1. Butalia, Urvashi.

‘Beginnings’, The Other Side of Silence:

Beginnings The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history.
Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the
space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the
two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan. By far the largest proportion of these
refugees — more than ten million of them — crossed the western border which divided the historic
state of Punjab, Muslims traveling west to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east to India. Slaughter
sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from
malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary
British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people
died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women
are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and
indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were
destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned. Astonishingly, and despite many warnings, the new
governments of India and Pakistan were unprepared for the convulsion: they had not anticipated
that the fear and uncertainty created by the drawing of borders based on headcounts of religious
identity — so many Hindus versus so many Muslims — would force people to flee to what they
considered ‘safer’ places, where they would be surrounded by their own kind. People traveled in
buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot in great columns called kafilas, which could stretch for
dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 400,000 people, refugees traveling east
to India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route. This
is the generality of Partition: it exists publicly in history books. The particular is harder to
discover; it exists privately in the stories told and retold inside so many households in India and
Pakistan. I grew up with them: like many Punjabis of my generation, I am from a family of
Partition refugees. Memories of Partition, the horror and brutality of the time, the harking back
to an — often mythical — past where Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs lived together in relative peace
and harmony, have formed the staple of stories I have lived with. My mother and father come
from Lahore, a city loved and sentimentalized by its inhabitants, which lies only twenty miles inside
the Pakistan border. My mother tells of the dangerous journeys she twice made back there to bring
her younger brothers and sister to India. My father remembers fleeing Lahore to the sound of
guns and crackling fire. I would listen to these stories with my brothers and sister and hardly take
them in. We were middle-class Indians who had grown up in a period of relative calm and
prosperity, when tolerance and ‘secularism’ seemed to be winning the argument. These stories — of
loot, arson, rape, murder — came out of a different time. They meant little to me. Then, in October
1984, the prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her security guards, both Sikhs. For
days afterwards Sikhs all over India were attacked in an orgy of violence and revenge. Many
homes were destroyed and thousands died. In the outlying suburbs of Delhi more than three
thousand were killed, often by being doused in kerosene and then set alight. They died horrible,
macabre deaths. Black burn marks on the ground showed where their bodies had lain. The
government — now headed by Mrs Gandhi’s son Rajiv — remained indifferent, but several citizens’
groups came together to provide relief, food and shelter. I was among the hundreds of people who
worked in these groups. Every day, while we were distributing food and blankets, compiling lists of
the dead and missing, and helping with compensation claims, we listened to the stories of the people
who had suffered. Often older people, who had come to Delhi as refugees in 1947, would remember
that they had been through a similar terror before. ‘We didn’t think it could happen to us in our
own country,’ they would say. ‘This is like Partition again.’ Here, across the River Jamuna, just a
few miles from where I lived, ordinary, peaceable people had driven their neighbors from their
homes and murdered them for no readily apparent reason than that they were of a different
religious community. The stories of Partition no longer seemed quite so remote: people from the
same country, the same town, the same village, could still be divided by the politics of their religious
difference, and, once divided, could do terrible things to each other. Two years later, working on a
film about Partition for a British television channel, I began to collect stories from its survivors.
