A year on, I returned to Sargodha. By then Milo had a job, so he wasn’t invited. I travelled instead with writers Najum Latif and Farrukh Goindi. Najum curates the Lahore Gymkhana Club Cricket Museum. His friend, Mr Goindi, also lives in Lahore, but was born and bred in Sargodha.
We took the motorway out of Lahore. After that the route seemed different – more alive than I remembered.
Along the Punjab highway humanity is teeming.We pass groups of bearded old men sitting on charpoys or squatting around a small fire. Younger men are harvesting eucalyptus and bamboo – chopping and hauling them to make matchboxes, scaffolding and furniture. Motorbike repair is a flourishing trade. In the roadside shops everything looks oily and black except for a row of bikes in the front, polished up shiny for sale. Tethered goats and chickens stuffed into small rattan cages watch the traffic thundering by. Set back from the road, there is cricket. Not really a game, just a few boys bowling and batting on a rough patch of ground.
We share the road with all sorts. Overloaded rickshaws and bikes make their slow steady way. Donkeys pull carts piled high with green mustard plants and they, too, seem to strain under the load. The painted trucks look cheery from afar. They have mirror designs and colourful tassels. But up close you realise the wheels are enormous, and if the unseeable driver chooses to use it, the blare of the horn is deafening.
Mud villages appear every few miles. The dung walls are sturdy and clean. The succession of upside-down funnel constructions are brick kilns and are notorious, I’m told. Brick workers inhale noxious dust. Some are kept chained in slave-like conditions, a practice that campaigners like Asma Jahangir fought, with some success, to outlaw.
After a while the kilns peter out. Now there are housing estates being built to absorb a population expanding at a troubling rate. There are no dwellings in sight, just gaudy arches surrounded by plaster palm trees, elephants and giraffes. Closer to the city there are marriage halls – monster constructions, many in mock Mughal style, designed to hold thousands. Here a family can entertain the whole village and saddle themselves with a decade of debt.
Suddenly I started to recognise my surroundings. We had arrived in Sargodha.
We stopped on the corner of College Road. It was good to get out of the car, stretch our legs and briefly stand in the open. We had an appointment for lunch at the Gymkhana Club. It was not like Delhi or Lahore: there were no pavilions, petunias or lawns. The building was new, the glass chandeliers were enormous and the décor shiny and gold. There were not many diners and the service was good.
Our host was Ghulam Muhammad Tiwana, a friend of Mr Goindi. He was one of the few members of the, now huge, Tiwana clan who still lived in the city. Most, he said, had either moved to Lahore or lived on farms in villages nearby. He had been active in politics, a member of the national and provincial assemblies, but there was no honour in it, he said. He spoke in Urdu, Punjabi and some English about the Muslim League and the Unionists, Jinnah, Sikander Hayat Kahn and Khizr Tiwana. It was hard to follow the thread, but he said politicians allowed the killing to happen. He declared himself a Punjabi nationalist who mourned the slow death of the language.
After lunch we got into cars and drove to what I was told was the place where my grandfather’s house used to be. On the corner of Club Road and Kachery Road.
We pulled up and got out of the cars. Mr Tiwana and Mr Goindi pointed to a space, or rather a spread of land, where it was. The house was vast, they reported, and spanned the five nondescript two-storey commercial buildings (one or two may be shops) that faced us on the other side of the road.
Both men said they knew the house well (there were very few of that size) and visited it numerous times. Mr Goindi said that a classmate used to live there. The friend’s father, he thought, was in the irrigation department. He never knew whether the house was rented or owned. He said he used to play cricket in the grounds before the house came down in the mid-1990s. Mr Tiwana said this was the fate of all the big houses. The land was divided. His grandparents had a house further along Civil Lines, which was also pulled down for commercial development.
It is hard to relate what I see to the place my mother told me about. There is no sign of a canal. Or any green space. The garden where she walked with her father is gone. So are the grapevines, the jasmine and all the fruit trees.
I accepted the Homestead no longer existed, but I still wanted to know what became of it after Partition. Could Lady Khizr really have seen Papa-ji’s white turbans lying there after he left?
