Empire: World History - 16. Partition

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

The line has been drawn. India and Pakistan have been divided. Mountbatten and Radcliffe have left. But how will ordinary people caught up in this geopolitical event fare? Listen as William and Anita are joined by Kavita Puri to discuss the impact partition had on real lives. http://www.projectdastaan.org/ To get your free two week trial for Find my past, go to www.findmypast.co.uk and sign up.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire   Twitter: @Empirepoduk   Goalhangerpodcasts.com   Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. Now, we left you in the last episode of this podcast with the bells chiming midnight, as both India and Pakistan sever their relationship and break apart into two distinctly new countries. You heard all the drama and the characters leading up to it were immense.

We've talked about Gandhi. You've heard about Mountbatten, Jinnah. The question is, what about the people who then had to live their lives after this Fisher was created? And we have the very best guest to talk about this, don't we? Most certainly do. Cavita Puri. Welcome. Or Cavita Puri.

We should call you. Kavita Puri. We had this whole discussion about, so let's just explain this. To those of you who aren't privy to our babbling before we actually record this, we would properly say in India, Kavita Puri. I'd be Anita Arnden. But you are Kavita Puri because you are, she's also an excellent broadcaster who works at the BBC. One of the best.

Well, I agree. Her series, partition voices, absolutely excellent. It's part of the British Libraries of Sound Archives now, is it? Exactly right, yes. Which is amazing. First of all, just tell us what that project was all about, and then people all understand why you are exactly the right person to talk to. So, firstly, thank you for that very generous intro, and I'm a little starstruck to be

with you both. So Partition Voices began in 2016, and I was very aware as the 70th anniversary was approaching, that these stories could be around us in Britain, but they were not preserved. It wasn't even talked about it. And it was in my own family, my father lived through partition, but never talked about it.

And I would talk with my friends of South Asian heritage and say, is that your experience too? And they'll say, yeah, but we don't. It's unmentionable. So I persuaded someone to commission me to do a series, had no idea if anybody would speak. And to cut a long story short, I realise these stories are everywhere in Britain, people who had lived through one of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century.

And their lives have been so disrupted and they came to Britain as British citizens after the British Nationality Act of 1948. But they came with their stories and they never talked about it. I find it really interesting that you say you spoke to your father because the voice that is distinctly missing actually from the voice of the voice of the. that I did hear in your series, it was your own family's voice. Now, is that because it was too hard or too, what happened? First, I didn't want to make it about me, but I suppose I did, I had always tried to speak to my dad, and I did interview him, and he would talk about everything. He would talk about growing up in Lahore, he would talk about being a teenager in India, he'd talk about coming to Britain in 1959, but he would not talk about that, there's a couple of months after

they had moved. You know, bizarrely, it's same in the same. In the United States, he'd talk about, you know, my family, obviously different side of the Imperial Divide, but my dad was there. He was, he was an ADC to General Merservi, who was the commander in chief, the British commander in chief of Pakistan. He was there when the flag went up and then was in Kashmir when Kashmir was invaded. He was on a, he was sent off on leave because the Pakistanis wanted to send in the regulars. The Merservi got sent off back to Britain and my father and my Batten's ADC went shooting in Kashmir, came back to find that the border had changed. They couldn't get back. It took them, I think six hours to drive from Rolpindi to Srinaga.

And it took them six weeks to get back. They had to get a transport plane to Delhi, a train across India, a flying boat to Karachi, and then make their way northwards back to Rolpindi. It was a huge epic struggle in this country that had just been born. And my father would not talk about it because a lot of his friends, a lot of his Indian confederates of the people he worked with were killed.

And his own Batman and all the people he did. He put them on a train. never reached Delhi and he never came to visit me in Delhi. I was there for 30 years during his lifetime. He would not come. So I was actually inspired. So again, my family also affected by it because they were all from what is now Pakistan, some from Lahore, some from Kalabag. I've mentioned this before, which is sort of up near the Northwest Frontier, what was the Northwest Frontier. And they never spoke about it, but it was only after your series, because I asked my mother, I said, you know, what happened? Because she was in a refugee camp as a baby. You know, I said,

your own mother was, yeah, because they, again, you know, all she knew is that somebody came in the night and told her family, you've got to get out, you've got to get out now, they're coming. And the family just left my grandmother, her mother, sort of, you know, with a tiny baby and other small children and just gathered what they could, and then just ran for it and then ended up in one of the collection camps near the Wagga border. But when I asked her for any details, she had no idea. And then I sort of read your book, which I think is exceptional, by the way, very proud to have blur. You did blurb it. I did blurb it. I did call out partition voices, untold British stories. But it made me think, actually, this is not enough. I don't know enough. I mean, that's a headline, but what is the story? So I got in touch with the last remaining relative that my mother had of that generation and said, what happened?

