallow Graves of Rwanda on his experiences on what Rwanda went through.In 1999, Mr Khan was appointed the Pakistan ambassador to France and returned to Karachi before completing his two year tenure to look after his ailing mother, who passed away in 2002.In 2003, Mr Khan moved to Lahore after his first appointment as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board. "I'd temporarily settled in Lahore then, and I really liked it. I bought a house here in 2006, and eventually settled here with my family."Mr Khan also teaches Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Read more about his life and career in Foreign Services here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahryar_Khan].He was married to his wife in 1958. He'd met her in England. She was a student at Queens College. "She comes from a distinguished Urdu speaking migrant family from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh and Allahabad." The marriage took place in Karachi. They have three sons and a daughter.Mr Khan is currently in his second stint as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board and lives with his family in Lahore. He visits his mother's home and resting place in Karachi from time to time. Both of his foster brothers, Sultan and Farooq have passed away. "Whenever I'd go to Bhopal, I'd meet Sultan. He served in the army most of his life and retired as a colonel. He passed away in 2014. I remained friends with Farooq all my life. He went on to become a chartered accountant and died in 2006."He enjoys visiting places of worship whenever in India or other parts of the world. "Be it the Muslim places of worship in Delhi and Agra, or the mosques and churches in Rome, Paris, England, Tunis, Jordan and Istanbul, I'm more interested in the history of these places of worship than the act of worship itself."Sharing his final thoughts on Partition, Mr Khan says: "The creation of Pakistan was inevitable but I don't think the division of Punjab and Bengal were inevitable. I believe these divisions were the source of a huge humanitarian disaster, which could have been avoided. In that sense both our Indian and Pakistani leaders let us down. I look back on Partition partly as a dream fulfilled for Muslims and partly as an avoidable horror that followed Partition. I feel the British must be held responsible for the role they played in leaving us with unresolved remains of their glory years: the water works, the railways, states and the boundaries."
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), May 31, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2303
18. Oral history with Suri Sehgal, 2016 October 23
- Title:
- Oral history with Suri Sehgal, 2016 October 23
- Author:
- Sehgal, Suri, 1934-, Cornell, Marly, Pradeepan, Raja, and Singh, Kavleen
- Author (no Collectors):
- Sehgal, Suri, 1934-, Cornell, Marly, Pradeepan, Raja, and Singh, Kavleen
- Collector:
- Sehgal, Suri, 1934-, Cornell, Marly, Pradeepan, Raja, and Singh, Kavleen
- Description:
- Suri Sehgal was born May 16, 1934, in the town of Guliana in a region of the Punjab that is now Pakistan. He was the second son and fifth of eight children of his Sikh mother and Hindu father. The Sehgal family was prominent in the area, owning many businesses and agricultural lands in a religiously diverse but harmonious community made up predominantly of Hindus and Muslims who celebrated each other's religious festivals together and enjoyed friendships.The Sehgal family lived as a large extended household occupying three houses on the same street with a palatial residential kothi nearby surrounded by Jaman trees, vegetable gardens, and flowers where Suri and his cousins and friends often played. The kothi had extra living space, prayer rooms, and huts for visiting holy men.Suri's mother's family lived comfortably in the nearby town of Arah where they had a large haveli, similar to the kothi, where Suri's physician grandfather provided free medical care to the poor. Suri naturally absorbed the philanthropic worldview of his parents and grandparents on both sides who were committed to helping the poor and less fortunate, as well as assisting in the affairs of their community.Suri's father, Shahji Sehgal, was a community organizer and associate of Mohatma Gandhi in the Indian National Congress working for the freedom of India from British rule. Shahji was away from home quite a bit as a result of this work and was once jailed with his uncle. Suri enjoyed a happy childhood sandwiched between three older and three younger sisters. He was not fond of school. His first appreciation for learning came when his family spent several months at a Palampur hill station in 1944 and he enrolled for a time in a Roman Catholic mission school. There he felt academically challenged for the first time.By age thirteen in 1947, Suri and his family lived in the town of Lalamusa near a railway station. By then, some members of his mother's family who had been living in Lahore had begun relocating as violence escalated between Hindus and Muslims. One Sikh uncle who was a police officer in Lahore had been transferred to Delhi before riots broke out. While the movement toward independence was being brokered, violence was erupting in various cities in the Punjab.The Sehgals were not too concerned at first. They firmly believed that people of differing views and religions could live together in harmony. On the morning of August 14, Suri's father was one of several speakers talking about hope for the future at the flag-raising celebration at the railway station. But that night a nearby school was torched and Suri's home in Lalamusa was under police guard due to danger from a mob.By the next day, with the arrival of a British commander and Hindu soldiers, the Sehgal home became the center of a refugee camp. The mass exodus continued in both directions as Muslims left their homes in India to come to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan fled to India. For the next few weeks, Suri helped his family host as many as forty people at a time on cots in their home as people sought safety in the camp.Suri's father, convinced by the mounting violence, particularly against women and girls, wanted to ensure the safety of his daughters. A Muslim friend gave Shahji a tip that a refugee train headed for India was due early the next day. Shahji wanted 15-year-old Shakuntla, almost 14-year-old Padma, and 11-year-old Santosh on that train accompanied by Suri's twenty-five-year-old brother Kedar.Suri was enlisted to help carry the girls' suitcases to the train station. But when they arrived, the train was already overloaded with people on the roof and stuffed into all the compartments. The two eldest sisters ran into one compartment and Kedar ran into another. Young Santosh found room in a rear car. As the train began to pull away, Suri's desperate father pushed him onto the train behind his little sister to accompany and protect her.The train stopped several times, sometimes unexpectedly. Shouting and screams could be heard at night, and food and water were scarce. The train turned south after reaching Lahore and came across the border into India at Ferozpur. The Sehgal children saw scores of dead and mutilated bodies all along the tracks.Once in India, the five Sehgals took a train to Meerut where the girls could stay for a short time with a young woman who had stayed for a time at the Sehgal's home in the refugee camp. From there, Kedar went to the border town of Amritsar to see if his parents and other sisters had also escaped. Suri went to Delhi to find his Sikh uncle, Gurdit Singh, who worked for the police "somewhere in Delhi."Over the next few weeks, Suri was joined by an eighteen-year-old family friend, Gurbaksh Singh, who had arrived in Delhi on an earlier train. As Suri searched for his uncle and Gurbaksh sought employment, the boys did the best they could while living on the streets. They witnessed a horrific mob killing of two Muslim men. Each evening Suri went to the K. K. Birla house where Gandhi came out on the grounds to talk about peace and unity and read from various scriptures. Suri was small and scooted up to the front and sit at Gandhiji's feet.After a series of what Suri considers true miracles, his family was reunited by the end of 1947 in Amritsar and, despite the surrounding dangers, not one family member had been harmed or killed during their Partition experiences. Suri and his sisters were already enrolled in school and the family was busy resettling themselves by the time the heartbreaking news came that Gandhiji was assassinated in January 1948.Over the next decade, the Sehgal family continued to reestablish their business and community associations (having lost everything they owned in the Punjab). Suri helped his father in business while in high school and went to college and graduate school for botany, earning honors. In 1959 he came to the US to obtain a PhD in plant genetics at Harvard University.While at Harvard he met his future wife, Edda Jeglinsky, who had migrated to the US from Germany and was living as an aupair in the home of a Harvard professor at the time, Henry Kissinger. Edda had a similar childhood refugee story. Her family had to escape their country of origin, German Silesia (now part of Poland), at the end of World War Two when she was three years old.Suri's first job after graduate school was with a regional seed company in Iowa. Edda joined him there and the two were married in 1964. They decided to become American citizens. For the next 24 years, Suri was a primary player in the seed company into an international success. Suri and Edda raised four children and two nephews and welcomed scores of relatives immigrating to the US, helping them get settled and assisting in the educations of many.In 1988, Suri and Edda, started a seed business in India called Proagro while Suri continued to work as a consultant in the global seed industry in Germany and Belgium. In 1998, when Proagro sold for a substantial amount, Suri and Edda shared their new wealth with all the employees, set some aside for their retirement, and used the bulk of the millions to create two philanthropic organizations with the intention of making a positive difference in the lives of the poor in rural India: Sehgal (family) Foundation (in 1998) and S M Sehgal Foundation in India (in 1999). Edda Sehgal is also a trustee of both foundations. Suri wanted to give back to his country of origin for the many benefits he gained, not the least of which was his early education.The S M Sehgal Foundation in Gurgaon, India, has been serving as a catalyst in partnership with communities to bring development to rural communities with programs in water management, agricultural development, and rural governance, with heavy emphasis on the empowerment of women. Their programs and innovations as well as their community radio station have received multiple awards as they continue to address many of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals. Suri has received several awards for social justice and philanthropy.He feels strongly that people who have migrated from India to the US and elsewhere and have been successful in their lives should feel a sense of responsibility to give back in some way to the country of their origin.At age eighty-two, Suri serves as the chairman and trustee of Sehgal (family) Foundation and S M Sehgal Foundation in India. Edda Sehgal is also a trustee of both foundations, which they founded together in 1998 and 1999 respectively. Sehgal is chairman of two seed companies. Misr Hytech Seed International S.A.E. in Cairo and Hytech India in Hyderabad. He is a Trustee Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. He is active in his local community in Captiva, Florida, serving on the environmental committee of the local yacht club.Suri and Edda continue to spend part of each year in India at Sehgal Foundation, visit their seed businesses in India and Egypt, and visit their relatives around the world.Suri's message to current and future generations is to try to make a positive and sustainable difference in the world—be of service to others whenever possible. His hope has always been that every person who comes in contact with him would be better for their association. Though he and Edda founded two charitable foundations, Suri does not believe in charity as such. The key to helping the less fortunate is empowerment—and the key to putting the power in empowerment is to create and rekindle hope. He says that "of course everyone needs a source of income, but making money must not be the key goal." Just as it works in business, if you focus on the fundamental needs in life and try to add value in all situations, the rest will come naturally. He feels very fortunate that he and his family survived Partition without harm or death and were safely reunited. They only spent about 2 days in the refugee camp before many friends came to help them. Suri credits the profound legacy of generosity created by his family that inspired many others to want to give back to the Sehgals. He has learned over and over that if you do good to other people and have that spirit of 'let me be helpful,' this pays off richly in the long run.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Captiva (Fla.)
- Imprint:
- Captiva (Fla.), October 23, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2580
19. Oral history with Syed Nizam Shah, 2016 March 3
- Title:
- Oral history with Syed Nizam Shah, 2016 March 3
- Author:
- Shah, Syed Nizam, 1932-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Author (no Collectors):
- Shah, Syed Nizam, 1932-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Collector:
- Shah, Syed Nizam, 1932-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Description:
- Syed Nizam Shah was born in Kashmir to a Kashmiri-English speaking family on 25th February 1932. He is from the Naqshbandi family. His father’s family hails from Tashkent and is known to be the founders of the Naqshbandi order of Sufi Islam in Kashmir. There are several shrines of the Naqshbandis still existing in Srinagar today. One of the shrines belonging to his family is the Khankahi Sokhta or Dodmut Khankah [in Kashmiri].Mr Shah’s father was the first Muslim governor of Kashmir at the time of the Punjabi-speaking Dogra Dynasty in the early 1930s. The Naqshbandis enjoyed an elevated position as a prominent Muslim family and had extensive landholdings spanning five villages. Mr Shah’s father was learned and fluent in Arabic and Persian, considered to be languages of scholarship in those days. They had a family library going back to several centuries of hand written manuscripts and literature. Mr Shah’s mother’s family hails from a village 20 miles off of Srinagar. She was a homemaker. Mr Shah was raised with one elder half-brother and one elder half-sister, and two younger sisters at their residence in Srinagar. His mother passed away three years after his birth. For a while, Mr Shah and his siblings were brought up by an Afghan royal family that was settled in Kashmir. “They were exiled after losing the wars with the British and were allowed to settle in Kashmir by the then-Maharaja. We still maintain ties with that family.” Mr Shah’s stepmother was a Christian woman his father had married after her conversion to Islam.Mr Shah says that in those days, people in Srinagar used to live in mohallahs. “In our case, the mohallah would comprise of various Naqshbandi families. In the family enclave, we used to have our own mosque called Khosha Sahib which still stands in Srinagar, named after the Sufi saint Khowaja Shah Niyaz. It’s a very small mosque and used to cater to families living in the mohallah. It has some historic relics of Islam there, one of which is known to be the hair of the Holy Prophet Muhammad, gifted to our ancestors by the Sultan of Turkey, on his spiritual expedition to Istanbul. It is displayed publicly on the birthday of the Holy Prophet. It is only accessible to the trustees of the mosque today.” The upper class Hindus – the Brahmins and Kashmiri Pundits – used to have their own mohallahs. There were very few Sikh families living there, and would dine with the Muslims and vice-versa. There was a school for Sikhs built by Maharaja Ranjith Singh. Shia Muslims lived in their own mohallahs. There was no animosity between people of various sects and faiths. There was a lot of respect for Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals and under his father’s governorship, they were observed jointly by all communities, as Kashmiris.Mr Shah was brought up in a mansion in the family enclave with a big garden, he remembers. In childhood he remembers having this love for cars in his family. Most of the growing up years were spent in the gardens. Describing the structure of the mansion, Mr Shah says, “Houses in Kashmir in those days used to have courtyards in between the gardens. My father had built the front portion of the house in the 1920s. My sister, myself, my step grandmother and father used to live in it. My brother and his family had the rear section of the courtyard. Diwali, Dussehra and Eid were celebrated jointly amongst Muslims and Hindus. Wazawan was a special dish made for weddings, cooked only by professionals trained in cooking the dish. White Kashmiri rice with gravy of various types was another popular delicacy.” He says. They had running electricity in Srinagar. They also owned an antique telephone that had the Morse code mechanism. They also owned a radio. The postal system was run by the British. King Edward’s stamp was used on the envelopes for letters. Villages in Srinagar didn’t have electricity.The rice, maize and corn farms and the peach and cherry orchards supplied food for the household. “We had cows and chickens but no buffaloes. There were no buffaloes in Srinagar. Due to my father’s hold on extensive agricultural property and orchards, our family was self-supporting. We used to grow mainly rice, corn and maize. The water for irrigation was channelized from the mountain stream and wells.”Mr Shah says that the lands on higher altitudes four five miles from Srinagar would be given to the British army officials and Maharajas from other States on rent during the summer and they would use them to hunt and play golf etc [nowadays the place is occupied by the Indian army].The famous Nedou’s hotel in Srinagar was owned by his sister. “There was one branch of it opened in Lahore, its name was changed to the Avari Group of Hotels after Partition,” he shares.Mr Shah was fond of hiking on the mountains and fishing with his father. He played hockey and cricket with his friends. “We had three horses. My sisters liked riding. I hated it.” He says. Some of his closest friends were Hindus, especially the children of Maharaja of Jaipur’s family.Mr Shah’s father was one of the first Kashmiri Muslims to go to a missionary school [Church Mission School] inaugurated by the Church of England, founded by Tyndale-Biscoe, a Kashmiri Englishman. “It was considered a big event to be enrolled at a missionary school in those days since it used to be the only school where English was taught. The others were typical schools where Arabic and Persian were studied.” Two of his younger sisters were the first from a Muslim family to enroll in a mission school called the Presentation Convent at Srinagar, as well. “That was run by the Catholics and it was the girls’ first English medium school.” He says.Purdah was not observed in the family which was a breakthrough because of his father’s status. “We were a modern family,” he says.Mr Shah’s early education started at home. He was taught by an English governess and Muslim cleric. At the age of ten, he was enrolled at one of the branches of Biscoe’s school in Srinagar that was run by his son at the time. Commenting on his father’s knowledge of English, Mr Shah says that it considered a mark of honor and respect even though the British Raj was not in Kashmir. Used to cycle to school frequently, sometimes picked and dropped by father. In those days, it was strictly required by law for bicycles to have a rear lamp reflector, and light in the front that would come on after sunset. “If you were well-off, you would have the dynamo light on your bicycle. One day when I was cycling back home in the dark, the traffic police officer stopped me because my dynamo wasn’t working. He reported the incident to my father and he was very angry and reprimanded me for it,” he recounts. Recalling his schooling with children of different religious backgrounds, Mr Shah says that some students faced difficulties adapting to the school activities. “There were many Kashmiri Pundits in the school and they couldn’t play football with us even if they wanted to. One of the tenets of their faith was not to touch leather since they were made out of skins of cows and buffaloes, like the football,” he says.In their house there were three kitchens, one for the servants and the maids, one for the family, and one for the guests from Hindu families with a set of cooking utensils and cooks specializing in their cuisine. “As a matter of strict protocol, utensils in that kitchen were never to be used for cooking meat, only vegetarian food,” he says.Just before Partition, the option available to Mr Shah’s father was to send him to the Doon School at Dehradun in India for higher studies. “He sensed that Partition could stir a lot of trouble because people had already started to evacuate areas amidst rising political tensions. My longtime school friend Karan Singh went on to the Doon School and I was left behind,” he says. In 1946, Mr Shah was sent off to England with a guardian and some Indian students on scholarships. They took to Rawalpindi by road and then took a train to Bombay [now Mumbai]. From Bombay they set sail for Liverpool by sea, and from Liverpool, took the train to London. Mr Shah completed his A Levels from the King Williams College in London.In the meantime, Mr Shah says that after the takeover of Shaikh Abdulla in Kashmir in 1947 and deployment of the Indian army at Srinagar, hell broke loose in many parts of the State. “My father kept me posted on updates who continued to serve as the Governor of Kashmir during the period of Partition maintaining a neutral stance between Jinnah and Shaikh Abdullah. The Poonch area became a hub of refugees who ultimately migrated to Rawalpindi and Wah Cantonment. My brother was in the civil services of Kashmir, and was attacked by Abdullah’s mobs in Srinagar while he was out running an errand. He fled to Karachi after that episode. Jammu became a horrifying example of ethnic cleansing. The whole exercise was unnecessary. In summary, Kashmir was made the victim of two nationalist ideologies.”Mr Shah was cut off from his ancestral home and family income at Srinagar during Partition, and he was soon looking for a job in England. “I had just gotten admission into Oxford and the London School of Economics but couldn’t study in those institutions,” he says. In 1950, he joined the British American Tobacco Group that was doing business in Imperial India and in Pakistan.In 1953, Mr Shah acquired a temporary passport to travel from the UK to Pakistan as a result of his posting at Akora Khattak in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by the British American Tobacco Group (BAT). We were the first batch of Pakistanis recruited selected by the company on the basis of our strong family backgrounds. During my first posting to Pakistan, I was not acknowledged as a Pakistani citizen. I could use that passport for only three months. For years, I was without a nationality, and this applied to all the Kashmiris in exile. We all lived in this foray of hope that the UN resolution will lessen the tensions between the two countries and we could cross borders, take on a 7-8 hour journey from Rawalpindi to Srinagar by car and visit our ancestral homes. This dream never came true. The Kashmiris who had migrated to Pakistan were considered stateless. They weren’t treated like refugees from India but from a disputed territory with no identity. During the plebiscite, the migrant Kashmiris in Pakistan were not allowed to vote,” he says.Starting as their assistant manager, Mr Shah served with BAT for 30 years, and six years as the company’s Chairman. In 1984, he took an early retirement. He was also posted in Dhaka, Chittagong and Karachi. Sharing his experiences of working in Dhaka and Chittagong, he says: “The Nawab of Dhaka was of Kashmiri origin, and because of that association, I received a neutral and respectable treatment,” During his tenure in Karachi, Mr Shah observed the sub-human living conditions of refugees from India in the waterlogged slums of Karachi. “There were hundreds of men, women and children lying around the railway tracks across the slums to relieve themselves. It was one of the most horrific sights of Partition that I could recall. The government paid no attention to that situation until the 1960s,” he says.After his retirement from BAT, he worked as a policy consultant for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank for various years on energy and projects in Pakistan. He continues to take up their projects.In 1955, Mr Shah says his father became the first Kashmiri allowed to visit Pakistan from Srinagar after Partition. In the 1960s, during General Ayub’s government, he says, Kashmiris finally became eligible for allotment of evacuee property on the condition that they would surrender that property if their homeland became a part of India. “During this time, Sheikh Abdullah paid a goodwill visit to Pakistan to improve ties with India, after consulting with Jawaharlal Nehru. One of my cousins was in that delegation. Shortly after his arrival in Pakistan, we heard news of Nehru’s demise, which was an unfortunate blow to the purpose of that visit, which was also lost. In Nehru’s time, Kashmir was given a special status. It retained its position as a State and had its own Prime Minister.”“Kashmiris suffer a perpetual state of statelessness and the government of Azad Kashmir in Muzaffarabad is only theoretical. In order to write a letter to my family in Srinagar, I had to send the letter to a third country for postage. I saw many refugees without any food or shelter from Poonch settling in Wah and Rawalpindi. I could have chosen India but there was this euphoria over having a new homeland and all the promises made, so I opted for Pakistan in a euphoria of hope that we could go home when we want to.”Mr Shah was allowed to visit Srinagar for the first time during Nehru’s government in India when Bakhshi Ghulam Muhammad was the Prime Minister of Kashmir, he remembers.He was married in 1958 to his wife through an arrangement by the Afghan royal family they were friends with in Srinagar. He has four children, educated in Karachi and abroad, and settled in the United States and the United Arab Emirates, nowadays. Mr Shah resides in Karachi with his wife nowadays.Sharing his final thoughts, Mr Shah says: “Srinagar to me is paradise on earth. I’ve travelled all over the world but have not found a place like it. I compare the Kashmiris to the Jews, being driven away from their homeland for God knows how long. “Every invader that has come to this land has inflicted persecution upon the Kashmiris and forced them out of their homes. Kashmiris did not get the benefits a lot of other communities did as a result of Partition. The way it was done was most criminal, it need not have been done this way. Partition to me is the largest religious ethnic cleansing and displacement in world history, which was dismissed by the British as a casual thought. I have not seen anything more horrific than this in the history of the world.”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu and English
