1947 Partition Archive Preserves Traumatic Past

Train, cargo ship, and donkey cart — that is how Muzaffer Haider and his family left nearly everything behind in the largest forced migration in human history, 64 years ago.

Haider, who now lives in Saratoga, was one of 14.5 million people who were displaced in the violent partition of British India that split the country into Pakistan and India on August 15, 1947. What should have been a cause for celebration — independence from nearly a century of British rule — quickly turned into a nightmare for millions who were forced to migrate across the new border.

Between 500,000 and 2 million people died in the process due to mob violence and extremists on both sides, although exact numbers are not known.

Now 72, Haider said he remembers those days vividly even though he was only eight years old when he and his extended family of about 25 haphazardly moved from their comfortable, upper-middle class home to a refugee camp in a place they had only distantly heard of — Karachi, Pakistan.

It took two weeks for Haider and his family to actually reach Karachi, at one point spending four days on a cargo ship that left from Bombay.

“It was very, very crowded, no bathroom facilities... very, very subhuman conditions,” he said. “A lot of people were sick on the boat in Karachi and we don't know what happened to them because everyone was looking after themselves.”

On the other side of the border, Vishin Jotwani, who was 25 at the time, traveled in a similar cargo ship — the only difference is that it was going in the opposite direction. To read the Palo Alto resident’s story, click here.    

There they spent about three days before moving to an area where quarters were set up for the migrants, which Haider described as one-room sheds without water and only a curtain hanging in front of a primitive commode. And they cooked food — which they got through government hand-outs, for they had no money — on bricks. About ten of them stayed in one shed, with the men sleeping outside.

Haider and his family spent one year in these quarters, before finally finding an apartment that had been abandoned by a Hindu family — to their immense relief.

Life in the quarters was shocking to Haider and his family, who had been affluent in India. “We were very well off,” Haider said. “We had 14, 15 rooms in our house — it was pretty huge — and we had servants.”

But both Jotwani and Haider consider themselves lucky — unlike others they knew, all of their immediate family members survived. “No one was concerned about the living conditions or the food,” Haider said. “Everyone was happy... not 'happy'... but happy to be alive.”  

Stories of Partition survival abound, and although some efforts have been made at recording the event, the stories of survivors have gone largely undocumented.   

But a new Bay Area organization is hoping to change this. Both Haider and Jotwani were among 175 people who have been interviewed by the 1947 Partition Archive, a new non-profit based in Berkeley which collects oral histories in video and audio format from those who were affected by the Partition. Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a postdoctoral physics researcher at UC Berkeley, founded the organization after an inspiring visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial oral history archives in Japan.

The project transcends religion or nationality and is not political, said Bhalla, and the organization takes care to gather stories from all individuals affected by Partition, regardless of their religious or ethnic background. So far, they have collected stories from Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Hyderabadi, Bihari, Pathan, Rajasthani, Gujrati and British populations.

Diverse communities used to live in harmony before the Partition. As Haider said, “There was no such thing as Hindu and Muslim. Everyday we lived together. People from Hindu communities used to celebrate Eid and we used to celebrate Holi and Diwali.” He said that their Hindu family friends even helped them escape and stopped an attack on his family. 

There is an urgency with which the Archive operates — many of the survivors are now in their late 80s, and their numbers are quickly dwindling.         

Although there have been some efforts made to document survivor stories in print form, no one has yet made a digital and diverse oral history archive like the one Bhalla and her team are working on. Armed with some basic video equipment and a desire to learn, volunteers often make long journeys of their own to visit survivors in their homes. 

“It is very sad and painful for me to revive the old memories,” Jotwani said, “but it is so important for the preservation of the facts — the real facts instead of leaving it to the imagination of the editorials.”

Bhalla hopes that the Archive will help clarify misconceptions about the history of the subcontinent. “In the U.S., they think India and Pakistan have been around forever — two countries at war for centuries, which is obviously wrong.”

The Archive currently has no paid employees, running on 60 volunteers all over the world and a few donations. But the interview sessions are as eye-opening for the volunteers as they are therapeutic for the survivors, who have sometimes wept after giving their accounts. 

“I’ve come across stories of a lot of regret,” said Cupertino volunteer Iram Nawaz. “That we were the same people, that we were a loving brotherhood — a whole community — just a few months before 1947.”

Read more about Nawaz’s and Los Altos resident Reena Kapoor’s interviewing experiences at Cupertino and Los Altos Patch.