And then sat down and recorded everything that she said. And it's, again, no wonder they didn't want to talk about it because it was horrific what happened. But there is this, there is silence in Britain, but there is also silence on the Indians have continent, but the silence in Britain, you can understand that they came in the post-war years and you can't look behind. You have to make a life you're, you know, there's hostility here. And oddly enough, you come here and you're working alongside, you know, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims together in the factories. And they were working together to fight for equality and against racism. That wasn't happening on the Indian subcontinent. They were all seen as Asians here,

whereas that was not the case on the Indian subcontinent. Often what you found is that it's the third generation that begin to investigate. In my case, in my son, my son, Sam, has spent the last three years writing a book on partition and on doing this project, Astan, collecting survivors' memories. Because to Anita's point, what happened is the 70th anniversary in Britain was hugely momentous because there was a public space finally for people to talk about their experiences. That public space hadn't existed. For so many reasons, there is an institutional silence. Britain. We don't talk about it. We're not taught it in schools. It's not part of the national curriculum in England. And then you come here and your kids are born here. They go to school.

They don't know it. They don't know to ask. They think all their family come from India, but they come from perhaps another or Pakistan. They come from their origin story starts in a different place. But it's also important to say there is a lot of shame and dishonor attached to these memories. You don't want to talk about that. So for all those reasons, there were silence. But just like you with your family members, Anita, since the 70th anniversary, and this is such a silence awakening that's happening around homes in Britain. People are trying to find out their family history.

British, South Asians, but also people with colonial British history too. And it is a very active thing. It's just that we don't really know about it. So you're absolutely right. It's the third generation. It's your son. It's his mates who are trying to embark on. projects to connect people with their homes. And it's a thing that's happening. And I think this is

often the case. If you look at, for example, the history of the Armenian genocide, there was two generations of silence and suddenly it was the third generation that started writing about it. Similarly with the Holocaust, I mean, now it's so present in our lives. It is taught on the curriculum, unlike unlike partition. But it took, it took, I mean, it was only more the show of a movie in the documentaries and the movies and Sophie's choice in the late 70s, early 80s. Exactly. It took decades for the Holocaust survivors. But can I ask you, I mean, as the Brit living in India,

because actually the aunt that I managed to corral to finally put some meat on the bones of this family story of ours, she was in India. And her first reaction is, why do you want to talk about these dirty things? Why do you want to talk about these dirty things? And so I ask you, I mean, is it different in India? Or is that sort of collective amnesia the same in India?

It's a third generation again. I'm thinking of Anshul Malhotra, who's my neighbour, in Delhi who's done this extraordinary work on partition. You've worked with her and are friends with her. And it's that generation that's picking up these pieces, talking to their grannies. And to them, it's extraordinary. When they actually talked to granny and get the story out,

the granny was in a refugee camp in wager or escaped from Kashmir or somehow smuggled her way through. I remember collecting some of these stories when I was doing City of Jins 20 years ago. And there was one lovely story of a group of Hindus that got stuck in a very militant part of the Northrest frontier and the army wasn't getting them out. And they were saved by, there was only one entrance to the village.

It was a fortified village. And they were saved by the sweet sellers who put their big dags where they make the jalebis over the door and they threaten to pour oil. These Indian swirly sweets, for those of you don't know. Swerly fried sweets. You'll like them, try them. But they are cooked in fats of oil and kind of sugar. And like a medieval siege, they had these, you know, boiling oil to pour over anyone

that tried to break into the village and managed to keep them out for two days with their sweets. So those sort of stories, you know, little oddities were appearing. But I think the big collect, I mean, people like Orvichy Bhutalia was... But that happened in the 90s. And it began earlier in India. And I know historians who tried to get people to talk, certainly in Britain, they weren't ready. These are traumatic memories. But there is something about coming to the end of your days where you are ready to talk.

But you have to be asked. You have to be asked. And then you're, yes, you're right. And if you're not asked, how, why? would you talk and someone has to listen? Absolutely. And if it's unbearable and if you're at the end of your life, you only have a little while to bear it. And I think that's, so look, can we do one thing? One thing that's really, really important because I think we're jumping ahead and we have to remind people, we have to remind people of what happened. So the strike of midnight happens,

because this is unfathomable to people who live in a country that has not been ripped apart. By a date, by men sitting around a table, by two sets of politics that cannot find themselves enmeshed in the future. They decide to go separately. But what that actually means is a line is going to be drawn through villages, through towns, across rivers, separating rivers from dams, separating people who have always worked with each other, factories. Ports from factories. Yeah. So, you know, so imagine this line. So first of all, can we talk a little bit? I think we've not done justice to the man who drew the line and why the line was so damaging. Cyril Radcliffe. So this man Cyril Radcliffe, of whom it was said, never travelled east of Paris.

He wasn't a big, you know, adventurer. He didn't really want to go to India. He didn't really understand India. He'd never been there before. It was too hot and too awful. In fact, if you've read, he always reminds you in my head of that Graham Green book, you know, Heart of the Matter, where you've got Wilson with his bald pink knees pressed up against a railing, a man who just wasn't meant to be somewhere hot.

