We pack our camera equipment and reluctantly leave the opulence of the Cecil Hotel and the crisp clean air of Simla. We’re heading back down the mountain path road to rejoin the Grand Trunk Road, and on north-west towards the major Punjabi cities of Jalandhar, the border city of Amritsar and then finally to the Pakistan border.
The drive down the mountain is spectacular and hair-raising in turns; we turn off the engine and coast down the impossibly windy road with the windows down. The crew, Simon, Andy and producer Deep sit smiling in a happy stupor, lulled by the gentle hilly breeze, beaming sun and jagged vistas. Not many words are exchanged and I wonder if no one is saying anything as if scared of breaking the spell. We’re descending towards the plains, full of people, traffic and unremitting noise. To underline each crew member savouring his personal paradise, all are connected to their iPods, lost in their own soundtracks. I join them, cuing up the ‘Boss’, Bruce Springsteen, to keep me company on our glide down the hill. Donning my shades and looking out of the car window, I get hasty glimpses of dilapidated villas on hills and pine-clad promontories.
It is easy to see why Simla must have seemed like heaven to those British officers of the Raj and their wives. It was, with its mock-Tudor houses, its snowdrops and its village church, just like being at home in the summer.
A fair number of those same British officers, in the decades after Independence, came back to India. Unexpectedly, their posting in colonial India had taken them to a foreign land that they would come to love, and love enough to move back here when they retired.
My father told me of Mr Godfrey, who worked for Bennet, Colman & Co., publishers of The Times of India. He gave my dad the task of distributing the papers and even after returning to England post-Partition, could not get India out of his system. The last my dad remembers is Mr Godfrey returning to Simla in the mid 1960s. He was not alone in this respect.
The former rulers of British India effectively swapped sides, and became citizens of the Republic of India. Instead of being lynched by angry natives, they were welcomed with open arms. India, inscrutable as always, simply absorbed them. I’m reminded of what Mark Tully told me in Darjeeling, that the Indian culture is almost unique in its ability to assimilate change without feeling threatened. Astonishing, when you think about it.
I wake up, disorientated and groggy, still in the back of a moving car. My shades are dangling down one side of my face, and wiping away a spot of dribble I look out of the window. We’re finally in Punjab, the large north Indian state that was decimated by the line of partition in August 1947. Greater Punjab at one time covered an area stretching from Delhi all the way across to parts of Afghanistan and became a British-administered state in the nineteenth century. After Independence most of the area was absorbed into Pakistan, with a smaller section becoming part of India. Despite the partition and the fact that the region contains Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, the common language even today is Punjabi.
It’s a good ten degrees warmer down here on the plains, and the usual tumult of streetlife is everywhere. The sun must have fallen whilst I slept, and out on the mighty road, trucks thunder past with the inevitable sound of the horn.
The horn. Oh, the multipurpose, ubiquitous, impossibly loud horn of the Indian road. People should write poems to its greatness and its infinite variety. Some sound quizzical. Others furious. Some are funny. Some are sombre. In India, the horn is not an instrument of violence or abuse; every truck I have ever seen here has HORN PLEASE emblazoned across the back. To sound one’s horn here is merely to express one’s existence and to share that joy with everyone else in a several hundred-mile radius. Our driver expresses his joy every five seconds.
To the uninitiated or the incredibly tired traveller, the constant sound of horns is just one of the countless challenges of the Indian environment. Pot-holed roads, traffic madness, rogue cows and insane Punjabi jaywalkers don’t help. And the street hawkers are back too: same crap, different day. This evening, amongst the usual vivid detritus on offer, is an extended range of paperback novels. I try to peruse the pile of books being carried while avoiding making eye contact with the purveyor. It turns into a scene from a Whitehall farce, as I turn away every time he throws a glance in my direction.
The book seller moves on silently and I resume staring at the increasingly glaring light bulbs and fluorescent tubes that border all the small stalls frantically trying to ply their trade to the endless succession of coughing, spluttering sloths that inch past their establishments.
