Remembering History Through Toba Tek Singh

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The Bloody Legacy of Indian Partition

The Partition of India of 1947 was the division of  British India into two independent domine states, India and Pakistan.^[6] The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India; the Dominion of Pakistan is today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, based on district-wise non-Muslim or Muslim majorities. The partition also saw the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India. The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on 15 August 1947.

The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.

                                                                    

 

Going back with Toba Tek Singh

 

Toba Tek Singh as a person…

As a friend of Toba Tek Singh, I am writing a letter to him after a month of partition when everything was settled down.

 

Dear Toba Tek Singh,

           How do you do now? I hope you are alright, I heard that everything is fine there in Pakistan, but the condition here is still worse. Last month on this day we had a terrifying part of our lives, I think we will never be able to meet again.

           I don’t have any shelter here, I am leaving in military tent, it’s been a month I have lost my parents, friends and all my relatives. The only person remaining is you, but due to this bloody political game we may never meet again. I heard that even your parents have passed away, sorry for that. Not only us many of them have lost their life, I somehow managed to come to India, on the way I saw many blood sheds, many of them throwing stones on one another, all the rails were rush, many were pushing each other, few of them died on that crowed. I even saw bullock carts along with men burnt on the road. As soon as I reached the camp, I was in a fix, I didn’t even know anyone, I stayed starving for 3 days. Its very difficult to stay here. There I used to waste money for unnecessary things, now I have no money. The previous day those riots burnt my house, my parents were inside the house, even they were burnt alive, I managed to escape.

         I heard that you have landed up in no man’s land, I think even you have faced hardship I don’t know how have you managed to cross that and land up in Pakistan, hope you are fine.

           Because of their political play we have suffered a lot, we have lost everything, I hope you are safe, waiting for your replay.

 

Report

           

Through the letter I have tried to give a glimpse of partition which caused many problems. We both were friends during partition we both have lost everything due to partition. Effect of partition have felt even today many of them have lost their families, friends, relatives etc.

Being a friend I have written a letter to Toba Tek Singh through that I have shown how it has effected people through our lives.

In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered.

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”

We need to know this historical incidence to be aware of such situations, creative expression gives a good interest to the readers, they are intended to read and learn about history. Religion is just a practice, but our ancestors made it as a group and started riots. Because of these religious issues many of them lost their lives.  British played a game on us to divide and rule, this gave was a success and now we are still facing the problem of it.

“United we stand divided we fall” it was better to be united instead of separating ourselves and fighting wit each other. Political members would have recognized that partition would incur a great loss and would have stood against it.

 

                                                      Thank you