Of Partition, pain & people

Simran Sodhi

The Partition is etched in the history of the subcontinent. The tragedy that unfolded with the mass migration of people across the newly created states of India and Pakistan has been the subject of various movies, books and poetry. Now, if things go according to plan, the tragic but important chapter in the life of this nation and its people will soon get a museum for itself.

Kishwar Desai, the driving force behind the idea, hopes that the museum is in place by 2017 to coincide with the 70th year of India’s independence. The museum to be called Yaadgaar-e-Taqseem or Memories of Partition is likely to be built in Amritsar. It will house paintings, sculptures, poetry and oral histories of people who migrated during the painful period of Partition.

Recently, the Partition Museum Project put out an exhibition entitled Rising from the Dust: Hidden Tales of India’s 1947 Refugee Camps. The exhibition, along with lectures, spread over the course of a week, offered a great opportunity to revisit the past and also to learn as how to record that past for posterity. For Desai, the plan is to get the first museum up and running in Amritsar and then to replicate the idea in places like Bengal and Lahore.

The exhibition had on display some beautiful pencil sketches by S L Parasher. Parasher was an artist, sculptor, muralist and writer. Born in what is now Pakistan, he was the Vice-Principal of Mayo College of Art, Lahore, when Partition occurred. He stayed in the refugee camp in Ambala during that time and most of his sketches capture the pain and anguish of the people, who had lost their homes, and it seems hope.

Simple and hauntingly beautiful is Turning Away, one of his largest pencil sketches on display, depicting a group of women, a baby in the arms of one of them. His sketches are simple and that probably is the genius of the man for the simple pencil strokes capture the emotions of that time extremely well. Thirst and Lonely Pilgrim are a few of his other sketches that decades later tell the sufferings of that time. His sketches, donated by his family, will form part of the Partition Museum Project. Poetry will also form an integral part of the project. As Desai put it, “It’s Punjab, how can you not have poetry”. The ongoing exhibition had a few of the poems of Sahir Ludhianvi and Ali Sardar Jafri on display.

The poem by Ludhianvi, titled Chabees Janwary, besides being a critique of the Indian nation-state, captures the failed promises of the state to its people. He wrote this poem on India’s first Republic Day.

Aao ke aaj ghaur karen is sawaal par

dekhe thhe hum ne jo, wo haseen khwaab kya hue…

bekas barehnagi ko kafan tak nahin naseeb

wo waada-haa e atlas o kamkhwaab kya hue…

jamhooriyat-nawaaz, bashar-dost, amn-khwaah

khud ko jo khud diye thhe, wo alqaab kya hue

(Come, and let us ponder on the question

Those beautiful dreams we had dreamt, what happened to them

Helpless nakedness does not even merit a shroud

What happened to those promises of silk and satin

Democrat, humanist, pacifist

What happened to all those self-conferred titles?)

The exhibition also displayed simple items like the chaddor and forced one to think of those tumultuous times when one lost one’s valuables and savings of an entire lifetime but the simple chaddor travelled across new nations and places with it. The loss of people, property, values and morals during those dark days when the right and the wrong merged so quickly and deceptively was brought alive beautifully by the exhibition.

Copies of The Tribune chronicling the historic dates of August 1947 were also on display. The paper clippings were a reminder about how events of those days created a new nation-state and its various institutions over time.

It is estimated that 14 million people were displaced by the Partition. But the sufferings and the pain of those events have been re-lived on both sides of the border by every new generation. Desai is hopeful that the Trust will be able to put together the funds needed to build the museum and that they are open to the governments as well as to the generosity of private individuals to build this historic and a first-of-its-kind museum on India’s division.