After some months my researcher from Sargodha University sent me a written report. It filled a few pages but imparted no real information, or none I didn’t already know. He went to the relevant government offices: the Tehsil and Patwar Offices and the Municipal Corporation. He asked for the information I wanted. What they wanted, he said, was some ‘financial incentive’. He understood that was out of the question.
In one place he was shown dumped documents ‘covered with thick layers of dust and mud’. In another he was told the information had gone to India. ‘Off the record’ he was told it had been deliberately destroyed. When he wrote to me that the culture of keeping records ‘offers lots of problems to the researchers’, I believed his frustration, but I was disappointed he had drawn a blank. Others I told commiserated. Yes, they said, getting information here comes at a price. Or else you have to know someone.
Now, back in Sargodha, it seems that I do. My companions make a few phone calls and a story emerges. After Partition, I was told, the house was allocated to an officer of the settlement department. The settlement department was in charge of allocation. Obviously, this sounded a bit rum. Unsavoury, even. This impression was confirmed when Mr Goindi referred to ‘the people who captured your grandfather’s place’.
I press a bit and am told the property was transferred into the name of the settlement officer’s wife, probably illegally using fake documents. A lot of possessions, including valuables apparently, were packed up and put in a storeroom.
I was told the property was then sold on to ‘an influential local family’, and given the names of two individuals. I found nothing online, but recalled that Professor Rasul’s book listed local people he considered important. Sure enough, both names are there. They are highly commended Muslim League supporters, one of whom was jailed in the 1947 agitation against Khizr Tiwana. One, it says, became Chairman of the District Council of Sargodha and then a member of the Punjab Provincial Assembly. I was told that large iron boxes had been taken from Papa-ji’s house to the house of one of these men.
I was thinking this over when I received another email telling me that wasn’t right. That family didn’t buy the house. I was given another few names.
I do not know where the truth lies. Given the Homestead is gone, lost in unhappy circumstances, is chasing down the detail a worthwhile use of my time? How do I judge the veracity of information I’m given? And who benefits from knowing it, so long after the event? Perhaps a point comes where it is right to close the door on the past. I am startled by this idea. I sound like my mother.
We stood a while, gazing at the space where the house used to be. I pose for a photograph with Najum and Mr Goindi, which I don’t send to Dip.
As we prepared to leave, Mr Tiwana asked if I’d like to go to ‘our village’. He meant the farmlands that Papa-ji owned. It was renamed Shahinabad in 1972, but the colonial map I had kept on my phone bore the old name, Handewale. Judging by photographs Abrar sent me the previous year, there was not much to see, so I hesitated. Then I said, ‘Yes, very much, thank you,’ and we were off.
We piled back into the cars. At the end of the road we turned and passed the rubbish-strewn scrubland where the locals had insisted my grandfather’s house stood. Mr Goindi pointed and said that’s where Khizr Tiwana’s house used to be.
I feel slightly sick. It might be from remembering the chickens decapitated for Anup’s wedding reception held here in the garden. But I think it’s more to do with the harsh judgement of history. Professor Talbot’s biography of Khizr persuaded me that he did his best to serve the Punjab and believed that preserving the cross-communal alliance of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh would keep the province united. But here history has recorded it differently. He gets no credit for the attempt.
We pulled up outside Shahinabad station and got out of the cars. A wide stone staircase led up to a white neo-classical building with two arches and an ocular window. There was no sign of a train, passengers or staff, so we had free run of the place.
The platforms looked onto some plains punctuated by very large boulders – the buried Kirana hill range. Hindus believe that the monkey-god Hanuman dropped them when helping Ram to recover Sita from the demon Ravana. Hanuman was bridging the strait between southern India and Sri Lanka, where Sita was held captive, but he lost some rocks on the way. Before Partition, Hindus gathered here annually, but now the Pakistan Air Force occupies most of the range.