People say that the convoy of refugees at Partition stretched all the way from Lahore to Delhi – a slowly moving queue of people 200 miles long. The traffic this evening feels a bit like that. I remind myself that at least there’s no physical threat and I know where I’m going, so I benignly allow the symphony of the highway and the aria of the street sellers to wash over me.
While the word ‘Punjab’ may summon images of dusty plains and arid roads, this region is actually the agricultural breadbasket of India. The word ‘Punjab’ means ‘Five Rivers’ and this region was famed for its fertile soil, creating a lush and productive belt which stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas to well beyond Lahore, before the fateful line of Partition was drawn.
My father’s family owned large tracts of fruitful Punjabi land, which made them fairly wealthy, but by all accounts, there were no motorcars or foreign holidays for them. They were from the frugal, pious, work-is-life school of thought. Any money made from farming was, if you’ll excuse another awful pun, ploughed back into the land. There was no unconditional trust in banking institutions at that time; money was simply invested in buying up more land. Why put your faith in paper money wealth when banks could so easily go bust, and land was going nowhere? How sadly ironic that it was the land that went. The wheatfields, undulating seas of sugar cane and corn, where generations of my father’s family toiled and where my dad’s adventurous childhood imagination was allowed to flow like uninhibited rapids, were lost to them forever.
More than any other Indian state, Punjab was most affected by the turmoil and carnage of Independence. Traditionally the homeland for Sikhs as well as Muslims and Hindus, it was the most densely populated area to be affected, encompassing several major industrial cities as well as the countless villages that were and remain India’s backbone. Many of these cities had majority Hindu populations, but the surrounding areas were dominated by Muslims. This made the task of creating a clear and unobjectionable border extremely difficult. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had cohabited here for hundreds of years and, certainly according to my family, without the scourge of communal violence.
My uncle had told me: ‘There were Muslim areas and Hindu areas within a town, where each lived but a few were mixed.’
I asked then, if people of the two faiths ever crossed paths at all? ‘Yes, of course,’ said my uncle. ‘The markets and shops were common and also we had both Muslims and Hindus working on our land … when we left in 1947 we asked a Muslim family that we trusted to look after our house and gave them all the keys. We thought there might be a chance we’d be back, you see.’
Any chance at all disappeared with the arrival of the border. In Pakistani Punjab today, approximately 98 per cent of the population is Muslim, and in Indian Punjab roughly 96 per cent of the population are Sikh and Hindu.
The devastation of Punjab by Partition also had a curious side-effect ten to twenty years later – as a result of so many people being displaced and effectively not having any roots or ties to their new locality, many sought to rebuild their lives overseas. Punjab became the source of the vast majority of Indians who settled in the UK, USA and Canada. Post-war Britain, needing a workforce to rebuild itself through the 1950s and 1960s, opened up immigration from any Commonwealth country. Many people came to large British industrial cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester – and my parents made that journey too.
Arguably, those of us born as second-generation Indians in England are the children of Partition – it’s odd to think that without that tumultuous moment of upheaval sixty years ago, my family might never have made the journey that brought my sister and me into being as the modern Britons we are today.
Anyway, what’s clear is that around the world, from Southall to Toronto to New York, it was Punjabis who left India in search of a better life and a brighter future and who have put down roots and created some of the most successful immigrant communities in the world. Many second-and third-generation Punjabis are now electing to have closer ties with the lands of their forefathers, re-acquainting themselves with the further reaches of family and choosing to get married here too. What’s more, they’re doing it on a scale of a Bollywood blockbuster; no village hall or pub function room with curly sandwiches and fruit punch will suffice – it’s got to be big, it’s got to be bold and I’ve been invited to one.