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Karachi (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Karachi (Pakistan), March 3, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2197
20. Oral history with Yogesh Munjal, 2016 September 10
- Title:
- Oral history with Yogesh Munjal, 2016 September 10
- Author:
- Munjal, Yogesh, 1940-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Joshi, Prakhar, and Chugh, Navneet
- Author (no Collectors):
- Munjal, Yogesh, 1940-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Joshi, Prakhar, and Chugh, Navneet
- Collector:
- Munjal, Yogesh, 1940-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Joshi, Prakhar, and Chugh, Navneet
- Description:
- Yogesh Munjal who is presently the Managing Director of Munjal-Showa, a subsidiary of the Hero Group, was born February 13, 1940 in Lahore, Punjab to parents, Satyanand Munjal and Pushpavati Munjal. He was the eldest of 5 brothers and 2 sisters. Satyanand Munjal is known for co-founding with his brother OP Munjal, Hero Cycle, the world's largest bicycle and motorcycle manufacturer. Shortly after birth, the Munjal family moved back to their ancestral village in Kamalia, District Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) in West Punjab. There they lived with the extended Munjal family, which included all the siblings and parents of Satyanand Munjal.His father and uncle were compelled to leave their village in search of work because of the shortage of opportunity in Kamalia. They started their careers at an army warehouse in Quetta, Balochistan, after which they tried their luck at a number of other types of businesses. Eventually they moved to Lahore and became well versed in the bicycle repair and trading business where Yogesh Munjal was born. They launched a bicycle parts and repair shop in Amritsar where the family lived for three years before moving back to Kamalia in 1946 to settle down. In July 1947, Yogesh Munjal started attending Khalsa school, an Urdu medium primary school, in Kamalia. He recalls the school building being two stories with a flat roof.He describes traveling with his father on trains, as a child, to places as far away as Karachi, Rawalpindi, Multan and Kashmir. They also traveled to Haridwar where 16 generations of his ancestors' names and history are preserved. They had lived in Kamalia the entire time.Satyanand's mother was a devout reader of the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, but before her passing she donated their Guru Granth Sahib to the Kamalia Gurdwara, as her husband, Bahadur Chand Munjal and sons had begun following the Arya Samaj traditions. Desite this, her descendants to this day hold both Arya Samaj traditions as well as Sikh prayers at their homes and factories on auspicious occasions. Satyanand's mother was a devout reader of the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, but before her passing she donated their Guru Granth Sahib to the Kamalia Gurdwara, as her husband, Bahadur Chand Munjal and sons had begun following the Arya Samaj traditions. Desite this, her descendants to this day hold both Arya Samaj traditions as well as Sikh prayers at their homes and factories on auspicious occasions.Satyanand Munjal had financed the construction of a new house which was completed in late July 1947 and the family had lived in their new home for only two weeks before Partition was formally announced. The home had a door that opened directly onto the street, and a courtyard with a kitchen in the center. There were two bedrooms on the back of the house. By summer of 1947, processions, slogan shouting and violence had reached Kamalia and it was no longer safe. They learned via a radio announcement that all Hindu and Sikh families were being asked to leave. At first, Satyanand Munjal went to Ludhiana and sent a message back to Kamalia via a traveler asking the rest of his family to join him, and provided the address of a rental property he had obtained. HIs mother, siblings and several members of the extended family decided to leave Kamalia at a moment's notice without any belongings via the last train. They left their brand new home. Yogesh had to leave his studies, which he had just started two weeks prior. While on the train, Yogesh and his one younger brother witnessed murders, body parts strewn along the train tracks and heard violence outside the train cars. There was suspense and fear in the air for the entire journey. There was no food or water to drink on the train and they did not receive anything untill they crossed the border into India. Once they crossed and felt safe, everyone was elated. They followed Satyanand Munjal's instructions and reached Ludhiana safely, where the family was reunited.In 1948, the Munjals moved to Delhi, where Yogesh completed primary education in the Hindi medium Technical High Secondary School at Kashmiri Gate. He eventually attended Delhi College of Engineering after which he attended Roorki University where he graduated with a degree in Architecture in 1964. He was also married to his wife during college. He had planned to open his own Architecture firm with two friends, but his family encouraged him to join and help grow the family business instead. Here is the incredible story of that family business, Hero Cycle, with humble beginnings in the chaotic aftermath of Partition. Hero Cycles quickly grew to become the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world,THE HERO CYCLE STORY:Once the family was in Ludhiana in 1947, Yogesh's father, Satyanand Munjal and uncle, OP Munjal, began looking for work to make ends meet. They started with the trade they knew best, bicycle parts and repair. They began visiting bicycle parts shops and asking for their requirements, and then took their orders to supply shops. They acted as middlemen and retained some commission. They eventually earned enough to start their own shop in Vidharganj in Ludhiana. As their business grew, they began to experience a shortage of parts supplies and decided to manufacture one part on their own, the top portion of a bicycle fork. Eventually they acquired a workshop in Ludhiana and began manufacturing the entire fork and soon, many other parts as well.In 1956 they won one of 100 licenses from the Indian Government to manufacture 25 bicycles a day. (Only 6 of the original 100 companies still survive). Their bicycles were the cheapest in India, selling for Rs 20/day, and enabling mass transportation of the workforce. By 1975, they were making 7,500 bicycles a day and in 1986, Hero Cycles appeared in the Guiness book of world records for being the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world. Today that number has grown to 20,000 bicycles a day. The Hero group also makes Majestic Mopeds and numerous other bicycle and car parts. For the last 14 years, the Hero Group is also the largest maker of motorcycles in the world. They also manufacture solar panel parts, and electric bicycles. Over 200 parts manufacturers have emerged in Ludhiana to supply Hero Cycles.Yogesh Munjal also recalls the story behind the formation of Hero Honda. Not long after, they applied for a license to partner with Honda. Hero Cycles was one of four manufacturers vying for the license to collaborate with Honda, and were selected as one of fourfinalists by the Indian Government. When the Honda officials visited them, they were impressed by the both the incredible efficiency and speed with which the employees worked and the respect the employees had for the elder Munjals during the walk through of the factory. The Honda officials then chose Hero Cycles as their India manufacturing partnerToday, the Hero Group consists of several factories and manufacturing plants. The various plants are each headed by different members of the extended Munjal family.Several key factors led to their success as Yogesh Munjal notes, including hard work, a deep commitment to honesty, an investment in the happiness of their employees and having a reputation for paying their vendors on time without any instances of delay in the history of their business. They also have a deep commitment to improving their local communities, through the building of schools, colleges, medical centers, hospitals (including the state of the art Hero Heart Center in Ludhiana) and numerous other philanthropic ventures.Words of wisdom for the next generation: We should always think positively, and then we can achieve anything. Fix a goal and work to achieve that goal. Prioritize often. Work in coordination with others. Don't complain but instead appreciate. Don't worry about credit. This will lead to progress. Everyone should contribute to the greater good and the country. What if we all devoted half an hour a day, out of the 24 hours to good deeds for the greater good?On Partition, he believes the violence could have been avoided with better planning by government officials. Unnecessary loss of life could have been avoided.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 3 video files
- Publication Info:
- Faisalābād (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Faisalābād (Pakistan), September 10, 2016
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2462
21. Oral history with Arghwani Begum, 2015 August 31
- Title:
- Oral history with Arghwani Begum, 2015 August 31
- Author:
- Begum, Arghwani, 1922-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Zafar, Naeem
- Author (no Collectors):
- Begum, Arghwani, 1922-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Zafar, Naeem
- Collector:
- Begum, Arghwani, 1922-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Zafar, Naeem
- Description:
- Arghwani Begum was born on 2nd January, 1922 at the Princely State of Sahaspur in Uttar Pradesh. Her mother, Ms Ghafoorunisa was a purdah-observing home-maker. Her father, Mr Samiullah Khan was a Governor of the Princely State of Sahaspur with 22 villages in the Bijnor district under his possession and supervision. Residents of the villages were mainly Muslim, Hindu and Christian families and most of them were farmers, she recalls. “Seasonal crops were grown in the villages with mainly rice, sugarcane, pulses and sesame from what I’ve seen. A portion of the harvest would come to my father. That was our family’s main source of income,” she says. The irrigation system for the lands at Sahaspur was well-based. Each village in Sahaspur had its own well. She grew up with three sisters at their haveli (mansion) in Sahaspur. Arghwami Begum is the youngest. Electricity came to Sahaspur in 1934, when Arghwani Begum was 10 years old. “Before electricity arrived in our area, we used to have oil-powered fans,” she recalls. Their haveli was segregated into mardana (male) and zanana (female) sections including the living rooms, dining areas and the kitchens, she recalls. “Men and women living in the house were not allowed to trespass into each other’s sections,” she says. The same rules applied to the servants and the maids, she says. There was a separate building for guests within the haveli and stables for the elephants and the horses as well, and a garage for cars. Food used to be made by the cooks. “We used to have both male and female cooks assigned to the dining areas. The men used to eat outside mainly, while the women ate inside,” she recalls. Copper pans and utensils were mainly used for cooking. “On the first or second of every month, they’d be electroplated,” Arghwani Begum’s clothes, shoes and other household amenities mainly came from Delhi and Muradabad. Jewellers from Delhi used to come to Sahaspur to sell gold and diamond necklaces and earrings as well, she says. Recalling her early childhood days, Arghwani Begum says she was overtly fond of climbing the trees. “I used to get together with my friends and climb the falsa and the morus trees and pluck the fruits.” She recalls having many dolls and playing with her friends. “Sometimes we would marry the dolls and enact a proper Indian wedding in their honour. Our mothers used to stitch the wedding clothes for the dolls,” she recalls. Most of Arghwani Begum’s childhood friends were daughters of farmers from all ethnic and religious backgrounds who used to visit her haveli with their parents quite often, especially during harvest seasons and crops distribution days. “Before I entered my teens, I was officially a boy with no purdah restrictions,” she says. She learnt to read and write in Urdu at home. “We used wooden boards to write in Urdu. We’d use two types of bamboo pens, the ones with flat nibs was used for writing alphabets and the ones with narrow nibs were used for punctuation marks and dots,” she recounts. Arghwani Begum received her early and advanced religious schooling at home as well. She never went to an academic school of learning. “My father was against it. I grew up on Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s compilation of Islamic teachings in Urdu called the Bahishti Zewar and the novels of Maulana Nazir Ahmad Dehlvi,” she says. In 1935, Arghwani Begum and her family went on their first annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia on ship via Karachi. “I used to run around in the ship a lot. We were at sea for 10 days before reaching Mecca. We completed the pilgrimage at Mecca and Medina, and then went to Jeddah. We stayed there for about three months and returned to Karachi via Jeddah,” she says. In 1943, she was married into a family from Delhi. “It was a three-month long wedding considering the time-consuming journeys on elephants. The barat stayed at our haveli for seven days,” she recalls. By 1947, Arghwani Begum, mother of two children, a daughter and a son, was pregnant with her third child. Recalling events leading up to Partition, she said Hindu-Muslim communal tensions had begun to escalate after May 1940, when the Pakistan resolution was passed. “Before that, there was lot of unity and trust between the Hindus and Muslims. We began to see the effects of the resolution when fighting started to erupt in the villages of Sahaspur,” she says. She was 25 years old and at Rang Mehal in Delhi when Partition was announced. She was in her eighth or ninth month of pregnancy. “I really didn’t have any clear understanding of what is going on when our boxes were getting packed with valuables and necessities. My family told me that we are moving out of the haveli and nothing else,” she recalls. They set out from Sahaspar in the family’s motor vehicles with her children, mother-in-law, husband, sister-in-law, uncles and their families for the Purana Qila (Old Fort) of Delhi. “At the Fort, we didn’t have a roof to sit under as there were so many families there and it was raining immensely. One of the families at the camp, in charge of pegging tents saw us and immediately pegged a tent around us. Arghwani Begum spent the night there and the next morning went into labour. She gave birth to her third child, a son, at the Old Fort migrant camp at Delhi, a day after Partition. Arghwani Begum’s sister-in-law had started crying incessantly after holding her new-born nephew “but I didn’t register why”, she recalls. “There were no clothes for the baby. He was draped in one of my daughter’s frocks,” she says. They stayed at the Old Fort for two days and carried on to the Nizamuddin Railway Station in Delhi in the army jeeps that were expected to pick them up. “At the station, while everyone was worried about having something to eat before the train departed, I wanted to get on the train immediately. I hadn’t eaten for nearly three days but had no hunger for food. I just wanted the journey to end,” she says. During her journey to Lahore from Delhi that started on the 17th of August, her train made stops at various stations. Recalling a night’s stay at the Amroha Railway Stop, she says lots of people got off the train in desperation to get water and eatables for the journey but never returned. “At some stations that were downhill, we saw people from the hilly areas rushing towards our train with food and drinks for the refugees for the rest of the journey. It was a relief to see that but I still didn’t have the heart to eat or drink anything,” she says. As her train continued to move, Arghwani Begum witnessed the massacre of Sikh passengers in a train passing by theirs in the opposite direction. “There were men climbing and entering that train with swords and knives. I saw the sudden commotion and heard their screams and cries of panic. I also witnessed men jumping off that train with their women and girls. It was horrifying.” she recounts. Her train finally made it to the Wagah border on the 20th of August but it was not the end of the ordeal as our train had come under attack too. “It was so sudden. We immediately sealed shut the windows of our train with whatever we could get our hands on. My baby almost fainted due to lack of Oxygen in our berth. One of the male helpers in the train helped my baby get some air through the train’s main entrance while the killing spree lasted for an uncertain period. There was a lot of people, especially children from many berths of that train had been killed. I saw their bloodied bodies when we finally got out of the train when the assailants had left,” she says. From Wagah, Arghwani Begum and her family (mother-in-law, sister-in-law and children) moved to the refugee camp at Walton. They were picked up hours later and shifted to the Davis School which had been temporarily converted into a residence for migrants in poor physical shape. She was reunited with her husband and parents three days later. “They’d discovered our whereabouts through announcements on loud speakers at the railway station,” she recalls. From Davis School, Arghwani Begum’s family moved to her daughter’s future husband’s uncle’s house in Model Town where they stayed for two-three days. From there, she moved to a small independent house in Model Town’s C-Block, once occupied by the Hindu families. “There was a 10-kanal vacant plot next to that house which used to belong to an affluent Hindu landlord. My husband purchased the plot and we had a big house built on it for my children,” she says. In the 1950s, her family was allotted some lands at Dera Ismail Khan against their property at Sahashpur by the Pakistani government. “We had no roots or business in Dera Ismail Khan and therefore used those lands for agricultural purposes only,” she says. Her mother-in-law expired in 1971 followed by her husband who died of heart failure in 1975. The couple has two sons and four daughters. Two of her daughters are educated and settled in the US. “My husband had left my sons on a solid footing and taught them all there is to know about leading a responsible life. They practically took care of everything after his demise,” she says. In 1980, she visited her birthplace in India with two of her daughters Nabahat and Sabahat on train. Her daughter says, “She had practically started shaking and crying as we approached her house. It was very intense for her.” Arghwani Begum currently lives at her husband’s house with her maid, one of her sons, daughter-in-law, grand-children, and great-grand-children in Lahore nowadays.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Panjabi and Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 1 video file
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), August 31, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1803
22. Oral history with Birinder Pal Singh Cheema, 2015 October 4
- Title:
- Oral history with Birinder Pal Singh Cheema, 2015 October 4
- Author:
- Cheema, Birinder Pal Singh, 1931-, Cheema, Sharon, and Islam, Nabila
- Author (no Collectors):
- Cheema, Birinder Pal Singh, 1931-, Cheema, Sharon, and Islam, Nabila
- Collector:
- Cheema, Birinder Pal Singh, 1931-, Cheema, Sharon, and Islam, Nabila
- Description:
- In time, Mr. Cheema's family rebuilt their lives in Amritsar after Partition, but some things were never replaced: the memories and family heirlooms, the photographs, the land, and numerous good friends. Birinder Pal Singh Cheema was born in Pipri, Uttar Pradesh in 1931, the youngest of five children. His older sister and his paternal aunt were both married to direct descendants of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and as such, Mr. Cheema's family lived on the royal estate where his father and uncle helped manage affairs. In 1939, the family moved back to their ancestral village, Badoki Gosain in Gujranwala District. It was a difficult adjustment, particularly for schooling, as the local language in their new home was Punjabi, whereas Mr. Cheema had grown up speaking Hindi and Urdu in Pipri. The family soon adjusted to agricultural life however and assumed their responsibilities as landlords of the various local village farms. These farms produced crops of sugarcane, wheat, mustard, and tobacco. It was an idyllic existence, he recalls, and villagers of different religious groups all lived together cooperatively. They remained unconcerned with the pending division in 1947, believing they would remain in their home regardless of which side of the border their village fell.A week after Partition's announcement, they began hearing via various news reports of rampant rioting and killings on both sides of the border. In their own village, rumors of attack started to circulate. Feeling afraid for the first time, they quickly determined that they had no choice but to leave their home, he remembers. As painful as that decision was, they remained hopeful that they would one day be able to return, he says. Leaving safely proved to be a challenging task. The mass exodus of villagers in such a short time had created a sense of fear and distrust that resulted in outbursts of violence locally and beyond. There was no organized system of migration in place for the millions of people about to be displaced. They were on their own, he says. Mr. Cheema attempted to leave on more than one occasion with some family members but each time, they were not able. One morning, the domestic helpers who had been standing watch over the house had gone into the village and Mr. Cheema and his older brother awoke to find a man wielding a sword, standing on the eight-foot-high wall bordering their courtyard. The man announced that he was there to kill them. It was his duty, he said, and he assured their mother that she would be spared. His mother challenged the man, creating a distraction that allowed Mr. Cheema, who was 16 at the time, and his older brother to escape through the front door. Wearing only summer shorts and shirts, barefooted and bareheaded, they ran for hours until they reached the first of many refugee camps that they would stay in until reaching their final destination of Amritsar.Mr. Cheema's entire immediate family survived the ordeal and were eventually reunited. He is grateful that he did not experience violence first-hand and for the fact that, at each refugee camp along the journey, he was well-fed by volunteers. In time, the family rebuilt their lives in Amritsar, but some things were never replaced: the brick house they left behind, along with memories and family heirlooms, the photographs, the land, and numerous good friends that they would never see again. In particular, he has often wondered about his best friend, Mushtaq Ahmed Cheema. After Partition, Mr. Cheema continued his studies in Jalandhar, working and volunteering for a period of time at a local refugee camp. In 1951, he had the opportunity to pursue his studies in England. His visit to Mumbai was exhilarating, as he had never seen the ocean before or sailed on a ship, and was looking forward to the new life overseas. Once in England, he worked his way through school and graduated from the engineering program at the University of Astin in Birmingham. During this period, he met the woman he would marry, a nursing student from North Wales. In 1961, a job offer from the Hindustan Steel Company in Rourkela, Orissa, took him back to India. His fiancé soon joined him and they were married in a traditional wedding in 1962. Their first daughter was born in 1963 and a year later, plans began for the family to move to Canada.Mr. Cheema had two more children in Canada, a son and a daughter, and today he has four grandsons. He remains an active participant in all their lives and since his retirement, has enjoyed some travel, working in his garden and keeping fit with exercise programs available in his local community. Until recent years, he didn't think often about Partition. Still, some memories have been painful for him, he shares. His philosophy, having gone through Partition as a migrant and a refugee, is that we should love our neighbours and choose resolution over conflict at all times.For many years he worked for Northern Electric (Nortel) as a senior engineer until his retirement in 1996. During his career, he was renowned for his negotiation skills and was in fact chief negotiator for the engineers' bargaining committee as well as president of both the Engineers' Association and his company for many years. He moved to Canada in 1964, arriving by ship, and was joined a few months later by his wife and their eldest daughter. Today, he is 84 years old and lives in Montreal, Canada.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 29 video files
