Remembering Partition, One Story at a Time

Guest blogged by Ranjanpreet Nagra and Jaskiran K. Mann

In February 2011, six months after finishing my Master’s in South Asian Studies from University of Michigan, I moved to Berkeley and was still looking for a job and a place to live when I met the founding members of The 1947 Partition Archive, an entirely volunteer-based effort aimed at collecting and preserving the stories of the 1947 Partition of British India. I expressed my interest in conducting interviews as well as helping out however I could, since I was fluent in both Punjabi and Urdu. I also had experience conducting interviews in college and for my Master’s thesis. Since that first meeting, I have loved every aspect of my volunteer work with the Archive.

I’ve had the good fortune to interview people in English, Urdu and Punjabi, and to travel to places throughout California, as well as Toronto, Canada.  Presently, I am traveling through East Punjab, conducting interviews. I’ve heard some amazing stories of adversity, fear, violence, and strength.

My first outreach work was that following March, tabling at Hayward Gurdwara on a cold and cloudy day. I enjoyed talking to people and telling them about the project. That was the first time I had to explain – in Punjabi – what we do and its purpose. I had some difficulty translating at first, but since then I have had many opportunities to explain, and become more comfortable doing so as a result.

This past June, I drove to Fresno and Selma with my co-volunteer, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, to conduct interviews, one of which was with Mr. Kang. I remembered signing him up for an interview at Selma Gurdwara in April. His genuineness and delight came across in his interview, which was almost two hours long – he talked at length about his childhood in different villages in Lyallpur. He was born in 1936 and was a young boy of only 11 years during Partition. He had spent his childhood in Chaks 15, 21, and 23 in Jarhanvali Tehsil in Lyallpur District. He described the prosperity of his childhood: their fertile land and ample crop yield. After Partition, he felt that his family faced adversity and indifference from the natives in East Punjab; no one offered a helping hand. They did labor work for more than two years until they were allotted their land.

He became nostalgic when I asked him about his childhood in the village where he was born. He made me feel as though I was doing the right thing by asking him about his life. Yet, I noticed a sadness in his eyes from not being able to take me to the place where he had grown up. No matter how hard he tried, I would never be able to imagine his life as a child. “That was something else altogether… that life, that childhood, that prosperity,” he reminisced.

I especially remember him because he made me feel positive, hopeful and optimistic about interviewing Partition survivors. I felt as though I had established a personal connection, and was touched that he was appreciative of me interviewing him.

Volunteer Ranjanpreet Nagra sits with two interviewees from her trip to Toronto, Canada in October 2011.

In October 2011, I was able to conduct several more interviews for the Archive while visiting Toronto for a few days. In Brampton, I interviewed N. Kaur who was 15 years old at the time of Partition and lived in Jalandhar district. She was traumatized by her father and uncles, who spoke of killing all their daughters if their village was ever attacked. She said the girls became thin with the stress and fear of one day being killed, and therefore lost interest in life and material possessions; when their mother would bring them milk, they were afraid that the milk was poisoned. Her story made me reassess my assumptions about non-immigrants’ experiences: they were just as traumatized and scared as the immigrants themselves.

Every time I interview someone, I learn something new: I get to know a new person and a different life and lifestyle. I also can’t help but consider what that person experienced in Partition and how Partition has shaped their personality as a result; I couldn’t help wonder if N. Kaur’s loss of trust in human beings during Partition made her the tough skinned woman that she is today. I also wonder if going through tough times made her stronger and tougher in facing the hardships of life.

With each interview, I’ve grown to admire the survivors. I admire their strength and their optimism.  They left behind their lives and their possessions and are still alive. They’ve survived years and decades, and multiple displacements. They lived through the time when people lost their faith and trust in human beings and humanity, and managed to remain relatively optimistic. During these few months of collecting interviews I’ve trained myself to listen, to forget about my own relatively trivial problems, and to just lose myself in their stories.

