Remnants of Partition: Aanchal Malhotra (1947)
Aanchal Malhotra, author of Remnants of a Separation. For a full transcript of this conversation, please scroll down.
In this superbly-evoked episode of Travels Through Time, the Indian writer Aanchal Malhotra takes us back to the cavalier, chaotic and catastrophic sequence of events surrounding Indian Independence in the summer of 1947
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In the immediate aftermath of World War Two it became clear that the Raj was no longer sustainable. But how should the British leave the Indian subcontinent after such a long period of colonial rule? Should the territory be divided? How could this be done?
On 3 June 1947, the citizens of the subcontinent received part of the answer. Their lands were to be divided into two nations: India and Pakistan. These nations would come into existence on 15 August, with India to be a secular nation and Pakistan a homeland for Muslims. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’, said Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India in his Tryst of Destiny speech.
So began the most traumatic of summers. The most pressing question at that time was where this border would run. As riots flared across the Punjab, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, an English lawyer who had never set foot in India before, was sent to draw what would become known as ‘The Ratcliffe Line.’
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, (WikiCommons)
Radcliffe fell ill upon his arrival in India. This hamstrung the work of a man who had little understanding of the cultural complexities he had been sent to resolve. All around there was disquiet. At his daily prayer meetings in July, Mahatma Gandhi was arguing against the idea of division, ‘The very creation of two nations is a poison, the Congress and the Muslim league have accepted this, but a vice does not become a virtue merely because it is accepted by all.’
By the middle of August, Radcliffe’s work was done. As the monsoon heat soared and the land was soaked with torrential downpours, millions learned just where Radcliffe had drawn his line. The news set a rapid process of migration in action. An estimated 14 million people left their homes- on foot, in caravans, clutching their few belongings.
This is known, till date, to be the largest mass-migration in the history of the world.
Hearing about the commotion, the massacres and the hundreds of thousands of refugees, Radcliffe refused his fee. He left India never to return. Once home in England he destroyed all of his papers that related to the event we now remember as ‘Partition.’
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Aanchal Malhotra lives in New Dehli. She is a multidisciplinary artist and a historian with a particular interest in the workings of memory and material culture.
Click here to order Aanchal Malhotra’s book from John Sandoe’s who, we are delighted to say, are supplying books for the podcast.
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Show Notes:
Scene One: 3 June, 1947 New Dehli, India – the announcement of Indian independence and subsequent Partition called the Independence of India Act, 1947 or the Mountbatten Plan.
Scene Two: 8 July, 1947, arrival of Sir Cyril Radcliffe in New Dehli, who goes on to draw the “Radcliffe Line.”
Scene Three: A journey begins in Lahore. The days of Partition – roughly, the middle of August, 1947. The northern belt of present-day India and Pakistan.
Memento: A blood-soaked shawl
People/Social
Guest: Aanchal Malhotra (@AanchalMalhotra)
Presenter: Peter Moore (@petermoore)
Producer: Maria Nolan
Titles: Deft Ear
“All I can say is that, what happened, happened, but the truth is that many such unconceiv-able things happened in our life and after a while even the memory fades and eventually becomes dormant, we just forget. Then years later we recollect them in conversations, like this one, with a sense of disconnect, as though these were not the lives we have lived our-selves but incredible snippets of fiction that had sprung out of mere imagination.”
Map of the scenes described in the episode
1909 British Map of India
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More about the scenes
(Sc 1) June 3, 1947 India – the announcement of Indian independence and subsequent Partition called the Independence of India Act, 1947 or the Mountbatten Plan. Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, along with legislative members of the dominant groups - Indian National Congress represented by Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Acharya Kripalani; Muslim League represented by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Jhan, Sardar Abdul Rab Nishtar; and the Sikh community represented by Sardar Baldev Singh – came to an agreement about a concrete plan for the independence of British India.
This plan was subsequently broadcast to the peoples of India through the radio and newspapers in English and vernacular languages. People across the country though rejoiced at the prospect of a long overdue independence, did not quite understand what Partition meant, where the border between India and Pakistan would lie and whether they’d be forced to leave their homes, being minority religions on either side. This was one of the factors that led to rioting across many cities and villages of north India.
(Sc 2) Indian Independence Day – August 15, 1947 – when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru is giving his iconic Tryst with Destiny speech as independent India’s first Prime Minister. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”
(Sc 3) The days of Partition – roughly, the middle of August, 1947. The northern belt of present-day India and Pakistan. Under the monsoon heat and torrential downpour, 14 million people migrated across the newly created border of India and Pakistan, called the Radcliffe Line. They migrated on foot in caravans on foot, carrying their belongings, vehicles, families and animals. They migrated on trains, trucks and even on planes, if they could afford to. This is known, till date, to be the largest mass-migration in the history of the world.
Margaret Bourke White, the American photographer, who photographed this migration for LIFE magazine, called the Partition “an exercise in human misery”; Prabhjot Kaur, the Punjabi poet who wrote about extensively about migration and home, and who herself migrated via train sitting on the massacred bodies of other refugees, called it “an unholy rush”
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Click here to order Remnants of Partition by Aanchal Malhotra from our friends at John Sandoe’s Books.