Mr Tiwana walked over to a group of eight men that had appeared. He shook each of their hands. They talked for a while, then Mr Tiwana re-joined us and recounted what he had learnt. An older man, known to Mr Tiwana, said his family came over from the Indian side (Panipat). He was born after 1947, but he knew the land had belonged to Sardar Harbans Singh. There was a lot of land, so it was divided and allocated to different people, including his family.
The man joined our group and carried on speaking. All the land in the area, he said, belonged to Sikhs. He gestured into the distance. Two villages across from the station belonged to Sikh landowners too.
Initially, I was told our informant was a local politician. A bit later, this was revised. He is a union leader in a small village who wasn’t elected but intends to keep trying.
We organise ourselves into a group for a photograph on the steps at the front of the station. As we walk back to our cars and I thank Mr Tiwana, he congratulates me for having brought my grandfather back. I ask what he means. He says that from now on, the villagers will talk about Harbans Singh, the Sikh who used to own the land here. They will say his granddaughter came over from London and they will show the picture of us on their phones.
From Lahore I messaged Azam Noon, who renewed the invitation to stay at the farm with his parents, Mazhar and Rahat. I happily accepted. But on the way there I became anxious. Originally, I was to lodge at the university, so the police were asking Abrar, who was asking Najum, where I was staying (an unregistered foreigner). We had become a party of four and were arriving hours later than I had said. It was pitch dark, although by happy coincidence, Mr Goindi’s driver from Lahore knew the Noon family as he came from Bhalwal, close to where we were headed.
I shouldn’t have worried. What a welcome! The farmhouse was filled with paintings, sculptures and artefacts created by family members. We had a convivial evening discussing politics, religion, history and sport (cricket and polo). Mazhar’s uncle was Sir Firoz Khan Noon, a hugely influential politician both before and after 1947. In 1946 he abandoned the Unionists for the Muslim League, which put a nail in his clansman, Khizr’s, political coffin. He later served as Pakistan’s seventh prime minister until 1958, when the military edged him aside.
I asked Mazhar if any of the current generation had entered politics. Yes, he said, you have to. Otherwise ‘there is no one to pull the strings for you’. But it is a ‘snake-pit’, which good people don’t enter.
We ate a wonderful dinner with fresh vegetables from the farm. It was February, so fires were lit in our rooms.
In the morning the sun is bright, but the air is cold. We sit on the terrace outside, with four large dogs: an Alsatian, Labrador, Pointer and another breed I can’t recall because I’m not all that into dogs. As it’s winter, the family are in hats, slippers, sweaters and socks. I, foolishly, am pretending it’s spring. I decline additional clothes, claiming to be ‘used to the cold’, but eagerly accept an invitation to tour the garden before breakfast, hoping it may warm me up.
We join a brick path that weaves through palm trees and under an arbour of bougainvillea not yet in bloom. Mazhar uses his walking stick to point out leafless strands of orange blossom, which look lifeless, but will soon fill the place with fragrance and colour. We pass a tree house, then a pond with flamingos and black and white swans. It’s wonderful. Further on there are stables.
Is this what the Homestead was like? Give or take some of the details. The estate is enclosed by high walls and has the feel of an earlier era.
We lingered for ages over our omelettes, parathas and toast. It was hard to tear ourselves away, but we had to get on. I had agreed to speak again at the university. When I opened Abrar’s email attaching a poster to advertise the event, I had to laugh. I’d said a small group, like last time, but I failed to follow up and check what he’d arranged. I needed to plan something more structured to say. The drive back to Sargodha was a good chance. In the daylight I saw how deep into the rural countryside we had come.
The lecture hall seemed pretty packed. Men sat on one side, women the other. Abrar spoke first, rousing the audience in Punjabi and English sharing some of his recent research on colonial (mis)rule. Professor Rasul spoke briefly and then it was over to me.
My talk was less personal this time. I touched on memory and historical research. I shared thoughts about my favourite revolutionary, Bhagat Singh – how he was celebrated in Amritsar but not this side of the border. And at Abrar’s request, I showed the photograph of the 1938 opening of the Sargodha Female Hospital.
