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Remembering partition: 'It was like a slaughterhouse'
Monday, September 2, 2019 IST
Remembering partition:

Seventy years after the partition of India and Pakistan, survivors from both sides recount stories of horror.

 
 

"When you see your own mother drenched in blood and stomach opened, intestines coming up, how would you feel?"
 
Salahuddin Khalid was a young boy living in New Delhi when life as he knew it erupted in a cataclysm of violence and bloodshed.
 
It was 1947, and the border between the new nations of India and Pakistan had just been created.
 
Salahuddin and his family found themselves on the Indian side of the border.
 
They were Muslims in a land dominated by Hindus and Sikhs.
 
"I heard a shriek. I turned and I saw a Sikh with a sword in hand and my sister was running," he recalls.
 
"First, they entered the room of my mother, killed her, then they ran towards us."
 
Salahuddin fled in fear. When he returned, his mother lay mutilated.
 
"It was just like … a slaughterhouse," he says.
 
It has been 70 years since partition - the moment the subcontinent was divided by Britain, creating India and Pakistan. The number of survivors who remember that moment, and the violence that left more than a million people dead, are fast dwindling, leaving many worried that this part of history may soon be forgotten.
 
Back then, Salahuddin knew little of the political events that foreshadowed the deaths of his mother and at least a million more people across the Indian subcontinent.
 
But it was people like him who endured the deadly aftermath of Britain's historic decision to relinquish its Indian empire and carve it into two new nations along religious lines.
 
Now, 70 years later, memories of the horrors that unfolded as Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs turned on each other, remain raw in the minds of those who survived.
 
"When I remember all those things, I feel so much pain and my heart shrinks," says Salahuddin.
 
The creation of India and Pakistan prompted the biggest mass migration in human history, as Muslims who were scattered across India and Hindus and Sikhs who were in Pakistan desperately tried to make it to the other side of the border.
 
As people fled their homes, a wave of violence was unleashed with neighbours turning on each other.
 
"People who a year before would've attended each other's wedding parties … are murdering each other, raping each other's daughters, roasting each other's babies on spits," says historian William Dalrymple.
 
He describes how train stations in cities like Lahore, in the new nation of Pakistan, morphed into scenes of mass death.
 
"The platforms are literally awash with blood because a load of Hindus waiting on the platform to travel to India have been massacred, and another platform was covered with blood because a train had just arrived from India full of dead Muslims. Total chaos," says Dalyrymple.
 
Amolak Swani was a 17-year-old Hindu girl living with her parents in Peshawar, Pakistan, when she heard that a Muslim mob was approaching their home.
 
Her father told her and her mother that the attackers were setting homes on fire and taking women away.
 
"He was very frightened and he quickly gave my mother a bottle of petrol and some matches and told her … 'If we don't survive downstairs, then don't give up your honour. Pour the petrol on yourself and our daughter and don't let yourself be taken into the hands of those people'," she says.
 
The attackers eventually passed by their house, and Amolak and her family fled to the Indian city of Amritsar.
 
But other women didn't escape.
 
Sardar Joginder Singh Kholi, a Sikh teenager at the time of partition, recalls a woman named Veerawaali who lived in his village in Pakistan's Punjab province.
 
"She was a very beautiful woman. But during the unrest … Muslims were chasing after her," he says.

 
 
 
 
 

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Shibu Chandran
2 hours ago

Serving political interests in another person's illness is the lowest form of human value. A 70+ y old lady has cancer.

November 28, 2016 05:00 IST
Shibu Chandran
2 hours ago

Serving political interests in another person's illness is the lowest form of human value. A 70+ y old lady has cancer.

November 28, 2016 05:00 IST
Shibu Chandran
2 hours ago

Serving political interests in another person's illness is the lowest form of human value. A 70+ y old lady has cancer.

November 28, 2016 05:00 IST
Shibu Chandran
2 hours ago

Serving political interests in another person's illness is the lowest form of human value. A 70+ y old lady has cancer.

November 28, 2016 05:00 IST


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