Transcription
Remnants of a Separation: Aanchal Malhotra (1947)
[Music]
Peter Moore: Hello I'm Peter Moore and this is Travels Through Time, the podcast where we ask an expert guest to explore one year in history through three telling scenes. Our time traveler today is Aanchal Malhotra. Together we're going to go back to witness the chaotic end of the British Raj and to watch as individual stories play out, often bewilderingly and traumatically, in that process known to us today as Partition. You'll soon hear that Aanchal has a compelling way of telling these stories and I think she generally has a wonderful talent for evoking the past. She lives in New Delhi where she works as a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in the workings of memory and material culture. But she's over in the UK at the moment to mark the British publication of her first book – Remnants of Partition, a kaleidoscopic material history of the events surrounding Indian independence in 1947. The writer Edmund de Waal has called her book ‘one of startling originality, weaving stories of intimate connections with objects and harrowing histories of displacement into beautifully cadenced prose. It’s a book to treasure.’ I sat down with Aanchal week ago in London, I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Welcome to Travels Through Time Aanchal.
Aanchal Malhotra: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Peter Moore: Right ok so let's get going, what year would you like to visit and most importantly why?
Aanchal Malhotra: So the year we're going to go back to is 1947 and that's really the year that kind of changed, I guess, the geographic as well as the mental landscape of South Asians because it started off with talks of Indian Independence, that was at the time decided to happen in 1948, very quickly things escalated after the war had ended in 1945, riots between various religious groups of India had broken out, partition plans were finalised, the mapmaker Cyril Radcliffe came to India. And what I think 1947 did for us as South Asians was ferment what nationality meant, what it meant to be Indian and Pakistani, both in terms of our geography being so fortified and also what it meant to inherit some form of national identity.
Peter Moore: Yeah, and I think the point you brushed on there which is the most important one that we should just linger on for a moment is the speed that this process happened at because you're talking about the formations of countries which are often hundreds of years in the making. We’re talking, what, a couple of months from ideas to planning to execution and this is the speed that it was all going at, right?
Aanchal Malhotra: Well it depends on who you ask, what side you ask, but I would say that the struggle for Indian independence really began with force in the 1930s, but with the inclusion of India as a British colony in World War Two it really escalated quite quickly because India was not interested in being included in the war. The Viceroy at the time did so without any kind of prior notice or even talking to any of the national leaders so Indian leaders are quite upset about it, there is a political void because they all are sent to prison for retaliating against being in the war. Things start to take shape. It becomes quite apparent that Britain will no longer be able to sustain India as a colony anymore because post-war Britain there's not a lot of money. It becomes quite clear that India is not going to be a part of the British Empire for much longer. But the scale, as you say, and the speed at which it happens is really quite quick because it's not just the fact that Britain is extricating itself from India but it’s also the fact that various religious groups are warring amongst themselves within India so all of that expediates the process much faster than it otherwise would have.
Peter Moore: Hmm, so on the 1st of January 1947, for example, no one would have had much of an idea what it was going to look like on the 31st of December 1947, is that right?
Aanchal Malhotra: It’s completely accurate. I think even when we were within partition, within the days of partition, a lot of people didn't know what was happening because it was really quite confusing and there were plans and, yes, the plans were announced but, you know, think about these things – not everyone is educated, not everyone has a radio, not everyone reads the newspaper at that time. And so how you got your information was often through word-of-mouth, so even when you were in the midst of independence or Partition you didn't really quite understand what was happening so a lot of people followed others, you know, either villagers or family or friends and migrated, as it were, across this border.
Peter Moore: If the one factor is the speed at which, you know, the process unraveled the second is the amount of people that were affected by it because – you talked about this in your book, I'm not quite sure of the numbers, you'll tell us now – but there’s an enormous number of people which are affected by these decisions.
Aanchal Malhotra: That's right. So it's known as the largest mass migration of people in the world to date. Official numbers say 14 million people displaced and 1 million killed, which in itself is vast. It was called things like an unholy rush, it was called a massive exercise in human migration, you know it was awful, it was really awful.
Peter Moore: It's just this process of sorting people into these divisions which have been artificially constructed very quickly to make sense of a very confusing situation. So let's leave that there for the moment because I think we're gonna move through the events of the year through your three scenes and let’s start our time travels because for your first scene – I mean, these are all quite specific dates, we've got the 3rd of June 1947 and India. If you're going back to that date, what's happening on that date? Can you tell us please?
Aanchal Malhotra: Yes so, imagine a room, actually quite similar to the one we’re sitting in right now, and it is populated by about six to ten men and these are men that represent the four major segments of people involved in India, which is the English, so the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten is there; it is the Indian National Congress, which in the particular room is represented by three Hindu officials including Jabal al Nehru, who went on to be our first Prime Minister; there is representation from the Muslim League, so Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who went on to become the president of Pakistan and the Sikh community, which is represented by Baldev Singh. And they are basically deciding the fate of India. Lord Mountbatten has drafted a plan which is called the Mountbatten Plan which elucidates the points of Independence and subsequent Partition into independent India and independent Pakistan. India, which is going to be a secular country involving all religions and Pakistan known to be a new homeland for Muslims. They are basically writing down the points of this arrangement: when India will be partitioned, when will independence be granted. By that time the British were ready to give independence to India in 1948 but with their situation post-world War Two it became quite clear that 1948 was already too far away. So it was decided very quickly that Partition will happen and happen that very year in August. So imagine this is June, this is just a couple months later.