I am interested in this group, I said, because one is my grandfather but also because of what these gentlemen share. They have all been forgotten by history. In fact, in some ways they are its losers. The Brits, Governor Craik and K.V.F. Moreton sailed home in their ships. The Hindu advocate, Brij Lal, and my Sikh grandfather were uprooted, lost their homes and the way of life that they knew. And there are the Tiwana family members. Umar Hayat Khan’s son Khizr became Premier of the Punjab. Khizr worked closely with Allah Baksh, pictured next to Umar (in their flamboyant Tiwana turbans), but come 1947 they and their vision for the Punjab were swept aside.
The professor sits in the front row. I don’t mention his book. The official history that records Khizr as, in effect, a traitor who stood in the way of the Muslim League and Pakistan. I don’t know if he understands or has any opinion about what I am saying. Again, his face gives nothing away.
I might also have mentioned Jinnah and Iqbal, not as men who were forgotten. Far from it. They are Fathers of the Nation, whose faces appear in almost every public space. But is modern Pakistan really what they had in mind? Or was it something more plural, more responsive to the wishes of its people?
After the lecture there were photographs and I received a bouquet of roses. We bade farewell to the professor, then reconvened for tea in Abrar’s room in the Department of History and Pakistan Studies. We returned to subjects we had enjoyed discussing before, Partition, the Raj, military recruitment, and added into the mix colonial courts, judicial independence and academic freedom.
I was pleased to see the gentleman from Hoshiarpur again. I discovered new things about him. His maternal uncle was a commander in the Indian National Army (INA) named Fazl Muhammad Dogar who was put on trial at the Red Fort. He served two years in prison until Nehru’s intervention secured his release.
When the time came, we were sorry to leave. As we got in the car my companions expressed surprise at how open-minded and ‘liberal’ the young academics were (was there a sub-text, ‘here in the provinces’?). Driving out of the campus we spotted a sign on the gate. This open-mindedness, it appeared, didn’t extend to the university administration, at least not where romance was concerned: ‘On 14 February,’ the sign read, ‘flowers are not allowed to be brought in the University.’
Before this second trip to Sargodha, Abrar sent me a photo on WhatsApp. It was the framed photograph of the opening of the Female Hospital, up on a wall. I forwarded to it Milo, then living abroad. He joked, ‘Where is the wall? Do you think it’s his office?’ Obviously, once I was back in Sargodha, I wanted to see. Apart from anything else, I wanted to show Najum and Mr Goindi the place.
We walked up to the medical unit. The door was open and, as we approached, I saw Papa-ji there. The photograph was indeed on the wall, in pride of place, I would say. It was quite high up, but I’m not complaining. High up is good. No one will bang into it or object that it is taking up space.
Three ladies were talking together at the reception. I started to explain why I was there, pointing up at the picture, but they recognised me from the previous year. One, a nurse, gestured to a room I hadn’t noticed the last time and ushered me in. The resident gynaecologist sat at her desk, catching up on her paperwork. A small child was playing nearby. I told her about the picture. She stood, reached to shake my hand, and said, ‘Your grandfather did a wonderful thing.’
It was a long drive back to Lahore. I told Najum and Mr Goindi what the professor had written about Hindus selling their possessions in the streets.
‘Impossible. They could not be selling things.’
Mr Goindi told me his uncle was a shopkeeper (and poet). He had the only radio in Kachery Bazaar. It was attached to a loudspeaker so people could hear Jinnah’s speeches and the announcement of Independence. ‘I have heard everything from my family,’ he said, ‘but I never heard this kind of story.’ He agreed there was no violence in the city, but there was chaos and fear and no time to sell any goods.
Najum took the same view.
‘People left their homes as they were. There was no time to sell things. It is a fake line he has written. We left Jullundur under the same circumstances – just with the clothes we were wearing. We thought we would go back in a few days.’
