Consider This from NPR - Trying To Heal The Wounds Of Partition, 75 Years Later

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

75 years ago this week, British colonial rule ended in India. Two new nations emerged - Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. But that freedom was followed by chaos and bloodshed. Partition triggered a mass migration across a shared border, as millions of Muslims fled to Pakistan and millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled to India. Violent attacks happened on both sides of the border. An estimated one million people were killed. Pakistan and India still grapple with the repercussions of Partition and the effects are still felt today. NPR's Lauren Frayer tells us about an effort to heal some of those old wounds by reconnecting elderly survivors of Partition with the homes and villages they haven't seen in decades. Additional reporting in this episode from NPR's Diaa Hadid.You can read more about Diaa and Lauren's reporting on this story here.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org Seventy-five years ago this week, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation. He was about to become India's first prime minister. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. Freedom from British colonial rule.

But that hard-fought freedom was followed by chaos and bloodshed. Colonial India was partitioned into two independent nations, Pakistan as a homeland for Muslims, and India, a secular republic with a Hindu majority. This partition led to one of the biggest recorded mass migrations. Many Hindus and Sikhs went to India, Muslims to Pakistan. Some 10 million people fled or were forced across the new border along religious lines. Historian Tanika Sarkar says more than a million people were killed. It's true that India got this great gift of democracy, but the way partition came about through unimaginable violence,

not inflicted by the British this time, but by Indians against each other, that cast a very long shadow. Violent attacks, rapes, and abductions happened on both sides of the border. And we'll warn you that this account includes some details of that violence. Trains traveling between India and Pakistan became known as ghost trains because of the corpses on board, people killed as they tried to flee. D.D. Arora was 16 when he escaped to India. When he boarded the train, he learned that everyone had been slaughtered on the one in front of him. The track was full of bodies. We thought we'd be killed if we didn't move from there.

We had seen the mob shouting, leave this country, otherwise you will be killed. A mob is a horrible thing. I found that even your friends, Muslim friends, nobody recognizes you. People had become like animals. Mohammad Qureshi was 13 at the time of partition. He fled from India to Pakistan, even though he wanted to stay in the Indian city where he was born. NPR reporter Dia Hadid spoke with him five years ago in Lahore, Pakistan, and he said that even after all these years, he still yearns for his birthplace. to my house and put my foot at the before my house. Since 1947, when India and Pakistan gained their independence, the two countries have been in four wars, military standoffs and many skirmishes

at their border. Most were over control of the territory of Kashmir, a dispute that is still alive today. Religious tensions also persist. Pakistan is majority Muslim, and India is majority Hindu. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a Hindu nationalist who has brought the majority Hindu faith into politics in a way that many voters like. But critics say that's led to the persecution of Indian minorities, especially Muslims, and its deep intentions with neighboring Pakistan. Consider this. 75 years after gaining independence, India and Pakistan are still grappling with the repercussions of partition. Coming up, we'll hear about projects on both sides of the border

that attempt to heal some of those old wounds. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, August 18th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Visa restrictions in India and Pakistan make it difficult for citizens of either country to cross the border. So many survivors of the bloody partition have not seen their loved ones they were separated from in 75 years. In Pakistan, two friends

are working to change that. In the next five or 10 years, these people will pass on. We want to bring peace to people who have held this pain in their hearts for 75 years. Papinder Singh is from Pakistan's Sikh minority, and Nasser Dhillon is from the Muslim majority. They became friends when they bonded over their interest in partition history. And for the past six years, they've been making videos for their YouTube channel, Punjabi Lahar, of people talking about

how they lost their family members during the mass migration that resulted from partition. These videos have close to 100 million views. And in the luckiest cases, they help people track down their loved ones and reunite them. With each video that goes viral, hopes spread that some of these people may finally see their loved ones again. Singh says the videos are so popular because many Pakistanis and Indians want to heal the wounds of partition. The partition happened, but we can move on and show each other love. Not only did people get separated from their families,

but many elders have not been able to see their childhood homes in 75 years. In New Delhi, NPR's Lauren Freyer tells us about another project in this effort to reconnect people to what they lost in partition using technology. Does it have a date? 1947? An elementary school certificate from the 1940s is all that Ishar Das Arora has left from his hometown in what is now Pakistan. He's from a Hindu family. They were minorities in a Muslim area. And at the time of partition in 1947, they came under attack. They decided to flee to Hindu-majority India,

and they left with only what they could carry, he recalls. As we fled, I saw our village go up in flames. All the Hindu houses were set on fire, he says. They hid in a cattle shed. Ishar was eight years old. He remembers his father had a cough and they worried it would give away their hiding place. But a kind Muslim neighbor, the village chief, protected them. He sat atop the roof to fend off mobs of attackers, Ishar explains. They survived the night and the next day crossed into India. That was the last Ishar saw of his hometown called Bela, a village surrounded by green hills. We used to stand on the hill and shout, he says, and the last word would echo back.