Our convoy pulls over on the GT Road just outside the city of Jalandhar, famous for its manufacture of sports goods. During the 1970s I received more cricket bats and hockey sticks as gifts, made in Jalandhar, than I had friends who wanted to play the damn games. In fact more than I had friends. There’s nothing more tragic than playing cricket on your own and even then I never won. Anyway, I digress. We’re only about an hour away from Amritsar and the Pakistan border and I can’t resist stopping to see this fusion of the traditional and the modern. The bride and groom are second-generation Brits from Walsall, the home-town of my in-laws, and having had their civil ceremony back in Blighty, they’re looking to party on at their reception here in Jalandhar.
Any Indian wedding is an ambitious production number, and this one is no exception. The venue is a purpose-built ‘themed’ function suite and it’s situated right on the GT Road. The theme becomes clear as we approach the address – the whole place is done out like a fort, complete with five-storey-high towers and turrets. We’ve arrived early so we can find out what goes into the preparations for a wedding catering for 5,000 guests. Yes. Just in case you’re the kind of reader that doesn’t like to go backwards, let me tell you that number again – 5,000.
The place is still being set up; tables and chairs are being carried into place in the vast outside dining area and the various buffet areas are being readied. The most frenetic corner of this massive undertaking right now are the kitchens. I walk through a huge indoor dining area (nice to have the choice), which has an army of little workers polishing chandeliers, putting up streamers and pouring flower petals into table centre pieces. It looks like a wildlife documentary, particularly as there are, it seems, three people to every job. I can hear David Attenborough’s voiceover:
‘The worker ants scurry about their business with nary a word, their finely honed instincts carrying them to their destinations, three to a garland, four to a porcelain figurine; there are no written or verbal instructions save for the one that the manager ant gives by the rubbing of his antennae.’
As I wander through into the kitchens, everything goes momentarily black as my eyes adjust from the brightness of the cavernous dining room. The cooking area is huge and dark and it feels like I’m entering some medieval cave. Slivers of light filter through the windows on two sides of this irregular-shaped room and are immediately diffused by the smoke, from what seems like forty gas fires. One area seems to be for washing, chopping and peeling before being passed down a production line to the marinating and dunking section, before being scuttled off to the frying, boiling, baking, grilling part of the operation. Small channels are cut into the floor, criss-crossing the room like Venetian canals with tiny bits of peel bobbing along like gondolas.
There must be over a hundred people in here, but the speed at which pots, plates and trays are despatched and the general lack of illumination makes me unsure as to whether I’ve counted people twice, or simply missed the other hundred chefs toiling away. Was that two small people carrying that large tray or was it one large person carrying two smaller trays? The enclosed space and numerous blazes make the room much hotter than I expected, but the bouquet thrown up by this hapless combination of smells is rather delightful.
The noise too, seems reminiscent of a medieval scene, the clanking and clanging of stainless steel, like that of knights preparing for battle amid the various war cries:
‘Chopping chopping chopping’
‘More oil’
‘Aloo gobi lau’
‘Chicken ready?’
Cry snacks for Harry and for England, I think as I retire to the relative cool of the 90-degree heat outside.
The grassy area surrounded by the faux walls and towers is the main dining area for the guests. A stage is already erected from where the live music, and ultimately the disco, will be conducted. However, first the waiting staff must be hired. The first batch of hopefuls arrive for selection. They wear their own black shoes and this becomes the first criterion for elimination; the trainers, sneakers and sandal wearers are summarily dismissed and the chosen ones are guided to the barber, who sits outside the ersatz citadel, at a small table with no mirror, looking like a bored usher at a cinema kiosk. After being shaved and sheared, the recruits are handed their regulation white shirt, bow tie (elasticated, natch!) and apron and head for the final hurdle … the inspection. Like a military review, the boss walks up and down checking the state of these hapless (relatively) few. Some are sent forth to have their shoes polished, trouser hems stitched and one doesn’t make it, as he couldn’t work out how the elasticated bow tie worked, which seemed harsh, but how could this man be trusted with vats of hot dhal the size of military satellite dishes? It’s tough and ruthless and he had to go.
Our camera crew decide to get a fancy shot from on top of the turreted towers until they’re told that the entire edifice might come down if someone actually stood on it. The crew also then find themselves face to face with perhaps the most resolutely consistent feature of Indian weddings in the last quarter of a century: the wedding video camera man.