During this time, I have also mentored UC Berkeley students, including Jaskiran Mann who has accompanied me on several interviews and outreach events. Here she talks of her experiences thus far:

I first heard about the 1947 Partition Archive when one of the founding members gave a short presentation on it during a Friday morning Punjabi class at UC Berkeley. It was the 2010 fall semester, only months after I had taken a Modern South Asian History class that covered everything from the fall of the Mughal Empire to the rise of British colonialism to the 1947 Partition. Although we learned about Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, and other key players in modern South Asian history, the spring semester ended before we had a chance to understand what had transpired in the subcontinent in and around 1947. Partition happened to be a period of history that I was particularly interested in, considering my maternal grandfather had migrated from Lahore to Jalandhar in 1947. My interest was definitely piqued.

Before I began volunteering to interview, though, I was part of a small team of undergraduates who acted as co-facilitators for a three unit student-run course on Partition at UC Berkeley. Students from diverse academic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds had a chance to interview survivors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the students shared his interview experience, which was particularly memorable for me since it shed some light on the legendary Princely States of India and their culture. A young man born and raised in Hyderabad described the Nizam of Hyderabad as a fair and progressive leader who instituted educational reforms, leading to the Osmania University of Hyderabad, for example. For me it illuminated the fact that despite negative characterizations of the Nizam by outsiders, the Nizam’s own subjects seemed to think quite highly of him.

Mr. Mirchandani migrated from the Sindh in 1947. Here he recollects fond memories of places from his youth. He uses this map for educating Sindhi youth in the US about their ancestral homeland.

Shortly after that semester, I began shadowing mentors conducting interviews, the first of which was Guneeta interviewing Mr. Mirchandani in California. He is originally from the Sindh, currently a part of modern-day Pakistan. Although he disagreed with Partition as a solution to the rapidly rising communal violence of the time, what seemed most frustrating for him was that he had to leave behind the Sindh he had known growing up. The language and holidays once central to the Sindhi Hindu identity slowly eroded as Sindhis migrating to India adopted English and other Indian languages, such as Hindi, to adapt to their new country. The loss of culture and a way of life, unfortunately, seems to be a common thread in many survivors’ tales. However, survival and overcoming these losses are just as much a part of the story. Mr. Mirchandani is interested in a Sindhi Renaissance in that he wants to revive Sindhi literature and pass on various aspects of Sindhi identity to future generations, including the Sindhi language.

Since then, I have tabled at the San Jose Gurdwara and done mostly Punjabi interviews with Ranjanpreet, who has acted as my mentor throughout this process. Some of the most memorable tales forced survivors to leave behind homes, friends, livelihoods, and entire futures. Mr. Malhotra for example comes from a well-educated family for whom academics were of the utmost importance, and yet, when Partition forced them to flee to India, he had to quit school to focus on helping the family by selling vegetables and pakoras at train stations. Just minutes into his interview, this seemingly tough character broke down in tears, remembering with pain the dreams he had to leave behind during that fateful August of 1947. Even though he is now a proud father to three married children and owner of his own business in Delhi, a careful look into his eyes reveals just the surface of suffering and devastation he has had to endure.

All of these stories, unique and yet similar in so many ways, point to the fact that these individuals are survivors in every sense of the word, having survived Partition as well as the loss of life and culture that accompanied it. These faces also remind me why I fell in love with history and everything that comes with it – languages, cultures and traditions, but most importantly, the people on the ground, who have experienced and lived it, not just the big names that have made their way into our textbooks. These are the stories and faces that have made 1947 more tangible for me.

About our work

We both plan to continue working for the 1947 Partition Archive. To date over thirty of us have collected more than 230 stories from the survivors in the US,  India, Pakistan and Canada. This grassroots effort grows every day with each new volunteer and Partition story.  A total of 78 volunteers and numerous community members have come forward to help make this story collection, archival and presentation possible.  Our future plans include collecting stories from across the global South Asian diaspora so that we can increase global awareness of Partition through human stories.  We are recording voices from all economic, ethnic and religious backgrounds.  The full collection will be archived in prominent libraries with short clips available on an interactive map of South Asia on our website. These resources will serve both future generations in connecting with their own ancestral history and scholars interested in understanding the ramifications of Partition.

How you can join us

This winter, six of us are going to South Asia to collect more stories in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.  There are many ways in which you can join the effort:  (1) Help us identify Partition survivors, (2) Volunteer your time, or (3) Contribute financially since this community based project is made possible entirely by your support.  Visit our website to learn more.