My father, Lieutenant Colonel Jaswant Singh Marwah, is a sprightly ninety-one-year-old Second World War veteran. In April 1943, after graduating from the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun, he was commissioned into the Royal Indian Army Service Corps (RIASC). He thus became the first ‘afsar’, or commissioned officer, in his family. Though he was commissioned in the RIASC, my father’s heart was set on serving in the Indian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (IEME) from the very beginning, as he had majored in subjects like higher mathematics, physics and chemistry for his graduation from the University of Punjab. He was thus happy to get transferred to the IEME in 1948. ‘Frankly speaking, I wasn’t either enjoying or feeling comfortable doing the assigned duties in the RIASC,’ Dad would tell us. It was from the same academy, twenty-one years later, that I would also graduate and get my commission.
In 1944, my father was posted to the Reserve Supply Depot at Karachi Port, after completing the basic young officer’s course at Kakul and a few weeks’ attachment at the RIASC Centre at Ambala. The Karachi depot stocked rations for the army deployed in the Punjab and the North West Frontier Province, particularly items like tinned fish and milk imported from the UK. He married Jaspal Kaur in December 1944 in Rawalpindi, and took her to Karachi. They were in Karachi for a brief period during the war. My father recounts that he would take my mother out to the sea quite often by motor boat, and they would also go for long walks on the beach. It was exciting for them to be near the sea – it was like a honeymoon posting. However, sadly for them, it lasted only a few months.
In February 1945, he was posted as the commanding officer of a rail-based petroleum sub-depot at Samasata, about 20 miles from Bahawalpur, a princely state in the Punjab. Being the only officer, he also doubled as the station commander of the small military set-up there, with a few junior commissioned officers and soldiers under his command. It was almost like a one-man-and-a dog team. As my mother was expecting me, her first child, great love and care was lavished on her by my father. A box of ‘bedana’ (seedless) grapes from Chaman, near Quetta, that my dad arranged for her at that time was something that she remembered all her life. It was in this small, dusty and remote military cantonment that I was born on 17 September 1945. My mother had a forceps delivery, and both she and I survived, in an era in which there were many deaths during childbirth.
While the Allies were winning the war in 1945, colonial India’s domestic political scene was witnessing turbulent times. The British had realized that India could no longer remain their crown jewel: the sun was setting over the empire, and the future of the subcontinent had to be decided soon. There was a growing feeling amongst the people of India that independence was round the corner. At the same time, rumours that India was being partitioned were spreading like wildfire. In this wartime scenario, the Indian Army, particularly the Indian officers, junior commissioned officers and other ranks, faced great uncertainty. Once the war ended, this feeling got accentuated even more. The sad prospect of serving in different armies once Hindustan was split into two nations was not easy to digest. It was ironical as armymen, irrespective of whether they were Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or Christians, never thought of themselves as anything but Hindustanis. But at this juncture of history, the officers and men had become a confused and perplexed lot. Time was running out and the soldiers had to decide quickly whether they wanted to serve in the Indian or Pakistani army!
Many people in the Punjab had a flicker of hope till the very end that they might not be uprooted from their land, home and hearth. Such sentiments were understandable. However, a great catastrophe befell the Indian subcontinent on 3 June 1947, when the Mountbatten Plan was announced for the partition of India. The date fixed for the division of British India was 15 August, and the proclamation of the Radcliffe Award, which would define the exact alignment of the border between India and Pakistan, was scheduled for the next day, 16 August. This was wrong, in my opinion, as people who owned properties didn’t want to abandon them till they were sure of the boundary. Some of the landlords even converted to Islam and stayed behind to keep their lands! Till the time the Radcliffe line was clearly established, there were millions of affected people who couldn’t take any decision about their future. When they finally did make up their minds, it proved to be too late and calamitous for many of them, for in the bargain they lost their lives too.
My grandparents and other family members, who were mainly Punjabi Khatris, both Sikhs and Hindus, were uprooted and devastated. My grandfather, a disabled veteran of the First World War and his family, and that of Anupama (I call her Rohini), my future wife, had little choice but to migrate to the Indian part of the subcontinent.
They were not only a witness to many horrendous incidents, but also suffered untold pain and misery themselves. An example in our family was the assumed violent death of Rohini’s elderly grandmother; her body was never found. This period thus had an indelible and traumatic effect on this generation’s psyche and life as also that of their children. Khushwant Singh’s unforgettable book, Train to Pakistan, gives a moving account of this tragic period. The whole thing was a human tragedy of unimaginable dimensions, and possibly avoidable, according to some contemporary historians.
As a result of this Partition, the armed forces and their assets were also divided between the two nations. Regimental histories were torn asunder. Vertical splits and division of manpower and equipment took place in various regiments of cavalry and artillery, and in infantry battalions of mixed-class composition. The farewells were carried out in a spirit of bonhomie between the parting soldiers, who were comrades-in-arms till that day. Barring a few exceptions, the Muslims on one hand and the Hindus and Sikhs on the other, went their different ways. Little did they realize then that within a few months both the armies would get embroiled in a war over Kashmir. My grandfather, whose battalion, the 1/67 Punjabis, was similarly divided, was quite heartbroken about this and once remarked, ‘The “paltan” that was built by our blood, sweat and toil over a century or two, disintegrated overnight with the stroke of the pen of the Mulki Laat, the Viceroy!’
It was a time of great stress for my parents. Between March 1946 and February 1948, my father, who was just a captain, was shunted around to eight different military stations in various units! So was the case with a large number of commissioned officers and men too. Things would never be the same again for officers and men of the British Indian Army. The effect was traumatic as well as tragic in many cases, particularly for those soldiers and their families who happened to suddenly find themselves living in the wrong country.