I spent my last evening in Lahore staying with Alema Khan, Imran Khan’s sister. She hosted a magnificent dinner, inviting people she hoped I’d find helpful and interesting, which I did. Her doctorate supervisor was a canal colony expert. A former UN official echoed much I’d read about mistrust of India and the early ‘offences’ that still rankle: turning off the water supply, withholding Pakistan’s share of money and arms, Mountbatten and Nehru ‘snatching’ Kashmir …
The men eventually faded away, but a group of we ‘ladies’ chatted into the morning. Some had children studying in the UK and US. The mothers were frequently bemused by their news: bearded young men from the University Islamic Society chastise their daughters for going out during Eid, even though it is well after sundown. Girls in hijabs invite their sons for biryani, assuring them their fathers will be out.
Alema’s husband was an engineer in the Pakistan Air Force and spent many years in Sargodha. He said that in 1976 when he arrived it was still a small, pretty town. He left in the early 1990s, by which time it was not.
Like Najum’s family, his fled in 1947 from Jullundur. His grandfather was a retired minister who had settled there. When Sikh rioting started, a then captain in the army came with two trucks and weapons to escort the family over the border. He counselled them firmly – unless they crossed by 5 p.m. there was no guarantee they would reach Pakistan safely. His mother and aunts always said that without this young man they would not be alive. Years later, Alema’s husband met the man’s daughter and was able to repay the ‘debt’ by helping her with an education project she was running.
Pakistan’s national carrier PIA, which I chose to fly me back home, is said to be in serious financial trouble. That might explain why there was no in-flight entertainment. Not just a restricted supply of new films, no films at all. Hell’s teeth, I initially thought. This will be tough. But, of course, it was not. I had two books and an interesting neighbour who was up for a chat.
I was given the first book in Lahore to teach me, I assume, about a dark side of Pakistan I’d be unlikely to see. It was a novel called Born to Live Naked: The Story of Sexual Harassment, Abuse and Exploitation of Women, written (implausibly) by a retired Major General. I knew I ought to persevere with it, the issues were important, but the abuser–abused dynamic made me too angry and on an aeroplane there are no available outlets for rage. So I packed the book back in my bag.
The other book, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, was a delight. I savoured it, rationing the chapters as I would slivers of chocolate fudge cake. So, after a while, I turned to my neighbour. She was of Pakistani origin, born in Britain, where her parents and grown-up children were living. She and her husband had recently moved to Lahore. She worked for a private school provider and enjoyed a more comfortable life than in Britain, she said – a bigger house, a driver, servants who bring tea at the end of a long day at work.
She asked what I did, which prompted her to speak of Partition. Mountbatten was biased. He messed it up, she said. Kashmir was meant to be part of Pakistan. Then she backtracked: ‘But I don’t really know the history that well.’
We talked about how history is taught. She told me the Curriculum and Textbook Board recently raided their office. Someone had complained that a textbook they had been using for years suggested that Azad Kashmir (disputed territory administered by Pakistan) was part of India. They had to put stickers over a map and get Oxford University Press to reprint the books.
Other books were also causing problems. A social studies book showed a statue once displayed in Lahore Museum (now controversially in Delhi) that the Board declared un-Islamic. It was the stunning bronze Indus-era figurine, The Dancing Girl, found at Mohenjodaro. The company agreed to cover the picture. Another textbook wrote that Pakistan lost the 1971 war when East Pakistan became Bangladesh. The Board said that was wrong: the Pakistan Army called for a ceasefire, which meant Pakistan was the victor. The company has written to the publishers to correct the ‘mistake’.
When we tired of talking, I gazed out of the window. We were flying above a soft cushion of cloud, and the sky was clear blue. I thought about new friends I had made on this trip and interesting things that I did. I resolved to read Ayesha Jalal. Many people spoke of her book and insisted Jinnah imagined Pakistan as part of a loose federation, not a sovereign state. Some talked of the missed opportunity in 1945 when Nehru, they claimed, scuppered the Simla agreement, which could have achieved this.
As we begin our descent, the pilot addresses us over the tannoy. He tells us we will ‘shortly be landing, Inshallah’. We laugh. Inshallah? Does that mean he’s unsure what he is doing? Has he actually handed the controls over to God? I close my eyes and before long we have landed safely at Heathrow, whether by the agency of God or the pilot or both.
A few weeks after this trip to Pakistan, I was in the National Archives in Delhi. It was not a place I had ever enjoyed spending time. With some exceptions, the staff remind me of the customs officer who wanted to confiscate Dip’s ring.
