Stories from partition - death and remembering
A black and white image of a man in Lahore overlooking some traffic.
Written By Arooj Khan
A recent bereavement provided me with a welcome reminder. Our grief is not equal to that of white people. Just as colonialism dictated, our death is in servitude to white grief. Any outpouring of collective emotions, similarly to collective Black and brown joy, is grimaced at, at best or criminalised. It is because our lives are considered ungrievable that grieving becomes a political act.
An example of this that has been etched into my memory was when I was walking my elderly and terminally ill Auntie along a road when a group of white teenagers and men started shouting ‘Oi Pakis’ to us as we crossed their paths. The anger and disgust at the lack of respect for a deteriorating human life almost cost me a criminal record, however, my Auntie shrugged her shoulders – already heavy with years of racial abuse - and excused them for not knowing any better.
Before any kind of theory or analysis, there exists a story. This story is pivotal to ensuring that our solidarity and vision is strengthened into a culture of honouring and resisting by remembering those who society chooses to forget, Yasmin Gunaratnam’s Death and the Migrant, Cindy Millstein’s Rebellious Mourning and Maya Kalaria’s Half Woman, Half Grief are all really important reference books for this.
The recent bereavement that I alluded to earlier was that of my dad’s oldest brother, Sultan Mehmood Khan who died in the early hours of Saturday 15th January 2022.
He was the last remaining survivor of Partition in my family, and the kindest gift he left to his kin was an interview with an Indian television channel, where he shared his life story and the impact of the Punjab Partition on him and the wider community.
He explained proudly how he was a Pashtun, the son of Inayatullah Khan and the grandson of Dost Muhammad Khan, born in 1931 in Ahvaz in the southwest of Iran where my grandfather was serving as a police officer. Shortly after his birth, his mother and twin sister passed away, which resulted in my Uncle and his father travelling back to Mawlah Pathaan in the city of Kalanaur in the Punjab - a piece of land given to my ancestors with the agreement that they would hold a regional court (a Loya Jirga) on behalf of the Mughal Emperor at the time.
My Uncle describes how everyone - Sikh, Muslim and Hindu - would all wear a ‘pug’ (a turban), signifying the solidarity between the communities and everyone was included in all kinds of celebrations regardless of their religion. Mutual distrust did not exist on the face of it, rather similar socio-economic classes and occupations played a large part in ensuring that genuine and collective solidarity existed.
However, Partition changed all of this, given that religion and national identity became intertwined.
During the interview, my Uncle explains how my grandfather ordered ammunition from Peshawar and would beat any member of his family if they spoke about deserting Kalanaur, a place they had called home for so long. Eventually, it grew too unsafe for them to stay and it was decided they would leave in the middle of the night with the clothes on their back.
My grandfather said that the family should disperse as they would have a greater chance of survival. My Uncle and grandfather, travelling together, traversed a terrain littered with dead bodies. When they arrived at the border, my grandfather recognised a young Sikh man from Kalanaur who helped them cross over to newly created West Pakistan, never to return.
My Uncle ends his segment of the interview by saying that ‘Kalanaur has never left my heart’.
Not enough airtime is given to the horrors of Partition, namely because Britain did not want it to be known that its ‘gracious’ offer of independence wreaked the most devastating havoc, fragmenting an ancient land, causing the death of millions and creating enemies out of the best of friends.
The Partition generation is dying and it hurts to know that nothing has been provided to them in exchange for their pain and suffering. They had to endure it, repress it and pass it on, leaving the current generation to unpick the trauma.
We know, too, what the racial inequities of grief mean for our future; a collective, colonial trauma that our white counterparts will never understand and most likely will never experience.
But, with the stories of Partition seeping into our shared activism, art, music, photography, research, and literature, the importance of passing on the stories of those who survived it and mourning those who died for the creation of our ‘democratic’ homelands is profound.
Eventually, we will heal from Partition. Until then, we will reclaim our time to grieve, rest and collectively mourn in order to create the basis and momentum for further radical change and remembrance.