Displaced People, Especially Women (Guha Chapter 5)

(Part four in an ongoing series dedicated to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi. Last week’s post can be found here. Next week we will look at chapter six, on the Constituent Assembly and the writing of India’s constitution. )

There are lots of interesting bits in Guha’s fifth chapter, on the resettlement of refugees scattered across India after Partition. The part I will focus on in particular is the status of women who were abducted, forcibly married, and then forcibly returned to their families. But to begin with, here are some general facts on the displaced people who ended up in India:

  • Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of refugees in Punjab were temporarily housed in camps. The largest of these was at Kurukshetra, where there were some 300,000 refugees. Over time, a major land redistribution effort was initiated, so that farmers who had been displaced from land in Pakistan were granted land in India. More than 500,000 claims were processed through this effort. (According to Guha, the effort worked, by and large; withing a few years, many displaced Punjabis from farming villages were back at work on new lands.)
  • Nearly 500,000 refugees ended up in Delhi, fundamentally changing the character of the city. Some settled in outer districts like Faridabad, while others were given land immediately to the south and west of New Delhi. Many of Delhi’s new residents thrived in trade, and came to hold a “commanding influence” over the economic life of the city.
  • About 500,000 refugees also ended up in Bombay, including a large number of Sindhis. Here resettlement did not go as well, and Guha states that 1 million people were sleeping in the streets (even in the early 1950s).
  • 400,000 refugees came into West Bengal during and immediately after the Partition, but another 1.7 million Hindus left East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) following communal riots there in 1949-50. At least 200,000 ended up in desperate straits in “squatter colonies” in Calcutta, where the refugees effectively overwhelmed the city. Conditions here were much worse than they were in Delhi or in the resettlement camps in the Punjab. The government may have been slow to respond because it presumed that many of the refugees would be returning — and that communal feelings in Bengal were not quite as bad as they were in Punjab. (A mistaken presumption, Guha suggests.)

Those are some of the general facts Guha gives us. What stands out to me is how effective the new Indian government was, on the whole, in responding to the mass influx of people. There were failures — and again, Guha singles out West Bengal as the worst — but if you think about the numbers involved, it’s astonishing that the process was as orderly as it was. Hundreds of thousands of displaced families were allotted land through a rationalized, transparent process oriented to ensuring their survival. And food relief and temporary shelter was provided to thousands more (not without international help).

However, one area where the state really did fail — astoundingly — is with women who had been abducted, converted, and forcibly married in the Partition. Guha’s account here is quite thin, so I’m supplementing what he says with material from Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s book, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.The abductions happened on both sides, and both India and Pakistan agreed to cooperate in the effort to restore abducted women to their families. Here are some of the numbers, from Menon and Bhasin’s book:

The official estimate of the number of abducted women was placed at 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan. Although Gopalaswami Ayyangar (minister of Transport in charge of Recovery) called this figures ‘rather wild,’ Mridula Sarabhai believed that the number of abducted women in Pakistan was ten times the 1948 official figure of 12,500. Till December 1949, the number of recoveries in both countries was 12,552 for India and 6,272 for Pakistan. The maximum number of recoveries wre made from Punjab, followed by Jammu and Kashmir and Patiala. (from Menon and Bhasin)

In 1949, Indian Parliament passed a rather bizarre law called the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Bill, which gave the government virtually unlimited power to remove abducted women in India from their new homes, and transport them to Pakistan. The government could use force against abducting families, and it could also hold abducted women in camps if needed.

The problem with this process is that nothing in the law, or the major humanitarian effort that followed, was oriented to ascertaining the will of the women themselves. While some were in fact eager to rejoin their families, quite a number (no one knows exactly how many) were not at all eager to return. The biggest reason is of course the sense of anxiety and shame about being marked as “fallen women” — they weren’t at all convinced that they would be accepted by their families. Other times, the women had had children by their new husbands, and were at least resigned (if not happy) with their new lives. (Nothing in the law passed by Parliament dealt with the situation of women who had had children, nor was the final status of children born of these marriages determined by the Bill.)