Over a period of about eighteen months, I spent many days searching through indices and calling up files looking for Papa-ji’s application for compensation under the government scheme. When my time ran out, Vanya, an assistant professor at Ashoka University, continued to hunt. If found, I hoped it would include a description of the Civil Lines House and Handewale lands and perhaps their value and date of acquisition.
It was a slow and mind-numbing task. There were very many individuals called Harbans Singh who had lost land in West Pakistan and there was a limit to the number of files you were permitted to call up in a day. We scoured about two hundred files bearing this name. I came across Khushwant’s claim for his Lawrence Road house in Lahore, but of Papa-ji’s lands I found nothing. I was disappointed, but in the laborious process of looking, something else caught my attention.
An index I looked at by chance referred to statements taken by the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, Fact-Finding Branch. The topic was murder and looting in the District of Sargodha. I filled out the slips (the maximum I was allowed) and handed them in. The next day I returned to look at the files.
I sat down, opened the first and started to read. I was stunned by what I had found. Facts that had seemed so elusive about what happened in Sargodha around the time of Partition. I reminded myself of the context – the statements supported claims for compensation – but the testimony felt grimly authentic, anguished and true. The files held about a hundred and fifty statements. I read maybe half.
Trouble started, it seems, in early September 1947 in villages surrounding the city.
Here, the vastly outnumbered non-Muslims suffered a crescendo of harassment and extortion. False complaints were filed against Hindus and Sikhs. At the police station they were forced to hand over money, sometimes large sums. Their crops were auctioned and the money paid to refugees or a ‘Jinnah Fund’. Pawned possessions were returned to Muslims for no money. Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, in the words of one man, were ‘steadily spoilt after the partition’, after ‘the creation of Pakistan’.
Mobs began to appear, sometimes organised by people from outside the village, armed with khularis (axes) and other weapons. A statement reported that non-Muslims paid for safe passage to escape the threats and intimidation, but on the journey they were attacked. Sixty people were killed. Twenty-five girls were kidnapped. With military help the rest reached the city of Sargodha.
There were many accounts of looting, murder and theft. In some places, police and influential people assisted the mobs. In others they held them off, risking their lives. Sometimes non-Muslims fought back and defended themselves.
One described a mob attack on a village on 8 September 1947. The writer, who escaped, said they defended themselves with boiling water, ‘sheers of gur’, ‘heaps of pebbles’ and bricks. His son fired on the mob from a hidden point. Then they saw a light and shouted. It was a military patrol. A Colonel ‘Gordon’ responded to their cries. He came with a European officer and twelve to fifteen Baluch soldiers, who refused an order to fire on the mob. Reinforcements eventually came from Sargodha and evacuated the village.
Another man recounted what happened in Miani, Bhalwal the following day, on 9 September. Goondas (thugs) and dacoits helped by a police constable and ‘the Baluch military’ committed an atrocity, he said. Babies were cut to pieces and thrown from buildings. In the chaos he lost his daughter-in-law and granddaughter. I closed the file and saw a handwritten note stapled to the outside. It stated that this event was classed as a ‘major incident’ in which six hundred people were killed and one hundred girls were abducted.
I took a short break with a few files left to read. I returned, noticed the room was thinning out and turned up the next statement. It was by a retired police officer who wrote that the Sargodha Superintendent of Police, Ram Singh, and the District Commissioner ‘set an example for creating peace and keeping law and order in the District’. Then they were transferred. After that (no date was given), he wrote, those in the villages were ‘at liberty to make threats and loot’.
In Lahore, over tea, Samina Tiwana had told me about Ram Singh, the Sargodha Police Superintendent. He was the man who left his suitcases with them for safekeeping. Professor Rasul mentioned him as well as the District Commissioner, in his History of Sargodha. The professor wrote that both men were appointed by Khizr as bureaucrats who ‘could toe his line without any uneasiness of conscience’. These accounts of Ram Singh’s integrity clearly conflict. He has his supporters and his detractors and I have met both.