- Publication Info:
- Dollard-des-Ormeaux (Québec)
- Imprint:
- Dollard-des-Ormeaux (Québec), October 4, 2015 - 2015-11-05
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1914
23. Oral history with Geoffrey Langlands, 2015 January 31
- Title:
- Oral history with Geoffrey Langlands, 2015 January 31
- Author:
- Langlands, Geoffrey, 1917-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Author (no Collectors):
- Langlands, Geoffrey, 1917-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Collector:
- Langlands, Geoffrey, 1917-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Gill, Raj-Ann
- Description:
- Geoffrey Douglas Langlands was born on 21st of October, 1917 to a British family in Hull, Yorkshire in England.His father worked for an Anglo-American company and his mother was a folk dance instructor at a small school. Mr Langlands was raised with his twin brother John Alexander Langlands. Both the boys were named by their mother.“Geoffrey and John were my parents’ favorite names. Alexandar Douglas was the name of my maternal grandfather. Since my twin brother was ten minutes older than me, Alexander went to him, and Douglas became my middle name,” he says.Mr Langlands’ father died as a result of the 1918 flu epidemic that had killed over 20 million people worldwide. After their father’s death, the Langlands moved to their mother’s parents’ home in Bristol where he was raised with his brother by their mother and maternal grandparents. Geoffrey’s mother died of cancer in 1930, and went into the care of their grandfather eventually, who’d passed away a year later. “Our father died when we were one year old. Our mother died when we were twelve, and we lost our grandfather when we turned thirteen. There was a lot of death in our family from a very early age,” he recounts.In July 1935, Geoffrey completed his A levels, and took up teaching science and mathematics to second grade students at a small school in London the same year. He taught for nearly four years. “In my fourth year, I was promoted to teaching third grade students,” he says.During this time, news of World War II caught Geoffrey’s attention. “I was preparing to enter the fourth year of teaching and then came September 1939. I was sitting by the radio all by myself when I heard Churchill say that Hitler has taken over Poland, and as of 11am, Britain is at war with Germany,” he recounts. “I never did anything without discussing things with my brother. Once, I saw an advertisement in the English paper asking for persons to join to become engineers in the air force. My brother advised against it since our family had no money whatsoever. He was not around at the time WW II was announced. Without telling anyone I made the decision, and headed straight to the recruitment office to enroll as an ordinary solider,” he recounts.Mr Langlands joined the British army in 1939, and in 1942, he was recruited as commando and fought against the Germans at the Dieppe beach in France organized by the chief of operations Lord Mountbatten.In January 1944, Geoffrey joined the British Indian army and was posted at Bangalore where he was made in charge of selecting, recruiting and training young men to become officers in the army. “I was under training at Kent. One day, three British colonels of the Indian army came to the place where we were being trained to become army officers. They wanted volunteers for selecting applicants to the British Indian army. I was the only one with that kind of experience, and was therefore chosen for the job. I was in a unit for interviewing, testing and training the boys applying to be officers in the army. It was an important task and I was engaged in the unit for two years,” he says.Sharing his experience of the initial years in India, Mr Langlands says the Quit India campaign by the Congress was gaining a lot of momentum and the British soldiers could sense the tensions building up. “To quit India was something impossible, especially when the war was on. We were under strict orders to stay at our posts till the end of the war. There was no question of going anywhere else around the world,” he says.In early 1947, Mr Langlands and his unit came under the supervision of Lord Mountbatten for the second time, now as the last viceroy of British India. “He was in charge of all of us, and it was evident that he was in a hurry from day one in India as well. We used to call him the whirlwind man,” Geoffrey says. “The first thing he did was give names of volunteers to stay on for one year after the actual independence. I was also selected as one of the volunteers since I’d already been engaged in the task of recruiting and testing potential army offices in India,” he recounts.“We had to add one short paragraph in a lot of documents stating ‘do you want to join the Pakistan army or the Indian army?’ Mountbatten made the Indian army in charge of the task, and there was a lot of suspicion that he did this to delay whether young ones wanting to join the Pakistan army would have the choice to make the selection,” he recounts. “However, when the lists were finally issued by the Indian army, the young ones had the choice to join Pakistan army,”After Geoffrey’s recruitment as the volunteer trainer during Partition, he was posted at Dehradun, where he trained potential officers for both the armies up to December 1947,” he says. “In the meantime, in July, I was told that I must travel to Rawalpindi at once by train because I’d been posted to one year in the Pakistan army, and the young men at Dehradun wanting to join the Pakistan army were to arrive at Rawalpindi from where we would take them to the military academy in Kakul for training.”Geoffrey took a train to Rawalpindi to make arrangements for the young men’s arrival in the city. When he reached Rawalpindi, he found the city deserted and found the army officers’ mess after all day of inquiring. “There was only one cook in the mess, and everyone else had gone off to India I was told. There was no office for the young men from Dehradun to gather at, and no one to receive them there,” he recounts.At the time of Partition, Mr Langlands describes being on the railway for route back and forth between India and Pakistan for ten days as an officer of the Pakistan army.His journey began from Rawalpindi to the tribal areas around the Himalayas by train, to make a farewell visit to his infantry there. Upon reaching the Gujrat railway station, the station master requested him to vacate the train for passengers in the train behind them. “The passengers were Indian army troops bound to India. We stayed in the station for an hour, and then moved on. When we got to the Lahore station, it was almost empty. The top man was there with few others but no trains were moving. The train that we had vacated for the Indian troops was waiting at the Lahore railway station. The station manager asked me to guard the train for the night as there was a lot of trouble in Lahore, and I kept guard of it the whole night,” he says.The next morning, Geoffrey set off from Lahore. He had gotten half way to Amritsar when their train was stopped a small station near a village. “The villagers told us that we can’t go ahead in the train tonight as there was a lot of trouble in Amritsar. We took refuge in a big bus and there were about 20 Indian officers with me. They were talking to each other and saying somebody has to go out and find out from the train guard on what’s happening. None of them seemed clear on whether they should go. I volunteered to check things on their behalf,” he recounts.Geoffrey met with the train guard who took him to the station master’s office. “We’d walked down the platform and halfway to the station master’s office, some people started firing machine guns at us from nowhere. I shouted at them: Stop fighting! Stop firing!”“They were used to the English voice and they stopped firing. I went down to the steps and shouted don’t fire until you can see who you’re firing at. When we got to the station master’s office, he was lying down, having been shot dead inside the office. The assistant was sitting at his desk shivering, and asked what was happening. We told him the train is not going to move until daylight comes,”About mid-day, the next day Geoffrey and the Indian troops managed to get to Amritsar railway station. “The military guarding the trains at the station were in Pakistani army uniforms, getting ready to return to Lahore. The Indian people knowing that I was from the Pakistan army told me that they no longer want the Pakistani military to be here but allowed me to continue my journey to the Himalayas. Recounting the journey, he witnessed people firing at each other indiscriminately and indescribable insanity. “At times, when people would rush towards the train, the men with the machine gun would ask me, “Should I fire at them?” I was an ordinary passenger in the train trying to keep things calm but the question kept coming up throughout the journey,” he says.Mr Langlands stayed with his infantry in the Himalayas for nearly four days that was quite shocked to hear about what was going on down the hills.“Gradually all the train crosses were cut off, and I had to spend three-four days there [to regain focus].”In September 1947, Mr Langlands took the train to New Delhi from Peshawar [express service]. There he was told to coordinate with the unit in charge of sending migrants to Pakistan. Like most migrants to Pakistan, Mr Langlands was required to get clearance from the Pakistan desk of Delhi. They had to clear some payments and I had no problem with that. From Delhi, I took the emergency flight by air to Lahore. You were only allowed 20 pounds of luggage. There were no seats in the plane as everyone was sitting on the floor to accommodate more people,” he recounts.“The idea of giving any sort of power had no effect on me but the turbulence continued for several months after Partition,” he says.In December 1947, the young men of the Pakistani army in Dehradun were officially transferred to the Pakistan army. During the same time, most British officers were asked to leave Pakistan by the new government prior to the completion of their yearlong contract with the British government. “Jinnah spoke strongly with the prime minister against letting all the British soldiers leave. He directed him to find out what all the British officers had been doing in the past four months and see which ones are worth keeping. So they agreed,” he says.From January 1st 1948, a two-year contract was given to those who’d done moderately good work, and those who were really good at what they’ve been doing were given a contract of three years with the Pakistan government. Mr Langlands retired from the army as Major after a decade of training Pakistani army officers. He resumed his career in teaching and joined the Aitchison College for Boys where he taught in Lahore for 25 years. To read more about his life and career in Pakistan, please visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Langlands.Sharing his thoughts on the Fall of Dhaka, Mr Langlands says that from the beginning of training of the boys in military units at Dehradun and Kohat, he had sensed aspiring officers from West Pakistan didn’t like going to East Pakistan at all. Every time I went to East Pakistan, I saw the army officers weren’t doing very well there. After 20 West Pakistanis had applied to become army officers, as mandatory practice, a small group of them was sent to East Pakistan for six weeks twice a year. The first group was sent in December,” he recalls.East Pakistan [Bengal] had been supplying items to the capital of West Bengal through Calcutta or growing things and sending them to Calcutta for several decades. “Now they had been cut off from that route, and couldn’t go there. They had good growth in all sorts of things and plenty of water but found no support from the government. The capital of East Pakistan had a university that was just about the worse in all of Pakistan and there was so much of poverty. The government was really not interested in investing there. The Bengalis considered themselves a colony still being ruled by Britain, and had fairly strong reasons right from the start to break away as separate from West Pakistan,” Mr Langlands says.Sharing his final thoughts on Partition, Mr Langlands feels the bloodshed and violence that resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions was due to poor leadership decisions of the last viceroy of British India. “Mountbatten was told to get the final independence by August 1948 but he had it done in August 1947. It was typical of him. Otherwise, millions of lives could’ve been spared. It could’ve been done more peacefully and many wars that followed could’ve been avoided,” he says.Mr Langlands nowadays lives in Lahore at the Langlands House in Aitchison College. “I was seeing two ladies when I was young and each would ask me whom will I marry and when. I’d tell them not until the war is over.” Mr Langlands is 99 years old today, and he never married.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 video file
- Publication Info:
- Lahore (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Lahore (Pakistan), January 31, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2067
24. Oral history with Jaya Mehta, 2015 December 16
- Title:
- Oral history with Jaya Mehta, 2015 December 16
- Author:
- Mehta, Jaya, 1933- and Saleem, Sobia
- Author (no Collectors):
- Mehta, Jaya, 1933- and Saleem, Sobia
- Collector:
- Mehta, Jaya, 1933- and Saleem, Sobia
- Corporate Author:
- California Humanities
- Description:
- Mrs. Jaya Mehta, nee Jaya Patel, was born in Vadodara, now known as Baroda, India on May 15th, 1933. Because her father was a businessman, her family traveled quite a bit with him between places likes Baroda, Bombay, and even East Africa, where Mrs. Mehta spent a few years of her childhood. Mainly, however, her family lived in Bombay. Hers was a unique family: they had seven siblings from three different mothers. Her father’s first wife had had four children before passing away in childbirth; then her father remarried, but his second wife passed away during the birth of their first child. Mrs. Mehta’s mother had two children and remained the mother for the youngest three-four children. Mrs. Mehta’s elder half sisters were already married by this time, and one had moved away from their family in Bombay to live in Baroda with her husband. Mrs. Mehta’s siblings got along so well with each other—despite their differences in mothers—that they became a role model family for her Gujarati community in Bombay.Mrs. Mehta cannot speak of her childhood without speaking fondly of her father, Mr. Somabhai Patel. When asked how it was that her various siblings got along so well with each other, without hesitating Mrs. Patel credits her father, in her words the man who helped shaped who she is today. He was a very commensensical and practical man. Every evening, he made sure the whole family had dinner together, and every weekend, he also made sure they went to a drive together either to the beach, which was not so crowded in those days, or to their farmlands, 11,000 acres of primarily cotton. Mr. Patel stressed the importance of an education to both his sons and his daughters, supporting two of his daughters in becoming practicing doctors. The environment in the Patel house was, also quite uniquely, one of morals but not religion, something unheard of in those days. However, because Mr. Patel was well-respected within their community, no one bothered him in hs ways, even when most of his children had small civil ceremonies rather than grand religious weddings. Mr. Patel also instilled a sense of independence and health in his children, telling them that even if they wanted a cup of water, they should fetch it themselves, and they shouldn’t eat street food, but fruits with thick skins only when purchasing food on the street.Mrs. Mehta herself was not so fond of studying and reading, so one summer, she took a vacation with her sister and Mr. and Mrs. Sevenoaks to Europe by sea to various countries like the United Kingdom and Austria, among others. She speaks of how, even at 19, she would get into amusement parks as a child because of her thin figure—however, she also speaks of how she would get carded when they went to an over-18-only place and would have to carry her passport accordingly. Mrs. Mehta’s hair was a incredibly long when she was young and even into her middle age—it would near reach the ground! She would turn heads wherever she went and catch people’s attention. One time on her European trip, when they were trying to cross the border, the two guards were arguing amongst each other before they approached her in the vehicle. “We can’t decide,” they said to her and her sister, “if you two are twins!” They couldn’t believe it! Mrs. Mehta’s sister’s hair also cascaded down at least to her knees. The Sevenoaks were kind to the girls, making sure to explain local customs to them, like kissing on the hands as a form of greeting, so that they wouldn’t be alarmed as they passed through different countries, like Austria.During the time of the Partition, Mrs. Mehta says that she herself was not very involved. Her father had a strict rule—education first, everything else after. Thus some of the younger Patel siblings, the students in her family, were even sent away from Bombay to Baroda by her father during that tumultous time to continue studing. Mrs. Mehta recalls though that her elder sisters, who were married and had already completed their studies, were somewhat involved as citizens and activists in the Partition. Following the news and advice of the Indian National Congress, they bought a spinning wheel to spin their yarn and threads to make their own clothing, like Gandhiji was encouraging people to do. They would make themselves simple clothes and wear them until they were tattered all in an effort to make sure they didn’t purchase the British’s mechanically produced cloth. Her sisters would also attend some of the protests and rallies. A few of those, Mrs. Mehta remembers, were right next to their home. The Britsh soldiers and militia would come and beat the legs of those who were injured quite badly. She remembers her father would open their home up to these injured rally and protest attendees and that her family would tend to them and care for them.Bombay had always been a cosmopolitan city and would always be one, according to Mrs. Mehta, so she didn’t feel that it changed very much after the Partition. The Sindhi population in the city increased, and with them, they brought their love for education and built universities around the city. They were also very good embroidery- men and women, and hence with the influx of their populations, Bombay’s embroidered and designed clothing and styles boomed. All in all, Mrs. Mehta says, the changes were small, but whoever migrated to the big city brought with them all the positives and good things about their culture and shared them with the city and its inhabitants.Bombay is where Mrs. Mehta has spent the majority of her life. As a child, she enjoyed attending the Kite Flying Festival on the 14th of January where the children would fly kites and eat sweets, like peanut and sesame brittle. She also loved celebrating Garba with her Gujarati community in Bombay. During Garba, Mrs. Mehta would be able to sing, a passion which naturally ignited in her from the tender age of four, and dance dandian, a two-stick spinning dance style; she also loved the little gifts of metal utensils they would receive at the event. Bombay was where Mrs. Mehta dated her husband for six years; it’s where she eventually married her husband; it’s where she sang on the radio and modeled saris; it’s where she had a her daughter; it’s where she decided to learn to sing formally by moving to Baroda to attending a five-year singing program; and it’s where she finally decided, after her husband passed, that she would give up her life in India to move to America to be with her daughter in 2003.However, Mrs. Mehta has not slowed down one bit since her move to the States. Because of the sense of independence her father instilled in her, she’s learned to adapt, begin new projects, and never be bored. These days, Mrs. Mehta is still quite active: she drives herself, cooks vegetarian meals for her family four days a week, gives the seniors at the India Community Center singing lessons, has a weekly bridge troupe, puts on fundraising Bollywood dance numbers in which she’s often center stage, and is working to collect various memories and stories in to compile her family’s history. Of course, she also manages to share her love with her daugher and two grandchildren.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi, Urdu, and English
- Physical Description:
- 4 video files
- Publication Info:
- Fremont (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Fremont (Calif.), December 16, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2020
25. Oral history with Kidar Jain, 2015 December 26
- Title:
- Oral history with Kidar Jain, 2015 December 26
- Author:
- Jain, Kidar Nath, 1937-, Dhir, Keshav J., Jain, Shaili, and Ghani, Imran
- Author (no Collectors):
- Jain, Kidar Nath, 1937-, Dhir, Keshav J., Jain, Shaili, and Ghani, Imran
- Collector:
- Jain, Kidar Nath, 1937-, Dhir, Keshav J., Jain, Shaili, and Ghani, Imran
- Description:
- In the fall of 1947, Kidar Nath Jain was a boisterous ten-year-old boy living in Jhelum, Punjab. When he saw buses lining the streets outside his childhood home, offering to take passengers to India, he was curious. One day, he boarded one, accompanied by his brothers and sister. He was told that their father would join them a few days later. The bus took them on a journey from Jhelum to Lahore, over the Atari border to Amritsar, India. He loved the journey and the excitement of travelling to an unknown place. Mr. Jain remembers how dark and quiet it was when they arrived in Lahore, and that the passengers were discouraged from leaving the bus, or buying treats or food from street vendors. Today, Mr. Jain still summons the excitement he felt when he boarded that bus, and the eagerness he felt for his journey to India. He recalls how, as a boy, he fully expected that when the adventure was over he would return home. As a ten-year-old, he could never imagine that he would leave his childhood home and ancestral land forever, and that he would never again return to Jhelum. Today, as an adult he shudders to think of the dangers of that bus journey. Their bus had no police or army guard, but they managed to arrive safely in Amritsar. Mr. Jain and his siblings resided temporarily with relatives in Amritsar. Every day, they would run anxiously to greet buses arriving from Pakistan and search for their father. He had promised he would meet them in Amritsar in a few days. Over and over again they scoured the buses, but there was no sign of their father. When Mr. Jain and his siblings learned that their father had been killed before crossing the border, he felt his world collapsing around him. From that point on Mr. Jain endured a very challenging time in his life, he shares. He went from living with privilege to being identified as refugee, living in an orphanage, and later, becoming a child laborer to support himself and his family. For years he still dreamt of being reunited with his father, since he would hear news of families being reunited all the time, but his dreams did not became a reality. In his dreams, Mr. Jain would come to know a familiar feeling of suffocation, and the sensation that someone, or something, was trying to kill him. In the years that followed, Mr. Jain had given up on his education and began working as a laborer in a hosiery factory in Ludhiana. More misfortune followed when his elder brother, Roshan Lal, died of rheumatic heart disease. Before he passed away, his brother had impressed upon the Mr. Jain the value of education and the importance seeing it through. So, Mr. Jain spent his days working and nights studying. He had no financial security and his younger siblings now depended on him for food and clothes. The Partition meant they had lost their home, land, family belongings and heirlooms. The only income they had was their father's modest government pension that Roshan had been able to secure for them. Mr. Jain managed to excel in spite of his difficult circumstances, and by his early twenties he had earned a master's degree in English language and literature. Mr. Jain's degree made him eligible for an arranged marriage with his wife who would prove to be a steadfast, loving companion of over fifty years. Together they navigated through the stresses and hardships of life, Mr. Jain shares. His educational attainment would also enable him to migrate to England, where he and his wife had five children and eight grandchildren. When times were challenging, Mr. Jain always turned to classic books of science, humanities, philosophy and spirituality. A defining force in his life has been a strong desire to restore his family's well-being to what is was before Partition, he shares, and to never forget the lives lost in 1947. Mr. Jain stresses the value of education to his children and grandchildren. Today, Mr. Jain feels content and at peace with his life in England, a country which, after many decades, he now considers his home. Mr. Jain continues to have an insatiable thirst for knowledge across the humanities and sciences. He feels that if every person took it upon themselves to think deeply and independently, with a level of skepticism, then tragedies like Partition could be avoided.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 15 video files
