What followed, especially in Punjab, the principal center of the violence, was one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way.
All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors. Within a few months, the landscape of South Asia had changed irrevocably.
In , Karachi, designated the first capital of Pakistan, was Delhi, the capital of independent India, was one-third Muslim. By the end of the decade, almost all the Hindus of Karachi had fled, while two hundred thousand Muslims had been forced out of Delhi. The changes made in a matter of months remain indelible seventy years later. More than twenty years ago, I visited the novelist Ahmed Ali.
Forster, and is probably still the finest novel written about the Indian capital. Ali had grown up in the mixed world of old Delhi, but by the time I visited him he was living in exile in Karachi. All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed. So many words are lost. Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and journalist of varying artistic attainment.
Afterward, during several years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he translated and adopted as models. Although his work is still little known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him a wider audience.
Although he faced criticism and censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that accompanied Partition. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped.
As he tries to explain his affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:. I thought she had gone into a faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside the city. Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and. Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. I had carried a dead body.
Two or three years after the Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India.
It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not. However, the decision had been taken at the topmost level on both sides. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh. The need to earn a living forced Manto into a state of hyper-productivity; for a period in , he was writing a book a month, at the rate of one story a day. They weren't happy about things like economic problems as a result of rules put on them by the British.
There was also a lot of tension between Hindus and Muslims. In the years leading up to independence, the idea for the new independent region to be divided into two separate states - India and Pakistan - was born. India was formed mostly of Hindu regions, while Pakistan was mostly Muslim areas. The partition of India forced millions of people to leave their homes to move to the other state.
This was the largest forced migration of people that has ever happened, which wasn't because of war or famine. Ten-year-old Sumayyah, year-old Shubhashukla and nine-year-old Kamolpriya went on the mission of their lives to find out what happened to their families during the Partition of India. Since Partition, there has been conflict between India and Pakistan - particularly over an area called Kashmir, which both states say, even now, should belong to them.
Pakistan and India have gone to war with each other, and there was conflict when East Pakistan broke away and became Bangladesh. At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake up to life and freedom. There are still tensions and divisions in the country and many families have never been able to go back to where their ancestors used to live.
There was nothing that could have prepared the approximately 14 million refugees for this nightmare. The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan was accompanied by one of the largest mass migrations in human history and violence on a scale that had seldom been seen before.
As the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal were effectively split in half approximately seven million Hindus and Sikhs and seven million Muslims found themselves in the wrong country. Believing they would return "home," many families left their valuables behind before they packed up their essential belongings and began the trek to India or West or East Pakistan now Bangladesh.
Many never made it. How could neighboring communities, accustomed to centuries of relative peace have suddenly turned so violently upon one another? In August , the British decided to end their year long rule in the Indian subcontinent and to divide it into two separate nations , Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India.
The process of partition, however, was not simple. In addition to the British-controlled territories, the subcontinent also consisted of many other territories under French, Portuguese or Omani rule, as well as more than sovereign princely states ruled by local monarchs.
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