Many were horrific and of a kind that, when I was younger and heard them second or third hand,
I had found hard to believe: women jumping into wells to drown themselves so as to avoid rape or
forced religious conversion; fathers beheading their own children so they would avoid the same
dishonourable fate. Now I was hearing them from witnesses whose bitterness, rage and hatred —
which, once uncovered, could be frightening — told me they were speaking the truth. Their stories
affected me deeply. Nothing as cruel and bloody had happened in my own family so far as I knew,
but I began to realize that Partition was not, even in my family, a closed chapter of history — that
its simple, brutal political geography infused and divided us still. The divisions were there in everyday
life, as were their contradictions: how many times have I heard my parents, my grandmother,
speak with affection and longing of their Muslim friends in Lahore, and how many times with
irrational prejudice about ‘those Muslims’; how many times had I heard my mother speak with a
sense of betrayal of her brother who had married a Muslim ... It took 1984 to make me
understand how ever-present Partition was in our lives too, to recognize that it could not be so
easily put away inside the covers of history books. I could no longer pretend that this was a history
that belonged to another time, to someone else. I began, like any other researcher, by looking at
what had been written about Partition. And there was no dearth of material. Yet, as I read my
way through it, I found myself becoming increasingly dissatisfied, sometimes even angry. If the
books I was reading were to be believed, the Partition of India was something that happened in
August 1947. A series of events preceded it: these included the growing divide between the Congress
and the Muslim League, the debates between Jinnah and Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and a host of other
developments on the ‘political’ front. And a series of events accompanied and followed it: violence,
mass migration, refugeeism, rehabilitation. But the ‘history’ of Partition seemed to lie only in the
political developments that had led up to it. These other aspects — what had happened to the
millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the ‘human dimensions’ of
this history — somehow seemed to have a ‘lesser’ status in it. Perhaps this was because they had
to deal with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful
regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong
determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture ‘factually’. Yet, could it
really be that they had no place in the history of Partition? Why then did they live on so vividly in
individual and collective memory? I looked at what the large political facts of this history seemed to
be saying. If I was reading them right, it would seem that Partition was now over, done with, a
thing of the past. Yet, all around us there was a different reality: partitions everywhere, communal
tension, religious fundamentalism, continuing divisions on the basis of religion. In Delhi, Sikhs
became targets of communal attacks in 1984; in Bhagalpur in Bihar, hundreds of Muslims were
killed in one of India’s worst communal riots in 1989; a few years later, the Babri Mosque was
destroyed in Ayodhya by frenzied Hindu communalists (supported, openly and brazenly, by political
parties such as the Bhartiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad and the Shiv Sena), and later, thousands of Muslims were again targeted in Surat,
Ahmedabad and Bombay. In each of these instances, Partition stories and memories were used
selectively by the aggressors: militant Hindus were mobilized using the one-sided argument that
Muslims had killed Hindus at Partition, they had raped Hindu women, and so they must in turn be
killed, and their women subjected to rape. And the patterns were there in individual life too: a
Muslim and a Hindu in independent India could not easily choose to marry each other without
worrying about whether one or the other of them would survive the wrath of their families or
communities; if such a marriage broke up, or for some reason ended up in court, you could be sure
that it would be accompanied by public announcements, for example on the part of the judiciary,
about those who had accepted the two-nation theory and those who had not. All of this seemed to
emphasize that Partition could not so easily be put away, that its deep, personal meanings, its
profound sense of rupture, the differences it engendered or strengthened, still lived on in so many
people’s lives. I began to realize that Partition was surely more than just a political divide, or a
division of properties, of assets and liabilities. It was also, to use a phrase that survivors use
repeatedly, a ‘division of hearts’. It brought untold suffering, tragedy, trauma, pain and violence to
communities who had hitherto lived together in some kind of social contract. It separated families
across an arbitrarily drawn border, sometimes overnight, and made it practically impossible for
people to know if their parents, sisters, brothers or children were alive or dead. A mother and
daughter, separated in the violence of Partition, found each other fifty years later through the
agency of a newsmagazine when, in search of stories to mark fifty years of independence for India,
a reporter and a photographer went looking for families divided at Partition. A brother and a
sister were brought together after fifty years at the border by the same newsmagazine. A father