- Publication Info:
- Birmingham (England)
- Imprint:
- Birmingham (England), December 26, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2062
26. Oral history with Maryam Babar, 2015 November 18
- Title:
- Oral history with Maryam Babar, 2015 November 18
- Author:
- Babar, Maryam, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Rashid, Osman
- Author (no Collectors):
- Babar, Maryam, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Rashid, Osman
- Collector:
- Babar, Maryam, 1941-, Hassan, Fakhra, and Rashid, Osman
- Description:
- Maryam Babar [name at birth Maryam Haqqani] was born on December 6th 1941 at Hyderabad Deccan to a Scottish-Indian political family. Maryam was called Munni at home by her family when she was small. Her father, Mohammed Intisaruddin Haqqani was a powerful landlord, cousin of Laiq Ali, the prime minister of Hyderabad Deccan at the time, and brother-in-law of physicist Raziuddin Siddiqui. Her mother, Eva Matthew Watt was a homemaker, niece of Sir Robert Watson Watt, well-known for his invention of the radar during World War II.Mrs Babar’s parents met at the Glasgow University and were married a few months later. Narrating the tale of their marriage, she says: “My mother was from a deeply religious Church of Scotland background, and her parents’ only child, and my father was a practicing Sufi Muslim. My mother left Scotland in 1935 and married my father in 1936. She married a Muslim Indian against her family’s wishes and it took them a while to accept their marriage,” she recounts.Sharing the story of how Mrs Babar was named Maryam by her mother, she says: “My mother had a dream that she was pregnant with me and in the dream she was instructed to read the Chapter of Maryam [Mary] from the Qur’an until the day she delivers the baby. Without telling anyone, she picked up the book and started reading the chapter, and I was therefore named Maryam,” she says.Mrs Babar was raised with an elder sister and younger brother at the Goshamahal in Hyderabad. Her family, she says, were the jagirdars of the State with their own coins and currency, system of slavery, judiciary and postal system that were independent of the political apparatus of the government of the Hyderabad princely state.Sharing her earliest memories of growing up in Hyderabad, Mrs Babar says that the smell of jasmine invokes her childhood. “In the summers, our beds would be covered in jasmine flowers to keep the room fragrant and cool. Every time I see or smell jasmine, I’m taken back to those nights in Hyderabad, just before bedtime,” she recounts.Another memory of her life in Hyderabad was taking walks with their aya in the evenings and playing in the vicinity of one of her father’s textile factories and witnessing work at the gigantic sugar plantation near the factory. “We used to make footballs out of the massive lumps of sugar in the plantation,” she recounts. Breakfast used to be the favorite meal of the day for Mrs Babar. The breakfast menu included khichdi, square parathas, khagina [egg and onion curry], ghee-fried minced mutton, with khatta [imli paani and fried onion dip].Maryam’s maternal grandfather and maternal uncle fought in the First World War and Second World War respectively. Mrs Babar vaguely remembers watching her mother glued to the radio listening to the BBC for news during the Second World War. “It used to be a very tense time for her since her brother was fighting in that war. We were not allowed to utter a single word when the radio was on,” she remembers. The languages spoken at home before Partition were Deccani Urdu, Persian and English.Mrs Babar and her siblings had no idea about the implications of Partition. “From 1947 until the police action in Hyderabad in 1949, we didn’t notice any change in our lives but our elders did and that may have affected us at some sub-conscious level,” she says. Recalling the game she used to play with her cousins, called Pakistanis versus Indians [modeled around the American game of Cowboys versus Indians], she says: “Everyone would want to be an Indian, not a Pakistani. Pakistanis were the enemies and they would always lose,” she recounts. “One day, my father saw us play and say demeaning things about Pakistan. He sat us down and told us that Pakistan, is a country for Muslims, it is not our enemy. That was my first realization of Partition and after that, it felt okay to be on the Pakistani side of the team but it continued to lose in the game,” she remembers.In 1947, Mrs Babar and her siblings were taken to Scotland by their mother to meet with their ailing grandfather. Her strongest memory of stay in Scotland was her refrain from taking any sugar when offered. “During World War II, there was shortage of food supplies and everything was being rationed, including sugar supplies. Our mother strictly forbade us to waste lumps of sugar in tea and milk. Her lectures had such a profound impact on us that we’d refuse to take even one lump of sugar at our grandfather’s house,” she remembers.In 1949, Mrs Babar returned to Hyderabad and was enrolled at the Mehboobia School that was run by the British. “It is during the time at school I began to feel some tension in our city. Firstly, we were appalled at having to learn Sanskrit and Hindu greeting phrases at school when main spoken languages of Hyderabad used to be Urdu and Persian. Secondly, we started hearing news of “police action” and of “Hyderabad going under siege,” recounts Mrs Babar. “I heard many horror stories of the gorkhas wreaking havoc, raping, killing and looting women and children,” she says.One night, thousands of rioters gathered around the Goshamahal and started chanting ominous slogans. Mrs Babar and her entire family were inside. Mrs Babar and her siblings were instructed to sleep on the mattresses at the landing of the mansion, the only place that did not have any windows. “We were huddled on to the mattresses and made to keep quiet. I heard my parents talking with each other about a pistol my mother was carrying. I remember my father asking her how she is going to defend herself with one pistol against thousands of angry people outside. She’d told him that the pistol is not for them but for killing the children just in case the mob breaches the mansion. I don’t want my children to die at the hands of the rioters,” Mrs Babar recounts her mother saying. “I asked my mother about the pistol decades later and she was quite surprised to know that I’d heard her intentions to kill us at some point if things went bad,” she says.Back in 1949 in the meantime, Laiq Ali, the prime minister of Hyderabad Deccan went under house arrest. “My mother was out shopping one day and her maid’s son met with her and told her to inform my father not to go home as the police is on its way to arrest him,” she recounts.Mrs Babar’s uncle managed to escape his house wearing a burqa and was flown out of Hyderabad Deccan by the Australian explorer and pilot Sidney Cotton. Mrs Babar’s mother after hearing the news of her husband’s pending arrest went to the post office and sent a telegram to her uncle Robert in Gaelic to intervene and help them leave Hyderabad safely. He had a great deal of influence because of his famed invention of the radar. He’d immediately contacted Krishna Menon, the newly appointed Indian high commissioner in the UK and advised him to help his only niece and her family to leave Hyderabad unharmed. Krishna Menon rang up Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru rang up General Chaudhry, the Indian army chief in charge of the Hyderabad siege, who gave him special instructions to pick up our family and escort us to Bombay,” Mrs Babar recounts. “The General personally came to pick us up, and he told us that things were so bad that even his own regiment didn’t know that he is helping us escape Hyderabad. We left India with my father’s briefcase only. He drove us to the railway station, and boarded us on a special train to Bombay where we checked in at the Taj Hotel for a day. From Bombay, we took the evening flight on one of the Dakotas and flown to London. The year was early 1950,” Mrs Babar recounts. Mrs Babar and her family stayed in London for two years and then relocated to Karachi in 1952.“As Hyderabadis, we were living in this fantasy bubble that India is one country and Pakistan is one country but Hyderabad will always remain Hyderabad since it was the largest and independent princely state in India at the time. It wasn’t a question of us leaving India and coming to Pakistan. In our heads, we thought that we have left Hyderabad and settled in Karachi. When our father announced [in London] that we are going to Karachi, he didn’t say we are going to Pakistan, instead he told us since we had a fairly good time in Karachi, we are going to go settle there. From a child’s point of view, we were not leaving our country to be in another country,” Mrs Babar says.Mrs Babar resumed her schooling in Karachi at the Saint Joseph School, completing her O levels in 1957 followed by Senior Cambridge in 1959 from Saint Joseph College. Her father was elected the chairman of the Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC) and he built the Karachi Shipyard with the help of German engineers in the 1950s. He also set up textile mills in East Pakistan and sugar mills in Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.Sharing thoughts of settling in Karachi, Mrs Babar says that it was fairly easy for her father to get over the nostalgia of leaving behind Hyderabad. “He took giving up his homeland as something that was inevitable and he strongly believed in letting go of the inevitable. My mother on the other hand, couldn’t get over it all her life. She used to compare each and every aspect of life in Karachi with what we used to have in Hyderabad,” she says. Sharing the effects of leaving Hyderabad on herself, she says: “I haven’t been able to have a hearty breakfast ever since I left Hyderabad with my family.”Mrs Babar met her future husband, CSP officer Bashir Babar, during German language classes in 1960 and married him three months later in December 1960 at Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where she lives with him nowadays. They have three daughters and a son [who passed away a decade ago].Mrs Babar gave birth to her second daughter in an Indian army jeep in New Delhi during the war in September 1965. “For our own safety, the Pakistani diplomats were incarcerated during the war in New Delhi where my husband was posted in 1962. It was our first international posting. I was helped in the delivery by Dr Mohini through an emergency C-section. She was shocked to see my condition. My daughter was due on the 6th of September but my body had become numb and non-responsive. I couldn’t register any labor pains. I’d lost a lot of weight in only a month’s time,” Mrs Babar recounts.When her daughter was three days old, Mrs Babar was allowed by the Indian government to fly to Karachi as a result of an unexpected opportunity. “There was a Pan-American Airline that was scheduled to make a brief stop at Karachi. There was an Indian national that had to be picked up from Karachi as well, so I was sent off on to the plane. When the plane started to move, the pilot made an announcement that the plane would go directly to Beirut and will not be stopping at Karachi. I went in a state of panic with my three-day old daughter and immediately got myself off the plane. I ended up spending another six weeks in Delhi after that incident,” she says.After her return to Karachi in 1967, Mrs Babar and her family travelled to Brazil, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Australia, Germany and then finally India in 1992. She vividly remembers her husband’s posting in Beirut and escaping several assassination attempts and bombings in the city during their stay. “For three years, we lived through the Israeli occupation and the intifada, and witnessed many families we knew lose their lives as their homes were blown to bits. My husband was almost assassinated with a bomb planted under his bed that we managed to find out about well in time. On many days, we didn’t know whether he was alive or dead,” recounts Mrs Babar.In 1996, Mrs Babar settled in Peshawar permanently at her husband’s home. She started her own farming business in 1988 and continues to do so today. “We built a farmhouse in 1988, located about 2 kilometers from the city. I learnt to speak fluent Pashto and carry out all affairs of family and business in the Pashto language,” she says. Mrs Babar’s father passed away in 1972 and her mother in 1994. Both her parents are buried in Karachi.Sharing her final thoughts on Partition and being a child of the diaspora, Mrs Babar quotes her father: “We are a victim of our own spite. Partition is a result of our own personal and racial prejudices.” She adds: “My mother was conscious of the fact that her people would never accept us as Scots so she’d made a conscious decision to raise us as Indians. Now, when I say that I’m from Hyderabad Deccan, people automatically assume I’m from India since I can’t possibly be from Hyderabad Deccan if I’m not an Indian national. This is the dilemma we face. It is a terrible thing to be a refugee. When you are forced to leave what has been your family’s home for generations, for centuries, the place where you were born and made to think it’s yours forever, you remain a refugee for the rest of your life. It never goes away. I’m living in a home that I absolutely love but I’ll always know that this is not where my roots are, as we say in Urdu mitti bulati hai [the motherland beckons],”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Peshawar (Pakistan)
- Imprint:
- Peshawar (Pakistan), November 18, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1959
27. Oral history with Shahezadi Begam, 2015 July 25
- Title:
- Oral history with Shahezadi Begam, 2015 July 25
- Author:
- Begam, Shahezadi, 1943-, Chakraborty, Deborshi, Banerjee, Debraj, and Zafar, Naeem
- Author (no Collectors):
- Begam, Shahezadi, 1943-, Chakraborty, Deborshi, Banerjee, Debraj, and Zafar, Naeem
- Collector:
- Begam, Shahezadi, 1943-, Chakraborty, Deborshi, Banerjee, Debraj, and Zafar, Naeem
- Description:
- Shahezadi Begam could not remember her birthday or the year she was born. However, we can apprehend that she is at least seventy-two years old from her narrative of her whole life. She was born in Calcutta in the park circus region where her family had a large house. She told that it was a joint family and many of her relatives used to stay with them in that house. She had four sisters and she was the youngest. Her father was in construction business and had a successful professional life.After Partition her family decided to migrate to Pakistan but the reason behind it was unknown to Shahezadi. They took a train from Calcutta and came to Shahjanpur railway colony in Dhaka crossing the border. As she could remember, her family was not able to sell their house so she believed that someone later occupied it. She did not go to school but learned Arabic and studied the Quran at home. After few years, she married Abdul Hamid who was a worker in Shahjanpur railway factory.But the 1971 Liberation War jeopardized her family life. They were driven out of their quarter for being Urdu speaking. Goons looted her house and she told that few of her relatives also died during the course of war. They were in custody of Indian military in Rajabag for a month without having necessities of livelihood. They were taken to Mahammadpur Geneva camp where they still live. Her sister went back to Calcutta and is living there. Her daughter went to Karachi in RePartition but they could not go. So her daughter is living in Karachi for last forty years and they have never met since Liberation of Pakistan.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 3 video files
- Publication Info:
- Dhaka (Bangladesh)
- Imprint:
- Dhaka (Bangladesh), July 25, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1801
28. Oral history with Syed Babar Ali, 2015 June 29
- Title:
- Oral history with Syed Babar Ali, 2015 June 29
- Author:
- Ali, Syed Baber, 1926-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Jones, Elaine, Farooqui, Khadeeja, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Author (no Collectors):
- Ali, Syed Baber, 1926-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Jones, Elaine, Farooqui, Khadeeja, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Collector:
- Ali, Syed Baber, 1926-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Jones, Elaine, Farooqui, Khadeeja, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Description:
- Syed Babar Ali was born in Lahore on June 30, 1926 to Syed Maratib Ali and Mubarak Begum, both of whom are direct descendants of Prophet Muhammed. His father together with his brother owned a military contracting business that catered to the British Army. He is the 8th child in a family of nine children. In more recent history, his ancestors, the three Fakir brothers, Azizuddin, Imamuddin and Nuruddin, were key members and close confidants in the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh who ruled Punjab from 1799 to 1849. His family history includes colorful anecdotes and folk memories from the life and times of the three Fakirs and their interactions with Ranjit Singh. He recalls the fascinating tale of the way in which Fakir Nuruddin negotiated and helped acquire the infamous Koh-i-noor diamond from Shah Shuja of Afghanistan. Fakir Nuruddin he recalls, also met with Sir Metcalfe, then Governor-General of British India and negotiated a key treaty that mitigated British invasions of the Punjab.Syed Babar Ali started his education at the Sacred Heart Convent in Lahore and began attending Aitchison College in 1934, when he was eight years old. Ink pens were used in those days with special nibs: the g-nib for English and the z-nib for Urdu. While English was the primary language used in school, Punjabi was the language spoken at home and amongst his friends. He obtained his High School Certificate from Aitchison and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science from the Government College of Lahore in 1945. He fondly recalls the friendships he formed at Aitchison, many of which have lasted his entire lifetime. One such example is his childhood best friend, Harcharan Brar, who went on to become the Governor of Haryana and Odisha states in India and eventually became the Chief Minister of Punjab in India.He tells of family holidays while growing up spent in Murree Hills and Srinagar in Kashmir, and local outings at the Lawrence Gardens in Lahore as well as movies at the Majestic Cinema. They generally drove to their holiday locations in the family car, a Fiat Minerva. In those days, hawkers sometimes came from as far away as China to sell table cloth and beautifully hand embroidered cotton and silk fabrics. He also recalls several Chinese restaurants in Lahore. Puppeteers, or putliwalas, came to entertain the children of Lahore from Rajasthan. Favorite street foods in those days included pooris and sweets, not much different from today. Unique to Lahore were the khatai biscuit, kabobs and kulfas (similar to kulfi).As he grew up, he and his brothers favored the Unionist Party initially and eventually began to follow the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His best friend Harcharan Brar favored the Congress party, though this difference in political leaning absolutely did not affect their friendship. They had a very tight bond and both friends spent considerable time at each other's homes. In 1944 he was on a trip to Bombay with his brother Wajid, when he had the pleasure of having lunch with Mr. Jinnah. Later in 1945, he was in Delhi when under a completely different circumstance, he ended up having lunch with Mr. Jinnah again, this time overhearing a discussion about their efforts to start a car factory. He was in awe. In 1946 he had a third encounter with Mr. Jinnah when his mother hosted a ladies garden party at their home, to host Ms. Jinnah. Their home was near Mamdot Villa, where Mr. and Ms. Jinnah were staying as guests of the Nawab of Mamdot, who was also the President of the Muslim League in Punjab.In December of 1946 he took off for the United States, where he received admission for a masters program at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He boarded the Sterling Castle, a 200 passenger ship, to London. Some of the passengers he befriended on that ship included K. M. Cariappa (later to become first commander-in-chief of the Indian Army) and Kailas Nath Wanchoo (later to become the Chief Justice of India). His first impression of post-World War II London was underwhelming. London was rather depressing since it had been bombed and destroyed, and was quite different than what he had expected. He did however really cherish his first sight of the Buckingham Palace, which was left unharmed during the War.From London he headed to Canada from where he boarded a night train to Michigan. His mother sent him letters and newspapers from Lahore via mail. He learned about the Partition and the political and civil unrest by reading the materials sent to him, as well as American newspapers at that time. During his time in the US, he describes taking a transcontinental road trip in a Packard car with a number of other South Asian students. They drove the car first to Columbus, Ohio and onto Los Angeles via Route 66. He describes the vastness and the small quaint towns and villages, the Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, Mt. Rushmore and the Black Hills. He then went on to visit his brother in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He recalls paying no more than $2 per night for a hotel stay along the way.On August 14 and 15 in 1947, the Pakistani and Indian students at University of Michigan gathered together to celebrate independence. One of Syed Babar Ali’s Indian friends sewed both a Pakistani and an Indian flag, both of which were raised side-by-side at the celebration at the Reckham Auditorium. There was great jubilation and excitement about independence. His family back home was in Lahore and did not have to migrate. However, his best friend Harcharan's family left for good along with several other friends who were Hindu and Sikh. Later that year, he got the chance to volunteer as a bag carrier for a delegate at the first Delegation to the United Nations in New York. There he got to witness the decision to create Israel. The experience reinforced his interest in international affairs.His eldest brother Syed Amjad Ali was appointed as Pakistani Ambassador to the United States in 1954. During this time he visited his brother and married his wife, Perwin Ali, in a ceremony at the Ambassador's home in Washington DC in July 1955, while she was visiting as a tourist from Pakistan. Then vice president Richard Nixon attended their wedding, which was also photographed for Time Life magazine. In December 1947 he returned to Lahore to carry on with the family business.After 11 years in the family business, he had an idea for which he received much support from his family. He traveled to Sweden and began a joint venture with Akerlund & Rausing, a leading family run packaging company that later began Tetra Pak. Together they began Packages Limited in Pakistan and the partnership is alive and thriving today, 60 years later. The success of the partnership inspired several other partnerships with key multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestle and so on. Babar Ali went on to become a leading businessman in Pakistan.In addition to business developments, Syed Babar Ali has made considerable social impacts in Pakistan via education and philanthropy. For instance, his visit to the field of roses in Sweden inspired the rose garden which he set up in Lahore. He had the opportunity later to attend Harvard Business School, where he really appreciated the education he received and was inspired to bring the same knowledge to students in Pakistan. This inspiration led to the creation of the premier Lahore University of Management Sciences in 1984, where he serves as the first Pro-Chancellor. He later founded the Ali Institute of Education for the education of teachers. He also founded an art school that focuses on preserving the ancient and lost practice of miniature painting, the Naqsh School of Art, appropriately located in the ancient walled city.Other valuable contributions include bringing the World Wildlife Fund (now World Wide Fund for Nature) to Pakistan, co-founding the South Asia Institute at Harvard University among many more, several of which can be found listed on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Babar_Ali.Syed Babar Ali reminds us of the old Punjabi saying that "one and one don't make two, but 11. Hence if we are together, we can be much greater than two. We, the people of South Asia, especially India and Pakistan, can be 11 if we have the right attitude towards each other."