But there were other reasons not to return as well. Menon and Bhasin have a fascinating account from Kamlaben Patel, a social worker working with abducted women for the Indian government. She was stationed in Lahore between 1947 and 1952, and worked on a number of cases. She became personally involved with one particular young woman, and Menon and Bhasin give us the story in her own words:

I have written about a case where the parents thought it was alright to sacrifice the life of a young girl in order to save a whole family. And when we were arguing about her recovery then the father said, this is our girl, and the girl denied it because she was terribly hurt by their behaviour. She said, ‘I don’t want to go back. I have married of my own free will, I don’t want anything from my parents.’ When she refused to return, it became very awkward. She was in the home of a police inspector. We felt that if we have found an abducted woman in the house of a police inspector, then how can we expect the police to do any recovering? That is why we had to bring her back.

After interviewing the woman, Kamlaben found out why she was so adamant:

That girl kept saying that she didn’t want to go to her parents, she wouldn’t budge an inch. After two or three days she broke down, she told us that her parents had been told by the police inspector, ‘If you leave your daughter, gold and land with me, I will escort you all to the cantonment in India.’ That man was already married, had children. He had told her father, you give me this girl in exchange for escorting you all to an Indian cantonment. Then her father gave him his daughter, 30 tolas of gold and his house. One night I called the girl to my bedside and said, if you want to go back (to the inspector) then I will send you. If you don’t want to go back to your parents, don’t go, but please tell me why.’

What happened in the end: the young woman said she didn’t want to go back to the police inspector (in Pakistan), but she also refused to go back to her parents. Acting beyond the call of duty (and beyond the mandate given her by Mridula Sarabhai), Kamlaben was able to arrange a marriage for the woman to a displaced young man living in Amritsar. She later had a child, and came to thank Kamlaben personally for her efforts. (At the same time, Kamlaben was castigated by Mridula Sarabhai for getting too personally involved.)

For me this story illustrates some of the basic problems in the government’s “recovery” effort, though it also suggests how individuals can sometimes intervene to try and respond to the particularities of individual cases, and more importantly, the will of individual women affected by the Partition.

Menon and Bhasin don’t suggest that the recovery effort that was undertaken shouldn’t have happened. Rather, they point out that the way it was done was flawed — it was, in effect, an arrangement between the men ruling the two new countries, carried out to protect national (and familial) “honor,” rather than to ensure the best possible result for the affected women. Though the goal was to rectify a wrong, one could argue that it in some ways continued the patriarchal mentality that led to the atrocities against women in the Partition in the first place.

I should point out that most of the stories about women abducted in the Partition do not end as happily as the one above. Many “recovered” women committed suicide, while others ended up as prostitutes. But there are many, many stories, which you’ll find recounted in books like Borders and Boundaries as well as Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence. Amrita Pritam also wrote about this in her novella Pinjar, which was made into what I thought was a decent Hindi film a few years ago.

What comes up again and again in these stories is the failure of the government’s blanket policy to address the particular experiences of women who had been abducted. On the other hand, it might not be the government’s problem entirely: in the late 1940s neither Indian nor Pakistani society was really set up to accommodate women who had been so brutally alienated from their families and communities. What these women really needed, perhaps more than anything, was the ability to determine their own fates, to be enabled to become independent, both socially and financially. But it appears that that, which is to say, freedom, simply wasn’t an imaginable conclusion in the vast majority of the cases.

37 thoughts on “Displaced People, Especially Women (Guha Chapter 5)

  1. What stands out to me is how effective the new Indian government was, on the whole, in responding to the mass influx of people.

    In some sense it is a miracle, since at that time, Indian had a huge food grain shortage, they had to request from other countries to give wheat.

    I liked Guha’s description of satellite cities around Delhi (NOIDA, Gurgoan, etc.) that sprung from refugees became hub of prosperity within few years.

