PARTITION(TRAGIC STORIES)
REGISTER NUMBER-20SJCCC369
1BCOM D
PARTITION
(TRAGIC STORIES)
Dear Toba Tek Singh, after the partition of India and
Pakistan I do not know what happened to you. I hope you are not completely
demolished. I hope you are safe and I hope you are keeping your people safe out
there. This sketch is for you. I don’t know whether you are, in India or
Pakistan. I have imagined you somewhere in between the border of India and
Pakistan. I want to find out where you are situated so that I can come and
visit you. After the partition most of them have lost their lives, lost their
families and lost their homes. You were such a beautiful place, but now you are
lost. After the partition I have asked so many people about you, but no one
really told me exactly where you were, all that they told me is that you are
where you always used to be. During the partition so many people struggled,
people were hiding in bed rolls as they started shooting everyone in the train,
so many blood stains and dead bodies could be seen all around. A British man
and his son who were on the same train were absolutely silent. Later we found
out that his wife and daughter had been raped and killed in front of them.
India and Pakistan were together and it was like two people with two different
religions living in the same tent. They might have been happy together but
after the partition it felt like the tent had been divided into two halves and
India and Pakistan became two different countries itself. Toba Tek Singh,
wherever you are I hope there are beautiful trees, clean rivers and streams,
birds, animals and beautiful insects in you. I hope the people living there are
getting enough food, drinking water, shelter and I hope they are having a nice
time with their families. If I ever find you, I would love to come and visit
you because I have heard so many stories about your beauty and it seems magical
to me. I am glad that many people don’t know about you, if they find out about
your beauty they might come and demolish it. Even if you are a very tiny place,
I hope you are safe and I want you to grow and become more beautiful and I want
you to be a strong place that no one can demolish.
-Thasmaye
2/04/2021
REPORT:
From the lesson Toba Tek Singh we understand the
confusion that took place during the partition of India. In this lesson we do
not know what Toba Tek Singh is. Many people think it’s a person some think
it’s a place but the story does not reveal that. This story tells us about the
partition of India, how people struggled during the partition. We had discussed
earlier about the story Ravi Paar written by Gulzar. It is about a Punjabi
family who had very young twins and they were travelling on the train, while
travelling they realized that one of the twins was stillborn. They realize this
when they are shifting to another place during the partition. The people in the
train tell the parents that it is best to throw away the stillborn into the
river and say goodbye. After a lot of thinking the mother decides to throw away
the child. The mother feeds the other child milk and r the child was not
drinking it, that’s when she realizes that she had thrown away the child that
was alive during all the chaos. These are the kind of incidents that took
place.
The above drawing depicts how the partition changed
everything. It a tent where the Hindus and Muslims lived together and Toba Tek
Singh also was situated there, but no one knows where it is situated, what we
know is it is either in India or Pakistan or somewhere in the border. It shows
how the partition destroyed everything. In this picture the tent is falling
apart but it has been tied to the earth and there are people in the tent and
even though it is breaking apart the people in the tent cannot get separated
because it is tied. This shows us the struggle that people faced during the
partition. Apart from what was discussed in class when I read about few tragic
stories during the partition of India, it made me realize that our leaders who
fought for our independence really struggled a lot. An 82-year-old lady who is in
UK now tells us how seven members in her family were killed. Her last memory
was seeing her father through the keyhole with her two-year-old brother crying
in the background. She was hit over the head while she was looking through the
keyhole. Before the partition she had a very happy childhood in Delhi, it was a
Hindu area so as Muslims they couldn’t leave the house. Their neighbors were
Sikh and they said they would protect them but they had itself attacked her
family. This picture also shows how people were killed. The dead bodies, blood
stains and it was believed that that more than one million people had been
killed. Majority communities used violence to drive out the minority, communal
riots and faith-based killing were brutal in Punjab, which was divided into a
Muslim west and Hindu and Sikh east. Inter-communal violence was rife in the
years that followed, and to a lesser extent to the present days.
A creative mode of expression is important in
historical reimagination because it helps us articulate our feelings and
thoughts. It helps us think critically about the world and helps us practice
visual communication. Historical reimagination can be done in many creative
ways. One sketch or painting can have so much meaning behind it. Different
people can look at it in different ways. Toba Tek Singh, we still don’t know
whether it’s a place or a person. I imagined it as a place, I imagined
beautiful streams in a forest and I imagined soaking my feet in the ice-cold
water that flows in the forest. I imagined it as a forest because it’s an
unknown place, there might not even be people living there, it could even be a
small stretch of land. This is where creative mode of expression is important.
Imagining what happened during the partition takes you into a whole new world.
The thoughts are; what happened? what could have happened? they could’ve done
this, why did it happen? No one really knows the truth; different people tell
us different stories. But when you want to portrait something, it cannot
blindly be written. You can show it in any creative way and explain it to
people. But what you show and what they think could be entirely different.
That’s why when you express something in a creative manner, we may see so many
new things, because everyone is not like minded. Figment of your imagination is
something imagined or created by your mind. Something that someone believes to
be true, but in actual fact does not correspond with reality, and is made up in
their mind.
Historical context selected is how partition changed
everything, I know quite a few people, when you ask them what their mother
tongue is, they say Hindi, but when you ask them where their hometown is, they
say Pakistan. One of the stories I heard is that a lady and her sister were not
so popular in school, the lady and her sister used to talk to each other in Hindi
and Urdu and they didn’t like that. It was very stark and the food was
disgusting. They were given cabbage stalk instead of the lovely curries that
they ate. For the people who survived and lived through the partition, they
have their own stories. Manto makes us think about “who the real lunatics are?”
are they the ones living in the asylum, or those who tried to divide them? We
don’t know because we believe what we hear from others. Is it compulsory for
people to belong to a country, what if they choose neither? No one knows where
we belong in the end of the day. Everyone wants to belong somewhere based on
the religion. The personal unheard stories about partition expose it for what
it really was. It’s a confusion that lives in the center of these stories. We
haven’t read enough about violence that took place at the time, so we can’t be
exactly sad either. We don’t know much about the partition and that is one of
the bigger reasons as to why we have so much communal violence today. Many
people were involved and so many people were affected during the partition,
small babies were killed. At that time no one felt bad or anything, all they
wanted to do was kill.
Partition triggered riots, mass causalities, and a
colossal wave of migration. Millions of people moved to what they hoped would
be a safer territory. Many of the people concerned were very deeply attached
not just to religious identity, but to territory, and Britain was reluctant to
use its troops to maintain law and order. Both states subsequently faced huge problems
accommodating and reagitating post-Partition refugees, whose numbers swelled
when the two states went to war over the disputed territory of Jammu and
Kashmir. Today the two counties relationship is far from healthy. Kashmir
remains a flashpoint; both countries are nuclear armed. Indian Muslims are
frequently suspected of harboring loyalties towards Pakistan; non-Muslim minorities
in Pakistan are increasingly vulnerable thanks to the so-called Islamisation of
their life since 1980.
Even now there is a lot of discrimination, but its far
better than how it used to be. One of the recent incidents took place near my
house. I live in Indiranagar, there was a protest at Karachi bakery. A group of
people raised slogans against Pakistan for its involvement in February 14
terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, which claimed lives of 40 central reserve
police force troopers. The protest forced the shop at Indiranagar to cover the
name ‘Karachi’ on its signboard and put up an Indian flag. Some people pick
fights for no reason. Today everyone has started to open up, even though there
is hatred, there are some people who will support them. We as people of this
generation should make world a better place without discrimination and we
should treat all religions and all types of people equally.
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