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 10 video files
- Publication Info:
- Atherton (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Atherton (Calif.), June 29, 2015 - 2015-07-07
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1700
29. Oral history with Zeba Rizvi, 2015 December 17
- Title:
- Oral history with Zeba Rizvi, 2015 December 17
- Author:
- Rizvi, Zeba, 1940-, Saleem, Sobia, and Islam, Nabila
- Author (no Collectors):
- Rizvi, Zeba, 1940-, Saleem, Sobia, and Islam, Nabila
- Collector:
- Rizvi, Zeba, 1940-, Saleem, Sobia, and Islam, Nabila
- Corporate Author:
- California Humanities
- Description:
- Zeba Rizvi was born in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh in 1940. Her family traces its roots to Persia, from where most of her forefathers made their way to Badaun and settled. Her grandparents resided in Badaun until they migrated to Pakistan at the time of the Partition, although her own immediate family did not. She will never forget the words of her father, a government officer: "I have made my final decision, we are staying."Mrs. Rizvi, born Zeba Roshan Raza, had a rather large family with seven siblings. As a child, Mrs. Rizvi recalls that her family had an unusual dynamic. She remembers that the children were encouraged to read and learn about the world, but they weren't allowed to go outside and watch the street entertainment. They could leave the house, but only with a caretaker. Mrs. Rizvi particularly loved her summer holidays, fun and carefree. One of her favorite activities was attending the exhibitions in which sellers from different places would come and showcase their goods. Oftentimes, circuses accompanied these sellers at exhibitions and the whole affair could last up to a month. Perhaps because of their strict household environment, Mrs. Rizvi and her siblings grew up reading quite a bit. When she was a student, Mrs. Rizvi became involved with debating at her school from the sixth grade and into her university years. She excelled and won multiple debating trophies. She recalls that trophies stayed at the school and were put on display there while the medals for participants were taken home. Because of her winning track, her trophies always stayed with her schools. Her excellent reading and debating skills led Mrs. Rizvi to later major in Urdu and begin writing short stories in college.As a child, Mrs. Rizvi's family included her father, her mother, her siblings, and her amma. Amma was Mrs. Rizvi's family's domestic helper who took care of the children and the household; however, at that time, it was common to not address servants by their names, so instead her family called the woman "mamma," or mother. When she was small, Mrs. Rizvi understood her life as having a "Mummy" and an "Amma." Her Mummy would teach her important life lessons, such as to live within one's means. Mrs. Rizvi's amma took care of her on a daily basis and told her stories from various traditions. The Partition was something that was distant from the minds of Mrs. Rizvi and her siblings. She attributes this to the fact that her family moved out of the Badaun, where her extended family and other Muslim families lived, very early on because of her father's job. As a government official, he had to travel quite a bit for work, and he always took his family with him. Their family always lived in large, beautiful compounds in the Civil Lines, where government officials were housed. Their homes had spacious central courtyards where the family would sleep in the open in the summers, reserving the surrounding rooms for the cold winter months. Their rather large compound would include the surrounding wilderness, sometimes even with the Ganga on one side as when they lived in Ghazipur. In the Civil Lines, Mrs. Rizvi reveals, they were not Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, or Christians, they were considered as government families. She says that there were no religions in friendship, religion was just a reminder to love others.After Partition, Mrs. Rizvi married Mr. Yusuf Zaki Rizvi. The marriage was an arranged one and he grew to be her lifelong companion. They wed in Lucknow, lived in Raipur for a little while, and moved to Mumbai where they raised their children. During her life, Mrs. Rizvi has enjoyed being a homemaker, a wife, mother to three, and a grandmother to six. She strives to promote friendship and understanding between all people in her daily life. Mrs. Rizvi also volunteered for various NGOs and social organizations. She has guest starred on several All India Radio shows focused on women. These days, Mrs. Rizvi lives with her daughter's family in the United States where she also continues to write short stories inspired by current world events and joyous occasions in her life that she shares with her friends.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English, Hindi, and Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Cupertino (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Cupertino (Calif.), December 17, 2015
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_2021
30. Oral history with Anshu Sur, 2014 December 6
- Title:
- Oral history with Anshu Sur, 2014 December 6
- Author:
- Sur, Anshu, 1942-, Roy, Raikamal, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Author (no Collectors):
- Sur, Anshu, 1942-, Roy, Raikamal, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Collector:
- Sur, Anshu, 1942-, Roy, Raikamal, and Korwar, Sucheta
- Description:
- Mr. Anshu Sur was born in 1942 in Baraitala, Noakhali (now in Bangladesh). Noakhali was one of the worst affected areas during the 1946 Direct Action Day riots. One of his first memories at the age of four is of the riots that would break out on 16th August in Noakhali. Just before Durga Puja, sudden streams of relatives would enter their house during lunchtime, claiming their homes had been burnt, their families killed, and women abducted. Mr. Sur and his family would flee to his uncle's home in Noakhali town the very same day. This was, Mr. Sur recalls, the first time he had set foot out this far outside his home. From his uncle's home, the family would disperse, and Mr. Sur would take the train to go to another uncle's home in Jalpaiguri. His uncle was the manager of a tea garden there, and Mr. Sur remained there until things quitened down, and joined his father in Calcutta after some time. His father, meanwhile, had rented a home in Bhowanipur for the family to stay in. After the riots they would return once to Noakhali, but things had drastically changed. All their relatives and acquaintance had fled, and from a village that was entirely Hindu in composition, not one Hindu remained. In this climate of communcal tension, "no one was speaking," Mr. Sur remembers, "everyone was whispering."Mr. Sur remembers how the Hindu upper castes of their village mistreated the Muslim agricultural labourers and fishermen, and it was this social divide that instigated the violence during the riots, he believes. No Muslims were allowed to enter the homes of Hindus and had to stand a distance of 100 meters away. Often, if a shadow were even to fall within the domain of the Hindu home, the place was religiously washed and scrubbed. The Hindus were predominantly the land owning classes, while the Muslims were the laboring classes.After moving to Calcutta, Mr. Sur's way of life would dramatically change. His father, previously a landholding talikdar, would see a series of successive failures in business ventures and Mr. Sur would start studying with his brother in class four (much ahead of his actual school year), so that money could be saved if the brother shared their books. A couple of times, Mr. Sur had to be taken out of school due to financial crises. After completing his matriculation, Mr. Sur would start taking private tuition to earn money on the side. In this way, he would put himself through college, graduating with degrees in commerce and law. He would then sit for the state civil services examination, and start working with the department of culture in West Bengal. During 1971, where a huge refugee influx was entering from Bangladesh into India, Mr. Sur went personally to hand out supplies to the incoming refugees. He remembers standing under torrential rain, directing refugees to their shelters - ”overnight," claims Mr. Sur, over 1000 refugees were rehabilitated. After a long career in the department of culture, Mr. Sur, currently works with television and information. He lives with his wife in Salt Lake in Calcutta.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Bengali
- Physical Description:
- 9 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kolkata (India)
- Imprint:
- Kolkata (India), December 6, 2014
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1532
31. Oral history with Gayatri Chakraborty, 2014 July 2
- Title:
- Oral history with Gayatri Chakraborty, 2014 July 2
- Author:
- Chakraborty, Gayatri, 1938-, Biswas, Sarmishtha, and Sengupta, Debanjan
- Author (no Collectors):
- Chakraborty, Gayatri, 1938-, Biswas, Sarmishtha, and Sengupta, Debanjan
- Collector:
- Chakraborty, Gayatri, 1938-, Biswas, Sarmishtha, and Sengupta, Debanjan
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Gayatri Chakraborty was born in 1938 at her maternal uncle’s home at Patuakhali Sub-Division Town, District: Barishal, East Bengal, erstwhile undivided British India (now Bangladesh). Though she grew up in a joint family and lived her early childhood days with her kin and cousins together at their ancestral home situated at Charadi village, near Raanir Haat Steamer Ghat of Barishal Dirstrict, but later she spent most of her childhood days at her maternal uncle’s place. Because, her father Capt. Sudhangshu Ranjan Mukhopadhyay was in British Indian Army and that’s why he had to stay away from his home months after months.Gayatri’s father was the only earning member in the entire family. He used to send some money at his home every month and with his regular financial support, the whole family managed to survive somehow. Though they had nearly 10 Bighas of land to cultivate, but it was under mortgage when Gayatri was growing up as a little kid. Beforehand, the family had another source of income from their traditional family business of tobacco. But as soon as Gayatri’s father joined the Army and left home, her only paternal uncle was unable to run their family business alone. Hence, he had to give up and since then the family fell in a deep financial crisis. Meanwhile, Gayatri’s maternal uncle got a job in Calcutta and moved over there. And then in a short while, he found new jobs in the colonial city for Gayatri’s paternal uncle and her elder cousin. So, they also moved to Calcutta in order to join their new jobs. As a result, there were no adult male members left in their village home at Barishal to look after the kids and their young mothers.In this circumstance, Gayatri was not admitted to any school. Though she was very keen to study and go to a school, but nobody in her family paid much attention to a little girl’s desire at that difficult moment the whole family were going through. So, Gayatri had to stay confined within her village and spent her days by playing with her little brother, cousins and friends. She had some close friends of the same age group who also lived in the same village as her neighbours. All of them were from upper caste Hindu families, although there were a large number of Muslim families in her neighbourhood. But the Muslim population was mainly poor farmers and remained marginal in the existing social hierarchy. Nevertheless, there was no such tension or rivalry among the two communities in her village, rather they lived in peace and harmony and the relationship between them seemed to be very smooth and friendly. But there was a clear, visible divide between the two. Most of the Muslim families in her locality were landless agricultural labourers who worked in the land owned by the Hindu landlords. And primarily due to this overt, distinct divide in economic class and social strata, Gayatri didn’t have any opportunity to get a Muslim friend in her childhood days.So, a little village girl was growing up in such a critical juncture when the colonial history of South Asia was awaiting a rupture. And at that point of time, in 1946, her family got completely shattered with the sudden and unexpected news of her father. Through a telegram message they came to know all of a sudden that her father was caught by the royal police of British Indian Army and sent to prison as he was an active member of the Indian National Army (INA). Nobody in the family ever heard before that Gayatri’s father had already left the Army and chose to fight for the freedom of his country against the oppressive British rulers. In spite of living in dire straits, the family was proud of her father being a freedom fighter.However, soon after they heard of the incident, the senior family members decided to leave their home at Barishal, East Bengal and take a temporary shelter at her maternal uncle’s place in Calcutta as there was no other earning member in the family who could feed them at that critical moment of their life. So, left without any other choice for survival and driven by the uncertainties embedded within their everyday existence, Gayatri, the little girl, had to migrate from their home to Calcutta in search of a refuge for the first time in her life along with her hapless mother, younger little brother, aged grandma and one elder cousin brother in the year of 1946. And finally, they arrived in Calcutta in order to stay together with her uncle for the time being. Gayatri wasn’t very sad about her migration from a village to a big city, rather she felt quite excited about the possible changes in her life once she would arrive in Calcutta. She started dreaming as though it would bring a break in the monotony of her stagnant village life, whereas the city would appear before her with full of its surprises and bring some new opportunities for her. So much she longed to get admitted in a school like all other kids. Now, while she was in Calcutta, she had a strong conviction that her dream would come true this time. But again, her dream remained marooned as the Partition of 1947 came into being and the political turmoil and unrest started affecting the life of the ordinary people to a great extent in the city.After the Partition, her father was set free from the prison and he came to Kolkata to get reunited with his family in 1947. But the happiness didn’t last long. Again in 1948, only a few months later since the Partition, Gayatri, the 10-year-old girl, moved back to her ancestral home situated in Charaadi Village at Barishal of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) along with her parents and the little brother in order to escape from the riotous situation in Kolkata while their other family members continued to stay back in the city. Few months later, her father returned again to Calcutta in search of a suitable job leaving behind his wife and children at their home.Meanwhile, Gayatri’s mother became pregnant and died all of a sudden at their village home in East Pakistan in 1949. So finally, haunted by the threat perception of a violent riot amid the wary environment filled with widespread fear, panic and suspicion, Gayatri was forced to leave her home permanently and had to flee along with her little brother and elder cousins to the post-Partition India in the year of 1950 just before the violent 1950 riots started spreading over around her native village at Barishal. As the member of an uprooted refugee family, she then reached a suburb of Kolkata to reunite with her father and other family members again who had already shifted to India for the sake of their survival and since then she started living together temporarily with her family at the uncle’s place in a refugee colony at Belgharia.Her father then tried to start a business venture but his attempt was in vain. In the meantime, Gayatri’s maternal uncle joined Indian Railways and shifted from Kolkata to Chittaranjan, a township in West Bengal, India. So, left with no other means to feed the children, her destitute father decided to take a shelter at his brother-in-law’s quarter at Chittaranjan and finally they settled over there permanently. Since then Gayatri and her little brother were raised by their grandma in a district township, faraway from Kolkata. But her dream to attend a school never came true. As she was forced to move constantly from one place to another like a shuttlecock all through her childhood, she never got a chance to go to a school. Hence, catching up her lifelong craving, she started studying at home at the age of 20-21 and preparing herself to appear in the board examination privately. And thus little Gayatri turned in a woman. So one day, instead of appearing in the examination, she got married to Mr. Mantu Sona Chakraboty, a central government employee, in the age of 24 and became a homemaker. She gave birth to three children – two daughters and one son, and has been living for last 35 years in her husband’s house situated in a suburb of North Kolkata called Agarpara in the district of 24 Parganas (North), West Bengal, India. Only one and half years ago, she lost her husband, and being a widow she now continues living in their own small house with her only son and granddaughter. But there is no sign of affluence in their everyday living as the entire family solely depends on the monthly income of INR 10000.00 only what she receives as the family pension on behalf of her deceased husband. So, poverty lurks in every corner of her household stilltoday while her son Mr. Debasish Chakraborty can’t even contribute anything as he is currently suffering from a huge loss in his business endeavor.However, after the Partition, Gayatri Chakraborty never had any scope to return to Bangladesh in order to pay a visit to her ancestral home. She lost any connection even with her childhood friends. At this age of 76, she doesn’t really feel any urge to re-connect with the past or going back to her birthplace again. Nevertheless, at present she still lives with the vibrant memories of her lost childhood, and not yet she finds any rationale behind the Partition. She asks a simple question, “Why the hell did the Partition happen? What did I get in turn except suffering, pain and loss?” Still she is seeking an appropriate answer, but the answer, she knows, is blowing in the wind!
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Bengali
- Physical Description:
- 48 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kolkata (India)
- Imprint:
- Kolkata (India), July 2, 2014
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1048
32. Oral history with Leela Mamtani, 2014 January 29
- Title:
- Oral history with Leela Mamtani, 2014 January 29
- Author:
- Mamtani, Leela, 1932-, Joshi, Prakhar, and Puri, Mandakini
- Author (no Collectors):
- Mamtani, Leela, 1932-, Joshi, Prakhar, and Puri, Mandakini
- Collector:
- Mamtani, Leela, 1932-, Joshi, Prakhar, and Puri, Mandakini
- Description:
- Mrs. Leela Mamtani was born in Kandyara town of Nawab Shah District in Pakistan on October 21, 1932. Until the age of fifteen, she lived in Kandyara while her brothers lived in Karachi and Hyderabad. Her father was a prominent landlord and they lived in a huge haveli. The house had various secret cupboards called hoori, which were used to hide valuables. In 1947, the family had to abandon two hoori full of riches. Mrs. Mamtani walks down the memory lane when she describes the family life in Kandyara. Her family had very harmonious relations with Muslims and there were brotherly sentiments. Mrs. Mamtani recalls her mischief from childhood and shares memories with friends Devi, Tilli and Sheila. They used to bunk classes and ran into the orchards for fruits or the ponds and waterfalls.Mrs. Mamtani mentions a festival Thaddari which was celebrated during the monsoon months. It was not a religious festival but a community celebration when all the families got together for singing and merriment, and exchanged sweet breads. Mrs. Mamtani’s family offered prayers to the water god Darya Shah.Folk songs were a major part of all revelry- community or religious and all major activities like child birth, marriages, crop harvest. Mrs. Mamtani bursts into a melodious song that the women used to sing overnight during celebrations. Another unique aspect was the intricate embroidery work of Sind province, mostly done by Muslim ladies. The markets in Kandyara were elaborate and segregated according to commodities- cloth, general items and food.The Indian National Congress, in its bid to raise awareness about the national movement, was popularizing the spinning wheel charkha, which went on to become the symbol of India’s freedom movement. Mrs. Mamtani recalls they had a dedicated period at school every day for learning how to spin the wheel and weave yarn. The Congress organized rallied to ignite the patriotic fervor amongst everyone. With an air of pride for the country, Mrs. Mamtani says, “By the time I was fifteen, I had been to jail twice”.The months of 1947 that saw British India’s freedom and consequent division of the land were met with hardly any disturbances in Kandyara. Mrs. Mamtani recalls sporadic attacks and night long pelting of stones at her house. By December of 1947, the attacks increased in intensity and the family had collected stones and red chilli powder for protection. On Januray 1, 1948 Mrs. Mamtani’s family decided to leave and took a bus to Hyderabad with all that they could carry.On their way to the port city of Karachi, the family was robbed off everything. After five days, Mrs. Mamtani boarded a ship with her family for Mumbai. The captain of the ship did not know the directions for Mumbai and he anchored in the middle of nowhere. Mrs. Mamtani remembers the conditions of sea sickness and loss that had gripped everyone. The ship then docked in Kutch in Gujarat.After moving through several towns the family settled in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After her marriage to Mr. Satram Mamtani in 1952, Mrs. Mamtani moved to Delhi. Her talent in singing was acknowledged by a music director Darshan Singh, and he trained her in modern vocal music. Mrs. Mamtani went onto become a radio singer of repute. She sings in Sindhi, Hindi and Punjabi; and works hard to popularize and preserve Sindhi folk songs. Her radio programs are also broadcasted in Pakistan by the External Affairs Ministry of the government of Pakistan.In 2009, Mrs. Mamtani was invited by the Urdu Services of the BBC London to visit Sindh. She recalls with nostalgia the love and warmth she received as she travelled across the province. She also visited her old house and hometown. People loved her there and arranged for recording her songs.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), January 29, 2014
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0852
33. Oral history with Milkha Singh, 2014 May 27
- Title:
- Oral history with Milkha Singh, 2014 May 27
- Author:
- Singh, Milkha and Joshi, Prakhar
- Author (no Collectors):
- Singh, Milkha and Joshi, Prakhar
- Collector:
- Singh, Milkha and Joshi, Prakhar
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Milkha Singh, renowned athlete, shares his story with The Archive, also captured in the film “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag.” Milkha Singh was born in Gobindpura, Kot Addu, in Muzzafargarh district. Kot Addu lies near Multan, and Mr. Singh describes it as a sandy place, with only horses for transportation. Mr. Singh’s forefathers were originally Rajputs from Rajasthan, and were ironsmiths.Mr. Singh’s father was a small time farmer and had a small land holding. Until grade four, he studied in a mosque. Mr. Singh describes the 1930s, when he used to walk barefoot to his school with his friend. To build up his stamina, he used to run for 10 miles. They spoke Multani language there. Mr. Singh was very fond of wrestling. Inter-community relations were very strong and everyone lived happily.Mr. Milkha Singh had many siblings. One of Mr. Singh’s brothers was in the army and, around the time of Partition, had warned them that Kot Addu was in danger. He was in grade eight during the time of Partition. One day, a large frenzied mob arrived. Families came together to protect one another. Local leader went to negotiate terms but was shot. Before dawn the next morning, the mob entered the city. There was heavy gunfire and many did not survive. Young Mr. Singh was trying to hide. He remembers seeing his father fight bravely, and finally struck with a sword. When he fell, his father cried, “Bhaag Milkha, bhaag,” pleading him to run away to safety. Buildings were burned and many women took their own lives as to avoid abduction. At the end of the night, Mr. Singh realized that he had lost his entire family, except for his elder sister Hoondi, and the brother in army. Hoondi had managed to escape, with a newborn baby.Mr. Singh recalls his run from Gobindpura to Kot Addu railway station. His father’s last words ran through his head. He boarded the first train to Multan, which was smeared with blood. He hid under seat for the whole journey.At Multan, Mr. Singh stayed in the army barracks, where his brother’s wife lived. Later, they took an eight hour long journey in military trucks and crossed the Hussainiwala-Ferozepur border. His elder brother stayed behind in Pakistan, since he was on duty and awaiting orders.Ferozepur was full of refugees. After some days, Mr. Singh found an abandoned building. To earn for food, Mr. Singh began looking for work. He earned through odd small time jobs by polishing shoes at the barracks in lieu of leftover food. One day, the river flooded and Ferozepur was inundated. Mr. Singh managed to escape the flood and headed for Delhi.There were thousands of refugees on the Old Delhi railway station. The platforms were covered in refuse. Cholera was spreading. Those times of abject poverty made Mr. Singh very resourceful. Mr. Singh scouted around for petty jobs. He was arrested for traveling without a railway ticket. His sister, whom he had found at the Purana Quila refugee camp, sold off her jewelry for his bail.Mr. Singh started working as a cleaner at a shop for a monthly salary of ten rupees. He joined school in grade nine but did not continue because of the changes in the mode of education. The army was recruiting and had set up an office in Old Delhi. Mr. Singh applied and was rejected three times. Finally, he got selected in 1952.His penchant towards running was accidental. In 1953, while he was in the barracks, it was announced that a six mile race would be held and the top ten recruits would be given an extra glass of milk everyday. It was this extra glass that motivated him into winning his first race. He soon got selected for cross country races and was trained by his instructor who was a former runner. This started his career as an athlete.After his victory at the Commonwealth games of 1958, his popularity catapulted to higher levels and he was invited to various countries. There was an Indo-Pak Sports Meet which he was reluctant to attend, due to his memories of Partition. But he was convinced to participate. Returning to his native place was a tumultuous experience. Mr. Singh visited his village and met his childhood friend. It was at this race that he was given the title of “The Flying Sikh.” Mr. Singh went onto participate in 80 international races, and won 77 of them.Mr. Singh had met his wife in Ceylon and they got married in 1962. The couple now lives in Chandigarh. Mr. Milkha Singh shares he has cried three times in his life: when he saw his family killed in Kot Addu, when he did not win the gold medal at the Rome Olympics, and when he saw the Bollywood movie that has been made on his life. He wants to visit Kot Addu once again, and see his village. He is very hopeful of the future. His message to the world is to develop a strong will power, and fighting spirit.This interview was conducted by The 1947 Partition Archive staff Prakhar Joshi.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- Chandīgarh (India)