whose thirteen-year-old daughter was abducted from Pakistan by Hindu men, made several trips to
India to try and track her down. On one of these, he was arrested on charges of being a spy and
jailed. His daughter was never returned to him. These aspects of Partition — how families were
divided, how friendships endured across borders, how people coped with the trauma, how they
rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experience
of dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns and villages they
settled in — find little reflection in written history. Yet, increasingly after 1984, I began to feel
that they were essential to our knowing of Partition. What then, I asked myself, were the tools I
had to hand to begin this search, what were the ‘sources’ I could turn to? Writing on holocaust
memories and testimonies, James Young poses the question: how can we know the holocaust except
through the many ways in which it is handed down to us? 1 He answers it by suggesting that as
much as through its ‘history’, we know the holocaust through its literary, fictional, historical,
political representations, and through its personal, testimonial representations, for it is not only
the ‘facts’ of any event that are important, but equally, how people remember those facts, and how
they represent them. The question might well be extended to Partition, for how do we know this
event except through the ways in which it has been handed down to us: through fiction, memoirs,
testimonies, through memories, individual and collective, through the communalism it unleashed and,
only as one of these aspects, through the histories it has produced. Perhaps more than any other
event in modern Indian history Partition lives on in family histories particularly in north India,
where tales of the horror and brutality, the friendship and sharing, are told and retold between
communities, families and individuals. A Punjabi refugee only has to meet another Punjabi refugee
and immediately stories of ‘that time’, of home and country, are exchanged. Or, an Indian refugee
only has to meet a Pakistani refugee for the same process to begin. This collection of memories,
individual and collective, familial and historical, are what make up the reality of Partition. They
illuminate what one might call the ‘underside’ of its history. They are the ways in which we can
know this event. In many senses, they are the history of the event. It is to these, then, that I
decided to turn. The choice brought its own problems. Working with memory is never simple or
unproblematic. I am deeply aware of the problems that attach to the method I have chosen. There
has been considerable research to show that memory is not ever ‘pure’ or ‘unmediated’. So much
depends on who remembers, when, with whom, indeed to whom, and how. But to me, the way people
choose to remember an event, a history, is at least as important as what one might call the ‘facts’
of that history, for after all, these latter are not self-evident givens; instead, they too are
interpretations, as remembered or recorded by one individual or another. Let me try to explain this
with an example. One of the commonest responses I encountered when I began work was people’s
(initial) reluctance to speak . What, they asked me, is the use of remembering, of excavating
memories we have put behind us? Every time I was faced with this question, I came up with a
question of my own: why, I wondered, were people so reluctant to remember this time? Surely this
reluctance in itself pointed to something? Was it only to do with the horrific nature of events —
sanitized into numbers and statistics in the pages of history books — or was it to do, at least in
some instances, with people’s own complicity in this history? There had been, at Partition, no ‘good’
people and no ‘bad’ ones; virtually every family had a history of being both victims and aggressors
in the violence. And if this was so, surely that told us something about why people did not wish to
remember it, publicly, except perhaps within their families where the ‘ugly’ parts of this history
could be suppressed. How then, we might ask, extending James Young’s formulation, can we know
Partition except in the ways in which it has been handed down to us: not only in the texts and
memories it has produced but even through people’s reluctance to remember it. In this kind of
knowing then, what we know as ‘facts’ are not self-evident givens. So much of the existing history
of Partition is made up of debates about these ‘facts’ — debates that balance one person’s
interpretation against another — that I do not plan to repeat those or indeed to go into them
here. Thus, although Partition is the subject of this book, the reader will not find here a
chronology of events leading up to Partition, or indeed the many ‘political’ negotiations that followed
it. Nor will he/she find much about the major players of this history: Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah,
Liaquat Ali Khan, Mountbatten. Their absence from my work is deliberate. Instead, I focus on the
stories of the smaller, often invisible, players: ordinary people, women, children, scheduled castes. I
do this principally through interviews and oral narratives . Immediately I say this I know that I
am entering a problematic terrain. Oral history is a deeply contested area in historical discourse. I
have no wish to pose people’s narratives, or even a notion of ‘raw experience’, against something
that we might call history, for both are not unproblematic concepts. I am not a historian. History
is not my subject. I have come to this work through a political — and personal — engagement with
