India-Pakistan Partition’s last generation: Will their memories of home survive them?

DELHI/KOLKATA/PUNE/TIBBA/ BENGALURU – Mr Vikram Kalra stashes away his prized possessions in a steel locker in his Delhi home. Among them is a fraying hand-drawn map. It shows his ancestral neighbourhood in Lahore, Pakistan, which his father drew from memory before he died in 2004.

Keen to retrace his family’s origins, which lie in present-day Pakistan, Mr Kalra, 60, an Indian citizen, had asked his father for the map so that he can find their ancestral home – or what remains of it – if he ever manages a trip to Lahore.

And so, a 1940s Lahore neighbourhood from his father’s boyhood memory remains depicted in ink on a fragile, slightly stained piece of paper. Local landmarks are represented, along with the road that the Kalras’ house stood on, which, in a reminder of ties that bind India and Pakistan, is still named Delhi Road.

“This is everything,” said Mr Kalra, referring to what he calls his “priceless” document. “It is our background, this is where we came from.”

Mr Kalra’s father, one of seven children of a large and prosperous Hindu family, fled Lahore with his parents in the first week of August 1947, joining more than 15 million people displaced by the Partition that year. It remains, even today, one of the largest mass migrations in human history.

As Britain granted India independence, the British Raj cleaved India into two independent nations of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. At least one million people were killed during the separation. The violent birth of the two countries was accompanied by communal massacres, arson and rape on both sides of the border as families migrated in search of refuge and rebuilt their lives from scratch in a new homeland.

The British colonial government commissioned a barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India and was not familiar with the country, to draw the new national boundaries. He arrived in July and was given just five weeks to accomplish the immensely daunting task. The new borders were not made public until Aug 17, 1947, two days after the grant of independence to India and Pakistan.

The cataclysmic event from nearly eight decades ago still casts a long shadow on South Asia today, not just on the geopolitics of this deeply fractured region but also the lives of its people.

Closure still eludes nations and people. India and Pakistan remain at loggerheads over Kashmir, a territorial dispute inherited from 1947. And millions such as the late Mr Rajeshwar Kalra were condemned to perpetual exile without the opportunity to revisit their homeland.

His son, Mr Vikram Kalra, also has yet to visit Lahore – a city of more than 14 million people less than 500km away – as recurring tensions between India and Pakistan and his busy professional life keep putting obstacles in the way.

The latest bout of conflict between the two South Asian neighbours, in May, has made his dream even more elusive.

As they left their home in 1947, the Kalras believed their departure from Lahore would be a stopgap arrangement. One of Mr Kalra’s paternal uncles even paid the electricity bill for their house on the day of their departure so that they would not return to a home without power.

Survivors who lived through the Partition continue to pine for ancestral geographies they were plucked from. Ms Reena Varma, 93, has lived almost her entire life in India, but still thinks of Rawalpindi city in northern Pakistan as her “home town”.

“I have always identified myself as a Pindi girl,” she said, seated in her apartment in Pune, a city in western India. “I never thought it was not my home.”

Ms Varma was born in Sialkot in present-day Pakistan, and moved with her family to Rawalpindi when she was about four months old. The family abandoned their house there in July 1947, when she was 15, to relocate to India as communal violence began to spread in the city.

Like the Kalras, this Hindu family too assumed that their displacement would only be temporary, and that they would return to their beloved “Pindi”. Unfortunately, that never happened.

In 2022, at the age of 90, an indefatigable Ms Varma finally made the journey back alone to visit her childhood house, now occupied by Pakistani Muslim owners.

She failed to secure a visa in her first attempt but managed to snag one after one of her videos, in which she had expressed her fond desire to visit Rawalpindi, was brought to the attention of the then Pakistani Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ms Hina Rabbani Khar. She intervened to ensure Ms Varma got the visa.

People warned Ms Varma against the visit, but she said she did not sense “even 1 per cent” of fear. “I felt as if I was going home.”

At the border in Attari – which back then was the only functioning border crossing point between India and Pakistan – an otherwise excited Ms Varma wept inconsolably, suddenly overwhelmed by the losses her family had suffered because of Partition.

