The Broken Wings

یوں دی ہمیں آزادی کہ دنیا ہوی حیران"” and “سارے جہاں سے اچھا ہندوستاں ہمارا” are few of the many exhilarating national songs in Pakistan and India which are the charm of ‘Independence days’ celebrations and signify patriotism. The youth of both the nations happily sing and celebrate their nationhood with great zeal. The national textbooks and the general history told about the making of the two nations is so romanticized and filled with sacrifices by the leaders that all we can do is appreciate them and consider them as our heroes. Although Partition of the subcontinent is a vastly used term, people in the new states of India and Pakistan think that these two nations were made rather that they were ripped apart from each other. Even if one thinks about the word partition, it gives very cruel and sad feelings. 15^th of August 1947 (or 14th of August for Pakistan now) brought with it one of the worst tragedies in the history of the world.  While celebrating the happy history of the nation making now, we never think of the brutal killings and most terrific migration and displacement of millions of people back then. This whole process of was very long yet unplanned and thus lead to uprooting many families of the same home into two different unknown houses. “I feel like I am an aborted plant, I have no roots.” An old lady (whose name is not mentioned) says in an interview in “The 1947 Partition archives - lest we forget the human tragedy” while talking about her feelings about partition. We seldom take in consideration such accounts. We hardly remember that we were one and British left the subcontinent with its broken wings after decolonization and each wing is striving to fly now with the divided soul.

`           As VaziraZamindar explains very well in the text we discussed that partition was a very long process. The main idea of partition came from the “Two Nation Theory”. Muslims and Hindus had lived together in the subcontinent for years and years, but then British came and conducted a census where they divided people into Muslim and Hindus. This division never existed before during the Mughal Empire, but British gave subcontinent this gift which was later shaped into the almighty Two Nation Theory.Umar Khitab, a person I interviewed who migrated from India at the age of 17 told me when I asked about religious tolerance in the subcontinent before partition.“I remember my teacher of primary school; she said that India does not believe in religious differences. There is Ali in Diwali and Ram in Ramzan. We are one nation and we have been living together as one”. It was not only back then, but I came across this news from India today: “Joining the throngs in Delhi on Tuesday was an unusual community of mourners. They carried out their own taziya procession and beat their chests in lamentation. But they were Hindus, not Muslims.”(The Washington Post, by Ishaan Tharoor). This is how Hindus celebrate a Shias’ religious event with them. People of Subcontinent have not only accepted diversity but celebrated it. It is interesting that the Two Nation Theory was given the status of a theory before experimentation, and sadly the common people were put to experimentation afterwards by the prophets of nationalism in the name of self expression. A video “A letter to Dear Neighbor” by ‘Logical Indian’ which just came out and is trending on social media shows that how much this theory was wrong and is still wrong after 67 years of experiment. The video says that Pakistan and India are the reflection of each other, and although a wall is created between us; we still hear and feel each other very clearly. Scientifically speaking, this uneducated guess of existence of two nationswas politicized as a theory and was used to tear down the subcontinent. Why were two different identities imposed on us? Why were the leaders giving us nations by snatching the birth place from many?

            A major cause of the partition and the damage that followed was that it was much unplanned. Many people did not know what was happening and what the future would look like. Asim Roy tries to highlight in The High Politics of India Partition the fact that according to many people Jinnah was using the Lahore Resolution 1940 as a tactic move to be equally represented in United India where Hindus were in majority. It was not even named as Pakistan Resolution and Jinnah said that the name Pakistan was foisted and fathered on Muslim League by Hindus. There was this fear in Muslim leaders that after British leave the subcontinent; Hindus will be taking over everything and vice verse. This fear led to movements like “Divide and Quit” or “Now or Never by Ch. Rehmat Ali”. The worst of all was that there was not any concept of boundaries till late 1940s and the geographical separation was an idea unknown. Saadat Hassan Manto explains this issue in a remarkable way in his famous writing Toba Tek Singh.An asylum was located in Lahore which became Pakistan. After they were told of this decision, the inmates could not understand what it meant:

“As to where Pakistan was located, the inmates knew nothing. That was why both the mad and the partially mad were unable to decide whether they were now in India or in Pakistan. If they were in India, where on earth was Pakistan? And if they were in Pakistan, then how come that until only the other day it was India?” According to BBC report ‘The Hidden Story of Partition and its Legacies By Dr Crispin Bates’another explanation for the chaos in which the two nations came into being is Britain's hurried withdrawal with the realization it could ill afford its over-extended empire.This was the situation during partition. People were engulfed in a snap by this tragedy unknowingly.

            “I feel like I was forced into exile, except I did nothing wrong to deserve that.” An eyewitness named G. S. Sekhon said in an interview with 1947 Partition Archive. What does it mean to plug off people of their motherland in the name of making nations? There were very less options for people than to migrate. The funny thing was that the heroes of our partition were mostly based in places like Bombay and they suddenly started caring about the people of Karachi and Delhi. 47.6 percent population of Karachi was comprised of Hindus and 33.2 percent of Delhi population was Muslims. What kind of an awful disturbance would havetaken place when such a huge number of people shuffled around? Some of the migrants reached their destination, many lost their lives on the way and several of them did not know where their destination was.

نہ خدا ہی ملا نہ وصال صنم

 ادھر کے رہے نہ ادھر کے

This Urdu poem describes it very well because in the name of ‘Khuda’ and ‘Sanam’, people were displaced but many of them were not accepted by either state. As said by the Archive, about 15 million people became homeless and over a million lost their lives during the mass cross-migration of peoples. “As many as 100,000 women were abducted and countless children were orphaned,” the Archive states. “Many of the eye-witnesses, now in their 70s and 80s, still remain deeply emotionally wounded. Moreover the global legacy of Partition lives on today in the form of the disputed Line of Control between India and Pakistan, the world’s second most heavily militarized border.” All of this was done for the sake of getting recognized as two nations. Many women were sexually harassed and others were killed by their parents so that their daughters do not face such accidents. Humanity and feelings for the birth place was overshadowed by the sordid teaching of people like Bose, Mashriqi and Sarvarkar. Their goal was achieved, nations were made and military was set up on the borders.

            “I looked up to see the same sky, the same stars, but this was India,” said J. Hemrajani, a Hindu who moved to Delhi from a small town in Sindh, Pakistan while talking to 1947 Partition Archive.  The story of partition did not end once the refugees got settled, but it will always stay in the atmosphere of the subcontinent. People have families and lands across the borders. This was entropy of cultures, languages and traditions. Many people left their hearts in their own places and ended up on the other side of the wall bare handed but with lots of memories. This psychological impact on people of relating themselves to the other half of the subcontinent would never go away. 98 percent people in our class have some direct family relation to the partition. These stories are not told to the youth because they are painful, but the genetic characteristics like kids of migrated families in Pakistan having Banaras touch to them would keep reminding us that we have been torn apart. There were still thirty five million Muslims left in India making it the largest number of Muslims in a non-Muslims States in the world. The other broken wings like Kashmir and Bangladesh stand there alone looking at Pakistan over a thousand miles of India.

            Partition of the subcontinent was a very cruel tragedy and I am not sure how much of Ehsan it was on us by giving us so called Independence. If India was the best in the world, then why did the same writer have to dream of a separate homeland? No matter what ever the story was, it is never worth the lives we lost and the families which broke.

کچھ ظالموں نے نہ جانے کس حرص سے

میرے ہی گھر کا بٹوارا کر دیا