history, contemporary communalism, and a deep and abiding belief in feminism. All of these have
led me to the realization that it is extremely important to be able to listen, to attempt to
understand how and why religious difference, for example, has come to acquire the kind of resilience
that it has. Why is it that so many second and third generation Hindus and Sikhs after Partition
have come to internalize notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ when they have no reference of Partition —
except through family and community memories? What is it about the selectivity of memory that,
in this case, feelings of fear and hatred seem to have been nurtured, to have a greater resilience,
while feelings of friendship and sharing are not allowed to surface? I am aware of the many pitfalls
that are attendant on the method I have chosen: there is no way of knowing, for example, if the
stories people choose to tell are ‘true’ or not, nor of knowing what they choose to suppress. How can
we know that, four or five decades after the event, the stories are not simply rehearsed
performances; or that they are told differently for different people, perhaps tailored to suit what
the person thinks the interviewer wishes to hear? How do we reach beyond the stories into the
silences they hide; how can we assume that speech, the breaking of silence, is in itself a good
thing? There are a hundred such questions. But I am not making a claim for oral history as
against what we understand as the disciplinary narratives of history; rather, I would like to ask if
there is a way in which people’s stories, notwithstanding all their problems, can somehow expand,
stretch the definitions and boundaries of history and find a place in it. Is there some way in
which history can make space for the small, the individual voice? Whatever its limitations, the oral
narrative offers a different way of looking at history, a different perspective. For, because such
narratives often flow into each other in terms of temporal time, they blur the somewhat rigid
timeframes within which history situates itself. Because people locate their memories by different
dates, or different timeframes, than the events that mark the beginning and end of histories,
their narratives flow above, below, through the disciplinary narratives of history. They offer us a
way of turning the historical lens at a somewhat different angle, and to look at what this
perspective offers. I do not want to argue here that oral narratives can replace what we see as
history, only that they can offer a different and extremely important perspective on history, a
perspective which, I believe, enriches history. I have come to believe that there is no way we can
begin to understand what Partition was about, unless we look at how people remember it. I do not
wish here to carry out a literal exercise of first seeing how people remember the history of
Partition, and then attempting to penetrate their narrative for its underlying facts to arrive at
an approximation of some kind of ‘truth’. Instead, I wish to look at the memories for themselves —
even if they are shifting, changing, unreliable. James Young says: ‘Whatever “fictions” emerge from
the survivors’ accounts are not deviations from the “truth” but are part of the truth in any
particular version. The fictiveness in testimony does not involve disputes about facts, but the
inevitable variance in perceiving and representing these facts, witness by witness, language by
language, culture by culture.’ 2 I can find no more eloquent description of what I hope to do in this
book. Collecting material is sometimes the easiest part of putting a book together. The difficult
decisions come when one wants to try and figure out what to include and what to leave out. Over
the many long years that I have been working on the subject, I have interviewed perhaps seventy
or so people. While this is a number that sounds quite substantial to me, in terms of the number of
people who were affected by Partition, it is negligible, an indication of the fact that no single
individual can tackle this project in its entirety. While one part of this book is made up of my telling
of Partition stories, in the other parts, people I have interviewed tell their own stories. But of the
number I spoke with, I have included only a fraction. This is not because the others are not worth
reproducing. Rather it is because each story has been virtually impossible to edit out of this book
for one reason or another. And in the end I have chosen to use a rather arbitrary criterion. I
have included the stories that meant the most to me, stories of people with whom I have formed
real friendships, or stories to which I keep returning again and again . In presenting the
interviews to the reader, I have taken the liberty of narrativizing them — that is, I have removed
the questions posed by the interviewers, and have let the text run as one continuous narrative,
although no chronological alterations have been made. And in a few cases, I have retained the
interventions made by other people, particularly in instances where they add to, or illuminate,
certain aspects of the text. This shaping of the interviews to turn them into more ‘readable’ texts
has been done quite consciously. I do not believe the transcript of any interview can ever be an
unmediated text. In transferring words to text, so much is lost: the particular inflection, the
hesitation over certain thoughts and phrases, even certain feelings, the body language, which often
