CULTURE-AUSTRALIA: Trauma of Partition Haunts Indians, Pakistanis

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

SYDNEY, Aug 14 2007 (IPS) - As Indians and Pakistanis celebrate the 60th anniversary of their independence, people affected by the simultaneous partition of the sub-continent and now living Down Under still find it difficult to make sense of a colossal man-made tragedy.

“There were fires, killings, mass hysteria. Suddenly, humanity was lost and people were not the same any more,” says Nusrat Soofi, who was only 15 when she was compelled to leave the warmth of her home in Kolkata to Chittagong, then East Pakistan.

Soofi’s story did not end there. A bloody civil war in Pakistan that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 once again forced her family to relocate to Lahore, the place of her birth.

“I often get confused about my identity and feel divided. It was an unfortunate chapter in human history”, says Nusrat, who lived in Iran before finally migrating to Australia in 1977. On the positive side, she says that continuously moving from country to country allowed her to ‘’imbibe the benefits of studying and learning other cultures and languages.’’

Some of the angst of partition has been captured by Sydney-based filmmaker Anita Barar in a 75-minute documentary, ‘Crossing the Line’, which tells the story of 15 families who moved across the border through bloodshed and mayhem to begin life afresh.

The 1947 partition of British India in the name of religion mostly affected the provinces of Punjab and Bengal and involved large-scale exchanges of Hindus and Muslims, numbering more than 14 million.

As the newly formed nations of Pakistan and India (on Aug. 14 and 15 respectively) were incapable of handling such a massive ethnic cleansing exercise, violence erupted and close to a million people were slaughtered.

Most of the survivors roughed it out for months in refugee camps with meagre amenities set up in the new countries. They lost not only their homes but also family members and friends as they made their journey through treacherous tracts across a new border.

Barar’s parents migrated to Delhi from Dadu, a small town in the Sindh province of southern Pakistan. Her father was assured by his friends in Pakistan that things would cool down, but one fateful November day in 1947 they had no choice but to take the train to India with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

For most of the senior citizens here who at the time of partition were aged between 10 and 36 years, there is a yearning to visit the home of their childhood and adolescence. “My father had locked the house and given the keys to our neighbour. Until his last breath in 1989, he had hoped to return to what he still called our home in Dadu. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fulfill his wish someday,” says Barar, who moved from Delhi to Sydney in 1989 with her husband and daughter.

She says: “My parents’ everyday conversations always had the prefix ‘before partition’. Unlike my four brothers, I was born in Shahjahanpur, in independent India, and it made me very curious of what undivided India was like. I have used the documentary to provide a platform for people from both countries to share their first hand experiences of how a line on the map, drawn on the basis of religious majority, changed their lives forever.”

Stifled sobs resonated through a packed Riverside Theatre in the western Sydney suburb of Parramatta. For those in the audience, affected by the partition, buried memories were coming alive on screen.

Gurcharan Singh Sidhu, who was in a hostel at the agriculture college in Layalpur (now in Pakistan), says, “We were all friends and then from March 1947 there was a sense of unease and distrust. It was sheer madness and now we realise it was a grave mistake. We should have stuck to our strong human bonds and not fallen for the political and religious ploy.”

The documentary encapsulates the emotive stories of senior citizens of Indian and Pakistani origin now living in Australia who had moved across the border against their own and their friends’ wishes. There are touching tales of how Hindus and Muslims risked their lives to protect friends and neighbours from the other community.

Brahm Prakash Sharma was 12 when his family was forced to flee Lahore during the tumultuous months of 1947. The memories of that fateful day which changed his life, like of many others in the sub-continent, are too vivid to forget.

He recalls, “My father had just returned from office and was relaxing with a ‘hukkah’. Within minutes, a large crowd armed with sticks and swords had gathered outside what was once our home and set the gate ablaze. Soon there were shots piercing through our living room. Along with our neighbours, we began jumping over the roofs to escape the mob’s fury.”

Sharma remembers the young Muslim boy, Fazlu, who placed beams to make a bridge over a wide lane that separated the houses. “He was our guardian angel. I still remember his face. We owe our existence to him.” In 1998, he migrated to Australia to be near his son and daughter.

Migration is fraught with challenges and is never easy: whether it is forced as during the partition or a conscious decision to settle in another country. As Nusrat says, “It was difficult to settle into a new country like Australia at a late age. I was 45 when we migrated here.”

Today, thousands of miles away from the sub-continent, the unwitting participants of this tragic historic event are effervescent to meet people from across the divide and take a trip down memory lane together. Their South Asian commonalities of cuisine, culture, clothes and language have helped them bond. They have moved on, but are still haunted by one perplexing question: Why did it happen at all?

Barar conducted a series of storytelling workshops, which were digitally documented, providing insights into the long-term impact of being uprooted and displaced. She was mentored and supported by the Western Sydney based community and arts organisation Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) and funded by the Australian government through the Australia Council.

Barar says the making of this film has given her a sense of belonging. “I entered in our senior citizens’ homes with camera, sound and light gear, but came out loaded with love, affection and blessings. A relationship was born. I became like their daughter and they all wanted to see my project, this film, happening. It is never easy to talk about traumatic times but they opened their heart. For me, it was like a journey with various stopovers.”

The documentary in Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi with English subtitles has interviews interspersed with archived film clippings and photographs from her father’s collection.