    There is a Pakistani (combined German and Irish production too) movie, Khamoshi Pani. I think that is perhaps the best movie I seen on partition. It is a woman’s story set from partition to Zia’s rise in Pakistan made by a movie director from Pakistan (Sahiba Sumar), and I think now she lives in India.

  2. Amardeep, you bring up a point that Guha does account for, but a bit differently. He says that in the Punjab and around Delhi, a considerable number of the Muslim population had vacated their properties when they left for Pakistan, which vacated properties accomodated squatters who had come from Pakistan. apart from the encampments at Kurukshetra. I guess the Bhakra-Nangal dam made it possible to provide conditions similar to that the refugees had enjoyed in their abandoned land holdings. It was more stressful on West Bengal to absorb refugees because not as many people had left for East Bengal, and later on, refugees from the Bangla Desh war spread into Assam.

    True, Guha doesn’t delve as deep into the problem of abducted women as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin already have, but th ebook is a survey, and he does say that there were instances where the women didn’t want to return.

    Until reading this book I never put two and two together to understand how the monster urban refugee problem originated in Partition– I had entertained some assumption that things were always that way, because they never looked different in my memory.

  3. True, Guha doesn’t delve as deep into the problem of abducted women as Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin already have, but th ebook is a survey, and he does say that there were instances where the women didn’t want to return.

    I don’t fault him for it — the survey aspect gets him off the hook for lots of things — but I guess for me this is one of the most fascinating (and disturbing) aspects of the refugee problem created by the partition. I decided to bring in the Menon/Bhasin book because of my own interest. (Maybe I should re-term this series of posts on Guha as “Guha Plus…”)

    Until reading this book I never put two and two together to understand how the monster urban refugee problem originated in Partition– I had entertained some assumption that things were always that way, because they never looked different in my memory.

    Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too.

  4. Amardeep,

    I just finished re-reading Freedom at Midnight, and it has some personal stories about women in Partition.

    One true story that stands out, and is now a folklore in Indian subcontinent. You’all have versions of it in songs, movies, and other places.

    There was an elderly Sikh farmer who had a saved a Muslim girl from being raped during Partition, he paid the pursuer to thousands of rupees (a huge amount at that time). He married her, had a daughter, and they were quite happy for more than 6 years.

    Until his nephews informed the Indian Government (they were afraid that they would not get any inheritance – greed). His wife was sent back by the Indian Government to Pakistan, and there she was immediately married to one of her cousins.

    This Sikh farmer converted to Islam, and went to Pakistan, and begged for his wife – only to be beaten and humiliated. Later, the issue was brought to Lahore court, and his once wife refused to accept him, and the daughter (He pleaded her to take the daughter at least since he did not want her to grow without a mother).

    He and his daughter committed suicide on the railway tracks. The whole Pakistan mourned for him and his daughter.

    His grave was vandalized by the cousins of his once wife. The citizens of Lahore got together, and gave him a decent burial again, in a site, which has now become sort of holy ground.

  5. Correction: He and his daughter committed suicide on the railway tracks. The whole Pakistan mourned for him and his daughter.

    The daughter survived by a miracle, and she was adopted by a couple in Pakistan.

    She is now married, and lives in Middle East.

  6. Trivia: Only one part of Punjab was spared the brutal ethnic cleansing that wracked the entire province (Partition: The Punjabi Civil War?): Malerkotla, a Muslim ruled princely-state that acceded to India. Today Malerkotla is the only muslim majority town in Indian Punjab, and home to Indian Punjabs’ only Urdu college.

    Today, who is the most famous man from Malerkotla? Bobby Jindal!

  7. Ikram, yes, I know about Malerkotla partly through the work of a colleague at NC State University, Anna Bigelow. Anna (who is in Religious Studies) has done a lot of field work there — apparently the oldest Gurdwara in town was actually built by the Muslim Nawab in the 1920s! There is a PDF of one of Bigelow’s articles here.