And that was Cyril Radcliffe. And just pick up the story, Kavut. of what he was asked to do and how much time he was given to do it. So it's probably worth remembering, and I know you've spoken to the brilliant Alex, that Mountbatten brought forward the transfer date. It was meant to be June 1948. And on June the 3rd, he announced, actually, we're going to split up India, and we're going to do it in 10 weeks.

The new transfer date is going to be August the 15th. So they need to find someone who could draw this downline. And they chose Cyril Ragcliffe, who was a lawyer. As you say, had never been to India before. And he came over, he stayed largely in the Viceroy's house with census and submissions and maps, some of which were out of date. He never once visited the villages. He was dissecting. And he had to divide Punjab and Bengal.

That was his duty. Because these were the two most heavily Islamist-sized provinces of India, where unusually Muslims had become a majority as recently as the 18th century. Exactly. But these were also places that were hugely populous and where villages were so intertwined where people live side by side. They're unpicking, which is what he was tasked to do, was a virtually impossible task. And this is a culture, again, for people who don't know, where if you're a Bengali Muslim, you probably have a million times more in common with your Bengali Hindu neighbours. You like fish. You speak the same language. You read the same books. You go to the

same village festivals, be their Hindu Muslim or somewhere between the two. And do you think the people from the north like Punjabi is a loud and obnoxious, collectively? Exactly. Whether they're Sikh Muslim or Hindu. The northernists are the dreadful people and likewise it sort of, you know, so to take one characteristic, which is their religious identity and say we're going to cut you in half on the basis of this, it's in a sense as random as saying, we're going to cut in half people who are over five foot six on one side of the border and people under five foot. are going to be on the other side of the border. Exactly.

And he had 10 weeks. Let's just think about that. Ten weeks. I mean, Brexit took us years to do, but India was an incredibly complex country. And, I mean, you know, people argue about, you know, why it all went wrong. But I don't see how you could have done it in 10 weeks. It was an impossible task he had. Can we put some numbers on what that line through a map actually meant.

to human beings? Before we do that, I think it's really important to know that on, you ended your last program on midnight. And everyone was hugely kind of, you know, everyone was happy that finally the Brits were going. Fireworks going off. Parties in Bombay. Regatta outside the Gateway of India in Bombay. People driving up and down Marine Drive having fun and games.

Absolutely. And, you know, they were gone. And there'd been this movement for many decades to get rid of the Brits. But this is astonishing that nobody at that point on the 15th of August knew where the boundary line was. Because it hadn't been announced. It had not been announced. So they knew where they were going to put the boundary. I mean, we sort of touched on it with Alex, but he wanted, I mean, when I say he,

it's Mountbatten wanted his moment with the band. I mean, is that your understanding as well? Nobody really knows why. But I don't think they foresaw what was going to come. but maybe they wanted to separate them out. I have no idea why, and it's hugely disputed, but they announced it on the 17th of August. So two days after Indian Independence.

Exactly. And by that point, Radcliffe, who got the hell out. So maybe it's that, just we need to be gone. Yeah, and he said, he wrote to a stepson and said, there's 80 million people who will be unhappy with the decision I've made. And he left, apparently burnt his papers, and never, ever stepped foot. To look at all his works.

When he became a fellow of all selves? At in Oxford, overlooking the Radcliffe camera. Oddly enough, my book was made into a play recently, and one of his relatives came along and emailed me afterwards and said, because there was a Radcliffe character and said, oh, well, you know, thanks for depicting my kind of relative and said he never talked about it. Another person who never talked about it.

Isn't that interesting? But what he did say, well, he never took any money for doing it, but he did say there was no love loss between him and Mountbatten, which I thought was interesting. Interesting, he wanted to tell me that. There's one description of him in that Freedom at Midnight book. And they go and see him and he's cutting his roses. He's sitting there with a pair of shears when they arrive,

cutting the roses of a rose bush. And so to the numbers, what then happened was something that neither the British nor the governments of India or Pakistan had foreseen was that when people found themselves as a minority in these new countries that they would leave. And the numbers honestly are overwhelming. I mean, around the time of partition, so August 15th and the kind of ensuing months until around November, it's thought that between 10 to 12 million people were on the move in opposite direction. So, Indies and Sikhs to India Muslims to Pakistan. Walking in bullet carts.

Bullet carts. I mean, because sometimes, like you were saying, people had to move very suddenly. So you would just go with the clothes on your back. columns going in opposite directions, often with inside of each other. Exactly. And that, I mean, I think sort of bears talking about a bit more. So this column of humanity, like ants from space, if you would have had Google Earth, you would have seen these columns from on high.