tells a different story from the words, and indeed the conscious ‘shaping’ of the interview by the
interviewer who is usually in a situation of power vis-à-vis the person being interviewed. Given this,
I thought it pointless to pretend that the interviews could appear before the reader in some ‘pure’
form and have edited them into what I feel is a more readable form. The full text of each interview,
and indeed of the ones I have not used here will, I hope, be housed in a library or archive so that
they can be used by others researching this area. The fact that most interviews took place in
family situations also meant that women were seldom alone when they spoke to us. Much of the
time the interview had to be conducted in the nooks and crannies of time that were available to
women in between household tasks. Equally, if their husbands or sons were around, they tended to
take over the interview, inadvertently or otherwise, making women lapse into a sort of silence. This
is not uncommon — many oral historians have written about the difficulty of speaking to and with
women, of learning to listen differently, often of listening to the hidden nuance, the half-said thing,
the silences which are sometimes more eloquent than speech. Listening to women is, I think, a
different thing between women, than it is between men and women. When I reread the interviews
now, it strikes me that there are some very clear differences in the speech of men and of women. Is
there such a thing, then, as a gendered telling of Partition? I learnt to recognize this in the way
women located, almost immediately, this major event in the minor keys of their lives. From the
women I learned about the minutiae of their lives, while for the most part men spoke of the
relations between communities, the broad political realities. Seldom was there an occasion when a
man being interviewed would speak of a child lost or killed, while for a woman there was no way in
which she could omit such a reference. This is a question I discuss further in the conclusion to this
work. The process of identifying people to speak to was an almost random one. I first began to
consciously speak to people when I was working on a film called A Division of Hearts made by two
friends for Channel 4 Television in Britain. But once I had begun, almost everywhere I turned,
there was a story to be listened to. In Delhi particularly, you can be sure that almost every other
Punjabi person over a certain age has a history of Partition somewhere in his or her family. I
would often find myself stopping on roads to talk to people I thought looked the right age. Once,
after talking to a family in Jangpura in Delhi, I came out to find an auto-rickshaw to take me
home. The driver was dressed in the salwar-kurta that is typical of Pakistani Punjabis. I asked
him where he was from. He responded with a question — one that is commonly asked when you ask
north Indians where they are from. Are you asking about now or earlier, he said. The word ‘earlier’
is only an approximate translation of the word that he actually used: ‘pichche se’, which refers to
something that comes from an earlier time, and has been left behind. I told him I was interested
in where he was from ‘earlier’, not now. He said he was from Baluchistan, and had stayed there
for nearly ten years after Partition, in a small village where a community of Hindus lived peaceably,
without any problems. Soon, we were in his house talking about his recollections of the time. One
day, as I walked out of a take-away restaurant in south Delhi, clutching a roti and kebab, I was
accosted by a beggar woman asking for money. She spoke in Punjabi, an unusual thing, for there
are very few Punjabi beggars in the city. I asked her where she was from. She responded with the
same question: now or earlier. I gave her the same answer and she told me she had come from a
small village called Chak 53, that she had walked over with the large kafila of refugees and had
ended up, by a circuitous route, on the streets of Delhi, begging. In this way, I moved from one
person to another, one story to another, and collected stories, almost randomly. This is one reason
why there is no clear pattern to the oral narratives in this book. Some patterns will, however, be
discernible to the reader. For example, many of the interviews I have used come from the same
region — Rawalpindi district — and relate to incidents of violence that took place there in March
1947, just a few months before Partition. Often, in an attempt to recreate the communities that
Partition destroyed, people moved en masse to one place, or were housed by the State in a
particular place. When I began to track down Partition survivors, I was led, first of all, to
survivors of the Rawalpindi violence who lived in a middle class area in south Delhi. One person put
me in touch with another, and then another and in this way I collected many stories. It is for this
reason that the accounts of Rawalpindi survivors form a major part of my work. Apart from all
the methodological problems that attach to oral narratives, they are also very difficult to deal with
in practical, structural terms. How do you structure a book that is primarily made up of such
accounts? Should it contain just the texts of the interviews, should there be an accompanying
commentary, should there be analysis and/or explanation, should the interviews be long or short,
and so on. I have grappled with all of these questions. In the beginning, I thought it better to
simply put together a book of oral accounts, without any explanation or commentary. Gradually, I
came to believe otherwise: as a reader, and a publisher, I know that very few readers actually go