  8. As much as I support the partition and believe that it is the best thing to have happened, this is an area where things could have been done better. Ambedkar talked about planned population transfer much earlier and dividing of Bengal and Punjab much earlier (1942?? on his excellent book “Thoughts on Pakistan”). Instead of adopting his plan at the last minute (the events like asking the opinion of the Hindu delegates and Muslim delegates for partition of Bengal/Punjab etc.. matched his plan exactly) people could have planned this better. Afterall Turkey and Greece exchanged people (without much of a problem, I guess, before).

  9. Yes, it could have been planned properly, but I don’t think that was in the cards, what with all that was going on with British involvement and cartography and unification all at the same time. Independence Day should have been January 26, 1948. Mountbatten really was not what he’s cracked up to be, and made areal nuisance of himself about Kashmir too.

  10. I won’t just blame Mountbatten. I don’t think Jan’ 48 would have been any better with the same set of leaders and their muddled thinking.

  11. while others were given land immediately to the south and west of New Delhi. Many of Delhi’s new residents thrived in trade, and came to hold a “commanding influence” over the economic life of the city.

    These (especially South Delhi) are some of the most posh, most expensive parts of Delhi today.

  12. Ambedkar talked about planned population transfer much earlier and dividing of Bengal and Punjab much earlier

    Freedom at Midnight talks about how rushed the entire process of partition was. Radcliffe had 5 weeks to demarcate the boundaries. He felt that the end result was so bad that he feared an assassination and never accepted any payment for the job.

    It always amazes me how quickly the refugees assimilated into India, even though it was a country about which they often knew very little.

    As an aside – It still annoys my uncle, (who grew up in Delhi), that a newly arrived refugee from Lahore considered Delhi to be her home right after arrival and implied that he was an outsider. (She asked him when he was returning home, and advised him to be careful while taking the ship south from Nagpur ! 🙂 )

  13. About the Women’s Recovery Act — yes, it was certainly a Bill that could be termed a “transaction between men.” What’s particularly interesting, though, is how much Mridula Sarabhai’s influence lay behind the passage of the bill. Sarabhai was adamant in her belief that no abducted woman could possibly be happy, that the absence of consent precluded all else. Paradoxically it was her very feminism that led to the Bill’s inflexibility about the status of an “abducted” woman.

  14. Texasbrown, thanks for mentioning that. I had skimmed over a section of the Menon/Bhasin book where they talk about the debates over the bill, and now I’m seeing more about Mridula’s role (I might have phrased things slightly differently in the original post to reflect that).

    I get the sense that her perception was that all of the abducted women were always victims of the captors only, not of their original families. The example I gave above is of a case where the young woman was in a sense doubly victimized.

  15. I guess the Bhakra-Nangal dam made it possible to provide conditions similar to that the refugees had enjoyed in their abandoned land holdings.

    Construction did begin in 1948 but it was completed only much later in the early 60s. However, one of the reasons cited for the dam was to provide the migrants from West Pakistan agriculture conducive conditions similar to the more fertile west.I am not sure thus that it provided any immediate relief to the refugees.

    The problem with this process is that nothing in the law, or the major humanitarian effort that followed, was oriented to ascertaining the will of the women themselves

    A chapter later talks about the passing of the Hindu personal act which wanted to give a lot more equality and freedom to women. The act met with a lot of opposition, some valid on the basis of UCC but a lot of it from organizations like the RSS focused on how equality for women is against the Hinduism

    Khamosh Paani is a very good movie. Another related movie (womens issues, not partition) is Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi.

  16. Construction did begin in 1948 but it was completed only much later in the early 60s. However, one of the reasons cited for the dam was to provide the migrants from West Pakistan agriculture conducive conditions similar to the more fertile west.I am not sure thus that it provided any immediate relief to the refugees.

    I thought one of the reason that refugee problem in Delhi and around was a success, as opposed to West Bengal was countless dedicated social workers, Nehru and Patel both committed to it (as it was right in front of their face, Nehru had hundreds of muslim women camping in his official residence), and there was this Indian Civil Servant, a sikh who was a Oxford educated who did all the land allocation/ claims very assiduously to the refugees.