- Imprint:
- Chandīgarh (India), May 27, 2014
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_1039
34. Oral history with Sher Singh Kukkal, 2014 February 6
- Title:
- Oral history with Sher Singh Kukkal, 2014 February 6
- Author:
- Kukkal, Sher Singh, 1937- and Joshi, Prakhar
- Author (no Collectors):
- Kukkal, Sher Singh, 1937- and Joshi, Prakhar
- Collector:
- Kukkal, Sher Singh, 1937- and Joshi, Prakhar
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Mr. Sher Singh Kukkal was born in a village in Azara District of West Punjab, now in Pakistan. Since his great-grandfather, there was a tradition of devotional music in the family. They used to indulge in devotional music Raagi, and played in the Gurudwara. His father Mr. Gurbaksh Singh also made sculptures, which got Mr. Kukkal interested in Arts. His mother passed away when he was just a few months old, and Mr. Kukkal was taken care of by his grandmother and aunt.Mr. Kukkal lived in a village Bafa, which was nestled atop rocky hills. There used to be heavy snowfall and Mr. Kukkal remembers they had a bonfire at the centre of their classrooms during the winters.The society in Bafa was very fond of performing arts. There used to be frequent theatre performances and musical shows. Mr. Kukkal explains how they connected all the terraces with wooden planks and prepared a large flat space. Temporary stage was made for performances. Mr. Kukkal mentions attending a live concert of the legendary Indian singer Mukesh. Kite flying was very popular amongst kids his age back then, and also gulli danda, wrestling etc. There were folk tales and devotional music was recited in Pashto language.Mr. Kukkal’s school was a government one, with tin sheets for a roof. He recalls being taught by some British teachers, but otherwise the medium of instruction was Urdu. Punishments became fun in winters, since he loved playing out in the snow.From hearsay, he learnt about some resistance activities against the British Rule in Amritsar and Delhi. There were rare political activities in their region. Once there was some friction between different communities, and the locals Pathan Muslims surrounded their house with gunmen to provide protection.In 1947, many people started changing religions and identities. Before August, one night, there was a drum call and their Muslim friends warned them o an impending attack. They provided a truck and arranged for their transfer to a safe place. Since it was a Pathan truck, it would not be attacked, they re-assured. The Kukkal family adopted disguises and at four in the morning, left. Attacks had begun and some of their distance relatives were killed. The family left all of their possessions locked in the house, not knowing that they would never come back.They had a house in a nearby town, Haripur. Haripur too was attacked and the family continued to live under disguised appearances to protect themselves. Mr. Kukkal describes looking at dead bodies on spears and lots of bloodshed on the streets. After a few days, at the crack of dawn, the family fled and Mr. Kukkal’s father decided to move to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, India. He chose the city because it was a center of metal works industry and there were job opportunities for him. During migration, they stopped over at many Gurudwaras across the Punjab to spend the nights.Settling in Gorakhpur was difficult. Resources were extremely limited. Mr. Kukkal joined school in the seventh started, since he only knew Urdu, learning Hindi was challenging. 1960, he joined Art School at Lucknow University for a five year couse in Fine Arts, and later pursued a course in sculpture and photography. After a stint at teaching in Maharashtra, he went to Kabul, Afghanistan to work for rural development there.In 1962, Mr. Kukkal married Rajender Kaur. Their wedding at Anand Bhawan, Allahabad was attended by Pundit Nehru. When he returned to India, he got busy with spreading an interest in arts amongst the youth. Now he works at the Nehru National Youth Centre, teaches arts and organizes exhibitions.Looking back, he still sees visions of 1947-48, and gets very emotional. He plans to visit his village Bafa in the Norht West Frontier Province. Their relatives who chose to stay back in Pakistan in 1947, visit sometimes. He asserts that the coming together of arts and sciences is crucial for an all-round development of a modern society.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), February 6, 2014
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0996
35. Oral history with Bal K Gupta, 2013 December 21
- Title:
- Oral history with Bal K Gupta, 2013 December 21
- Author:
- Gupta, Bal K., 1937-, Kalra, Ankur, and Kharbanda, Mohan
- Author (no Collectors):
- Gupta, Bal K., 1937-, Kalra, Ankur, and Kharbanda, Mohan
- Collector:
- Gupta, Bal K., 1937-, Kalra, Ankur, and Kharbanda, Mohan
- Description:
- Mr Bal K Gupta was born in Mirpur, and is one of the few people who was able to witness the independence days of both India and Pakistan first-hand. He was ten years old when Partition occurred, and still remembers the day when he and his younger brother had to leave Mirpur – and their mother and grandparents, who could not follow.The escaping caravan of 25,000 was slowly reduced over time by shelling, attacks, kidnapping and the treacherous journey. When escape looked unlikely, some of the members killed their own wives, children and even themselves to prevent capture and dishonor.A small group of 5,000 was captured and forced to march through a narrow passage – over the bodies of their own relatives and friends – to an abandoned gurudwara in Alibeg. They were imprisoned for almost a year, with a daily food allotment of just 1 ounce of flour per person. A few escapees eventually found their way to Jammu and enlisted the help of the authorities and the Red Cross Society to free the remaining 1,600 survivors.It wasn’t until April of 1948 that Mr Gupta and his brother (now eleven and nine years old) could be brought to the Kurukshetra Refugee Camp, and be reunited with their relatives, who had since resettled in Jammu.It was longer still – 1954 – before another long-awaited miracle finally happened. The Red Cross had found his mother, and was able to bring her to Jammu to reunite her with her two sons and their relatives.Mr Bal K Gupta is currently a retired design engineer in Acworth, GA. But even today, all these years later, he still dreams of Mirpur.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Jaipur (India)
- Imprint:
- Jaipur (India), December 21, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0828
36. Oral history with Bapsi Sidhwa, 2013 April 7
- Title:
- Oral history with Bapsi Sidhwa, 2013 April 7
- Author:
- Sidhwa, Bapsi and Bhalla, Guneeta Singh
- Author (no Collectors):
- Sidhwa, Bapsi and Bhalla, Guneeta Singh
- Collector:
- Sidhwa, Bapsi and Bhalla, Guneeta Singh
- Description:
- Dr. Bapsi Sidhwa is a renowned author from Lahore, whose book "Cracking India" (aka "Ice Candy Man") was made into the popular film "Earth" which takes place at the time of Partition."I'm sharing this story because I wanted to share how Partition affected every single life. It affected my life by taking away my son and it put me through a grieving period for years! You don't forget it." Dr. Bapsi Sidhwa was born Bapsi Bhandara at her paternal grandparents' home in Karachi in 1938. She was raised in Lahore, where she moved about three months after her birth. The Sidhwa family descends from one of the original Parsi families that arrived by boat to Gujarat over 1000 years ago. Because of this, they are still entitled to a tithe from the fire temple. Her books have popularized the story of the fire temple that was founded in Gujarat by the first Parsis: They sought refuge but the local king refused gently and sent them a jar full of milk, symbolically communicating that the kingdom was filled to capacity and there was room for no more. The milk was sent back by the new arrivals with some sugar in it, sending the message that they would not burden the kingdom further, but rather sweeten their lives. The king agreed but required that they assimilate in dress, language, and several other local customs. Dr. Sidhwa also recalls other tales from her family. Her grandfather who had lost an eye during a war in Sudan, came to Lahore from a village called Bhandar in Gujarat. Lahore was considered the commercial and cultural hub at that time. The Bhandaras owned an ancestral wine shop. After Partition her father, Mr. Bhandara, acquired the Murree Brewery in Lahore. She notes that her father was fond of giving money away to charity. In fact, her grandfather was one of the founders of Mama Parsi School in Karachi. On the other hand, Dr. Sidhwa's father-in-law, was a freedom fighter and as a child her husband grew up as interacting with popular leaders of the time, including Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi. Dr. Sidhwa had two brothers. They spoke Gujarati at home, Urdu and Punjabi with their neighbors and Urdu and English with friends. When she was a bit over two years old, Dr. Sidhwa traveled to her maid's village, where she contracted polio. She later had surgery in Karachi by a renowned doctor, Col. Birajker, and she was "running around and climbing mountains" by age 13. Because of her polio however, she did not attend school with the rest of the children her age. Instead, she was home schooled and as a result grew up being very introspective. She was also deeply curious about the world around her. She became an avid reader, devouring any magazine, book or piece of literature that came her way. She also recalls being very close to a childless woman in her neighborhood, whom she credits with making her an affectionate person. A few months before Partition, she was walking with their gardener when they both came across a gunny sack. The gardener opened it and the body of a very young man was inside. She recalls being deeply struck by that sight as she realized the futility of a young life with so much potential lost. She recalls the skyline in Lahore being full of fires. There was also an "incessant jaunt" that filled her ears. It was the noise of chants from the various communities mixing together. Her next door neighbors had three children whom young Dr. Sidhwa recalls playing with. One day, they decided to avoid the violence by temporarily moving east and left their home keys and belongings in the care of the Bhandaras. They planned to return when the violence subsided. However, they never returned. After Partition, at the age of 19, Dr. Sidhwa married and moved to Mumbai. She had a son and a daughter, though her marriage ended when she was 23 and she moved back to Lahore. However, she was not able to bring her son with her, who remained in Mumbai with his father's family. Due to border restrictions, she was unable to see her son again for over a decade. She describes this as a devastating time as they went from embassy to embassy in Rawalpindi and Delhi. Dr. Sidhwa married Mr. Sidhwa during this time. When her son's father passed away, they were able to secure a passport for him after a tremendous effort that took months, and he finally was able to join her in Lahore during in his late teens. She recalls going to Wagah border daily for four months to receive him, until one day he finally arrived. It was during her second marriage that Dr. Sidhwa began to write. Many episodes from her life and her memories of Partition are captured in the fictionalized story that unfolds in Cracking India (which was also published in South Asia under the title "Ice Candy Man"). Today Dr. Sidhwa lives in Texas, not far from her son and her youngest brother.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 7 video files
- Publication Info:
- Berkeley (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Berkeley (Calif.), April 7, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0496
37. Oral history with Daniel Golan, 2013 June 28
- Title:
- Oral history with Daniel Golan, 2013 June 28
- Author:
- Golan, Daniel, 1932-, Nagra, Ranjanpreet, and Riggs, Erin Paige
- Author (no Collectors):
- Golan, Daniel, 1932-, Nagra, Ranjanpreet, and Riggs, Erin Paige
- Collector:
- Golan, Daniel, 1932-, Nagra, Ranjanpreet, and Riggs, Erin Paige
- Description:
- Daniel Golan was born in Karachi, in a diverse neighborhood. He was 14 years old during Partition. In 1948 his father sold everything and moved his family to Pune through Bombay. They took a ship to Bombay and then took a train to Pune where his grandfather, who had passed away, owned a house. After moving to Pune, he was contacted by a group called Habonim or "The Builders," who arranged for him and his two siblings to move to Israel. He came directly to Kfar Blum where he was adopted by a family. He worked in the family's fields, at the dairy farm, and drove a truck shipping pipes to the south. In 1989 he started learning the art of massage healing, reiki, and acupuncture.Later on, he married a woman from eastern Europe and they have three children. Today, he lives in Kfar Blum, as do his siblings and one of his sons.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 6 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kefar Blum (Israel)
- Imprint:
- Kefar Blum (Israel), June 28, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0529
38. Oral history with Khushwant Singh, 2013 August 27
- Title:
- Oral history with Khushwant Singh, 2013 August 27
- Author:
- Singh, Khushwant, 1915-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Bhai Baldeep
- Author (no Collectors):
- Singh, Khushwant, 1915-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Bhai Baldeep
- Collector:
- Singh, Khushwant, 1915-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Bhai Baldeep
- Corporate Author:
- American India Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation
- Description:
- Author Khushwant Singh was born nearly 100 years ago, on 2ndFebruary 1915, to father Sir Sobha Singh and mother Varyaam Kaur in Village Hadali, District Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan. He is one of five siblings, four brothers and one sister. His father, Sir Sobha Singh, contributed greatly to the building of New Delhi immediately following Partition. Prior to Partition, Mr. Khushwant Singh studied at the Modern School in Delhi before going to England to study law at King’s College.At the time of Partition, Mr. Singh was working as a lawyer at the High Court in Lahore. He lived near Lawrence Gardens in Lahore. He shares an interesting memory from the time of Partition in 1947: Mohammad Ali Jinnah approached his father Sir Sobha Singh and proposed that Mr. Khushwant Singh stay on in Lahore as a High Court judge in Pakistan. However, due to the chaos that began to unfold around him at the time of Partition, Mr. Khushwant Singh, decided it was not safe to stay on. He decided to first send his children to Kasauli in early July. A few days beforeAugust 15th1947, he drove with his wife from Lahore to Delhi. Before leaving, he locked his house and handed over the keys to a friend. What he remembers most about his drive are the ghost-like empty roads. As he was entering Delhi, he recalls seeing a group of armed Sikh men attacking another man. He remembers the time of Partition as one during which there was no humanity. He says he visited Lahore many times after Partition. Mr. Singh has written quite extensively about his post-Partition life in Delhi, following his move from Lahore, and is today renowned as an award winning and best selling author. He tells us that Partition affected him profoundly and thinks it is important to preserved lived memories. You can learn more about Mr. Singh's legendary career as an author after Partition through numerous sources:Today Mr. Singh lives in Delhi and continues to write, though he has not kept in the best health recently. He has two children, a son and a daughter, and one grand daughter.Interview by Manleen Sandu and camera by Bhai Baldeep Singh. Archived by Adity Tibrewala. Posted by Elaine Jones. Interview sponsored by the American India Foundation.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 4 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), August 27, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0630
39. Oral history with Mufti Irfan Miyan, 2013 October 8
- Title:
- Oral history with Mufti Irfan Miyan, 2013 October 8
- Author:
- Miyan, Mufti Irfan, 1936-, Alam, Zain, and Jamal, Asad
- Author (no Collectors):
- Miyan, Mufti Irfan, 1936-, Alam, Zain, and Jamal, Asad
- Collector:
- Miyan, Mufti Irfan, 1936-, Alam, Zain, and Jamal, Asad
- Description:
- The composition of Mufti Irfan Miyan’s full name (“Abul Hasan Nizamuddin Mohammad”) provides an excellent glimpse into his identity and the reasons for which he takes pride in the ancestral traditions he lives out to this day. Each part draws from his father and grandfather’s names. Each of their names similarly drew on their ancestry, including the great scholars of the Farangi Mahal ancestry and their Sufi saints in the Qadiri and Razaki silsilas (Sufi lineage or school of thought) from the village of Bansawi.The Farangi Mahal family is well-documented. Mufti Irfan’s brief overview begins with Hazrat Abu Ayub Ansari, a companion of the prophet who lived in Medina and housed him there. The next big figure in the family was the Sufi Khwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat (in modern-day Afghanistan), where there remains a famous mazar (shrine and tomb) dedicated to him. Abdullah Ansari’s descendants eventually migrated to India and took residence in Farangi Mahal where they established a seminary well-known across India and the Islamic world, particularly for its madrasa curriculum, the Dars-i-Nizammiya.The family, Mufti Irfan explains, was always half Allah-wallas (those who focused on religious commitments) and duniya-wallas (those with more worldly commitments). “Our khandaan was never one of sellers or businessmen,” he takes care to note, even of those who were duniya-wallas. His own household in Farangi Mahal—where he resides to this day—leaned heavily towards the religious pursuits of Allah-wallas. In his youth he always found himself surrounded by Hadith and the Quran, the studies of which his father singularly pursued. With a tinge of sadness, he recounts that this was often at the expense of basic necessities like food, for which others in the family would sometimes pitch int o help with. Their household, fortunately, was interconnected with the rest of the Mahal, and so it felt like his father, two older sisters, and an older brother could always count on the support of their extended family.Sometimes to their material detriment, their father’s philosophy emphasized that whatever God intends to deliver to them will somehow be delivered. “The world to us was like salt compared to faith,” Mufti Irfan said of his immediate family in general. More than once they lacked food to the point that they could not feed themselves for two consecutive days.“Khana (food) is for life—life is not for khana,” continued Mufti Irfan, justifying his father’s views quickly after betraying tears when recounting the hungry days of his youth. The family ate from rations whenever they were offered in Lucknow during the more financially difficult days of young India. The local ration-walla however was sympathetic to the family’s condition. Without Mufti Irfan’s father knowing or being asked, the ration-walla would not charge them the nominal fees required to disburse the rations. This was a fine show of the Lucknowi tehzeeb (manners) that the city was once famous for, Mufti Irfan said. To ask for payment when the ration-walla knew they were unable to was too disrespectful and so he quietly offered them loans instead, extending them for months at times. Surely enough though, Mufti Irfan’s family would always find some way or another to pay the ration-walla back.Even while a student Mufti Irfan sought to support the family and took on a variety of jobs, some as unglamorous as milking and cleaning cows in the neighborhood. Soon though he turned to tutoring students in Hindi, English, and later the Farsi and Arabic he learned in the Farangi Mahal madrasa. His primary schooling was all done in this household madrasa. With focus and discipline though, he was still able to pass his exams and make it to the university.Still to this day, Mufti Irfan outwardly displays with pride that he remains a Lakhnavi man of the Farangi Mahal, sporting a sherwani and topi with no desire to in any way imitate the British and their “suit-pant” style. Similarly, his primary enjoyments come from the songs, literature, and poetry of Urdu culture. He enjoys poems especially because they are what taught him to always look behind appearances to see what’s going on. Accordingly, this behavior informs his political beliefs today and views on Partition.Mufti Irfan’s earliest memories regarding politics are of the figures who passed through Farangi Mahal before independence: Abdul Bari, the Ali brothers of the Muslim League, Nehru, and Gandhi. The split of the entire extended family, he remembers, began from the moment of Partition, when, within his very household, his uncle tried to convince them that they should go to Pakistan. His uncle believed that there was nothing left for them in Lucknow or greater India, now that a separate Muslim country had been made. Because this uncle was the oldest brother of his family, he won the acceptance of Naani (their grandmother) and a few other elders. Little did these migrants know, however, that soon after they settled in Dhaka they would face yet another Partition when Bangladesh would win independence in 1971.Mufti Irfan’s father however was not won over by the Pakistani promise. He remained in Lucknow with the family. They were all overjoyed in the coming months after Partition to see that the city’s tehzeeb and religious unity still triumphed at a local level above the greater national fracture and bloodshed. Still, the presence of Pakistan left the thought of “Do we still belong here?” hanging in their minds for decades to come. The pain became more and more real as relatives in Farangi Mahal gradually began migrating to Pakistan, his father each time pleading with them not to leave. Mufti Irfan realized then what he thinks is the same now: politicals leaders manipulate the people to increase and secure their power, while the manipulated common man fights and only hurts himself.As his family’s economic fortunes and those of the Mahal saw further decline after 1947, Mufti Irfan realized that a career solely as an Allah-walla was no longer a realistic option in the modern world. How could he remain an Allah-walla at his core though, as he so desired, remaining true to his ancestors and their traditions? These were what he grew up with and what he felt were the essence of his identity, after all.As had been the case for his ancestors, he kept education the centerpiece of his life. He gained acceptance to Lucknow University, completed a combined BA in Urdu, English, and Education. This is where he met his first friends outside of Farangi Mahal. His father was quite angry when he found out about this pursuit of a BA, saying that there was no need for the academy’s confirmation, especially considering the exorbitant fees they couldn’t afford to pay. Luckily Mufti Irfan got a scholarship and a tutoring job to make up for the tuition shortfall.He then taught at Islamia College to support his family for a year and a half proceeding to obtain a Master’s and getting married. He had always hoped to pursue a Ph. D as he saw it as a reasonable, fulfilling career able to accommodate his independently-minded streak. It looked less and less likely though as financial troubles returned and grew more pressing. At one point he fell into investing and working in a doomed shoe business with a friend, after a teaching job had ended in Faizabad. The business failed. He lost money and was forced to send his wife home at one point to get his own house in order.His big break came with a senior inspector position at the Muslim Wakf of UP in 1977. His four-hundred rupee salary for the first month was all given to his father, but only through his mother because it would not have been becoming for the father to outright accept it himself. Almost four months later, Mufti Irfan’s father would die. He heard of the news at the Friday juma prayers.Mufti Irfan’s first wife Usmana Saeed died after chlidbirth. His daughter from that marriage today lives in Dewa. Another one of his children from his other wife would fall off a roof and die before the age of three. Still, he counts his blessings, still residing in his ancestral home, doing the noble Allah-walla work of a Mufti in Lucknow just like so many before him.On the subject of religion, he believes: “We are all eating the same dal chawal (lentils and rice)—everything else is just spices or chutney.” Shia, Sunni, and Hindu here have always equally cared for one another—what always matters first and foremost, he continues, was looking after your friends, family, and neighbors. “What we wanted was freedom, not division,” says Mufti Irfan. According to him, the British put Partition in the mind of Indians—an illusion that power for Muslims would only return in this kind of setup where they thought of themselves as a separate, independent nation. Partition might’ve changed some of the little ways people had of talking about “my country” or if India “is” or “is not” our place, but for him, it did not change the overall atmosphere and diversity of India—particular the city of Lucknow.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Urdu
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Bāra Banki (India : District)
- Imprint:
- Bāra Banki (India : District), October 8, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0675
40. Oral history with Satyajit Singh Majithia, 2013 May 28
- Title:
- Oral history with Satyajit Singh Majithia, 2013 May 28
- Author:
- Majithia, Satyajit Singh, 1938-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Sukhpal
- Author (no Collectors):
- Majithia, Satyajit Singh, 1938-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Sukhpal
- Collector:
- Majithia, Satyajit Singh, 1938-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Sukhpal