And if they passed each other, and just remember that these are people who've been forced to give up everything. And they've been forced to give up Zameen. Now, Zameen is something that has an enormous resonance with Indian people. It means their land. Land is important And Kavita you've got an amazing story that you garnered of somebody

who took a jarful of earth from his home when he had to leave I think it was Sin the province and just kissed it every day afterwards you know so Zameen your land means a lot to Indians so you have these two columns who perhaps have seen terrible atrocities

perhaps have had to leave everything behind now are frightened gripped with hatred of the people who did this to them, although they don't have a face or a name. Often their neighbours have turned on them. Right. Sometimes their neighbours have saved them, but often their neighbours are...

And then these Google Earth columns of humanity that are passing by each other, there'll suddenly be a break from one to the other. And there will, again, violence, you know, sort of sparking off. Like, I don't know how you even describe it, like sort of the... From a tap route, a shoot off of just pure hatred and violence. And that all because of a line drawn through a map by somebody who'd never even into the country before and never came again. So here are these lines.

Can you talk about the trains as well? Yeah, so people would go by foot or they would take trains. And if they were rich, they could take a plane. But the trains were incredibly treacherous because if you were going in one direction, it was pretty obvious what religion you were. And so people were waiting. And I mean, I spoke to people who, would see, I mean, one man, Gertcha would see there was a train line, the Lahore to Delhi train line,

and he would see the train at the end of his ground, not field, and he would see these dead bodies just hanging out, because everybody would be butchered. Every single person except the train driver, because the train driver would have to drive the train into the, you know, into the destination station. And one of my interviewees, if Taka Ahmed, fell asleep on a platform at Lahore, when he woke up there was wet and that wet was blood because the train that had just come in, the soldiers just kind of unloaded these bodies onto the platform. This was a pretty regular occurrence.

My dad was one of those soldiers. And do you know what? It's so interesting is when I talk about these stories, a lot of British people say their family, their fathers or their grandfathers, but were soldiers and was so traumatized that they never talked about. Did he talk to you, William, about it? What did he say? Over and over and over again. I got the cordering equipment.

I did all that stuff. And he kept putting it off and kept up. And then finally he died five years ago. And the night before his funeral, we were in the house with all my kids. And my son, Sam went and got his old photograph albums out from there, which we'd never actually seen. Open them. There it all was. Partition.

So he was the ADC to this general. So he was invited as an 18-year-old to these post-dinners. And he's sitting at one table in Rastropati-Bovun on the Mountbatten's silver anniversary dinner. And he's five seats away from Gandhi. And they're all there. And you've got this on a photograph. Wow. And we never got that story out of him until the night before his funeral.

And he never said it. He never said it. Despite endless requests. I do this for a living. I ask people. I've asked millions of people of these stories. Never got out of my own family. And it's really very interesting because none of our fellowes have talked about it.

And our very good friend, Anita Rani, did a great TV program about going back and just talking to people about why they didn't talk about it. And it turns out, you know, in many families, that rage, that violence found an outlet in the most terrible brutality. So people have to now sort of bear the knowledge that some people in their family behaved murderously. That's the shame and dishonor I was talking about, is that, you know, if we talked about the Holocaust before, we know who the good and the bad guys were. This is not the case with partition. There were victims on all sides, but there were perpetrators on all sides. Did you ever talk to anyone who said I did? So what did they?

I mean, did anyone say? Yeah, because of course they must have been, right? Of course. Well, these trains didn't kill themselves coming across the order. No, I mean, no one admitted to raping or abducting women. And again, just so that we haven't actually done the figures. So 10 to 12 million people are moving. A million people who were killed is the kind of figure that people.

A million people killed. But it's higher and lower, but also there were monsoons, you know, administrative failure, we'll never really know. But this figure of women, the official figures are that 75,000 women were raped, abducted, or forced to convert to the other religion, which means they were taken, their family members would go across a border, and then they would be kept with this family and then have maybe have children, but they would be of the other religion. But then what happened was because this was happening on both sides, the governments knew they went to kind of find these women and bring them back to their families. But some of these women didn't want to go. We're going to find out about some of the really difficult conversations that you've had during your research. And I'm particularly interested in sort of those who've had to confront that they might have been the bad guys, you know. But let's take a short break.

Welcome back to Empire, our very special guest today, Kavita Puri, the author of Partition Voices, Untold British Stories. And we were discussing just before we went to the break about why some families have been utterly silent. And the stories are only just coming out now. We had a few theories about this. Maybe it was too unbearable. People are reaching the end of their lives and they don't want to take the stories with them. Or they've got children or grandchildren who are now pushing and asking in a way that nobody wanted to, because it was too raw and too awful.

I think we just need to dwell on the awfulness for a bit longer because you've heard some horrific things in your research, right? Completely. And when you hear that, you understand why people want to keep their silence. So I've seen, you know, people who witnessed murders in front of them. I've spoken to perpetrators, people who were there who were part of a mob. What does that like? I mean, how do you even have that conversation?

