Reality of Borders: one of the most traumatic partition

 

The Golden Temple , Amritsar where people from all over the world come to bathe in its water , to look at the holy book inside the temple and to experience the holiness of this place.This place is the epicenter of Sikhism. Close by there is another important Sikh place called Kartarpur. It was established by Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism  500 years ago. It is the place where Guru Nanak spent his last days and it is the 2nd holiest place in Sikhism. For centuries Sikhs were able to make pilgrimage between this place between their heartland but in 1947 a British lawyer drew a border here turning British India into two countries India and Pakistan with the Golden temple on one side and Kartarpur to another side. Thanks to this border India and Sikhs are now cut off with their holy site.

Dera Baba Nanak, India - a platform at the border site where Sikhs can look at their holy place through a telescope which is just 3-4 km away.

In addition to cutting off the two  communities from their sacred sites this border separated families cut across rivers , forests ,farms , etc. we know today this border is heavily fortified with 3000 km plus fence.

This is the story of violence separation, one.  of the most traumatic events of the 20th century.It’s the story of how the hastily drawn line on a map separated one people into two.

The British controlled parts of India for nearly 200 years. In 1947 an massive independent movement was swelling across the subcontinent  and while back in Britain the country was in massive debt after fighting world war 2 and didn’t have resources to hold on to their colony so they started making plans to leave India. British officials thought that a proper transfer of power would be around five years but British leader in charge Lord Mountbatten arrived in early 1947 , he hastily decided to shrink their exit timeline and so what needed five years would now need to be done in just 4 months.  British India was to be split into two independent Nations, a mostly Muslim Pakistan and Hindu majority ,but officially secular India. 

 To do the actual drawing of the border , the British brought in the lawyer from London. He arrived a month before the British were supposed to leave India. He hadn’t been to British India before and didn’t know much about the region. He had no Idea about India ,Indian geography and Indian politics. Yet he was the one drawing the lines on a map that would affect millions of lives.

During his visit this British lawyer looked at maps and census data , focusing on the maps that showed religious identity of people in India. India has a wide variety of religions and based on these census maps, you can see the people of all religions lived among  each other all over the region.

Below map shows how people from various religion lives together before partition.

So to draw the line British lawyer looked at individual districts putting any district that had Muslim majority population into the new country of Pakistan , while Hindu and Sikh majority districts would be kept within India. Based on this method the lawyer begins to see what the border looks like. He only had five weeks to do this. He later wrote that it would have taken years to settle on property boundary and that’s method of drawing a line conceals that within the district there were sizable communities of all religions that had been living side by side for centuries all through India.

On 15th august 1947 both countries got independence. The lawyer left India on that day and he would never return to India again. Two days after independence the borders were made public, prompting more than 14 millions people to leave their home, their lives for what was now their side of the border. Hindu and Sikhs from Pakistan moved to India and many Muslims in India moved to new Pakistan. These were the people who were indeed forced to lose their entire home , their memories , their childhood and the things they saw. It was one of the largest forced migrations of people ever and it was a chaos , a chaos that led to widespread unspeakable violence cities on fire , sexual violence against women , trains with full of dead bodies.

The division of subcontinent became known as partition of India. The phrase synonym with trauma fueled by the reckless management of Imperial power.

Mssania an small village near border in India to be muslim community before partition. And in the middle of the town is this shrine where resident would conduct ornate Muslim burial practices on the graves. 

The town was actually in Pakistan in most of the maps but in the end  the British lawyer decided to draw the line here.

People here discovered that they were part of new India and many of them fled just across the border of the new state of Pakistan and they left this place empty. But just as Muslim were leaving this village for Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan were coming across into India and some ended up here. The Hindus and Sikhs that now live in this community have taken it upon themselves to continue Muslim traditions that this community was based off of. They continued to maintain these graves and these symbols even though they not necessarily pertain to their own religion. This is a sign of respect, of common identity in spite of the border.

But this one side of the story. Within the few months after drawing the border India and Pakistan fighting an all out war and many other wars were fought between these two nations.

If you take away the geopolitical bluster , the nukes , the barrier, the trauma of partition, you can still see how much these two  countries have in common. Same language , same food , same taste Hindu , Muslim and Sikh use to live together , attend each other social functions, marriages , everything. If you stand in the wall city in Amritsar and you stand in the walled city in Lahore , the smell that gives away is the same.

It is the politician who poisons people’s mind. The divide is created , nurtured, fostered because it suits certain politics. Over the years , politicians from both the sides have exploited tension with other sides of the stock feeling of nationalism.

With the repercussion of the  traumatic events of 1947 , this fortified and volatile border remains unchanged. If anything , it’s getting thicker. 73 year later , the shadow of partition continues to divide families , halt trade , stop cooperation, instill fear ,promote hatred and people  live in its shadow on both side young and old , continue to live with the division that’s superimposed upon their history of deep connection.

 

 

 

 

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