Partition: The old sub-continental wounds

In April 1947, Louis Mountbatten, Britain's last Viceroy in India, got down in earnest to find a solution to the problem of independence for India on the basis of a partition of the country.

In April 1974, the foreign ministers of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan initialled a tripartite agreement aimed at promoting reconciliation in the subcontinent in the aftermath of Bangladesh's War of Liberation.

In 1947 the British colonial power and the leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League grappled with the issue of how to partition the country along communal lines. In 1974 a new generation of leaders in the three countries carved out of the old India were busy trying to turn their backs on the past and move on to the future.

For the people of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, it has been a tragic tale of pain and recurring sorrow all along. In 1947, no fewer than two million people perished as the wheels of partition moved; and as many as 14,000,000 Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were forced to abandon their ancestral homes and settle in villages and towns they had never been to before.

In 1971, close to 200,000 Bengalis, a very large number of them having served in the Pakistan civil service and armed forces, were stranded in Pakistan at the end of the war. In Bangladesh, as many as 250,000 Urdu-speaking Muslims, who had migrated from Bihar in 1947 and settled in what was East Pakistan, found themselves in a country they did not regard as home.

In 1971, three million Bengalis, according to official Bangladesh government estimates, had become victims of the genocide launched by the Pakistan army in March of the year. In the nine months of the war, as conservative estimates suggest, 20,000 Pakistani soldiers lost their lives at the hands of the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali guerrilla army which itself lost hundreds of its soldiers. Beginning in early December, particularly after India joined the war, the Indian army lost anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 of its troops in Bangladesh.

The legacy of partition has thus been one of unremitting suffering. It is a legacy which over the decades has not been turned back but has in fact become hardened. Across-the-board suspicion of one another has underpinned human behaviour in all three countries. And yet this legacy goes beyond the political. It shines a sad light on the personal, of individuals whose ancestry and indeed belief in the oneness of society were fractured in 1947. Jyoti Basu's roots were in today's Bangladesh. Nostalgia defined him when he went back to Bangladesh in search of his roots.

In the west, families were devastated by partition, to a point where, unable to come to terms with the break-up of the country, they suffered without letting the pain show. Inder Kumar Gujral, Kuldip Nayar, Khushwant Singh, Ram Jethmalani and scores of others made their way out of what became Pakistan and to India. They would become reputed personalities in their new country, but did not forget the wounds in their hearts. The writer Pran Neville never forgot the beauty of Lahore, where his youth was spent, and reflected on that phase of his life in his advanced age.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, whose final political struggle in India focused on Bengal remaining a single unit and becoming a state independent of either India or Pakistan, was unable to translate his dream into reality. His home in Calcutta today houses the Bangladesh deputy high commission. Suhrawardy was never to go back to West Bengal after 1949, but one individual who did was Sher-e-Bangla A.K. Fazlul Huq. In 1954, visiting Calcutta as Chief Minister of East Bengal, Huq, a former Prime Minister of United Bengal, waxed eloquent about the cultural indivisibility of Bengalis on both sides of the frontier.

There are too all the tales of ordinary Hindus and Muslims who left their homesteads in 1947 in the expectation that the partition was temporary, that in good time they would go back to their homes. One venerable Hindu gentleman in Cox's Bazar made his way to Calcutta with a jar of murubba, for he was convinced he would be back home soon. He never did. Neither did his children and grandchildren. In the west, the classical music icon Bade Ghulam Ali Khan settled in his native Kasur in Pakistan, but soon lost his fascination for Pakistan and moved to India.

In the 1980s, the Indian actor Dilip Kumar made his way to his ancestral Peshawar, where he certainly felt his emotions rising as he visited the home his family had left before the division of India. In 1947, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan opted to join the new Pakistan army while his brother, an officer in the British Indian army, chose to be part of the new Indian army. In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the two brothers faced each other across the frontier. The Marxist writer Sajjad Zaheer, having suffered imprisonment in Pakistan for his politics, went back to India, where his career blossomed.

Till 1947, soldiers such as Ayub Khan, K.M. Cariappa, J.N. Chowdhury, Mohammad Musa and Yahya Khan served together in the British Indian army. Post-partition, they considered one another enemies as their countries went to war. Piloo Modi, the remarkable Indian politician, once wrote of how much he missed his school classmate Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and their days in Bombay. Every afternoon, Bhutto would appear outside Modi's home, let out a sharp whistle that was a signal for the cricket match they would play in their neighbourhood. Years after Bhutto's execution, Piloo Modi sadly noted that he still heard that whistle sounded by his friend. Jinnah thought he could have his vacations, despite 1947, at his Bombay home. He died thirteen months after Pakistan came into being.

In all the tumult generated by partition, in 1947 and in later years, men and women of accomplishment would find new homes in the countries they preferred to settle in. Noor Jahan, respected by Pakistanis as Melody Queen, decided to move to Lahore. In the early 1960s, Talat Mahmood and Bashir Ahmad arrived in East Pakistan. Talat Mahmood recorded a few songs in Dhaka before going back home to India. Bashir Ahmad stayed back, made a name for himself in Urdu and Bengali music in Pakistan. After 1971, he focused solely on Bengali songs, as did Runa Laila, who left Pakistan and came to Bangladesh in 1974. The well-known Dr Nandy, visiting India shortly before the 1965 September war, was never permitted to return to Dhaka by the Ayub Khan regime. The Pabna home of Suchitra Sen was lost to her family.

Close to eight decades have gone by since the vivisection of India. The pain yet lingers, in the grandchildren of partition's victims, in observers of history.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com