    Amardeep, do you remember his name. Guha’s book has a few pages on his work.

  17. this Indian Civil Servant, a sikh who was a Oxford educated who did all the land allocation/ claims very assiduously to the refugees.

    VP Menon Tarlok Singh

    I doubt that any factors came close to the fact that there were too many people / too little available land. Bengal had its share of social workers and outstanding civil servants. Calcutta is a former capital of India Bengal is the land of Arya Samaj, Bhrama Samaj ,etc. Besidtes Gandhi focussed attention on Bengal at the beginning of independance. (although I doubt that a fast unto death by the ‘father of the nation’ would have had anywhere close to the effect as the appeal of clean lawns for Nehru)

  18. Sure, Gandhi had huge influence in Bengal in entire 1946-1947.

    However, he had moved to Delhi in late 1947 till January 31st, 1948.

    The refugee problem in Bengal really flared up in 1949-50.

    It was Tarlok Singh.

  19. More than the Government apathy or any other reason, the lack of land for reallocation was I think the primary reason for things getting messed up in Bengal. And to think after all that, Pakistan did not value East Pakistan enough to manage to hold on to it. Much suffering for nothing I say…

  20. Amardeep:

    Hundreds of thousands of displaced families were allotted land through a rationalized, transparent process oriented to ensuring their survival. And food relief and temporary shelter was provided to thousands more (not without international help).

    Not True on both counts according to the book (pg. 98 second line regarding international help and pg 104 and 105 regarding the land) I guess that stictly speaking you could say that many got land in a transparent manner, many by fraud and many babus used this as an opportunity to get rich at the public expense (I liked the description of the PWD as Plunder without Danger and Public Waste Department — I guess somethings never change).

    Kush Tandon: I should not have been snide regarding Gandhi/Nehru’s attention, but bengal did have an amazing social infrastucture .. ultimately it just could not bear the number of people coming in — bengal is one of the most densely populated places in India and it could not handle the influx. I guess that the neglect the center would have hurt though — but this neglect of places other than N.India and the cowbelt region remained a feature of Indian Government for a long time.

  21. Does anyone know the statistics about the people who moved during partition? How much people moved to/from West Pakistan, to/from East Pakistan? The time frame for these numbers would need to be capped off when a significant amount of people stopped moving. The fifth chapter mentions that even two years after independence, 1.7 million people migrated to West Bengal during the winter of 1949-1950.

    Was there a Muslim section of the population who chose to move to the Indian side after partition?

  22. Does anyone know the statistics about the people who moved during partition? How much people moved to/from West Pakistan, to/from East Pakistan? The time frame for these numbers would need to be capped off when a significant amount of people stopped moving. The fifth chapter mentions that even two years after independence, 1.7 million people migrated to West Bengal during the winter of 1949-1950.

    right.. time of migration plays a key role in refugee settlement. While I think, during 47, Hindus/Sikhs were cleaned out of West Punjab and Muslims out of East Punjab, that’s not the case with Bengali migration. The refugees were given lands that were vacated by those who migrated hence Punjabi migrants are looked after while Bengali refugees are not. I think after 47-48, it’s mostly one way, Hindus from East Bengal into West Bengal.

    It is very interesting to note that a East Bengali Dalit , Jogindra nath Mandal was made the first law minister of Pakistan while his counterpart Ambedkar was made the law minister of India. It was Jinnah’s idea that in Bengal, Muslims constituted 60%, Dalits-Namasudras constituted another 20% and the upper caste Hindus the rest, so whole of Bengal should be given to Pakistan because he enticed Jogindranath Mandal to stay with Pakistan.. But after Jinnah died there was no use in Pakistan for his secular BS and Mandal was quickly chased out to India in 1950..

  23. Does anyone know the statistics about the people who moved during partition? How much people moved to/from West Pakistan, to/from East Pakistan? The time frame for these numbers would need to be capped off when a significant amount of people stopped moving. The fifth chapter mentions that even two years after independence, 1.7 million people migrated to West Bengal during the winter of 1949-1950.