And how do they express it themselves? Well, they say, you know, I was there as part of the mob. I didn't kill anyone, but someone used my sword and I saw them behead somebody. And I was 15. There was nothing I could do. I had to go along with it. Other people who say, you know, I threw nail bombs at people of the other religion. I had to.

I had to defend my home. There was no other option. But nobody admitted to committing sexual violence. But what people did talk about, and it's interesting that most people who came forward were men. And they would often say, oh, yes, and I saw the beautiful girls being taken by people of the other religion.

And you go, oh, but what did you do? Oh, God, nothing, because I would have been killed. What happened to them? Well, I don't know. And so it was just normalized. That was happening. And one person told him this extraordinary story of he went to an elderly, an elder's house, and there was a woman of the other religion, very young, beautiful woman there.

And she was being forced, she was Muslim, being forced to eat pig fat. And that was kind of completely humiliating for her. It's just gracious torture. And he ran home, cried to his mother, and she said, oh, God, there are barbarians. And I said, do you think she was being raped? He said, yes. And I said, but did the village know? And he said, but how did they justify it?

And he said because they were doing it to arm women to. And I think that's how people justified it at the time. The British talk often in their accounts of this. And she'd remember that the British soldiers were largely in barracks. There were British soldiers there. They were not utilised at this time. So you have absolutely no one keeping it. They were not allowed to be.

This is really important to kind of underline this. They had strict orders not to intervene to save Indian or Pakistani lives, only to save the lives of British. And it's worth pointing out that only six British people die during. One of those people is Bridget Keenan's father. Bridget Keenan, fabulous, fabulous author, very, very funny, author of a book called Diplomatic Baggage. Very funny. And her father worked in the Punjab Frontier Force.

But I think on the dated partition was sort of put back into barracks. And so could no longer stop the crowds from, he couldn't turn up in his arm and can do what he'd been doing in the previous month, which is stopping people massacring. each other. And what the point I'm trying to get to is that the British accounts often talk about madness. But what he and other people I've heard talk about when you really question them is that it wasn't just madness. There was a lot of organisation. Yeah. A lot of them were demob troops who were actually giving training. There wasn't just random attacks on villages. They were carefully plotted. There was gun running. Oh, there's looting proper, you know, there's stuff to be had. There was also, exactly. It was aimed not just at humiliating or raping. It was aimed at seizing land.

It was absolutely that. But I think there were these kind of paramilitary groups that were organizing it and absolutely it was about it was a contest for land but at the same time it was also the case that in this crazy kind of midst of frenzy that that neighbor turned on neighbor that wasn't about paramilitary organization that's just what was happening why was it so easy for people to descend to that lowest common denominator why because i think that if you see crimes happening against your own community, you want to do the same back. I think it's as simple as that. But it's also worth pointing out that not everybody, you know, as William alluded to, there were people who transcended that hate and didn't descend to killing or raping the other.

And I think it's really important to kind of highlight in these testimonies, because it's what the interviewee say. Of course, they talk about violence and horror. I expected that, but they also talk about people who live together so closely. And there's one story that I was told that I think demonstrates this so well of a Sikh woman who died. And her Muslim best friend suckled her Sikh children. So a Muslim woman suckling the Sikh children and she raised them as her own. I mean, what could be more intimate than that? And that's what it was.

As you said, they had the same language, food and culture. They were just divided by religion. And I think it's really important to remember that because they remember that. And they wanted us to know that 70 years on as well. Yeah. And again, you know, this is 75 years ago. There are people possibly listening to this who are 75 years old. You have a granddad who might be 75 years old or a grandmother 75 years old.

This is not that long ago that this happened. One of the stories of yours that I just again You almost welled up William But it's a big cryer You may not know this He's a big weeper Good job, this is radio I know, I know

But there was one that broke me And it was the story I did write it down Raj and Yasmin Oh, it's a beautiful story Can you just tell that story And I'll try not to cry And William I can't guarantee

he's not going to cry Because he's already almost off Right Oh for goodness He's got Put yourself together He's got You can't see it

But he's got tears in his eyes So Raj Deswani was in the Sindh province in Karachi And he would sit on his terrace He was 15 And he was with his Muslim Would sit with Yasmin, his His neighbor friend And his love

They loved each other Love and they would sit under the moon With a moonshine on them And he would He kind of showed me He clasped his hands as if he was kind of Raising them to the moon And he would say, I promise you the moon

And he wanted to marry her And actually he wanted the Brits to leave, but he'd put quit India leaflets all around the city, but he never for a second thought that that would mean that he would have to leave his land. His land that he, his parents, his grandparents, and so on and so on had lived on for as long as anyone can remember. And in the end, it became too difficult for his family

as Hindus to stay in Karachi and they decided to leave and on the day they left. all the Muslim neighbours came out crying and they pleaded with them don't go, don't go, we'll protect you and they said you can't and so they filled up the cart and he went to Yasmin

and she said come back and he said he didn't answer because he thought he might not and he held her hands and he said he watched her until he could see her no more but then oh years later and then years later He went by boat to a refugee camp in Mumbai, lived there for 12 years.