An army of well-wishers in Pakistan, who had helped her find her house beforehand and secure a visa, gave her a grand welcome, and she spent a night in the same bedroom that she had slept in as a child.

“They told me even Bollywood actors don’t get this much media coverage when they come as you have got,” recollected Ms Varma, adding that she has never thought of Pakistan as a “hostile” country. “All that is between governments, armies and religious people.”

Partition survivors in India and Pakistan see the event differently, said Ms Anam Zakaria, a Canada-based Pakistani oral historian and author of three books, including The Footprints Of Partition: Narratives Of Four Generations Of Pakistanis And Indians.

“Survivors in India register the event as an unfortunate break-up of the motherland. Nostalgia and remorse are on the tip of the tongue, even as some blame Muslims for dividing the country,” said Ms Zakaria.

Her own grandmother and her grandmother’s friends, who were around 20 years old during Partition, spoke of their suffering as a sacrifice until Ms Zakaria, 37, asked questions about specific locations and their lives before the division. Then, stories of Hindu and Muslim neighbours saving each other from mobs, and memories beyond the bloodshed and narrative of sacrifice, came tumbling out.

Most Pakistani Partition survivors have a “censored collective memory greatly impacted by what the state permits, and what is considered patriotic”, Ms Zakaria said.

Despite the painful memories, many survivors in Pakistan looked back fondly and told her that “their dying wish was to go back (to India) and visit the town or village they had left”.

Changes in population over the years

The yearning for a lost home haunts even young descendants of Partition families now in India who have never set foot in either Pakistan or Bangladesh. The latter won its independence in 1971 when a people’s revolution – mainly for linguistic freedom and against economic marginalisation – turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh, dominated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Ms Priyanjali Datta, 33, was born in Agartala, the capital of the north-eastern Indian state of Tripura, which adjoins Bangladesh, but often experiences a deep, melancholic longing for her lost ancestral homeland in that country.

She grew up listening to stories from her grandparents who had fled East Pakistan before Partition in 1947 to settle in India, especially from her paternal grandmother, Ms Putul Sinha Roy, who regaled her with tales from her ancestral Barisal, a district in south-central Bangladesh known for its many rivers.

“The way my Amma used to describe it, it sounded like it was the Venice of Bangladesh,” said Ms Datta, recalling her descriptions of coconut trees and fish so abundant that even after everyone had been fed, “heaps of hilsa” – a fish prized by Bengalis – would have to be burnt.

Having grown up in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal state, and now settled in Delhi for more than a decade, Ms Datta says neither city feels fully like her home.

While Kolkata, unlike Delhi, has a dominant Bengali identity, the Bengali spoken there is distinctly different from the “Bangal Bhasha” her grandparents spoke at home. Bangal Bhasha is a term used in West Bengal state to refer to Bengali speech forms used by people from the region that is now Bangladesh.

Even the food served at their house was different from what locals in Kolkata ate. There was a dominance of coconut, an influence carried over from Barisal’s verdant cornucopia, along with the use of certain fresh greens rarely eaten in West Bengal.

For many Partition descendants such as Ms Datta who have grown up and lived in multiple Indian cities, the idea of an imagined homeland offers an anchor of stability amid the displacement, flux or even conflicting identities.

At the same time, Ms Datta acknowledges what she fondly holds on to is the Bangladesh of the 1940s, not the current one. “Do I align with what it is now? I’m not sure,” said Ms Datta, who hopes to visit Bangladesh, particularly Barisal, one day to see the place her grandparents called home.

When Dr Tapati Guha-Thakurta, a Kolkata-based historian in her 60s, had the good fortune to return to places where her parents lived in present-day Bangladesh, she found them, as expected, entirely different from what she had been told and had imagined.

She is among the many Bengalis who have been able to visit Bangladesh, as travel across the border from India is relatively easier than between India and Pakistan, with multiple air, train and bus links.

Her father had come to India with his parents in 1937 from Dhaka and her mother arrived in Kolkata in 1944 from Dhaka after leaving her birthplace Chattogram in 1942 during the turmoil of World War II. Visiting their homes was, however, a bittersweet experience.

When Dr Guha-Thakurta went in 2016, she found that the once-verdant Chattogram of her mother’s memories had been gnawed away by rampant real estate development. And not a trace remained of her father’s family’s home in crowded Dhaka.