    1949-50 migration was triggered by riots in Khulna and Barishal. Here are the numbers for “Refugee influx from East Pakistan – 1946-1970” :

    1946: 19,000 (Noakhali riots), 1947: 334,000 (partition), 1948: 786,000 (Police action in Hyderabad) 1949: 213,000 (Khulna-Barishal riots) 1950: 1,575,000 (Khulna-Barishal riots) 1951: 187,000 (Agitation over Kashmir) 1952: 227,000 (economic conditions, passport scare), 1953-54: 194,000 (no “immediate” cause), 1955: 240,000 (Unrest over Urdu in East Pakistan) 1956: 320,000 (Pakistan’s Islamic constitution), 1957-1963: 73,000 (no “immediate” cause), 1964: 693,000 (Hazrat Bal), 1965-69: 162,000 (no “immediate” cause), 1970:250,000 (Elections)

    Total: 5,283,000 (1946-70).[link]

    They were unwanted by both West Bengal state government and the central goverment. From Nehru to B.C.Ray: “It is wrong to encourage any large-scale migration from East Bengal to the West. Indeed, if such a migration takes place, West Bengal and to some extent the Indian Union would be overwhelmed”. [Chakraborty, Saroj.1982. With B.C.Roy and Other Chief Ministers.]

    Both governments only recognized “immediate” trigger events, and not daily fear and insecurities. Partition was accepted as reason for refugee influx of 1947 alone. There were efforts to distinguish between “economic” and “political” refugees and establish a sliding scale of aid-worthiness to reduce state’s responsibilites —

    “whatever might have been the cause of the exodus in the past, similar conditions do not now prevail. There is hardly any communal disturbance in Eastern Pakistan… Therefore, the present exodus is due to economic causes” (Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1948, 26 June)

  24. Not True on both counts according to the book (pg. 98 second line regarding international help and pg 104 and 105 regarding the land) I guess that stictly speaking you could say that many got land in a transparent manner, many by fraud and many babus used this as an opportunity to get rich at the public expense (I liked the description of the PWD as Plunder without Danger and Public Waste Department — I guess somethings never change).

    Dizzydesi, I guess what I meant was, it worked — people got allotments of land, and in a few years Punjab would become the center of the Green Revolution and the wealthiest state in India. But yes, I probably should have mentioned that corruption was still a problem.

  25. Totally unrelated, but who ended up scoring that Kenneth Cole Sikh modeling gig? Certain aunties wanna know.

  26. Speaking of partition migration, the Biharis who chose to migrate to Pakistan in 47 by moving to Bangladesh (East Pakistan in 47) have really got shafted. More than half of them are still not citizens of Bangladesh and most of them are living in refugee camps. Bangladesh wont grant citizenships to most of them and Pakistan does not want to take them either so they are basically stateless and unwanted.

  27. On a side note – DLF (Delhi Land & Finance) the real estate behemoth in, primarily North India, got its start in the business when it was granted the rights in/around Delhi by the Indian government to build housing for the refugees streaming in from Pakistan.

  28. Speaking of partition migration, the Biharis who chose to migrate to Pakistan in 47 by moving to Bangladesh (East Pakistan in 47) have really got shafted.

    What do you mean shafted? They were opposed to Bengali language and Bengali interests right from the beginning. They thought they would move to East Pakistan and assert Urdu and what was essentially equivalent to a Muhajir identity on the local Bengalis. They aided Pakistani troops in quelling the Bengali resistance in 1971. To this day many (who were born and raised in Bangladesh) can’t speak proper Bengali, which they look down on. Besides, wasn’t it unnecessary ‘zabardasti’ to up and move to Bengal for no reason other than misplaced ‘Pakistani’ fervor??? I wouldn’t be so harsh to say they deserve what they got, but they are hardly innocent.

  29. On a side note – DLF (Delhi Land & Finance) the

    Aaahh…I finally know what DLF stands for. Were they always a private company, even at that time?