But he went back in 1992 and he stood outside the terrace. Actually, the first thing he did on the plane, and this actually makes me want to cry. He fell to his knees when he saw Karachi and he took the earth, he put it to his forehead. And he said, Mother, I have come home. Yeah. and he then went to his home. He looks up at the terrace where he would sit with Yasmin and he heard she still lived there.

And he thought, do I go back? Do I speak to her? But I'm now married. He'd married a wonderful woman, Gita in the camp who he's been happily married to now. He said, looked like Yasmin. That's what he kind of fell in love with. But he couldn't bring himself to speak to her.

Don't look at her? No, because he'd changed, she'd changed. But she never got married. He never got married. But he felt he let her down because he had. He got married. She never did. She just didn't.

No. And so he took some. No. No, no, so we never married. She was waiting. And so he then took some stones from the earth. And he showed me his stones in his study in London. And he said, I touch these and it's as if I'm connected to my earth.

But what's really interesting now is he says he was 15. If he was older, he would have converted to stay. Because he says, land. is more important to him than religion. And this was a choice many people had to make between staying or going, converting or... Well, people didn't convert, but I think it's important to say that

just because you were a religious minority in this new country... Exactly. Some people did convert, but some people wanted to stay, but why would you not? It's your land. I mean, I spoke to people who had to make that choice about leaving India,

and if you're Muslim, your parents, your grandparents, are buried in India's earth. And these were very difficult decision. Now, some people had no choice. They had to leave because the mob was coming. And some people left and were heartbroken for the rest of their days. They never got over it.

And some family stayed and some left and that caused a huge friction. But these were not easy decisions. And that's why, you know, in homes across Britain when I go there, people have gone back if they're lucky enough and they have a British. or they have stones or they have dust. And that's all they have is evidence to prove I was there too because they have nothing else. It's like an ancestral home. So there's a thing.

So I went for the Lahore Literary Festival and I am really... We went together. I mean, William is a very soft-hearted man and honestly, you can't see him, but he's been in floods of tears. I'm more of a hard-hearted cow. But I broke when I went to Lahore for some reason Because it was the little marketplace And I just imagined my grandfather And all of his family on my mother's side

Just sort of running through the market as a little boy And I saw a kid and I just thought Wow, this, you know, just overnight They no longer were, this was not there's a mean This was not their land anymore And it was, I don't know why it was so utterly moving I don't know why I'm moved by it now But certainly I just couldn't

speak for a while walking there. One of the distinctions we perhaps should make is the difference between what happened in the Punjab, which is what we're really focusing on here, and what happened in Bengal, where there was much less. People have said you're too northern, and I think they're probably right. We are a bit northern-centric, so let's definitely do that. The thing about a partition is that the numbers that we're talking about at that time were primarily, so we're talking about August to November, we're primarily Punjab.

Bengal had gone through and I'm sure you've you know you've talked about this on your pod the 1946 great Calcutta killings that sparked terrible communal violence beginning of the massive the day of direct action it starts first of all the direct action day in Calcutta

and goes to not Carly Tepera and Bihar and so so Calcutta has already gone through these convulsions people have already started to migrate and of course people did migrate in Bengal, but not on the numbers that there were at that moment of independence. But it's worth pointing out that the ramifications of that line and that border. And it's really worth saying that you have this new country of Pakistan, which was east and west, a thousand miles of Indian territory to get to Karachi to Chittagong was five days.

For those who don't know this, we should just perhaps clarify. So India is in the middle. And the new state of Pakistan, which is opened in Karachi with the flag raving, in fact, has another entire wing, which is in Bengal, which is not reachable. Not connected. Not connected in any ways, two wings without any connecting body. It's called east and west Pakistan. And it's always the, from the beginning, and this is one of the reasons why eventually East Pakistan, breaks off and becomes Bangladesh. It's always dominated by West Pakistan. The government is in

initially in Karachi and most of the people making the decisions are Punjabi. But also to your point earlier, Punjabis and Bengali's what on earth do they have in common? Maybe they have the religion, but they speak a completely different language, different culture, traditions. And ultimately, that's what led, as well as the power balance being then Karachi moved to Karachi to Islamabad is what led to... 20 years later. Exactly. And so, again, Again, it's the ripples of partition and the numbers there. You had 10 million refugees going from East Pakistan into India.

Hundreds of thousands have killed. And that is, and I think that partition, what happens in 1971, overshadows partition, I think, in the collective memory of now Bangladesh. So for those who don't know, so 1971, those who are in East Pakistan, the Bengalis that Cavita was just talking about, are just saying enough is enough. we don't want to be controlled by West Pakistan anymore. We want to be free of them. And West Pakistan says, you're not going anywhere.