Peter Moore: So is this a sense that this has been a problem, from the British perspective, which has been growing over a number of years and now they've got to the point where they realise it's completely unsustainable and they just want to get out, they want to get on with it, is that right?
Aanchal Malhotra: Yeah, because I think that with the demand for a new country, Pakistan, and a country that is of a minority religion at the time, I think that really changed things, that really changed things, and it really made English officials think about their position in India. So we’re sitting there – and it's not just about ‘yes, we are going to leave on this day, at this date’, it's also about Constitution. What kind of a Constitution will be adopted? What kind of voting will happen? The formation of Republic. Things like this are being decided upon. Constituent Assemblies. What villages, what cities might vote differently because they are known as princely states and they have autonomous, you know...
Peter Moore: Yeah exactly, but the thing that's really striking me we're almost going back to an age when it was, you know, this is a time when it was still possible for a group of men to sit around in a room and decide the fate of enormous questions and that’s something which to us today seems quite ludicrous.
Aanchal Malhotra: I mean, it’s interesting that you mentioned that because this is one of the things I think about constantly is that we are taught and we read this very large capital ‘H’ ‘History’, right? History of laws, history of rules, history of the past, history that is written by an obvious victor. And what I'm trying to do in my work and my book and my research is to record these small ‘h’ histories, histories of people, and those are often – I don't enjoy the term – but it's called a ‘subaltern history’, it's called ‘history from beneath’, but really this is the history that people make, right? People’s history. How does one decision taken by, yes, a group of men sitting in a room, affect a population as vast as that of India’s, right? So it's really quite interesting. And what happened after that date, the plan was decided, Lord Mountbatten came back to England, he discussed the plan with the Crown, it was accepted, he came back to India on June 15 1947 and he announced the plan.
Peter Moore: Okay, so at this time and if you were back there, you know, this is enormous decisions being made, this is stories of people going back and forth to Britain plans being hatched, etc. What's the general atmosphere like? Are they excited? Are they bewildered? What’s going on in, especially among these people you’re talking about in the room back then, what were they feeling like?
Aanchal Malhotra: The reactions of people are different because if we are talking about the people that were actually involved in creating the plan, of course there's a sense of elation because independence is around the corner, finally, 200 years of some form of enslavement or the other will be finished, soon, so that's a battle won. But at the same time, there's a sense of confusion because we have to understand that, though independence has been accepted and Partition, in principle and theory, has been accepted no one knows what Partition means, no one knows what it looks like, nobody knows at this point because the border has not yet been decided and in the people, the general people of India. So this broadcast goes out onto the radio, it’s in newspapers, people read about it, they talk about it and everyone is excited that they will be independent, right? There is a sense of ownership over your land. But nobody knows the borders of Pakistan, nobody knows whether they will have to migrate. So you have all kinds of very interesting stories, like there are stories of people who are Muslims living in Delhi – smack in the middle of India, landlocked completely – that are certain that Delhi will be a part of Pakistan because there's such a vast Muslim population.
Peter Moore: They're convinced of this.
Aanchal Malhotra: They’re convinced! Similarly in parts of Punjab that have, like Lahore where there is a huge Hindu and Sikh population they’re convinced that they’ll be a part of India. So I think that within the people of India there is confusion, there is excitement but then a little bit of animosity is beginning, very much beginning.
Peter Moore: Right, so you talk of animosity, what do you mean by that? What kind of early stirrings of that are you seeing at this point?
Aanchal Malhotra: The earliest massacre of one community can be traced back to 1946 it was called the Great Calcutta Killings, where it is recorded that Muslims killed Hindus in Calcutta. Post that, the second major massacre that is recorded is in March 1947 in Rawalpindi, that's called the Rape of Rawalpindi where the people that were targeted were women, Hindu and Sikh women that were targeted by Muslims and it was gendered. They were abused, they were brutalised, they were mutilated. After that August 1947 is the main kind of Partition riots and the violence that ensued in those days.
Peter Moore: Well, we’ll leave those to come to in a moment but it seems to me what you’re describing here is an incredibly powerful confluence of different forces. You've got nationalism, which has been around – as you write about this in the book – of people singing nationalistic songs, for example, this has been going on for many years. You've got the sense of a dream about to be realised, which is the kind of the hope and the excitement. But then you’ve also got a very dangerous undercurrent which is not always an undercurrent, sometimes it's out and open, of people who are going to use this for all sorts of different reasons, I'm imagining, which may be related to the Partition but then maybe have different origins as well. And we'll leave that moment there because clarity is what we're after and clarity, the British have decided, is going to be delivered by a particular person and this is your second scene which is on the 8th of July in 1947, so a few weeks later on, and we have the arrival of who?