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Born to parents, Surjeet Singh Majithia and Kushal Pal Kaur, Satyajit Singh Majithia, lovingly called Saty, was born in Amritsar, next to the Circuit House on 30th September 1938. The history of Mr. Majithia’s ancestors is really long, but the family had relations with Ranjit Singh, as his grandfather was married into the Majithia family. They had an estate in what now is Pakistan, called Dhani state, which was known for it’s horses. His family has a history in governance. His family also has a long history of war with the British, whether in alliance with Ranjit Singh or just by themselves too. Mado Jetha was the name that established Majitha, a place thirty odd miles from Amritsar. During the British, they were one of the only villages that had a municipality. The Majithias were known as the iron warriors of the Ranjit Singh empire, they were very active at the helm of affairs. Mr. Majithias grandfather was the Prime Minister of Nabha State, his name was General Shivdev Singh, who had a very strong personality, he suffered a lot as he was frequently put in prison by a Maharaja. One of the anecdotes that Mr. Majithia shares tells us about how his great grandfather was imprisoned in Banaras, while Maharani Jindal was there too. What has been told to him is that his great grandfather had his sister switch places with Maharani Jindal and helped her escape the jail and was taken to Nepal. When the mutiny broke out, his great grandfather protected the fort that he was imprisoned in, out of respect for women and children as he claimed that his fight was only with the men. He was later given an estate in Gorakhpur as a reward and he started his own farming there- whether indigo or sugarcane.His family is very well known and also from a very historically rich lineage. His Grandfather started a campaign to get people to join the air force and because the air craft industry hadn’t developed so much people were hesitant to join. His father and cousin joined the air force, his father then went onto became a fighter pilot and was selected to put on a show when the Prince of Wales came to India for a visit. His uncle Sir Kirpal Singh, took over the political work the family was doing. Upon his death, his father took on this political work. He was then also made the Ambassador to Nepal. Then his father became an MP after the third election, and also had a difference of opinion with Krishna Menon. His father had strong opinions against the Chinese and that’s where lay the difference of opinion, his father felt that China was major threat. Apparently Krishna Menon, was provoking Jawaharlal Nehru against Mr. Majithia’s father. After which he handed in his resignation as he didn’t want to be doubted and had strong beliefs. Mr. Majithia also holds strong opinions about China. His grandfather also worked towards upliftment of farmers, with the help of the leader of Haryana.He went to school at Sacred Heart School in Amritsar. He also went to the Doon School in Dehra Dun, which led to him being cocooned from the happenings of Partition. After his schooling in Dehra Dun, he went to Aitchison College in Lahore which was a very sports orientated school. He also did some of his schooling in United Kingdom. He didn’t finish his schooling in the UK all the way through but upon coming back to India he wanted to join the air force but his father suggested that he was not of the correct age to do so anymore. Given that, he ended up handling his father’s business in Gorakhpur. Then he got married to his wife, and had three kids, two sons and one daughter. His daughter is a MP in Delhi, his son is on the Cabinet and his oldest son is handling their family business and he resides with them in New Delhi now.His views on religion is that each religion teaches you to love the creation of the almighty and that those who don’t understand their religion end up fighting instead. That our souls are to be connected to your religion, and how could souls fight? He claims that they never differentiated between Hindu and Muslims and Sikhs and treat everyone equally when he went to college in Lahore.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Ludhiana (India)
- Imprint:
- Ludhiana (India), May 28, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0582
41. Oral history with Shanno Khurana, 2013 August 4
- Title:
- Oral history with Shanno Khurana, 2013 August 4
- Author:
- Khurana, Shanno, 1927-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Author (no Collectors):
- Khurana, Shanno, 1927-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Collector:
- Khurana, Shanno, 1927-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Description:
- Shanno Khurana was born as ‘Raj Kumar’ on 23rd December 1927 to father Chaman Lal Kumar and mother Jamuna Bai in the princely state of Jodhpur in present-day Rajasthan. She was later named Shanno after a woman from Jalandhar who visited Jodhpur to raise funds for a good cause. Shanno’s father was a railway engineer posted with the princely state of Jodhpur. Her mother died in a railway accident when Shanno was about 4 years old. Since then, she was mostly brought up by her paternal grandmother who lived with them. Her father was originally from Shahpur in Sargodha and her maternal side of the family was also from a place near Sargodha. Shanno is one of eight siblings, five sisters and three brothers. She also has one brother and two sisters from her father’s second marriage.Early in her life, Shanno and her family discovered that she had a lovely voice. However, her father never wanted her to pursue singing professionally since at the time, female singers were widely associated with courtesans in the king’s palace and this was frowned upon by larger society. Thus, Shanno and her sisters were also never allowed to visit the king’s palace. She would listen to songs on the radio and try to sing them. When she was eight years old, Pandit Raghunath Rao Musalgaonkar began coming to their house to teach music to her older brother. A few years later, Shanno’s father yielded to her request to allow her to learn from him as well. At the time, Shanno was attending St. Partick’s Convent School in Jodhpur. She remembers the nuns at school being very affectionate. Eminent Indian physicist, M.G.K Menon’s sisters studied with Shanno at St. Patrick’s Convent.Her first radio broadcast was from All India Radio in Lahore in 1945. Shanno fondly remembers singing Raag Multani. In the same year as her first radio broadcast, Shanno married Dr. Parmeshwar Lal Khurana. He was a medical doctor and dentist in the Air Force. In early 1947, she and her husband relocated from Lahore to Delhi for he wanted to practice dentistry in Delhi. When Partition struck, Shanno and her husband were living in a house on Parliament Street in Delhi. There was news of rioting in Connaught Place which was near their house. Since her husband’s family was from Banno in NWFP, they had close to 40 of his relatives who had come from Banno and were now living with them in Delhi while in search of their new homes. Shanno’s father-in-law was a prominent lawyer in Banno. With 40 people living in the house, Shanno remembers that time as being one of great hardship. Organizing their stay along with food and other amenities was a big challenge. At the height of rioting, some of them who had to sleep in the lawns due to lack of space inside the house, kept guns under their pillow. Some stayed in their house in Delhi for a whole year before they could move out into their own houses.After Partition, Shanno worked very hard to promote female musicians in newly independent India. She also noticed how the classical music scene in Delhi hardly enjoyed an audience or general presence in the city’s culture. Thus, Shanno, with a team of fellow artists who were her supporters, conceived and executed the concept of performing opera on Punjabi and medieval Indian folk tales and historical legends. She was able to use western mediums of performance arts to bring Indian classical music and arts into the consciousness of residents of Delhi who thus far were more into tea-time and cocktail bands as remnants of Delhi’s colonial legacy. In this interview, Shanno also talks about the role radio played in propagating classical music after Partition. She speaks about how after Partition, when the princely states were dissolved and musicians lost royal or aristocratic patronage, court musicians left the darbars and the common man finally experienced unprecedented access to these musicians for the first time. In 1959, she began studying from Mushtaq Hussain Khan, a highly distinguished classical music exponent who taught her until he passed away in 1964.Shanno eventually got her PhD in Music/Musicology and conducted extensive studies on the folk music of Rajasthan. Her contributions to classical music are very well known in India for which the Indian government also awarded her the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan awards in 1991 and 2006 respectively.She has two children, a son and a daughter. One of her grandsons, Naman Ahuja, is an art historian and currently teaches at Jawahar Lal Nehru University. Today, Shanno lives in the home she and her husband built together in Defense Colony. Her husband passed away a few years ago. At the age of 85, Shanno continues to practice singing for a couple hours every day.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 15 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), August 4, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0712
42. Oral history with Shobha Nehru, 2013 September 24
- Title:
- Oral history with Shobha Nehru, 2013 September 24
- Author:
- Nehru, Shobha, 1908-, Siddhi, Shagufta, Patel, Asim, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Author (no Collectors):
- Nehru, Shobha, 1908-, Siddhi, Shagufta, Patel, Asim, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Collector:
- Nehru, Shobha, 1908-, Siddhi, Shagufta, Patel, Asim, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Description:
- Mrs. Shobha Nehru, popularly known as Fori Nehru was born in Budapest on December 5th 1908 in a Jewish family; she was then known as Magdolna Friedmann. The changing political scenario in Europe in the late 1920’s led the family to change their last name Friedmann to Forbath. The family ran a business of toys and furniture. Due to the infamous Hungarian policy of Numerus Clasus, Mrs. Nehru was sent by her family to study in France and then later to England for university education. In England, Mrs. Nehru met and married a fellow student and moved to India. In India, Mrs. Nehru lived in Allahabad, Delhi Hissar, Ambala and Lahore amongst other cities before the Partition took place. Lahore holds a special place in her heart; it was the city where she got married and learnt to drive. They lived on Waris Road. In a short span of time, Mrs. Nehru took to India, became proficient in Hindustani, Indian food, customs and handicrafts. One of her early inspirations in India was Mahatama Gandhi.Memories of Partition bring pain to Mrs. Nehru. She says. “The things that we saw and what we heard were terrible.” In 1947, she was asked to work in the Emergency Committee in Old Delhi and an Emergency room headed by Mr. HM Patel, ICS was set up by the government of India. Being the only woman member of the committee, she was picked up to go to work by Mr. Patel. Once, as they were driving through the deserted streets in Daryaganj, Delhi under curfew, she saw a man sitting with fresh vegetables. She jumped out of the car and bought all his vegetables. Like other Delhi residents, she had not seen fresh vegetables for weeks. A photograph of her sitting in the Emergency Committee Room with officers with a Ghia, a bottle gourd attests to this.One of Mrs. Nehru’s most painful memories are of her when as a member of the committee, she sent off a train packed with refugees to Pakistan and the passengers were killed. She could not bear this and for a week would shudder at the thought of sending off another train. It was a terrible time. As a member of the committee, she wanted to purchase buckets for the Muslim refugees in Purana Qila but a Hindu shopkeeper in Old Delhi refused to give it for Muslims, who were responsible for murdering Hindus in Punjab. A stunned and deeply pained Mrs. Nehru ordered all buckets from the shops in Old City be purchased for the refugees.Mrs. Nehru’s Muslim bearer like many of their friends migrated to Pakistan. She could not believe the times, life was never the same. Today, her children are friends with the children of those friends who migrated. At the same time, Mrs. Nehru’s mother in law, Mrs. Rameshwari Nehru refused to leave Lahore until all the women refugees in the camps were evacuated. Neither Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru not her son could make her leave. Eventually, the family’s Muslim friend in Lahore managed this difficult task.Mrs. Nehru also helped start a retail outlet, originally called Refugee Handicrafts to give employment to the refugee women, in the hope to give space for their creativity. Pandit Brothers, a store in Connaught Place lent them a large carpet for the same. In due course of time, she was joined by other handicrafts experts and the venture became a successful one. They moved to an evacuee shop in Barakhamba Road till 1952. Despite the refugee camps being dissolved, the production of their handicrafts continued and so did their sales. In 1952, Refugee Handicrafts shifted to the American barracks at Janpath and eventually got absorbed into the Central Cottage Industries Emporium.Mrs. Nehru accompanied her husband to all the locations he was posted as a civil servant. She enjoyed living in the North Eastern States in India, Gujarat, and Kashmir where he was Governor of these states. Mrs. Nehru also accompanied her husband to Washington D.C., and London where he served as the Economic Minister at the Indian Embassy and High Commissioner, respectively. At an event in Washington, she remembers meeting the last Crown Prince Otto von Habsburg. She told him how she remembered seeing him as a baby with blonde hair.At 105, Mrs. Nehru having witnessed the World Wars, Holocaust, and the Partition questions the idea of wars and violence. She asks, “Do you think there is any use of having separate states? Pakistan and India? No one anticipated violence. We saw the bad and the good of the human beings. On one side they talk about Hindus and the other, they talk about the Muslims.” She can’t forget her husband’s friend, Qurbaan Ali Khan, the former governor of N.W.F.P, Pakistan. She never cried in her life as when she heard him say about the days of the bloodshed, “tauba… tauba… tauba...”
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi and English
- Physical Description:
- 4 video files
- Publication Info:
- Kasauli (India)
- Imprint:
- Kasauli (India), September 24, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0700
43. Oral history with Sushiri Motial, 2013 November 13
- Title:
- Oral history with Sushiri Motial, 2013 November 13
- Author:
- Motial, Sushiri, 1940- and Alam, Zain
- Author (no Collectors):
- Motial, Sushiri, 1940- and Alam, Zain
- Collector:
- Motial, Sushiri, 1940- and Alam, Zain
- Corporate Author:
- American India Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation
- Description:
- Sushiri Motial, née Gupta, was born to Lala Bishindaas and Prakash in the Amira Kadal district of Srinagar on July 11, 1940.The family would spend half the year living in their ancestral home in the Purani Mandi village of Jammu and the other half in Srinagar, Kashmir, where there father was a civil servant and eventually retired as deputy home secretary. He was later asked by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad to start an anti-corruption department and also ended up in charge of the Maharaja trust in the Jammu and Kashmir state.In Jammu they had a sizable five-bedroom house while in Srinagar they regularly switched between government accommodoations. This annual cycle of switching between the two cities was really the “greatest fun,” Mrs. Motial says, as they were always excited to move back and forth while enjoying the best climate of each.He studied in Jammu and was fluent in Sanskrit, English, and Hindi. The family spoke Dogri at home and English and Hindi outside. Mrs. Motial once knew Kashmiri and Bengali (after having lived in Calcutta for thirteen years) but has since forgotten them both. Their family had strong “lotus roots”—fond of all things Kashmiri, its paneer, the chashma shai water, and a composite religious atmosphere that she will forever feel nostalgic for.Mrs. Motial’s maternal grandfather was a rich jagidar originally from Lahore who died early, just before Mrs. Motial’s mother was born. Her father was the only child of fourteen to survive, so she had no cousins from his side, while the few from her mothers side only ever briefly visited.Her father’s foremost focus was the education of his children. Accordingly, each of them have gone on to high achievement in life, getting Ph. Ds, becoming doctors, and so on. She herself has an M. Sc. in zoology and is a retired su jok practicioner. Her and her siblings were raised with a strict 10 PM bedtime and a 4 AM wake-up call after which they took a walk, jogged, and completed their homework. She was fond of running, playing ball, boating, and taking Sunday picnics. “Nobody just sat at home,” she says, even on their free days. She grew up with an elder sister and brother, as well as another two younger sisters and brother. Her father was an exceptionally strong character, she says—a simple man who remains an enduring influence in her and her siblings’ life. Candidates for jobs that he intereviewed would bring him gifts, only to be refused. No showing off—keep things simple and live a simple life, was his motto. Discipline and honesty underpinned his life and what he passed on to his children.Their house was their temple. As their father was a great singer, he recited devotional bhajans and passed on the singing trait to his children. Mrs. Motial had Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh friends; her best friend was Sikh, her father’s best friend was Muslim. She remembers times when Muslims (even males, alone) would accompany her home late at night to make sure she arrived safely. These religious differences didn’t matter where she lived. She celebrated both Eid and Diwali with her family and Muslims friends —why shouldn’t they celebrate together when they lived together?Her father’s Muslim best friend stayed behind in India even after his children and wife went to Pakistan to join the rest of their family in Lahore and Rawalpindi. The best friend illegally crossed the border and was arrested on a number of occasions trying to see them. She remembers a dramatic episode in which he came to her sister’s wedding in handcuffs, after convincing the police that he had to come and give his blessings.“I can’t tell you,” she says, “how life in Srinagar—maybe the best in the world.” Though Partition was the first shock, everything bad in that region—that remains to this day—began in 1965.The family was in Srinagar at the time of Partition. Before they left the city as tensions arose, her mother filled up their pockets with basics like dry fruit, in case anything happened and they were separated. There was so much burning in the city that the sky turned a red hue while on the ground friends became enemies. Her family was still welcomed by friendly Muslims though and they took refuge in their homes on their way to safety in a military store. The image of dead bodies piled on carts remains with her to this day. Their father collected gasoline in the hopes of killing attackers—or the whole family—before they tried lay a hand on his daughters.Her ancestral village in Jammu became a battlefield in the days of Partition. Like that of so many others, her family’s property was all cleared out in the violence. Her maternal grandmother’s house was lost because it was on the Pakistan side of the border; her subsequent claim to the Indian government failed.Her father lost his job soon after Partition because he went to drop his family in Rothak, Haryana where his friends were well settled. Mrs. Motial did not go to school for a year, while her mother stitched and knitted to work and keep herself busy at their friends’ home. When things calmed down following Partition, the family returned to their regular schedule of spending half their time in Srinagar and half in Jammu until things permanently worsened after the 1965 war.She was married in 1963 to Virendra Singh Motial after a five-year engagement; their fathers were best friends. The Motials had three daughters, and she remembers hearing gunfire in when she was once feeding the first. Her husband said it was only fireworks, but the bullet marks on the side of a neighboring house confirmed what she had heard. Casualties in a nearby marketplace only added to their feeling that communal conflict had come to stay in the region. For the most part, changes in the region since 1947 have uniformly been bad, she feels. It’s sad that a few have been able to poison the whole place.In 1967 she moved with her husband after he got a job in Lucknow. He then was posted in Calcutta for a time before returning to Lucknow again permanently. They both continue to visit Jammu and Kashmir, but each visit has been tinged with sadness for what has developed there since their childhood when it was a place to have lovely experiences for people of all faiths who felt no tension in eating from the same plate, the same apple tree.What hurt most was in 1989 when someone in Srinagar after realizing who she was said, “This is not your Hindustan.” How could someone say that to her in the city where she was born, where she had been educated and married? In 1990 her best friend’s husband, a Hindu who owned a factory, was killed while living in a Muslim-dominated neighborhood. A cousin-in-law was murdered—after the house was demolished—when a group of Muslims felt disrespected. Friends in Jammu ended up in refugee camps after their homes were set on fire. Even Muslim friends have been caught in the crossfire though—the “sharif admi” (good man) has suffered regardless of faith, she says. “Understand your brother to truly be your brother,” she continues. “Think with your own brain. We should remain united.”She can still visit Jammu but not Srinagar, regardless of the lovely memories she has of the city. She recoils and shudders when I ask her what image comes to her mind on mentions of Partition: it is the mother of a friend going mad and eating coal after the trauma of 1947.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Hindi and English
- Physical Description:
- 3 video files
- Publication Info:
- Lucknow (India)
- Imprint:
- Lucknow (India), November 13, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0724
44. Oral history with Vilayat Khan, 2013 April 28
- Title:
- Oral history with Vilayat Khan, 2013 April 28
- Author:
- Khan, Vilayat, 1919- and Sandhu, Manleen
- Author (no Collectors):
- Khan, Vilayat, 1919- and Sandhu, Manleen
- Collector:
- Khan, Vilayat, 1919- and Sandhu, Manleen
- Corporate Author:
- American India Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation
- Description:
- Vilayat Khan was born in 1919 into a family of balladeers/folk musicians with musical prowess dating back at least two generations from his birth. His father’s name was Raj Mang and his grandfather, who was also a balladeer, was named Khairu; they were both dhaddis, practitioners of folk music rendered on a percussion instrument in Punjab. Vilayat is one of five siblings, all brothers. He did not attend a formal school and is not literate. He received training in folk singing, music and ballads from a very young age.He was married to Dhanni before Partition. When Partition struck, Vilayat was living with his family in Goslan. Vilayat’s family initially came to Malerkotla where his maternal grandmother lived. Being a Muslim family in east Punjab, his family was forcefully sent to a refugee camp about a month after they came to Malerkotla. From that camp, they were boarded onto buses that took them to Kasur. From Kasur, they took a train to Lahore. They did not see any violence along the way. His family brought a lot of gold with them. Vilayat came to Pakistan with his wife Dhanni, four brothers, mother and father. All of Vilayat’s children, 4 sons and 3 daughters, were born in Pakistan.Vilayat’s family eventually came to Sargodha, where it could only sustain itself with dignity till the time the money, gold and silver they brought with them was all spent. Vilayat says he forgot how to sing, including the poetry and lyrics of the songs he used to sing before Partition. There was no audience to appreciate his art. For survival, he did odd jobs like secretly cutting wood and selling it and other forms of day labor. He says such was his sadness in the 10 years that he lived in Pakistan, from 1947 to 1957, that he never once laughed.Sometime in 1957, Vilayat and his father decided that they would return to Goslan, for that is where they believed they would be prosperous, both monetarily and spiritually, once again. Vilayat remembers selling his mother’s silver bangles and other ancestral jewelry to accumulate Rs. 9000, the amount of money he needed to make his journey from Sargodha to Goslan, a distance of over 400 kilometers with all sorts of bureaucracy and border controls that added to the challenge of returning to India. In the interview, Vilayat narrates in detail the obstacles he faced in his journey back to India, including how thieves posing as policemen robbed his family somewhere near Lahore. He crossed the border near Lahore as well. It took him three days to cover the distance between Sargodha and Goslan.Vilayat says that his music “came back” to him after his return to India. Since then, Vilayat has continued singing and is one of the most senior and formidable exponents of dhaddi music across Punjab today. His contributions to his art form have been recognized by India’s national academy for music, dance and theatre, Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), in the form of the highly prestigious SNA Award in 2009. Today, at the age of 93, Vilayat lives with his children (some of whom have inherited his art form from him) and grandchildren in Goslan.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 9 video files
- Publication Info:
- Amritsar (India)
- Imprint:
- Amritsar (India), April 28, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0597
45. Oral history with Mohammad Shamsul Alam Joarder, 2012 January 16
- Title:
- Oral history with Mohammad Shamsul Alam Joarder, 2012 January 16
- Author:
- Joarder, Mohammad Shamsul Alam, 1937-, Afroz, Farhana, and Raichle, Joelle
- Author (no Collectors):
- Joarder, Mohammad Shamsul Alam, 1937-, Afroz, Farhana, and Raichle, Joelle
- Collector:
- Joarder, Mohammad Shamsul Alam, 1937-, Afroz, Farhana, and Raichle, Joelle
- Description:
- Lt. Col (retd) MS Alam Joarder was born in village Nagdah, Alamdanga, Nodia district in British India. His earlydays were spent in Jagaddal.Jagaddalis atownin North 24 Parganas district, on the banks of the Ganges river in the state of West Bengal, On theeastern banks of the river, the town has many jute mills which drew a large labour force from the neighboring states of Bihar and Orissa, as well as eastern Uttar Pradesh, quite often forming an overwhelming majority of the population in the area. Mr. Joarder's father, Golam Rasul Joarderwas an employee of the Alliance Jute Mills in the town.Life was happy and peaceful in the small town. Little Alam and his sister went to Kolkata almost every weekend to visit the famous sites, such as, the Victoria Memorial, the zoo..etc. Mr. Joarder recalls riding the train to the city of Kolkata in the 40's. It was a beautiful city with lots of attractions for tourists. One day in 1946, there was a big procession on the GrandTrunk Road (now Jessore Kolakata Haridaspur Road). Little Alam and his sister also wanted to join the procession with their father. But it was too crowded and his father decided not to take them to Kolkata. Later, he came home in sweat and blood. An awful riot had broken down in Sealdah. Hindus were killing Muslims and Muslims were killing Hindus without any reason. Mr. Joarders'a father said, "Thank God I came home alive. If I took two of you with me, I'd not have been able to save you from the mobs".Mr. Joarder's father felt things became tense between Hindu and Muslims after Partition and decided to move to E. Pakistan. He sent his family to his ancestral home in AlamDanga and loaded his furniture and belongings on a truck and headed for the border. However, the border patrol did not allow him to take a single piece with him. Thus, the family migrated to E. Pakistan only with their clothes on. Mr. Joarder and his familymigrated to the new country and started all over again. He completed his intermediates from the Magura college and joined the Pakistan Army. He retired asa Lt. Col from the Bangladesh Army. Today he lives in his residence in Dhaka andhas 4 grown children. Mr. Joarder spends most of his time preaching Islam and for humanitarian causes