She said her father had never “indulged in nostalgia” and her parents rebuilt their lives and tried to fit into a new, independent India without ever really wanting to return to the places where they had been born.

For instance, they quickly schooled themselves in the Bangla spoken in West Bengal, even though “Bangal” speech forms continued to be spoken at home. But in public life Bangal words carried over from Bangladesh gradually slipped away. For instance, “pani”, or water, gave way to “jol”.

On her trips to Bangladesh, Dr Guha-Thakurta easily felt at home there but also found she was immediately identified as “Indian” despite speaking Bangla. Locals identified her as Indian because of the way she spoke the language, which was marked by several subtle yet perceptible differences.

To them, her “Bengaliness” had been subsumed by her larger Indian identity, unlike their sole and unique Bengali identity. “I came to respect the fact that to be a Bangladeshi was to be a Bengali in a very different sense,” she said.

Still, she noted: “More than nostalgia, for me, it (the idea of Bangladesh as a homeland) is an inheritance of memory that I wish to cherish.”

Today, not many survivors of Partition are alive. And in another decade or so, the three South Asian neighbours will have no one left with a direct connection to the common past, further reducing the number of those with a deep appreciation of the ties that bind this divided region or who are personally invested in improving relations between the three countries.

Growing up in Delhi, Mr Kalra learnt to love Lahore through his father’s stories about sauntering through the city’s famed markets or taking a cooling dip in one of its canals with his friends.

But Mr Kalra’s own son, who turned 30 recently, does not share the same fondness. “Pakistan is going to be just another country for his generation,” said Mr Kalra.

Recurring tensions between India and Pakistan have not helped to sustain pre-Partition connections.

The enmity touches sport, trade and everyday life. Ms Zakaria had once been part of Exchange for Change, a programme that between 2010 and 2023 had thousands of school students in India and Pakistan interacting through letter writing, videos and visits. But in 2011, when the Pakistan team lost a Cricket World Cup semi-final match to India, she said “an entire classroom of kids in Pakistan was up in arms saying they don’t want to write another letter to Indians”.

“The fourth generation after Partition has such minimal contact with each other, and the distance and politics make them more hostile. Their perceptions have the imprints of state narratives,” said Ms Zakaria, who today lives in Toronto.

“Pakistan has an institutionalised hatred for Hindus and India even in textbooks, which reach students. In India too, the idea of all Pakistanis as terrorists and fundamentalists is deep.”

Lahore is a little more than an hour’s flight away from Delhi; so is Karachi from Mumbai. Yet, travel restrictions between India and Pakistan have made maintaining people-to-people links incredibly difficult. All flights, buses and train services between India and Pakistan have been suspended for more than five years.

Getting a visa to visit Pakistan or vice versa was already next to impossible, and visa services were completely suspended by both countries in the fallout of the terror attack in Pahalgam in April. New Delhi blames Pakistan for the attack, which left 26 civilians dead – a charge Islamabad denies.

Ms Hanifa, who uses only one name, is a 62-year-old Indian widow from Tibba village in Punjab. She failed to get a visa in 2023 to visit Pakistan to see her 105-year-old paternal aunt Hajra Bibi, after establishing contact with her for the first time since Partition split their family.

Aided by Pakistani YouTuber Nasir Dhillon and a Sikh man living in the US, Mr Paul Singh Gill, the two women instead flew to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for an emotional reunion in November 2023. “It is sad that I can’t go and see my relatives when I want to, despite them being so close,” said Ms Hanifa.

Ms Bibi died in 2024 and Ms Hanifa now worries that she may never get to see her second ageing aunt in Pakistan, who is in her late 80s.

“I wish India and Pakistan would reunite,” said Ms Hanifa. “It would be easier to see each other.”

However, each bout of conflict comes as a fresh blow to those who dream of closer links between India and Pakistan. As the two countries rained missiles on each other in May following the Pahalgam attack, Ms Hanifa’s daughter-in-law, Ms Shafiha Begum, deleted their new-found Pakistani relatives’ phone numbers and asked them to stop calling to avoid drawing unwanted attention from the police.

Mr Kalra, too, removed his Pakistani contacts from his regular WhatsApp broadcasts.