From the moment that the Lumière brothers brought their ‘cinematographe’ device to Bombay in 1896, I am convinced that someone in the crowd must have been thinking, Moving pictures eh? Stories … no, documentaries … no, news … no, weddings … YES!
Of course, Bollywood being such an integral part of Indian heritage meant that, as video cameras became available, a million unconnected Indians around the world became would be filmmakers, but never got further than weddings. In the pioneering days of the portable video camera back in the 1980s, a video-camera crew would push and barge guests to get the shot they wanted, shouting ‘Hut, hut, video wallah!’ in the same tone that cops in movies shouted ‘OK, everyone back, I’m a police officer!’ They would knock aside old people and children, forging forward like the Spanish Inquisition, fuelled by a greater moral and righteous purpose – the wedding video.
Back at the Jalandhar wedding, the video camera man and his crew (two assistants, one tall, one small) walked through the main gates of the fort and immediately set up their equipment, which consisted of sticking the camera on a tripod and attaching a big light to the top. As ‘Director Sahib’, as he was called by his minions, turned to survey his ‘set’, he suddenly caught sight of us. He realized that we weren’t a rival wedding-video outfit as soon as he registered our high-definition camera. Director Sahib’s pupils dilated in awe, and he and his assistants then rushed over to pose with our HD camera like it was a national monument.
However, the guests were beginning to arrive and I wanted to catch up with the bride and her family on the big day, before they were swamped by the 5,000 well wishers.
In guest quarters within the venue, the bride – Rajinder Kaur, a lawyer from the west midlands is going through her final checklist. Between checking her make up and laughing with her family, she tells me the reason for having the wedding here.
‘I come to India every year and when we saw this place, I realized it was affordable enough to have my dream wedding. We couldn’t do anything on this scale back home, it was easier to fly the family out and they could have a holiday too.’
A crescendo of drums outside seems to announce the imminent arrival of the groom, so I hurriedly leave the radiant bride and her entourage behind and join the others outside the fortress gates. Traditionally, the Indian groom arrives on a white mare, accompanied by a brass band, dhol drums and friends dancing as wildly as the law allows. However, as this is a modern hybrid wedding, things are done slightly differently. The groom arrives in a stretched limo heralded by kilted bagpipers. I can’t quite place the tartan, what Scottish clan are they? McBhogal? McSandhu?
The groom, Tarvinder Singh, however, is resplendent in traditional desi wedding gear – long Sherwani coat and matrimonial turban.
I clock where I am for a moment. Indian bagpipers, stretch Cadillac, life-size make-believe fort, couple from England, all on the GT Road in Punjab. Fantastic.
This event has just started and though I would love to see the festivities out, we have to move on to Amritsar, closer to the Pakistan border. As we pack up and load our gear, a gentleman approaches and begs me to see the attraction next door to the fort and offers to give me a quick tour of the mini theme park. The theme, would you believe, is ‘Indian village’. An area the size of a couple of tennis courts is given over to re-create ‘an authentic’ rural scene. Shoddy mannequins depict exciting pastimes including sewing, reading books and also cooking. The only live and moving exhibit is a bullock slowly walking round a wheat thresher.
‘Wow!’ I say with as much polite enthusiasm as I can muster. The bullock shoots me a glance, which says, ‘Don’t humour me. Just don’t. OK?’
I’m out of the theme park before the vans are packed. The Disney Corporation must be quaking in their cartoon boots. As we drive away I catch sight of Director Sahib, halogen light blazing, marshalling the guests like Cecil B. DeMille.
It’s early evening as we head back on to the trusty GT Road and onwards to Amritsar, holy town to India’s 16 million Sikhs. I haven’t got long as we have an early border crossing tomorrow morning, but I simply cannot miss the opportunity to see the Sikh holiest shrine, the Golden Temple.