Aanchal Malhotra: So the British officials decide that we won't be the ones to create the line, we can’t, and neither will anyone from India – can’t be a Muslim, can’t be a Hindu, can’t be a Sikh. We have to find a person, a map maker, to draw this very contentious border. And the border would be drawn, for the most part, between the provinces of Punjab and Bengal which had the most homogeneous mixture of people, right? So Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, all kinds of people lived there. It was very important to divide it on the basis of minority and majority religion. And they decided the best person to do it was not a geologist, who knows land, not a mapmaker, who knows maps, not a cartographer, who understands the making of maps on land, but rather a lawyer – so, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before. This particular trait of his was regarded as a good thing because someone who's never been to India before will be completely unbiased to its land and people. But that doesn't work! It doesn't work because he didn't speak the language, he didn't understand anything about the people, he didn't understand the different kinds of people, the various religions, the food, climate and, this is not a mark on his character, I want to make very clear because he was equally as confused as to why he was chosen.
Peter Moore: Could you give us just a little overview of what had been happening in the life of Sir Cyril Radcliffe up to this point? What had he been doing? You say he's a lawyer?
Aanchal Malhotra: He was a lawyer, he was just your average kind of lawyer, he was a good lawyer. And he was selected from a list of many people that had been shortlisted and he was selected particularly because he had never been to India.
Peter Moore: He'd never been to India at all?
Aanchal Malhotra: He’d never been to India.
Peter Moore: So this day here, the 8th of July, we're at, we kind of imagined him...
Aanchal Malhotra: The first mention of him is when this young English official Christopher Beaumont. Christopher Beaumont is going to be his secretary in India and so he says ‘yes, Partition is going to happen and so Radcliffe is coming to do it’, right? So Cyril Radcliffe arrives in India on 8th of July in 1947 and he has a total of five weeks to partition a country as vast as India.
Peter Moore: Do we know, I mean this is maybe trivial in terms of the greater problems, but do you know what he looks like? Can we just try to give us a picture of Cyril Radcliffe.
Aanchal Malhotra: Of course, I know what he looks like, I know what he did in India. I mean he looks kind of like a very run-of-the-mill Caucasian man because the most well-known photograph of him is much later in life and he is average height, he wears those round hats, he wears glasses...
Peter Moore: He sounds a real man of his time. With that name Cyril as well, which seems to be planted in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
Aanchal Malhotra: The thing is that, this is my opinion, that he’s a rather misunderstood character. Because we see in the subsequent weeks that the British government really needed a pawn and, little did Radcliffe know, that he would become that pawn. So he arrives in India and he gets really sick.
Peter Moore: And this is something that lots of people might identify with who made a similar journey, I suppose...
Aanchal Malhotra: His duties include travelling to Bengal, traveling to Punjab, looking at the land, surveying the land, looking at where water bodies go from, which is going to be the most natural progression of division. And he's only able to go to Bengal once, I know this because his secretary Beaumont writes that we had this wonderful flight over Calcutta and Sir Radcliffe saw the land where he was going to be, that he was going to be partitioning. Apart from that he didn’t really go anywhere because he falls really sick and Lord Mountbatten quite categorically tells him that ‘you shouldn't be seen near me’, right? Because then people will think that I have something to do with the border, because the border had to remain unbiased as far as it was possible. So because Radcliffe was unable to travel to these places he had to partition he was given a map, a very large, very outdated map and with outdated statistics and not a lot of help. He was given two Boundary Commissions, one for Punjab, one for Bengal with Indians on it, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus they were all on it. But what ended up happening is that those particular individuals from the different communities just started bickering amongst themselves leaving Radcliffe pretty much to draw the line on his own with the help of his two assistants. Imagine this: so you have a large table, you have a large map, you have outdated statistics, you have an outdated map and you're just gonna draw a line.
Peter Moore: We've no idea about the cultural subtleties that you’re confusing.
Aanchal Malhotra: Not as much as you would have to. So what he did is he followed, as best was possible, the natural progression of rivers and water bodies. But then there were really bizarre things that happened, like he cut through a village where one half of the village was in India and the other half was in Pakistan. There is a story, which was turned into a movie later, where they cut through a house! One half of the house is in India, the other half is in Pakistan. And it's quite complicated because the border wasn't announced until independence and the border was changed as well so...
Peter Moore: So this is, again, it’s a very opaque process. It's all going on behind doors with this Cyril Radcliffe character and he's doing it over five weeks, part of the time of which he’s incapacitated because he's unwell, so maybe that abbreviates that down to only three weeks or something like this. And yes, so no one knows what's going on and I suppose there must be just a sense of tension, people waiting for the news to be what's actually going to go on, is that right?