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- Bengali
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Dhaka (Bangladesh)
- Imprint:
- Dhaka (Bangladesh), January 16, 2012
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0296
46. Oral history with Roshini Rustomji, 2012 August 19
- Title:
- Oral history with Roshini Rustomji, 2012 August 19
- Author:
- Rustomji, Roshini, 1938-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Wadehra, Anurag
- Author (no Collectors):
- Rustomji, Roshini, 1938-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Wadehra, Anurag
- Collector:
- Rustomji, Roshini, 1938-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Wadehra, Anurag
- Description:
- Dr. Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, renowned author, shares her story with The 1947 Partition Archive.She was born Roshni Behram Rustomji into a Parsi family in Mumbai in 1938. Her father Behram’s family was from Karachi and had lived there for at least three or four generations. Her mother Gulnar’s family was from Mumbai. Dr. Rustomji was named Roshni, meaning light, as she was born during Diwali, the festival of light.Dr. Rustomji describes the story she heard growing up of how the Parsis first came to India. It is said that they first arrived into India by boat after fleeing persecution in Iran. They requested the king of Gujarat to grant them asylum. The king told them that his kingdom was completely full and there was no room for more people. He demonstrated this by sending them a tumbler of milk that was filled to the brim. At this point, one of the Parsi elders on board the ship added a pinch of sugar to the milk, thus indicating that they would not bring the vessel to overflow and indeed make the land sweeter. It is believed that the king accepted the Parsis into the kingdom and they were required to adopt the local language, Gujarati, and wear the local clothing.Dr. Rustomji says that while her father maintained this apolitical stance, her mother was very politically engaged and active. She describes her as a Satyagrahi who always maintained that the subcontinent would someday gain independence from British colonial rule. She says that her mother taught her about justice. She also says that she was brought up with a sense of, ‘we are going to be independent.’Dr. Rustomji says that people in Karachi referred to her family as the HJ or Hormusji-Jamshedji family. Hormusji was Dr. Rustomji’s great-grandfather, an entrepreneur who became very wealthy and well known in Karachi. Dr. Rustomji says that the thing she read that struck her most about Hormusji was that he respected all religions. She also mentions that Hormusji built the tramline in Karachi, which no longer exists today.Dr. Rustomji says that the stories she heard about her own family’s history led her to think about diversity from a very young age. Her father’s family has origins in China, while her mother was born in Japan. Listening to these stories also gave her a sense of Karachi as a small, closely-knit community, which, she believes, was carried on into her family life. She says that her house was very open to people from all backgrounds.Dr. Rustomji grew up in a boarding house run by her paternal grandmother. She mentions that her grandmother was widowed at a young age and the Rustomjis lost a large part of their fortune at this time. With seven children to bring up, she explored different ways of making money such as giving piano lessons and sewing. Around this time, many young Parsi men were arriving in Karachi to study or search for jobs. To cater to them, Dr. Rustomji’s grandmother set up the boarding house in a large two-storied building, which she rented at a low price from her best friend. Dr. Rustomji has vivid memories of being the only child growing up in this big house, surrounded by twenty or so boarders whom she would play with. She remembers there being an elderly Muslim woman at the house who told her stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. She also narrated other popular stories like Heer Ranjha, Laila Majnu and Sohni Mahiwal.Dr. Rustomji was first educated in a Montessori school in Karachi. She says that Madame Montessori herself had trained some of the teachers in the school. She recalls that many of her teachers were Satyagrahis.Dr. Rustomji’s father briefly joined the Royal Indian Navy. The family therefore moved to the different places where he was posted. They spent a short period in South India. When Dr. Rustomji was about six years old, the family moved to Mumbai where they lived in an apartment. Dr. Rustomji enrolled in a Parsi school. She recalls that her father escaped a bomb attack that was launched by Indian sailors rebelling against the British.After a year in Mumbai, the family moved back to Karachi. From the second grade, Dr. Rustomji started going to Mama Parsi Girls’ High School. She mentions that the school is still highly regarded today. Though it was a Parsi school, there were students of other faiths who studied there as well.In December 1946 at the age of nine, Dr. Rustomji had her Navjot, the Zoroastrian initiation ceremony. It is considered to be one of the highlights of a Parsi youth’s life. She says that since there were very few Parsis in Karachi, nearly the entire community was invited, as well as friends from other communities. Dr. Rustomji recalls that her Navjot was conducted in a Parsi hall in Karachi. During this ceremony, the Parsi boys and girls wear, for the first time, the sadra or muslin undershirt, and the sacred thread. Dr. Rustomji recalls that her Navjot was conducted by the High Priest of Karachi.Dr. Rustomji remembers that around this time, the subject of Independence from British colonial rule was being discussed. She recalls being very excited at the prospect of Swaraj or self-rule. But she also felt confused, as she could not understand why there was so much conflict between the different communities. She believes that the first time she learned about Partition must have been when she was in school.Dr. Rustomji was in Karachi when Pakistan got its independence on August 14, 1947. She remembers that she and the other students were taken up to their school’s terrace. Their principal declared that Pakistan now had its own flag. Dr. Rustomji recalls her bringing down the Union Jack flag and proudly raising the Pakistani flag. The students were taught the symbolism of the flag.Dr. Rustomji mentions that during Partition, her mother became part of a women’s group called ‘Poor Families Relief’. The group was concerned with how to help refugee women living in the camps. They taught the women how to sew and embroider. They provided them sewing machines that they bought with money received from donations.Dr. Rustomji remembers an incident that occurred about a week or two after Partition’s announcement. “My father and I were in a dining room. I am eight or nine years old. A man came to our door and he was begging my father that he could build a small shack for himself and his small son on his land. Their mother had died. But my father said, ‘No, we can’t. It’s not our land.’ I was furious at my father. I remember looking up at my father and his face was ashen, gray. I had only seen him like that one other time, when his eldest brother died.”Her father, a teacher, opened up the empty science labs at his school to house refugees, and allowed the refugee children to join the classes. She recalls, “Some of the Parsis were furious that he let Muslim boys in the Parsi school. He said, ‘They are good boys and they speak Gujarati, we should let them have an education.’”Dr. Rustomji remembers that the temple bells in the area stopped ringing after Partition, when she was ten years old. At the same time, she began experiencing anxiety attacks at sunset every day, which continued until she was about 20.Dr. Rustomji went on to study at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon on scholarship, intending to go for one year but decided to stay and complete her degree there, falling in love with the city of Beirut. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature in 1961. She later studied for earned her Master of Arts in English and American Literature at Duke University and completed a PhD in Comparative Literature, studying English, classical Sanskrit and classical Greek literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1973.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 12 video files
- Publication Info:
- Alameda (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Alameda (Calif.), August 19, 2012
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0420
47. Oral history with Sardar Tarlochan Singh, 2012 January 15
- Title:
- Oral history with Sardar Tarlochan Singh, 2012 January 15
- Author:
- Singh, Sardar Tarlochan, 1933-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Rekhi, Ben
- Author (no Collectors):
- Singh, Sardar Tarlochan, 1933-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Rekhi, Ben
- Collector:
- Singh, Sardar Tarlochan, 1933-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Rekhi, Ben
- Description:
- Sardar Tarlochan Singh was born in 1933, in village Todial, which used to be district Jhelum, about 80 kilometers from Islamabad, with 5% Sikh population, Dr. Manmohan Singh and Inder Kumar Gujral were also from the same district as Sardar Tarlochan Singh. Mr. Singh’s Father’s name was Sardar Blatant Singh and his mother was Sardarni Rampyari. His father was a business man and his mother was a housewife. He had one brother and one sister, who were younger to him. As kids, they used to ride bicycles for miles for fun as most sports in their village were traditional- like kabbadi. He recalls that bicycles were also the best mode of commute for them. He used to travel to different villages via horses or bicycles but he used to mostly go to his mother’s village. He lived in a normal three room house, which was common for their village, with a open courtyard, and they had a buffalo at home. His mom always milked the buffalo, and made milk products out of them. There were no hospitals super close by, but there were midwives and some local clinics.People from Mr. Singh’s village were there for a hundred years and more, Muslims migrated to this village eventually too, but due to the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sikh population had many benefits and prosperous amounts of land. His uncle used to be one of the best athletes in the area at that point, he used to always be invited to display his skills, his name was Bhagat Singh.People from the Sikh community, as he recalls were money lenders, which he thinks was a good profession for them. Land was minimally used for farming as the area was hilly but land holdings were still used to grow wheat, some vegetables, and flowers. Most women in the village worked on the charkha, and they bought cotton that came from East Punjab and South Punjab, they made Khadi out of it. Muslims worked as farmers and artisans, while the Sikh community was entirely business based. The two communities did share the same passion for the army. The most popular music was Kirtan in the Gurudwara and folk music, for entertainment people played volleyball and cards when they had enough time to do so. Some other forms of entertainment were shopping where people from Kashmir and Peshawar came to sell ‘heeng’ and other rare commodities. He also recalls that most festivals were celebrated separately by the communities and mostly in religious sites. The education in his village was great and they had a majority of Sikh educators and some Muslim teachers.He remembers hearing about the Akali movement led by leaders like Tara Singh. The meetings would take place in the village Gurudwara. The people of the village were interested in freedom from the British but not necessarily in the idea of Partition. They hadn’t anticipated it. People assumed that eventually there would be peace and only took very few things with them as they thought they’d be able to go back. When they migrated they only had clothes, no money or other possessions. They took the train to India, from the railway station in the village.The train took almost 10 hours for them to get from Rawalpindi to Patiala, which was traveling onwards to Delhi. They stayed in a Gurudwara for many months, there were about 120 other people living in small rooms there. During the travel, they closed all the train windows so that they couldn’t see outside and no one could peak in. This was also a tactic to avoid being attacked. The atmosphere was tense in the train, as everyone was stressed.Once they moved to Patiala, Mr. Singh was a child laborer and didn’t attend school for a year, where he collected eggs from different villages and sold them to people. After which he continued his schooling from all the scholarships he received for being an outstanding student. His father started a business there but couldn’t succeed, soon after which they all moved to Patiala and Mr. Singh finished his studies. On moving to Patiala, they were allotted a house based on the possessions they’d left behind, the compensation wasn’t completely fair but it was helpful.Once he was done with schooling, he managed to make a living and got involved in tourism. He joined service in Punjab, joined the public relations departments, he worked in Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi, he says that -“I’m a success story, a man with such a poor start, with no money, who has made it!” He headed the Department of Tourism in Delhi for 7 years, then he was a member of Parliament for 5 years, and finally was the first Sikh person to become the Chair of the National Commission for Minorities. He also worked to help the agricultural sector grow.He got married in 1951, he met his wife, when he was posted in Public Relations in Bakhra Dam, their parents agreed and then they got married.He thinks that Partition should have been peaceful, but the leaders didn’t allow it. He says - “Many other nations had situations like ours, but no blood shed like the one we saw, half a million lost lives. It’s hard to imagine how neighbors living next to each other became enemies, we became like animals, I saw people being killed, houses being burned, bodies of the people flowing in the canals and people being shot in trains.” He saw this happen everywhere, in Punjab and it was a horrible scene. He says that he saw ladies weeping and men being killed on the streets of Patiala and that “one can’t imagine how a human can be so wild”. He also is of the opinion that something like this can be avoided worldwide if the authorities strictly followed the principles and rules. He mentions that more than 3 million Sikhs are living abroad now. He asks Sikhs to compare themselves to the Jews. He claims that the Jews are stronger and established because they control the media in the U.S and U.K, are more literate and spend more of their knowledge on energy on the advancement of their community by using their intelligence and not focusing on little conflicts. He thinks that the Sikh community can use its strengths to work towards more positive outcomes.At the end, Mr. Singh recalls his visit to his village, where he lived before migration and with sadness he says that it wasn’t the same, not as prosperous and not as lively.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English and Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 2 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), January 15, 2012
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0401
48. Oral history with Ali Shan, 2011 August 21
- Title:
- Oral history with Ali Shan, 2011 August 21
- Author:
- Shan, Ali, 1941-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Khan, Yasser
- Author (no Collectors):
- Shan, Ali, 1941-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Khan, Yasser
- Collector:
- Shan, Ali, 1941-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Khan, Yasser
- Description:
- Mr. Ali Shan was six at the time of Partition. He had never heard of India or Pakistan. He shared the harrowing tale of that fateful day in 1947 that completely changed his life. When a mob attacked his village in District Ludhiana he watched his family and most of the people in his village get murdered. The gunman shot at him several times but missed each time. He survived and got the courage to run. As fate would have it, a mobster saved him and took him along. They walked for two days, spending the night on the way and he was turned over to a family, who raised him as their own for six months. He was a Muslim being raised as a Sikh. Eventually, the Pakistani military took him to a camp in Lahore where he was all alone, a six year old orphan. His maternal uncle was searching for him and found him in the camp and raised him. Today he stresses a message of peace and tolerance among all people. It was very difficult for him to share this story but he feels it is very important that people come forward to share these stories so that this sort of thing does not happen again... so that we can learn from the past.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 10 video files
- Publication Info:
- Fremont (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- Fremont (Calif.), August 21, 2011
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0153
49. Oral history with Brigadier Dewan Chand Duggal, 2011 August 20
- Title:
- Oral history with Brigadier Dewan Chand Duggal, 2011 August 20
- Author:
- Duggal, Dewan Chand, Brigadier 1922- and Kapoor, Reena
- Author (no Collectors):
- Duggal, Dewan Chand, Brigadier 1922- and Kapoor, Reena
- Collector:
- Duggal, Dewan Chand, Brigadier 1922- and Kapoor, Reena
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Mr. (Brigadier) Dewan Chand Duggal (retired from the Indian Army), was twenty-five years old and had joined the British-Indian Army as an officer when Partition happened. He was posted in Hong Kong at the time and when Partition was announced he received news that his mother and younger siblings – all of who were in Peshawar (now northwest Pakistan) – had left Peshawar for India. He also had news of much rioting and violence and feared the worst for his family. Unfortunately he had lost his father; his mother was a widow having lost her husband only the previous year in 1946. Upon learning of this development Mr. Duggal requested leave of his British commanding officer and rushed to India. But he did not clearly know where the family was and when they would reach India. He knew they were headed for Haridwar in northern India because Mr. Duggal’s father-in-law to be had offered up a house he owned in Haridwar to Mr. Duggal’s mother because he had a lot of respect for Mr. Duggal’s deceased father. With great difficulty Mr. Duggal reached India during this tumultuous time and then realized he could only get close to Haridwar via train but had no means to reach the house where he hoped to find his mother and siblings. Finally he reached the outskirts and walked tens of miles to the house where he did find his family. There was a very emotional and heart-breaking reunion as his mother related to him how they had to flee and had lost everything in the process. Mr. Duggal told us the harrowing story of how his mother insisted on going back to Peshawar on the trains that were taking people back and forth and often turning up at train stations only full of murdered passengers. She wanted to go back to try to retrieve some money or gold; this was because she had moved to India thinking it was a temporary move and was shocked to learn that Partition had indeed come to pass and she had no means to take care of or raise her children. Against all odds and everyone’s advice she did go back, somehow managed to retrieve some gold and money, brough it back and raised her remaining four children with some help from Mr. Duggal who was the only earning member of that family. Eventually all the kids - Mr. Duggal’s siblings - grew up and went to college – and left Haridwar.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 video file
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), August 20, 2011
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0180
50. Oral history with Ravinder Kumar Chopra, 2011 April 2
- Title:
- Oral history with Ravinder Kumar Chopra, 2011 April 2
- Author:
- Chopra, Ravinder Kumar, 1939-, Brito, Katherine, Kals, Devin, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Mahal, Dr. Anmol Singh
- Author (no Collectors):
- Chopra, Ravinder Kumar, 1939-, Brito, Katherine, Kals, Devin, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Mahal, Dr. Anmol Singh
- Collector:
- Chopra, Ravinder Kumar, 1939-, Brito, Katherine, Kals, Devin, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, and Mahal, Dr. Anmol Singh
- Description:
- Born as Ravinder Kumar Chopra in 1939, Ravi Chopra is the eldest of seven siblings. He was born in Lahore to a Diwan family, and lives today in San Jose, near his children. Mr. Chopra was only eight and a half years old at the time of Partition. He recalls that even up to two months before Partition, his Hindu family had a very friendly, and even affectionate relationship with Muslims in the community. Until Partition, Chopra was even babysat by Muslim family friends, and studied under a Muslim teacher in school.He remembers that about a month before Partition, there was a sudden change in the community, and friends who played together one day were suspicious of each other the next. At this time, Mr. Chopra’s father (a policeman) was promoted to another city. It was quickly decided that the family needed to leave immediately after the exams, but things grew worse much quicker than expected. One night, a Muslim friend who wanted them to be safe came to their house and warned them that they were to leave that very night. The family had only about 12 hours to pack up what they could, and carried it tied around their bodies to the railway station. Just as they boarded a passenger train to a bigger station, they saw their house in flames through the window.When the train came to the next station, Mr. Chopra was caught in the middle of gunfire (it was unclear who exactly was firing), and a bullet grazed his leg. His grandmother was extremely distraught at his profuse bleeding. Not knowing what else to do, with no medical care around, she took the only dhuti she had brought with her, sterilized it with her own urine, and wrapped it around the wound. When the train came, the family offered all of their possessions to be hidden in the compartment of a Muslim man, under the guise of being his family. Spending the train ride in the crowded compartment, the Muslim gentleman would pass them off as his family every time they were questioned. Chopra recalls seeing young girls throwing themselves into wells to protect their honor, and seeing dead bodies strewn along the train tracks. Once they arrived at Ferozepur, Ravi and his family spent ten nights in a refugee camps, where there was no hygiene, and life was miserable.Once reunited with his parents, Ravi and his family were given a house comparable to the one they had to leave behind, and started anew. His father was reinstated as a policeman, and he joined the army at age 15. Ravi’s paternal grandmother chose to stay behind with their family home, living with a Muslim servant who was very loyal to their family. The family survived financially because once his grandmother was forcibly removed from their home a few months later, she brought several kilograms of solid gold hidden in the walls with her. Today, Ravi has still not been able to go back to his home in Pakistan, as his position in the army made it difficult for him to get a visa to go to Pakistan. He lives in San Jose, CA, along with his children and their families,.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 video file
- Publication Info:
- San Jose (Calif.)
- Imprint:
- San Jose (Calif.), April 2, 2011
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0080
51. Oral history with Ajit Cour, 2010 November 2
- Title:
- Oral history with Ajit Cour, 2010 November 2
- Author:
- Cour, Ajit, 1934-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Kaur, Kanwalroop, and Kapany, Narinder Singh
- Author (no Collectors):
- Cour, Ajit, 1934-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Kaur, Kanwalroop, and Kapany, Narinder Singh
- Collector:
- Cour, Ajit, 1934-, Bhalla, Guneeta Singh, Kaur, Kanwalroop, and Kapany, Narinder Singh
- Description:
- Ajit Cour was born in 1934 and lived in Lahore during the Partition. Before the Partition she attended a Christian school. There, the nuns taught English to the Punjabi children, highlighting the difference in the sound made between the ‘k’ and ‘c’. The nuns claimed that the letter ‘c’ is feminine while the letter ‘k’ is masculine. This led Mrs. Cour to change her name from Kour to Cour. She remembers being brought up on stories that demonize Muslims by portraying them as the evil characters. She believes that these stories contributed to the uneasy relationship between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. In school, she noticed the discrimination between the Muslims and Hindus. Hindus and Muslims drank from separate water fountains, the Muslim children had a hard time finding partners for school projects, and the teachers were harsher on Muslim children. Ajit recounts her parents discussing the possible violence that might break out over the Ravi River (thinking that the boundary would be drawn along the river). Her mother believed that the tensions would end once the Muslims could represent themselves.On the night of the 14th, her father was glued to the radio as she went to sleep with her siblings. They all woke up to her mother and father crying after hearing the announcement. During the Partition Mrs. Cour remembers hearing stories of violence breaking out between families that have once lived together in peace. The violence was unlike any other she had seen before, people were proud of what they have done. Mrs. Cour recounts one particular act of violence were a man was beaten with a wooden rod, doused with petrol, and set on fire. This horrific event was celebrated, people danced around the man whilst burning in the street. After retelling the story Mrs. Cour describes this moment as “a very deep-rooted brutal, brutal, enjoyment of killing.”Mrs. Cour says that as Punjabis and Sikhs, they have left and lost their physical possessions as well as the importance of their language. After Partition the Punjab was split, and because of this the language diminished in its influence. She describes the history of the Punjabi language is one of revolution against the Brahmins and losing the history of the language, diminishes the power of the language today.
- Topic:
- History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 3 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), November 2, 2010
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0028