There are also fears of a similar chill creeping into India’s ties with Bangladesh following the ouster of its former prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India after a popular student-led revolt in August 2024.

But for the romantics who still dream of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India reuniting, most have come to accept that Partition was unfortunate, but unavoidable.

“I feel we all should accept we are from different countries,” said Ms Varma, urging coming generations not to repeat what happened and keep “humanity above all”.

Ms Zakaria recalled that one Pakistani mother had refused to send her son for an exchange programme to India, fearing that it was unsafe. But a day later, she consented. When Ms Zakaria asked the mother what had changed her mind, she said it was her father, an elderly Partition survivor, who had said: “The child is going to my home. Nothing will happen to him.”

“The first generation after Partition is a walking, talking source of history with all the nuances that governments want to filter out. We need individual histories to resist homogenous narratives, and punch holes in the state’s narrow history,” said Ms Zakaria.

In 2021, the Indian government designated Aug 14 – Pakistan’s Independence Day – as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”, worrying some that the current right-wing Hindu government was focusing disproportionately on the violence that accompanied Partition.

The choice of the word “horrors”, they argued, obscures other aspects of the period, such as hope – when members of one faith risked their lives to save those from another faith – as well as sacrifice and resilience displayed by members of displaced communities who successfully rebuilt their lives.

“Horror makes the whole thing so unidimensional,” said Ms Saaz Aggarwal, an Indian biographer and oral historian as well as a descendant of a family that went to India from Pakistan during the Partition. “It’s too provocative. It’s trying to upset you. It’s trying to make you indignant. It’s trying to make you hate somebody.”

Dr Rituparna Roy, 51, the initiator of the Kolkata Partition Museum Project, said rupture and violence were indeed “defining features of the times”, but it is also important to remember the cultural continuity that binds India with its partitioned neighbours.

Even today, Partition continues to haunt Indian Muslims, who make up 14 per cent of the population and number more than 200 million. They are the third-largest Muslim community in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan.

But few remember today that a large section of Muslims were against the Partition.

Historian Shamsul Islam, 77, grew up in Delhi with a little-known but important piece of pre-Partition history that still influences his family’s decisions and values. His grandfather was a member of the Azad Muslim Conference, a massive organisation of Muslims who sought a united India and who were against Partition and the Two-nation Theory.

“My grandfather Haji Abdul Malik was among millions of Muslims, mostly from the lower caste, who attended a historic meeting in Delhi in April 1940 that passed a resolution against the formation of the Islamic country of Pakistan, and wanted a secular, democratic, united India with a composite culture.

“Newspapers at the time recorded that the attendance at the conference was five times the size of meetings of the Muslim League, which advocated Partition just like Hindu nationalists did,” said Dr Islam, who chronicled the all-but-buried history of a large section of Muslims wanting an all-inclusive nation in his 2018 book, Muslims Against Partition Of India.

“Hindu nationalists in India today constantly ask Muslims to prove our patriotism. They berate us, asking us to go to Pakistan, they attack us as traitors, out of hate but also some assumption that Muslims drove Partition. The truth is that many of our families proved their patriotism long ago,” he added.

Dr Islam’s grandfather and friends were often beaten by pro-Partition Muslim and Hindu groups during their protests against the country’s division, and the Azad Muslim Conference’s founder Allah Bakhsh – a hero to Dr Islam – was fatally shot in May 1943 by assailants believed to be from the Muslim League.

After Partition, Dr Islam’s family chose to remain in Delhi and not move to Pakistan, even if it meant being cut off from their friends, abandoning property there, and losing access forever to the Afghan and Pakistani markets for their successful sewing thread brand, Sultan Bros.

“My grandfather and father chose to stay in India not as a sacrifice but out of a fundamental belief in the idea of an inclusive country, a democracy that is above racism and communalism,” said Dr Islam, who is married to a Hindu woman, actress and activist Neelima Sharma.

The inter-faith couple founded the Nishant Natya Manch, a theatre group that performs street plays against communalism and inequality. They also did not give their daughter Shirin a surname, so that she “is not limited by an identity we force on her”.

For many children of families that were displaced by Partition, a discovery of their family history has often also meant stumbling upon whole chapters of sub-continental history that were in danger of being forgotten and, thus, erased.