Aanchal Malhotra: Yeah I think there were rumours, right? So, in the general public people were discussing where the border would be, right? Which meant that there was a lot of preemptive migration. For example, Jalandhar, which is now in India, had an over 51% Muslim population and everyone was certain it would go to Pakistan so no Muslims migrated from there. When the border was announced, everyone had to leave in the middle of the night. But very interesting things happen. As the date the 15th August 1947 drew closer government officials also started appealing to Radcliffe: ‘Oh give us Lahore’, ‘oh why don't you give us Calcutta?’ Okay well what about Gurdaspur? You know, certain places to be in certain countries. But then other interesting things happened. For example Gurdaspur district, which was Muslim population was given to Pakistan for three days and then three days later it was given to India.
Peter Moore: This is all quite crazy horse trading over people’s lives.
Aanchal Malhotra: Absolutely. Similarly, over in Malda district which is now in the east of the country of India it was given to Pakistan and then it was given to India. So it was actually quite confusing and particularly because the line was announced on August 17 and independence happened two days before that. So it's very very confusing...
Peter Moore: So the chronology of all this is all a bit scrambled up and Radcliffe himself, you write how he actually leaves India very soon afterwards and he doesn't talk about this ever again, is that right?
Aanchal Malhotra: So Radcliffe gives his papers in and he was told that he has to have the line by August 12th or 13th, something like that, and he gives the papers in and then he sees what's happening in the country because people have already started writing, they've started migrating, there is news articles about arson and theft and murder and Massacre and he's quite horrified because he thinks ‘oh my God look what I've done’, right? And so he takes everything, he takes his papers, he takes his luggage, he takes every piece of information that he has collected in India and he goes back to England on August 15 and he burns every single thing. So everything we know about Radcliffe we know only through the papers and letters of his secretary, Beaumont.
Peter Moore: Okay, so he's almost like a hologram figure in that sense. But I think is this where your sympathy for him comes from? The fact that he was one of the first – maybe sympathy is the wrong way to characterise it – but the fact that you could see that he was someone who was forced into a situation he probably didn't ask to and he saw early on the dangers...
Aanchal Malhotra: I mean it’s complicated, right? Because he agreed to do the job but he didn't know what the job entailed. And I don't know if I have sympathy for him, I always wonder what I would do if I was in that situation – is it possible to partition a country which virtually looks the same on both sides? Like if I speak to people in Pakistan, in India now they will always say that we didn't even know where the border started. We didn't know that we had become Pakistani when we crossed this particular line because everything looked the same, people look the same, talk the same way, particularly in the north. I think that Radcliffe is a highly misunderstood character and I think he's unfairly dealt, I mean life has dealt unfair terms to him and the paradox, of course, the sheer paradox of his legacy is that the border is named after him. It's called the Radcliffe Line.
Peter Moore: That's a very strange afterlife for someone because, in the span of his life this was a very short period of a few weeks, but forever after he's going to be known by the work then that he did.
Aanchal Malhotra: Well, then WH Auden wrote this famous poem about him, where basically all he talked about was this man coming to India, getting dysentery and being unable to complete the task that was given to him and then running away, as if you were in abscond or something. So it’s really quite a strange legacy to leave behind.
Peter Moore: Well our second scene is almost within the confines of this Auden poem and we'll leave it there because it's a wonderful biographical sketch and of dilemmas on all sides. And from that I want to go on to your third, which is actually the middle days of August 1947, the days of Partition when all of these decisions have been made and the consequences are filtering through to everyone, normal people on the ground, so tell us what it would have been a bit like then.
Aanchal Malhotra: So the scene we’re going to visit now is the life of a young woman. Her her name is Prabhjot Kaur, she died about two years ago, but she was one of the most prominent Punjabi poets of her time. And she is one of the few women that continued to write during Partition, while living through Partition. So at the time she was a college student in Lahore and she lived with her siblings and her grandmother in Badami Bagh, a Gurdwara in Lahore. She was Sikh. We’re going to follow her journey from being in Lahore witnessing the riots and then crossing over into India. So earlier that year her parents had travelled to Kalyan, which is near Bombay, and they had lived there. And they, because all the children had still been in either schools or colleges in Lahore, they had left them with their grandmother. So the children lived in Lahore, the parents lived in Kalyan and things were fine. When August came and things were not looking so good Prabhjot Kaur’s mother comes by train [Peter: This is before news of...?] Well, it's during August, it’s in the month of August, so independence has not yet happened, the Partition line has not had been announced, but still tension is pretty high. So this woman comes to collect her children, she comes by train and she comes to the Gurdwara Badami Bagh and she's crying, she’s weeping, she says that 'my mother was crying and she says that the land is covered in blood, the land is seeped in blood, I had never seen it like this.’ So obviously rioting has begun because she has crossed from the south of India all the way to the northwest so she’s seen quite a lot of the land and she says, ‘we have to go.’ And before that Prabhjot Kaur describes to me that if they were ever to go out of the Gurdwara they would always carry red chilli powder, they would always carry their IDs, they would always carry a small knife. At night they would sleep on the roofs with bricks in front of them should someone ever attack. So her mother comes, they pack the stuff in the middle of the night, a truck comes to get them and Partition has not yet been declared, right? So nobody knows whether Lahore, the city that they’re living in, will be in India or Pakistan but all they know is that riots have begun, it's unsafe, particularly for young women, so we need to get to safety. In the middle of the night a truck comes for them and Prabhjot Kaur now remembers that she was cooking roti on the stove and she says ‘I remember later that I left the roti on the stove and it must have burnt everything down’ and she says ‘I don't know I felt kind of shameful having slinked out of my house like that’. They were all meant to wear black shawls and they all had to cover every part of them so that they, kind of, blended into the night. So this truck comes and they have been warned that trains are coming with people massacred, rioters might come to the station, so you have to be careful. So they arrive at the train station and it's silent, it's completely silent and Prabhjot Kaur thinks ‘oh my God, we’re safe, we're safe thank God’. A train arrives, it's completely quiet, it’s completely deserted, there are no rioters, there are no sickles, there are no swords, there is no fire. They get on the train and they realise why it's quiet – because every single person on that train has already been massacred. And so there are these terrible cut-up mutilated bodies and – you remember, she's a poet, so she's visual, she doesn't forget things – and so she describes these grotesque scenes of stray hair and people's objects and she says that, you know, ‘there were bodies on the seats’. And I asked her, ‘what did you do?’ and she said, ‘well, what could we do? We sat on those bodies’. And then she describes how she was wearing a black shawl, when she sat on those bodies the blood from the body seeped up to the shawl and there was a kind of dark, darker blackish ring that she could see. So they sat on these bodies and they came to India to Kalyan and there she volunteered in a refugee camp.