through a collection of oral accounts unless they are very short, and I thought the things people
said in the interviews were too important to be either summarily cut short, or just put together
without any comment. Also, if I was shaping the interviews, I felt I needed to point to what, for
me, was significant in those interviews. As I got more involved in the work, I found there was a
great deal I wanted to say, in addition to what the people I spoke to had said. There were their
stories, as they told them, and there was what I learnt and understood from those stories. I then
began to think of a way of meshing the two together. The structure that you see in the book now,
with excerpts from interviews forming a major part of the analytical chapters, was what emerged
from this. Even so, there remained the problem of where and how to locate the full text of the
interviews. I felt it important that at least for the small number that I had selected, there be a
place that was an integral part of the book. After much thought, I decided to place all interviews
together in a separate section at the end of the book. But having once done that, the same
problem re-presented itself: would people actually read them, or would they see them as simply
adjuncts to the other chapters? It seemed likely that that was what would happen, and to me the
interviews were far too important to be put aside as an appendix. Finally, I decided to move the
interviews into the main text, and to supplement what I have said in each chapter with one or two
interviews. Inasmuch as it was possible, I tried to relate the interview(s) to the chapter in which
they have been included, but this was not possible each time. It is difficult, indeed it is too pat, to
have, at the end of each chapter an interview that perfectly fits the subject matter of that
particular chapter. Had I had a list of chapters in mind before starting this work, I might have
been able to consciously look for interviews that could directly relate to specific subjects. As it was,
my interviews did not fit any particular pattern. Nonetheless, I have chosen to place them
alongside each chapter because I believe they offer insights into all, and more, of the things I have
discussed in this book, and are not only limited to the chapters they figure in. Sometimes, then, the
interview begins the chapter, at others it ends it, and in one instance, it provides the thread that
weaves the chapter together. I think the reader may find it helpful to keep this in mind while
reading the interviews. While interviews form my primary sources, I have also looked at diaries,
memoirs, newspaper reports and the kinds of documents that I feel are important for my work:
letters written by different people, reports of enquiry commissions, pamphlets and, of course, books.
From these I have reconstructed many different ‘voices’ of Partition: official, unofficial, informal,
others. These include the voices of people telling stories, the voices through which they speak in
memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, those that emerge from the official narratives, those that are
evident in communal discourses, and woven through all this, my own voice, reading, speaking,
questing, hazarding explanations. Together, these have made for a narrative in which my presence,
as author and interpreter, is quite visible, some would say almost too visible. I make no apologies
for this. I can only say that I have always had a deep suspicion of histories that are written as if
the author were but a mere vehicle, histories that, to use Roland Barthes’ phrase, ‘seem to write
themselves’. The absence of the ‘I’ in such histories helps perhaps to establish distance, even to
create the illusion of objectivity, perhaps to establish factuality. I have no wish to pretend that
these histories, these stories, are in any way an ‘objective’ rendering of Partition. I do not believe
such a thing is possible. For the many years that this work has been with me, I have felt involved
in it, intensely and emotionally, politically and academically. To pretend then, that this is a history
that has ‘written itself’, so to speak, would have been dishonest. In the process of working on
Partition I have become, like every other researcher or writer who gets involved, obsessive about
this work. For years, I have thought of little else. One of the things that troubled me enormously
when I began was precisely the lack of what is known as objectivity in my work. There was no way
I could deny a personal involvement; no way I could pretend that there wasn’t an emotional
entanglement; no way I could wipe out my politics. It has taken me several years to feel comfortable
with this fact. If this account is read as history, it may well be thrown out the door. Perhaps
then, the best way to read it is to add the word ‘personal’ to the history that I am attempting in
this book. And to throw out, once and for all, any notions of objectivity or distance. This is a
personal history that does not pretend to be objective. There is also another reason that my voice
moves in and out of these stories. Oral history is a methodological tool that many feminist
historians have found enormously empowering. Looking at women’s narratives and testimonies, and
placing them alongside, or indeed against, the official discourses of history, has offered feminist
historians a new and different way of looking at history. How does ‘history’ look when seen through
the eyes of women? How does it evolve, in narratives and testimonies, when women talk to women?