As we drive into the city’s outer limits, it’s easy to tell that this is an affluent city. Amritsar was, until the 1960s, mainly a rural town but engineering and light industry began to develop rapidly. The suburbs are well ordered and the mainly Sikh population’s egalitarian beliefs suggest that there are fewer beggars here.
We check into our hotel as dusk descends. The foyer is filled with a bevy of beautiful women. Now that’s what I call a welcome! They are in fact the crew of a Singapore Airline’s flight, stationed at the hotel overnight. It’s an example of Amritsar’s increasing importance as a destination over the last decade and the fact that Punjab’s overseas community have done well financially, that many international airlines now fly directly in to the city. One of the stewardesses smiles at me and recognizes me from my TV shows. Within sixty seconds, I’m surrounded by all the girls in a photo opportunity. Once again, I live out a James Bond fantasy. The fantasy (regrettably) is short lived and we head out to the Golden Temple.
‘Amritsar’ translates in Punjabi as ‘Pool of the Immortal Nectar’ and in the middle of a manmade water tank in the centre of the city lies the Golden Temple itself.
The Sikh religion was founded in the fifteenth century by Guru Nanak Dev who, like Buddha, was born a Hindu and after an epiphany began his own spiritual instruction. Once again, as with Buddhism, there are many similarities with Hinduism – strict practitioners are vegetarian, meditation is a fundamental practice, converts from other religions are not pursued, and spiritual fulfilment not leading to heaven or hell are just some of the beliefs that are shared. Guru Nanak’s teachings rejected the caste system, talked of the emancipation of women and rejected the worshipping of lurid idols.
As other Guru’s teachings also became incorporated into Sikhism, more warrior-like aspects emerged, including the carrying of swords and uncut hair being bound up in turbans. Sikhs developed a martial philosophy based on defence rather than expansion and fought fierce battles against the Mughals, and during the nineteenth century against the British. Though pilgrimage was never essential within the teachings, the Golden Temple at Amritsar has become as important a focus for Sikhs as Varanasi is for Hindus and Mecca is for Muslims.
The Golden Temple, an ornate and beautiful shrine made of marble and topped with gold leaf, rises from the holy lake and contains the Sikhs’ holy book, called ‘The Guru Granth Sahib’. The rest of the complex is made up of long marble buildings that emanate a cool, placid air. I join the devotees and tourists wandering through the vast central area, having washed our feet and covered our heads. The evening Kirtan, the singing of Sikh hymns, provides a melodious musical bed to wander about and introspect to. Such is the respectful nature of the religion that some of the hymns were even written by Hindus and Muslim Sufis.
Here in Amritsar, I’m as physically close as I’ve ever been to the Pakistani border and it was here that some of the worst violence ensued during the last days of the Empire. The city of Lahore (in Pakistan) is only sixty miles away, and Amritsar’s proximity to the India/Pakistan border made it a particularly dangerous fighting ground during Partition in 1947. Muslims, who made up nearly half the population of the city, fought bitterly with Hindus and Sikhs. This civil war is reported to have lasted five months, but there is no way of counting the number of lives lost.
At the Golden Temple, I met a man, only slightly older than my father, who told me of his experiences of those turbulent times. Bal Bahadur Singh was a child in 1947, and hailed from a village in the north west of the Punjab. The modestly sized Sikh community there had been used to living in an overwhelmingly Muslim area, but there had never been any trouble.
As word of communal and civil unrest in neighbouring villages began to reach the inhabitants of BB Singh’s district, tensions there also began to escalate. Muslim mobs began to approach and surround the village. Then began the attacks. The local Sikh priest was hacked up, bit by bit, as he continued to refuse to convert to Islam; a woman was physically ripped apart; and very quickly there was a deadly standoff.
BB Singh’s father was the head man of the village.
‘As the village elder, my father was respected and trusted by all; everybody would do whatever he asked them to, without question. Our village was surrounded by thousands of Muslims who either wanted us to convert or die … my father and the elders decided that they would fight to the death, and death was inevitable for us because of the numbers against us.