Peter Moore: And that was often the destination for lots of these people, these refugee camps, where in turn the conditions were often appalling in themselves and from then they filtered out to different life...
Aanchal Malhotra: Yes, my own grandfather’s family lived in a camp for four or five years.
Peter Moore: Hmm, so I think you’ve described that really evocatively and quite brilliantly and so I think we’ll just leave it there for a moment because there's much more we could say but I think that's a really powerful scene and I want you just to, like, kind of generally talk about what happened over the next couple of months.
Aanchal Malhotra: Her’s is not a sad story after that. She had fallen in love with an army officer who was posted in Baghdad during World War Two and they had met by writing poems. He printed a poem in a military gazette and she read it and she thought it was unfinished and so she wrote the next paragraph and they started conversing, and they fell in love. And they vowed to get married in an India that was Independent so after she came to India, he took leave and they got married in an independent India and they both were really prolific writers but things are not so smooth for everyone.
Peter Moore: Yeah, you've got here actually like this, I suppose, it’s a good way to think about this story is that the American photographer who went and photographed everything she called it ‘an exercise in human misery’.
Aanchal Malhotra: The thing is that we have to understand Partition as a conglomeration of various experiences. There is no umbrella experience we can, kind of, wash over the entire X million people that were killed in this place because everyone will have a separate experience and that's really the beauty of events like this, that we can understand and unpack them through so many different kinds of stories. So, I have spent the better half of my twenties recording stories like this and nothing ever ceases to amaze me because, you see, you began the podcast by saying that I focus on material culture. So I don't just go to the person and say ‘tell me the story of Partition’, I say, ‘what is the object you brought back? And tell me the story of the object.’ And through the object we visit Partition because for example the story of Prabhjot Kaur I told you, she had never told her family that story.
Peter Moore: And then there’s this, and I think from my experiences of living in Spain when they had a similar, or a parallel, catastrophe in the Spanish Civil War, and they had this thing called the Pacto del olvido, the Pact of Forgetting, and that seems to me like a necessary balm for a long time, for a lot of people. This kind of, the unspoken. And then you go through that process and then you have to almost return back to it and this is how the history changes with the generation.
Aanchal Malhotra: But that’s complicated, isn’t it? Because it wasn't just the burying of personal loss, it was the bearing of personal loss in a moment of religious conflict. So what that silence does is that it entombs itself and it becomes prejudice and it becomes bias and it becomes hatred for your neighbour, which is still very much prevalent between India and Pakistan. We have been at war for X number of years.
Peter Moore: So you think the unspoken becomes actually a very powerful motive at the bottom of people's actions? I mean there’s something that you write in the book here which really struck me and this is one of your grandparents when you ask them ‘what it would have been like if there'd been no Partition?’ And it really struck me because you say, and this is your recorded speech from them: ‘All I can say is that, what happened, happened, but the truth is that many such unconceivable things happened in our life and after a while even the memory fades and eventually becomes dormant, we just forget. Then years later we recollect them in conversations, like this one, with a sense of disconnect, as though these were not the lives we have lived ourselves but incredible snippets of fiction that had sprung out of mere imagination.’
Aanchal Malhotra: That’s exactly it. Because every time someone recounts something about that time – it’s kind of like what we’re doing, right? We’re spectators in history. Which is what they become at some point. Because, I don’t know, maybe there is a lack of desire to relive it, there is a lack of desire to unpack it, unearth it, so they talk about things in a very, kind of, journalistic way – emotionless – ‘this happened, this happened, this happened and this happened’, and, ‘I went here, then my brother was abducted, then we caught up with him 40 years later...’