But while oral history has been empowering, it has also brought its own problems. After all, the
telling is always only one-sided. How, further, can such historians ensure that the subjects of their
interviews are not simply the ‘raw material’ on whose experiences they will build their theories? In
some instances, oral historians, and particularly feminist oral historians, have attempted to
return the results of their research to their subjects, in an attempt to not be exploitative. While
such attempts establish sincerity of motive, they do little to change the equation of power that
underlies the collection of oral testimonies: for long after your subjects have spoken to you, their
voices will live on in your work, they may help to promote your career, and while they continue to
figure where you are concerned, the subjects themselves will recede further and further into the
background. The always troubling awareness of this ambivalence has directed me to choose a
methodology in which I make no pretence at being a shadow, in which I attempt to put the stories
I have heard at centre stage, along with what I felt, and continue to feel, about them. Thus,
although this book is not ‘only’ about women, women, their histories, the methodologies they have
created, lie at the heart of it. It is as a feminist, someone to whom the tools of feminist
historiography are important, that I approach this work. There is, however, a major lacuna in my
work: it is one-sided; it relates only to one aspect of Partition — that is, the partition of Punjab. I
have not looked at the east, at Bengal, at all. In the main this is because I do not have the
language; also the partition of Bengal was so very different from that of Punjab that I would not
have known where and how to begin. Equally, I have had no access to information, interviews or
anything else from Pakistan (other than, of course, the story of my uncle, and here there was a
connection of blood, as well as one other interview that I have borrowed from the work of some
friends). It is one of the tragedies of Partition that researchers working on this major event in
the history of the subcontinent can only have access to both countries — India and Pakistan — if
they belong to a third country. Not only are files and documents not easily available to researchers
from either side, but, when attempting to interview people, the baggage of bitterness and pain
makes it virtually impossible for someone from India to interview people from Pakistan — or indeed
the other way round — about something as emotive as Partition. I have tried, on many occasions,
to do this, but without success. The interviews you will see in this book were conducted over a
period of several years. When I began to talk to people, I had no fixed plan in mind: a book was not
on the agenda and it was only gradually that the idea for one crystallized. I decided quite early on,
however, that I would not follow a particular pattern in the interviews — that is, that there would
be no fixed questionnaire, no chosen ‘sample’ of people, in terms of geography or class or any other
category. I would simply ask people to speak about that time in their lives, and let the conversation
take its own course, to flow in whichever direction seemed appropriate. This was a deliberate
decision: if one is to do a proper collection of people’s histories of Partition, no one individual can
carry out such an enterprise. Any individual attempt then, such as mine is, remains limited. Given
this, carefully constructed questionnaires, or thought out samples, do not help to make the exercise
any more complete. I decided therefore, to follow whatever pattern the interviews dictated, and to
locate people in whatever way seemed best. Thus I spoke to many people, over extended periods of
time — sometimes, as in the case of Damyanti Sahgal, the interviews lasted several months. In
situations such as this, it is extremely difficult to be able to interview people alone. Most
conversations took place in family situations: even though we may have been speaking to one
person, the entire family — often several generations of it — would converge, and every now and
again, someone or the other would offer an explanation, or take on a question. Stories begun would
be left incomplete, and when resumed, would move on to something else. Later, we might come back
to the same story, or not at all. No neat chronologies marked the telling; there were no clear