That was 75 years ago. Ishar never returned to Pakistan. He couldn't. The two countries are still on a war footing. His family spent time in a refugee camp and later moved to Delhi. Ishar became a civil engineer. He got married, had children, and then grandchildren. We actually went to a wedding in Amritsar, and that's when he started talking about how we was a camp here. That's Ishar's grandson, Sparsh Ahuja. He recalls how a few years ago, they went to a family wedding near the Pakistan border, and his grandfather suddenly opened up and started talking about this beautiful village called Bela.

Sparsh, the grandson, had been studying in the UK, where he met Sadia Gardezi, a Pakistani, and they got to talking. It's difficult, for example, for me to visit India. It's hard for them to visit Pakistan. So how can we collaborate to kind of show former refugees their ancestral homes again? Together with a third friend, Sparsh and Sadia launched a virtual reality project. One of them would go to Pakistan, the other would go to India, and they'd make 3D films for elderly survivors of partition and for the public. When you've grown up in India or Pakistan, you have a very one-sided official history.

And projects like ours basically help fill the gaps. And we often joke that, you know, if you put together the national curriculums of India, Pakistan, maybe we can have kind of a story of what actually happened and what our actual histories are. So they applied for grant money, got sensitivity training to deal with trauma survivors, and pulled out a map of the subcontinent. All I knew was like Bela, Jand. Sparsh was able to visit his ancestral village himself because he has an Australian passport. He brought a video camera and a handwritten map from his grandfather. He'd like drawn a little map of the village. A scribbled map that's a recollection from when he was eight years old.

Yeah, that's what we had. The village... You took the piece of paper? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somehow he found Bela, just a cluster of mud houses in a mosque. Sparsh wanted to find the family of the village chief, the man who guarded his grandfather atop that roof. So he goes up to a woman in the street.

I've come from India. This is what I'm looking for. I show her the scribble. And she's like, OK, well, I don't know if it's the same guy, but, like, that's his house over there. That's his house right there, she says. Sparsh knocks on the door. A man answers.

Sparsh tells his story. And the man says, that was my grandfather who saved yours. And then the whole village suddenly came out from... He recorded messages from villagers and scenes of what Bela looks like now. The site of old Hindu homes, the school where his grandfather got that certificate. Then I mentioned the story about the hill that echoed and his son, so the great-grandson. I was like, I know where that hill is. Like, we call it the speaking hill.

And so they took me to that hill. He filmed that, too. The result is a 3D video immersion. Into the Pakistani village of Bela, viewed through a virtual reality device. It's like glasses with a thing on the front, and it's got a strap that goes around your head, and you're about to strap this on your granddad's head. Allowing 83-year-old Ishar, in his living room in Delhi, to be transported back to his boyhood. He's in the world of his village right now.

Yeah. He's hearing music and he's seeing... The music I've edited, because this is a very... His song he sings all the time. And there's some voices now. Speaking of the chief's son, who I recorded. When the video ends and Ishar takes off the headset, he says Bela is as beautiful as he remembered. My school is still there, he says, and the hills where my voice used to echo.

Sparsh and Sadia have made dozens of videos like this for survivors and also for the societies they live in. Because in Sparsh's grandfather's case... It was attacked by Muslims and also saved by Muslims. That's not something that fits neatly into the boxes of either Indian or Pakistani-like national history. And so the more of these stories we cover, the more blurred lines that we create. Blurred lines and borders across this subcontinent. Some of these videos will be on display in museums in India, Pakistan, the U.S.,

and the U.K. this summer to mark the 75th anniversary of partition. That was NPR's Lauren Frayer in New Delhi. And earlier in this episode, you heard reporting from NPR's Dia Hadid and Julie McCarthy. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.