It was a similar journey of self-discovery that led Mrs Aruna Madnani to curate the “Lost Homeland of Sindh”, a permanent gallery at the Partition Museum in Delhi dedicated to those who left the Sindh province, which is now entirely in Pakistan.

“When I grew up in Bombay, there was a huge silence in my family around what happened during Partition, and how they rebuilt their lives in India. My grandmother shared some nostalgic memories of joint families, huge meals and Sindhi mansions with courtyards, but that was it. It was anathema to be seen as a refugee,” said the 68-year-old, who now lives in Bengaluru.

A hospitality professional who has lived in Mumbai, Boston and New York, Mrs Madnani was so distanced from her identity, language and culture that “when people said I don’t seem like a Sindhi, I would take it as a compliment”, she admitted, adding that her family was perhaps so keen on fitting into India that they hid their historical roots.

But after her son was born in 1994, Mrs Madnani decided to resolve her “identity crisis”.

“I asked a million questions of every Sindhi I could find,” she said.

She learnt that Sindhis left their province in Pakistan only in June 1948, fleeing violent riots, and after being forced to give up their bungalows to people arriving from India.

“Due to our late arrival in India, and the absence of a Sindhi community here, unlike for Punjabis and Muslims, we were not embraced or welcomed. Though we are Hindu too, many Hindus in India thought of us as quasi-Muslim, and thus undesirable,” she said, suggesting it was perhaps because of the community’s proximity to Muslims in Sindh, because they ate mutton, and some of their elders exclaimed “Allah” when they were surprised.

She has since spent decades making documentaries, collecting pre-Partition artefacts and stories of other families, and curating the evocative Sindhi exhibition at the Partition Museum in Delhi that “sort of serves as a spiritual journey for Sindhis into their past”. She founded the Sindhi Culture Foundation in 2008 in Bengaluru, and also made a trip in 2018 to Sindh in Pakistan to see Shikarpur, the city her father grew up in.

So immersed in Sindhi culture and the experiences of Partition is Mrs Madnani that she has become a de facto custodian of collective memory, accumulating a wealth of oral histories and objects over 25 years to fill the silences of her own family members.

In recent years, there has been growing scholarship around Partition, moving away from dominant upper middle class narratives and throwing up new perspectives from communities and geographies hitherto neglected.

For instance, the experiences of Bengali refugees from marginalised caste groups are better appreciated today. Many were allocated land for housing not in cities, unlike those from upper-caste groups, but in undeveloped and largely forested areas such as Dandakaranya in central India or the Andaman group of islands in the Bay of Bengal.

Such treatment exposed them to considerable hardship on top of what post-Partition refugees experienced in cities.

“There are a lot of unheard voices that need to be heard,” said Dr Guha-Thakurta.

Dedicated Partition museums, including those in Amritsar and Delhi, have also been adding to a more nuanced understanding of the Partition’s history as well as its legacy.

Dr Roy said the Kolkata Partition Museum Project, with its online archives as well as diverse offline events, is an effort to remember the Partition in “a manner which is sane, which is as unbiased as possible and which gives new perspectives”.

Ms Zakaria said that the Islamic state of Pakistan has institutionalised the “othering” of Hindus and non-Muslims, and delegitimises dissent by any community as being Indian state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, “India’s national project and electoral politics are premised more heavily than ever today on hating Pakistan and Bangladesh”, she said, a policy that often turns into attacks on India’s minorities.

She called for more diverse stories of Partition to help the next generations see through the government propaganda, which impacts their lives today.

Despite having faced religious profiling and jibes for his identity, Dr Islam said he always finds himself rationalising these experiences, remembering that “not all Hindus wanted to throw Muslims out”.

“Who will win today? The secular ones or the communal ones? That’s the struggle. But India will never go the Pakistan way (of having a state religion), of that I am sure. Inclusivity was written into this country’s birth,” he said.

Dr Guha-Thakurta added that her parents, despite having witnessed some of the worst Hindu-Muslim violence in Kolkata in 1946, would not support any of the anti-Muslim bigotry that has often been seen in India.

“Because for them, it’s then going back (to all the rioting that preceded the Partition). What has been the lesson then?”