Peter Moore: The matter-of-fact-ness of the stories really strikes you?
Aanchal Malhotra: These stories are horrifying but I have come to understand that this may be the only way. You just create such a vast distance between you and the trauma that it doesn't feel like yours anymore, it feels like a thing completely removed from your body.
Peter Moore: But I think what you’re saying, which is really interesting to me, is that it seems like there’s a personal process there which is useful for people recovering from seeing horrific sights but then that becomes problematic in a greater sense for, like, society later when you have these manifestations of hatred on either side or prejudice or whatever and that's a really powerful thought. I mean, you say, even in your own experience, you say how this whole question of Partition sat at the very back of your mind like one of those things that you're supposed to remember but never quite surfaces. That's really fascinating. And I think, like just whilst we're talking about it, we'll talk just very briefly about Remnants of Partition the book, because what you're doing here is you're taking objects and using them as springboards into the history as ways – almost like Proust and his madeleine – [Aanchal Malhotra: That’s exactly it] to unlock these memories which have been stored up and hidden. Do you want to tell us about a few of the objects in the book?
Aanchal Malhotra: Yes! I think it’s time we made the conversation a little bit lighter as well. I will talk about one of the most bizarre objects that I have archived. So I went around India, Pakistan and England talking to people who had left their home. Through those things we would unpack independence, Partition, belonging, home – all these very large terms. So one of the weirdest objects that I found was in Lahore, it was a 15 and a half foot crocodile carcass. And the story, of course there's a story, is that...
Peter Moore: Is this the kind of thing one comes across when they're browsing the streets?
Aanchal Malhotra: [Laughing] No! It’s a completely bizarre story. The story is that this crocodile was on the banks of the river Beas in Punjab, in India, and he only used to prey on washermen, men that would come and wash the clothes at the riverside, because those were the only people that came there. And he had eaten, like, three or four of these men and so the villagers were very afraid of this crocodile. And so, one man took it upon himself to kind of avenge everyone and ‘I will kill the crocodile’, so he stalked the crocodile.
Peter Moore: [Laughing] I don't know why this seems comic because it’s quite a serious problem.
Aanchal Malhotra: The situation is serious, but the object is hilarious! So he stalks this crocodile and he kills it and then he takes it to the villagers –15 and a half feet long!
Peter Moore: Yeah, so it's not an insubstantial crocodile.
Aanchal Malhotra: Oh no, it’s a fat one!
Peter Moore: It’s eaten so many people...
Aanchal Malhotra: So it’s taken to the village, it’s put on display, so people see it, children touch it, the families of the the washerman who have died are like, ‘okay, the crocodile is dead, thank God’. Then he's gutted and he's a taxidermied and the head is severed and it's put on a wall, kind of like those deer heads...
Peter Moore: Oh goodness, like a crocodile on the wall enbalmed okay...
Aanchal Malhotra: Exactly. And the skin is folded and kept on the side. And when Partition happens, this crocodile is this man’s prized possession so he picks up the head, he picks up the skin and he takes it to Pakistan. And I saw it in Lahore and it's still there on the wall! So that’s one of the more comical objects. Then there are of course very banal things like books, lots of people took books, lots of people took pens, they took all kinds of heirlooms, they took things that were monetarily valuable that they could sell on...
Peter Moore: And you got a few in your family as well haven’t you? Like the lassi...
Aanchal Malhotra: Absolutely. My family took things that were quite mundane, actually. One of my great-grandmother’s – her main concern was food, ‘we will go to a refugee camp, we will get ration but what will we cook that ration in?’ So she took utensils things like the lassi glass, things like, you know, small pans and, you know, things like that. And we use them still in our house. My other great-grandmother took jewellery because she thought that she would sell it and it was a very expensive piece of jewellery that would have educated her children. People took heirlooms, they took fabric. The other really interesting thing is that not a lot of people believe that Partition would be permanent. So there's this story in my book about this woman who's so sure that Partition is so fleetingly temporary that she locks her house, right? Her house she locks fifty-one times. She locks the cupboard, she looks the drawer in the cupboard, she locks the kitchen, she does the drawers in the kitchen. Fifty-one keys for fifty-one locks and, what is more, is that she employs a local woman to clean the house before they come and she says that ‘before we come, the house should be clean’ as it's a good indication or something, right? So her grandson, who is quite a prominent writer himself, Gurcharan Das, remembers this keychain with fifty-one keys and, you know, the house that was locked and could never be retrieved. So people carried locks, they carried keys, the carried all kinds of things because some people knew that they would never be able to go back home.
Peter Moore: But I think as well, because of the totality of the change and the permanence that it's brought on these people's lives and the small number of objects because back then they had a very small amount of time and just the manner of the movement you didn't have the ability to carry much stuff. It’s almost, like, concentrated into a very small number of things, often two or three things per person, is a whole previous twenty or thirty or fifty or sixty years of existence and that, I think, is the power of your book. And I'm always struck when I think about the power of objects that it's always the more commonplace ones which act more powerfully, you know? The things that we repeatedly touch and you can imagine it's like everyone at home probably has a family heirloom which they're proud of but the things which really have a hold over people's hearts might be the old cup, the old spoon, you know?
