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Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

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Aanchal Malhotra

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“Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided”

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Book:Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
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“PARTITION' are your drains clean of blood now? do you recall the names, and faces of your own people? did your countrymen get to die right like human beings? butchered sisters and mothers still wait by the windows, with no lantern. that was no proper farewell past midnight. minarets whisper your ghazals to an empty sky, Koklass’ know the borders too. what have you done, sir?”

BordersPartitionGhazalPartition 1947Partition Of IndiaPartition Of Subcontinent 1947Minarets
Book:Dying With A Little Patience: Poems
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“Partition tore India into three pieces. Disaster struck. There was East Pakistan, there was West Pakistan, and there was the rest of India. Millions of people were uprooted from their houses, tens of thousands massacred on both sides. It was one of the greatest mass migrations and killings in human history. People today do not realize the tremendous trauma of Partition, whose negative vibrations continue to haunt us even today.”

IndiaPakistanKashmirPartitionPunjabPartition 1947
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“That afternoon, as the sun dipped below the horizon, the remaining British men and women in the subcontinent sensed their time in the land rapidly slipping away. They weren’t alone and many Anglo-Indian, Armenian, Chinese, Jewish, Irish and Burmese communities who had flourished in India under colonial rule were also leaving. ‘It seems so tempting to stay on,’ wrote Keenan. “One is only 45 and there may be many years to come. However, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, I have decided not to serve on with India or Pakistan. We must think of our home in some very nice place in England and make a quick break with the East … India is no place for us now.”

HistoryIndiaPartitionRaj
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“For the mainly Urdu- speaking migrants from India who abandoned home and hearth to make their futures in a predominantly non- Urdu speaking country, Pakistan was the land of opportunity. Better educated than most of their coreligionists in western Pakistan, they expected to get the best jobs. Some of these muhajirs, as the refugees from India came to be known, had sensibly moved their money before partition in the hope of starting up new businesses in both wings of the country. The idea of material gain encapsulated in “Pakistan Zindabad” was a stretch removed from the other more loaded slogan, defining its meaning in vague Islamic terms. But for all their claims dressed up in religious terminology, the protagonists of an Islamic state too had their sights on power and pelf in the Muslim El Dorado.”

PakistanPartitionMuslim Elite
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