We've already been sliced enough. And so there is an almighty bloodletting again in 71. Massive massacres. The Bengali intellectuals are lined up and gunned down. There are mass graves. Hideous, again, huge bouts of rape and sexual violence. And at this point, India wades in under Indira Gandhi. And the Indian army goes in to liberate East Pakistan.

in fact to separate the two Pakistan's, which suits India too, of course, because it halves, harves the opposition, so to speak, and divides them further. But it goes back to the point that it was kind of botched back in 1947. It was always a very uneasy alliance. Even Jinnah called his new country, East and West, truncated, moth-eaten territory. We had Isha Jalal in a previous pod talking about exactly that. Do you know, one thing I forgot, and you know, you always, we have such wonderful people on this pod. We're so lucky.

But I forgot to ask Ram Goua. who was our Gandhi expert. And I think it was in the film, maybe has planted it in my head. But is it right that Gandhi decided, because he knew that there was going to be violence, he chose to go to Noakali, which was in what was then East Pakistan,

Bengal. And he stayed there, and actually the violence was lessened because he was there. And actually, Punjabis don't warm to Gandhi. And I wonder if that's kind of a vestigial thing of, you know, he chose there and he let us bleed.

But there is a lot of unkind thoughts that swear a man about Gandhi in Punjab. And then he came to Delhi and I live in what is a partly Muslim village in Meroi outside Delhi because Gandhi came to the Dhaka, walked through the streets. Right.

And stopped the people killing the Muslims in Miroli, which is why they're still a large Muslim. I just extraordinary that one man could stop that tidal wave of violence. But just again, to pursue this point because it's important, how different was what happened in Bengal to the Punjab? So the Punjab we have, as we said,

as well as the kind of random violence of villager on villager. You've actually got armed gangs, particularly a lot of Sikh veterans coming back, very well organized with guns, drilled, regimented, sent out to capture land. What's going on in contrast to that in Bengal? You don't have this mass migration of people that was absolutely happening across this new border in the Punjab. Partly, I think, because there simply weren't a number of veterans in Bengal. Perhaps. and the levels of violence that you were seeing in the Punjab was not happening in Bengal.

They'd been through a lot of that already previously. But the kind of military evacuation units that the new governments then sent in once they realized, my God, you've got all these people moving, went into Punjab, that was there to kind of quell this kind of mass movement of people. But as I say, at the point around the moment of partition, perhaps because of Gandhi being there, it wasn't as bad by any means as it was in Punjab. And it's worth saying that different places across the Indian subcontinent fled up at different points. So things only got really bad for the Muslim minority in Delhi from September onwards.

And equally, in the Sin province, from September onwards. And often that was to do with the number of refugees that were coming. coming into the cities with their stories of horror and firing everyone up. I've interviewed a lot of people in Delhi on this matter. So you have these, Delhi just before 47 is very nearly 50% Muslim. And there are whole areas of the old city which are heavily Muslim majority. Now, in the course of 947, particularly through August, you get this massive movement of displaced, very angry families of Hindus and Sikhs who've been kicked out of their home.

their women have been possibly taken, their goods have been taken, their land is gone, and they arrive in Delhi to find themselves in a Muslim majority city and they say, what's going on here? How come these guys are allowed to stay

and they haven't lost anything? So you get individuals then doing attacks on various areas. A lot of the, there's two main camps, which is today called Punjabi bug and Kurobuk, which is where two of the refugee camps were.

There's also a lot. So my mom's family washed up in Koralberg. Exactly that. And then there's others in Piranakila, the old fort of Sheshasharuri, right in the centre, very near Rastrapati Bab, about a mile from Rush. And Jamamashir as well. And these families are flooding in. And there's lots of these extraordinary pictures by Margaret Bourne Knight who had previously. Oh, God, I said that.

Amazing photographs. Just Google her photos. They are haunting. She has both these columns of white-clad people with their bullet carts, with maimed and dying people being buried by the roads. So then she goes to the refugee camps in Piranakila. most famous picture on the front of many partition books of these two completely crazed-looking children that have obviously seen unspoken horrors. You don't even need a caption to see it, sitting on one of the chapters over the gateway of piranha-kina looking as if kind of mad,

crazy, wild, and it's worth saying that around a third of Delhi's population, Muslim population, left. In September, after this, so after these columns, the refugee camps are settled and then retributive violence is put out on the Delhi Muslims. So, I mean, we're sort of running out the time that we are together. I just want to talk about, you know, what this means to the present and what the legacy is of all of this. And just, Kavita, before we talk about the third generations, which I think you're incredibly strong,

and just with, is it fanciful, William, as somebody who lives in India so much, to say that the politics of India and Pakistan are perhaps still informed by that suspicion, and those awful things that only happened 75 years ago? Completely. I mean, in many ways you can say in 1947 still hasn't ended. The whole of subsequent history, particularly North India.