beginnings and endings. I began to understand how much, and how easily, the past flowed into the
present, how remembering also meant reliving the past from within the context of the present. For
so many people then, 1947 and 1984 flowed into each other and often it became difficult to
disentangle what it was they were remembering: the memory of violence, the vulnerability of
victimhood elided the many years that had passed in-between. At others, having begun to
remember, to excavate memory, words would suddenly fail speech as memory encountered something
too painful, often too frightening to allow it to enter speech. ‘How can I describe this,’ would come
the anguished cry, ‘there are no words to do so.’ At such points, I chose not to push further, not
to force the surfacing of memories into speech. Tellings begun thus would be left incomplete: I learnt
to recognize this, the mixing of time past and time present, the incompleteness, often even
contradictoriness, in the stories as part of the process of remembering, to oneself and to others. I
recognized too the imbalance of power that oral historians have often spoken about as being
inherent in such situations: for the most part I watched, listened, recorded while people laid their
lives bare. When they turned around with a question to me: what do you think this will achieve,
who do you think will listen to your tapes, will this really make a difference to anything, to our lives,
the lives of others, I felt, immediately, the inadequacy of my answers. Did it matter to the people I
was speaking to that I felt it important that the memory of Partition not be lost? That the
history of Partition had ignored their experiences and stories, and mine was part of an exercise,
tentatively begun, to restore these stories to history? That remembering, to me, was an essential
part of forgetting? I had no easy answers to these questions. A last word about the trajectory
that has led me to this work. In the beginning, I began work alone. After some time, however, it
became very difficult to continue thus. The kinds of stories I was hearing were so harrowing, so full
of grief and anguish, that often I could not bear to listen to them. And I could not escape a sense
of having the burden of the stories somehow shifted onto myself — it seemed almost as if, after
their initial reluctance to speak, once people decided they would do so, they would do so almost
cathartically, making you, as listener, the bearer of their burden. I remember coming out of a long
interview with a family in Jangpura one day, and thinking that I would not be able to go on, to
constantly listen to stories of such violence, such horror. It was at this point that a very dear
friend of mine, Sudesh Vaid, stepped in — at my request — and with the two of us working together,
things became much easier. We were able to talk, to share some things, to laugh about others.
Several of the interviews you see in this book were done by us jointly — and this is why I often refer
to the interviewers in the plural — and some were begun by me, and then continued by both of us.
At some point in the work, Sudesh dropped out. One of the key reasons she did so was because she
now began to feel she could not cope with the kinds of stories we were hearing. By this time, I was
too involved to drop the project, and decided therefore to continue alone. It is one of my lasting
regrets that Sudesh did not stay with this project: had she done so, it would have been a richer,
and I firmly believe, a better — as indeed a very different — work. Whatever its limitations — and
there are many — I now put this work before the reader in the hope that it will make some
contribution, however small, to the writing of Partition histories, and that at some stage in the
not too distant future, access to both sides becomes freely available to all of us. In 1997 India and
Pakistan ‘celebrated’ fifty years of independence. At the time, I thought that the best way the two
countries could mark this moment was to open the borders, even if only for a limited period (a year,
perhaps two). I am convinced that, had this happened, there would have been hundreds and
thousands of people wanting to go across to the ‘other’ country, to visit their old homes, to meet
their old friends and relatives. But that moment is past: I think all we can hope for now is that
there will be some opening up, sometime, for unless that happens and we are able to talk about
Partition, I fear we may not be able to put it behind us.