‘My father’s biggest concern was for the women and children, and it was decided that protecting their honour was the most important thing … as we knew that we could not survive, my father suggested that all the women and children should die rather than fall into the mob’s hands … My sister stepped forward first and asked my father to kill her first, so she could set the example. I remember she moved her plaits out of the way so his sword would have no obstacle in reaching her neck.’
I have never interviewed someone before where my hands have involuntarily covered my mouth and I don’t even remember doing it, but both of my hands were now clasped tightly around my mouth. Stifling a silent scream perhaps? Maybe even stopping myself from being sick, I’m still not sure, but I felt that BB Singh needed to have this tale heard, and I needed to hear it. I was way, way out of my comfort zone and struggled to ask him what happened next.
‘My father then killed my other sisters and my mother. Most women and children jumped into the well; maybe hundreds died that way.’
I search for any sign of trauma behind BB Singh’s eyes but I can’t tell. I see the water sparkling and reflected in the golden glow of the temple’s dome. ‘Did any women survive?’ I ask.
‘Two survived. There were two younger girls that leaped into the well; there were so many bodies in there that they landed on top of them.’
‘Looking back and the fact that at least two women survived, do you think the situation could have been handled better?’
‘No, it was only when the Muslim mob saw us killing our women, that they turned away; then they knew they couldn’t convert us, they thought, “If they can do that, then there is nothing we can do,” and they went away … then those of us who survived made our way to India.’
The horrific images were filling every iota of space in my mind as I focused on asking the next question.
‘What do you feel towards those people, the people that put you in that terrible situation?’
‘It was a terrible, terrible thing, but it’s important to not let hate fill your heart. I had awful nightmares for years, but the Partition was not brought about by any of us, but everyone responded to it in their own way … in life you have to deal with what is in front of you and what is real. We’d had many dealings with Muslims before 1947 and so it cannot be right to hate all Muslims because of what a few were doing, and also hating now doesn’t change the past.’
I tell BB Singh that I’m crossing the border tomorrow and will try and find my father’s ancestral village of Badhoki Gosaiyan, I ask him if he could ever make the journey back to his old village. To my utter surprise, he tells me that he’s already done it.
‘I went back a few years ago, back to that same village, I just wanted to see the place, pay my respects, that’s all. Of course I was apprehensive about going, but when I got there, the entire village and people from the surrounding district had come out to greet me. They all wanted me to eat at their house or visit them. Some even remembered me and my family and talked about how respected my father was in the surrounding areas. I was very moved; they gave me presents to take back to India. I got very emotional.’
I finally ask Mr Singh if he would ever go back.
‘Maybe,’ he answers, thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t feel that need to go now. I’ve made my peace and others should do the same. If I can do it, given what I have been through, then others should too.’
BB Singh heads off home and I feel I need to take a moment after all these revelations. I wander around the Golden Temple complex. Mr Singh’s elegance, generosity and profound forgiveness strike me as worthy of canonization. No child should be subjected to such horrific imagery and I find it difficult to fathom the mind of someone who is prepared to invest such total degradation on a fellow human being. Vengeance was being exacted on innocents, on women and children who knew nothing of the political machinations that were being wielded, which in turn were to scar, if not end, their lives.
I stare into the pool of golden nectar. The hymns from the faithful inside the main temple, the Harimandir Sahib, lilt gently across the balmy air. I am suddenly struck by how calm and peaceful this place is, a genuine sanctuary for reflection. Given that Sikhs were renowned warriors, the underlying philosophy of the faith is of total peace and the Golden Temple underlines that. As does Mr BB Singh himself, a fine advertisement for Sikhism, and indeed humanity itself.
The remnants of Mr Singh’s family ultimately made it across the border to rebuild their lives, much as my family did. Now it was time for me to cross that same border, but in the direction that millions of Muslims, uprooted and suffering violent retribution, were also forced to take. Mr Singh found peace and closure on his journey back in time. What would I find? Well, I was about to find out.