South India, they don't really understand what's going on. But in North India, there is such hatreds on both sides of the border. Such terrible atrocities have happened that this is completely an unhealed wound 75 years later. And that violence is, that kind of, the violence that's been done people and the violence that is now being generated by the hatreds unleashed by this still haunts politics the way that you know Hindu nationalists talk about Muslims the degree to which that chimes with their audiences we don't like to face this and advice a versa on the other side in Pakistan where the where the Hindus majorities have been virtually decimated so it's

So those of you who are listening, because I sometimes get asked this by, you know, sort of friends, you know, you have the same food. You look pretty similar. You have the same language. Why can't you just get along? Hopefully this may go some way to explaining the history is everything. Now, on third generations, what is the legacy that this leaves for them? It's different from the Indian subcontinent, if we talk about Britain, because I think what is passed down, and we have to call it what it is, it's generally. intergenerational trauma is passed down.

Even in silence, it can be. But something else is also passed down, which is that kind of nostalgia for the land that was left behind. And so these two things, the kind of trauma, the fear of the other, but also this great love of the land that maybe no one's ever been back to. And I think that the third generation, or some certainly British South Asia, are, it's an awakening for them about wanting to know their past, their past before their families came to Britain. They want to know their long history. And I think what I would say is

different about the third generation being part of the diaspora is they are used to feeling many things. They can be British or Asian or from Yorkshire or Punjabi Gujarati or whatever. So if they find out that their family begins across a border, I think they can accommodate that. Whereas I think in India where, let's be honest, state narratives and history is partitions in its telling, we're not subjected to that in the same way. And I think in India, if you find out your family are from across the border, that is a betrayal, perhaps, to say you feel something for that other place. We don't feel that.

And I think that is the difference. But I think the legacy is we are coming to terms with it within British, South Asian families at the same time that we as a country are coming to terms. with what empire means. And each generation rewrites what it means and what we remember and what we forget and what we keep our silence over. And it just is happening at the same time.

We're just at the beginning of it, really, I think. Just to wrap up, final story, one that deeply moved me in your recent radio series, Sparsha Hoosha going back to the Northwest Front. Yeah, Spars. He went back. So he, his father, he started, kind of spending some time with his father in 2017

and found that his father, who, grandfather who lives in Delhi, was writing in Urdu, and he was like, why is he in Urdu? So Sparha, for those of you, you know, if you're brown, you kind of can say in your filing system, okay, Ahujah, that's a Hindu Punjabi name or it could be a Sikh Punjabi name. This is a Hindu Punjabi person, right?

Exactly that. And so his grandfather lives in Delhi, and he notices Sparsh that every time Pakistan or partition comes up, there is this literal hush in the family. And he, this kind of young person, wants to break that hush. So he interviews his grandfather and finds out that he's from Bella, which is in Pakistan, and that a Muslim family saved his family's life. It's the reason his grandfather's alive.

He's like, I want to go back. And his grandfather's like over my dead body. I'm terrified for you to go back. Anyway, he does go back, really against all his family's wishes. He goes back with his best mate, Sam, Dalrymple. and that's your Sam, that's your son. Yes, there. And they kind of cross kind of crazy terrain and the taxi driver shouts at them and like,

why are you taking me here and they're in the middle of nowhere and, you know, the ground is very, very dusty and pebbly. And then Sparsh notices peanut sellers on the side of a road. And he thinks, well, hang on, that was what my great grandparents did. I must be close. And so they find Bella, it's got a long story short. He finds the family, the Muslim family, the people who saved his grandfather. And they take him to where his grandfather grew up and on seeing it. And I only found this out from Sam, not Sparsh, because he was still so overcome by emotion.

Sam describes him spontaneously falling to the ground, kissing the earth and staying there. for a long time. And he gets up and he hugs the man who shows him. So a Hindu grandson hugging a Muslim grandson. It's very beautiful. And he takes three pebbles from the earth and to cut another long story short, one of those pebbles is on the bedside table of his grandfather in Delhi. And then he made two into a pendant and he wears them every day.

But he says, that is my family archive. That stone, that pendant is my ancestor's body. I have nothing else, so this will have to do for now. And that story inspired him and Sam and others to start a charity where they link up people who can't go back. They're too old. They're too afraid to their ancestral home because what do they want to know? They want to know if their best friend is alive because they never had a chance to say goodbye.

You know, is that tree that I play in? Does it still stand? It's my home there. And they make these recordings in 3D of virtual reality recordings. And then they put these headsets on the old people and they reunite friends. And this is Dasthan, Project Dasthan, we should say. And we'll put the information and the blurb of this podcast. It has been so wonderful to have you.

William's still crying again. I don't know if that's the same cry or a new cry that's coming out. I know, I know. But thank you very much indeed. You've been listening to Empire from me. Anita Arnan and me William Drupal

Goodbye