  30. Amitabh They were opposed to Bengali language and Bengali interests right from the beginning. They thought they would move to East Pakistan and assert Urdu and what was essentially equivalent to a Muhajir identity on the local Bengalis

    I understand your vehemence, Amitabh, but not you callousness. You can’t blame all individuals for the actions of a government, or impute malign motives to every single refugee. Some of my family mograted to East Pakistan. They moved to East Pakistan for the same reasons everyone else moved to West Pakistan — greater economic opportunities, idealism, imminent (or actual) violence, and a fear of the future for themselves and their children if they stayed in India.

    They spoke Urdu and Bangla, and married their daughters into Bengali families. 1971 didn’t just destroy their lives and turn them into refugees for a second time in 25 years, it also geographically split their families by thousands of miles. It was a worse tragedy than partition, and (given that I get along fine with my Bengali relatives in California) possibly a preventable one, given greater generosity on the West Pakistani side.

    (I had written a longer, more emotional post as a response — but perhaps its not appropriate here.)

  31. What do you mean shafted? They were opposed to Bengali language and Bengali interests right from the beginning. They thought they would move to East Pakistan and assert Urdu and what was essentially equivalent to a Muhajir identity on the local Bengalis. They aided Pakistani troops in quelling the Bengali resistance in 1971. To this day many (who were born and raised in Bangladesh) can’t speak proper Bengali, which they look down on. Besides, wasn’t it unnecessary ‘zabardasti’ to up and move to Bengal for no reason other than misplaced ‘Pakistani’ fervor??? I wouldn’t be so harsh to say they deserve what they got, but they are hardly innocent.

    A couple of points here:

    (1) Lets keep things in perspective here. We are talking about 200,000 people who moved in 47. They had no ability to assert any identity on the tens of millions of Bengalis in Bangladesh. Also they did not speak any Bengali so they naturally favored Urdu as that was the only language they were familiar with.

    (2) The Islamists for the most part also aided the Pakistani troops. The Biharis were not the only ones supporting the Pakistanis in 71.

    (3) They dont look down on Bengalis and its mostly Bengalis who look down on them. They are living in very poor conditions in make shift refugee camps. They have no power to look down on anyone as they are at the mercy of their Bengali hosts who dont particularly like them.

    (4) Most of these people were born after 47 and should not be punished for what happened in 47 as they had nothing to do with it. Most of them are not granted Bangladeshi citizens and its very difficult to live as stateless people in Bangladesh.

    (5) There was nothing wrong in moving to East Pakistan in 47. Millions of people moved across the borders. Should the muhajirs be punished now in Pakistan?

    The MQM has been able to get some of these people moved to Pakistan. As Pakistan is unwilling to take the rest, Bangladesh should grant them citizenship.

  32. Besides, wasn’t it unnecessary ‘zabardasti’ to up and move to Bengal for no reason other than misplaced ‘Pakistani’ fervor???

    Not any more zabardasti than people from Orissa or Hyderabad moving to Pakistan. Wasnt that the whole purpose of partition?

  33. Amrita Pritam also wrote about this in her novella Pinjar, which was made into what I thought was a decent Hindi film a few years ago

    This film was from a woman’s perspective and I think the film-makers did a great job portraying it. I think the story was great (credit to Amrita Pritam).

  34. This film was from a woman’s perspective and I think the film-makers did a great job portraying it. I think the story was great (credit to Amrita Pritam).

    Yeah, the director Chandra Prakash Dwivedi did an excellent job. He also directed the well-researched and critically acclaimed TV series on Chanakya.

  35. Kush #4:

    One true story that stands out, and is now a folklore in Indian subcontinent.

    Wow! I’ve been to hell and back and very little makes me tear up anymore. But that story just did. Maybe I’m not such a nihilistic, cynical bastard after all.

  36. i dont want to interfere, but does any one of you can help me, contact right person who can in return help me find and MEET my aunties and cousins which were abducted during partition. (their relocation is not my concern) regards