Aanchal Malhotra: Well I have something to say about that because the very commonplace objects were often forgotten by people because they were so mundane. So, for example, if you had brought a glass, you saw it every day, you still use it in your kitchen, that you didn't really give it the importance it deserved or celebrate it's serendipitous survival. So if you and I are talking about this glass for like three or four hours and at the beginning of our conversation you don't quite care about it, well after three hours if I say ‘hey can I borrow that glass for my research? I’ll give it back’, you will almost always say ‘no, no, no it's my glass.’
Peter Moore: Well that’s something you write about in the book which I thought was really striking. This idea that someone might have, ‘there’s this old shawl over there – I'm not really bothered’, or an old ring or something like this, you know, they kind of.. I don’t know if they're affecting that they’re not bothered about it at all or whether...
Aanchal Malhotra: Well it’s nonchalance...
Peter Moore: Maybe it’s nonchalance. But the idea that you take that ring and put it on your finger, that it kind of makes them bristle in a way and there you see the power of an object to operate on people.
Aanchal Malhotra: And ownership, you know? Ownership over, not just the object, but ownership over a particular kind of history, a particular ancestry, a particular place that, now, a national border separates you from it, you know?
Peter Moore: Mm-hmm yeah, I mean you write about this superbly in the book really delving into a lot more of the history of these objects in the specific as you go through each one but also the idea of objects in general. I really recommend it, it’s a wonderful read and taught me an awful lot, not just about the history of this particular moment in time but also how material culture affects all of us and probably, you know, in this digital age when we have less to touch, basically, that the things that you can hold and feel the texture of and all the rest of them they mean more things to us, that’s what I was thinking. And at this point it almost seems like slightly trite, should I say, to ask you if you could bring an object back from 1947 to this year what you'd bring? Because you've been talking about objects all the time but is there anything you'd have in mind, if you could just pick one, what would you like?
Aanchal Malhotra: Yes, it's an object, it’s quite a sad object actually, but I would love to recover it. The story is, and I heard this in Karachi from a woman who heard it from somebody else, so the story goes that at the time of Partition in 1947 a woman was traveling with her husband from Delhi to Lahore, she was pregnant, they were young, the couple was young, and they were in a train traveling from Delhi to Lahore. And somewhere in the middle the train got stopped and rioters came on and they killed her husband and not just killed him, they shoved him off the train and threw him on the ground and she followed and he was stabbed, stabbed very very badly to a point where she took off her shawl, or her dupatta, her scarf and she wrapped it around his wound to stop the blood but it wouldn't stop, the shawl was completely covered in blood and he died, there and then. And because she was all by herself and she didn't know where to bury someone in the middle of these two countries she asked the stationmaster, the closest stationmaster, to give him a proper Islamic burial which he said he would do and then she was just sort of on her own. So she traveled to Lahore, the first thing she did is she went to a graveyard, she bought a plot and she buried that blood-covered shawl as a marker of her husband. She had the child and she never remarried and she took the child to the grave all the time to introduce him to his father. Now, if I could go back in time I would, I don't know it sounds a little bit strange, but I would keep the shawl. I would keep the shawl because then – she didn't have anything of his at all, you know? – and really, that was the only object that was closest, like it actually had his biology on it. So that's the one object. And this is the thing about doing work that involves talking to so many people is that you end up holding on to these incredible histories that are not yours and you end up fighting for them and, you know, I’ve thought to myself so many times, ‘why are you doing this work? Because this is not your family and this is, you know, you talk to Indians you talk to Pakistani, you talk to Englishmen and women.’ And it took me many years to realise that I had made this strange family of my own with Indians, with Pakistanis, with Englishmen, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians. We are all the same because we have all lived the same event in different ways.
Peter Moore: Mmm, and I think that's the main thing I'm going to think about when I leave this conversation is how history can unify but also separate people apart. We have this enormous... and I think this is always one of the challenges for historians is making sense of enormous events, Partition being one of the biggest you can think of. And here you've given us like fragmentary histories which take you at the idea of Partition from so many different angles. Thank you for sharing your stories today, thank you very much.
Aanchal Malhotra: It was my pleasure, thank you.
Peter Moore: Well that was me talking to Aanchal about the Partition of 1947 the other day and, really, I learnt a tremendous amount from listening to her, about the chaos of the preparation, the speed at which everything was done at, the way that uncertainty can so often spill over into something far more dangerous and, of course, the personal stories at the heart of it all. I'd absolutely recommend Aanchal’s book to you, it's called Remnants of Partition and it's available in the UK right now. If you enjoyed this episode of Travels Through Time please do leave us a comment or a rating to let us know, we'd really appreciate it. Our next episode stays in the 1940s but it comes at history from a completely different angle. I'm going to be talking to the best-selling historian Andrew Roberts about Sir Winston Churchill and those four crucial days in May 1940 when he became prime minister. It's a fascinating episode and we'll be publishing it in a fortnight but, from me and for now, that’s it. Thank you very much for listening.