Any lingering doubts I had about forced conversions in Sargodha were dispelled by these statements. Many reported Hindus and Sikhs being gathered together and told they would be killed if they did not convert. What happened was conveyed in various ways. ‘We were forced to recite Islamic verses.’ ‘We were trimmed and shaved according to Islamic fashion.’ ‘Sacred threads were removed.’ Some wrote that after being ‘converted’ they were ‘renamed’. ‘My name was Mushtak Ahmed.’ Or, ‘I became Said Rasul.’
‘The Muslims gave us a meal.’ When I first read this line, I thought nothing of it. Reading on, I realised the ‘meal’ had been beef. The writer was forced to eat it, but he couldn’t bear to name what it was.
From the end of August, it seemed, military trucks patrolled the countryside collecting Hindus and Sikhs for evacuation. This was about the time the Punjab Boundary Force was wound up. Many people were taken to a camp in Sargodha guarded by Gurkhas. One refugee estimated there were 40,000 by early September. Generally, it seemed to have been considered a safe place. People stayed for up to three months before being evacuated to India by train.
Reading on, I reminded myself I was not writing an academic work or preparing litigation. I just wanted a flavour of what might have happened. Thinking that I had that, I flicked more quickly through the remaining few statements until my eye caught some familiar names.
The writer was a Sikh lambardar, a local office-holder involved in collecting revenue. He owned some land of his own and managed a canal belonging to ‘Sir Malik Khizr Hyat, Sir Nawab Alla Bux and Sheiks etc. of Bhera’. In other words, Khizr and Allah Baksh – the former Premier and his Unionist ally and confidant.
The lambardar echoed earlier accounts of false complaints and people paying ‘large sums of money to save their honour’. Some were imprisoned and had to buy their release. These included the Chief Cashier of the Imperial Bank of Sargodha. A named factory owner was released, he wrote, ‘only on the recommendation of certain Tiwanas’. He himself faced false charges, which were withdrawn ‘at the instance of influential Muslims who were friendly with me’.
For a while he used his influence, and presumably the protection of others, to help people in need. He said he got hold of a military lorry from the Remount Depot in Sargodha, rescued thirty-four ‘desperate Hindus’ from a village and transported them to the city.
Then this: ‘On the 30th October 1947, S. Chanchal Singh Oil Factory owner was murdered by the Muslims in broad day light.’
Chanchal Singh. I know that name. This is the man from Professor Rasul’s sketchy account. This is the murder I have tried, and failed, to find out about. There he is. Right in front of me. I want to share the discovery, but the other researchers look busy. Of course, they won’t welcome the interruption.
The statement continued: ‘On 30.10.47 there was an announcement by the beat of a drum that all Sikhs should leave by the 4th of November 1947 or else they will be killed and if Hindus wanted to reside in Sargodha District they should apply to the Muslim League and their applications will be duly considered.’
Until then, he wrote, there had been no killing in ‘Sargodha proper’, by which, I assume, he meant Sargodha city. He left Sargodha on 3 November.
Shall I tell the professor his account is mistaken? Shall I suggest he correct it?
Outside the Archives building my eyes need to adjust to the sun. I make for a bench on the edge of the grass where I can sit and take in what I have read. I have been at it all day.
I had read many accounts of Partition, but none had affected me so. Many of these statements were written by hand, some with a typed version too, on thin now disintegrating paper. Most were written from a refugee camp. That it happened in places I had just been, involving people with whom I had made a connection, made it feel very immediate and troubling.
Forced conversions were unique to Pakistan, a country founded on the belief that Islam was under attack. But non-Muslims – Hindus and Sikhs – also acted brutally and showed no mercy to their brethren. Both sides tortured, killed, looted and raped. As Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the Adolf Eichmann trial, the ability to inflict unspeakable suffering is not unique to any particular people.
Angry black crows circle the trees overhead. ‘Caw caw. Caw caw.’ They are becoming emboldened. Some land, a bit close, and peck about in the grit with their sharp shiny beaks. The sun is still uncomfortably bright. I stand up and look at my watch. It’s time to move on.