Via 3QD, I came across an article in the Washington Post about a 10 year research project, based in Delhi but funded by the Ford Foundation, to interview thousands of survivors of the 1947 Partition.
The story begins with a powerful anecdote:
Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.
At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.
“None of the women protested, nobody wept,” Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. “All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book.” (link)
These ‘honor killings’, where women were killed by male members of their families to prevent their being raped by communal mobs, were not at all unusual. I do not know if they happened in other communities, but in the Sikh community in particular it is thought that thousands of women died this way. (I do not think anybody knows exactly how many it was.)
Thus far, the project has interviewed about 1300 people, including Bir Bahadur Singh. The project (“Reconstructing Lives: Memories of Partition”) does not appear to have a web presence, and I’m not sure whether there are any plans to digitize the tapes from the interviews, or publish raw transcripts. Hopefully, that will be in the cards at some point.
Readers, if you have grandparents (or great-grandparents?) who went through this, and who have stories they want to tell, I would urge you to interview and record what they went through while they’re still around. (Projects like the one I’m describing are only interviewing people still in India — I’m sure there are more than a few who have ended up settled abroad.)
If you’ve actually done such an interview, have you published the text of it anywhere? (If you’re interested in doing this, drop me a line.)
Why all this is important:Unlike the Jewish Holocaust, where there have been many documentary projects, including a number of survivor interview projects, the Partition of India has only been studied in dribs and drabs. There is, as I understand it, no public memorial to the Partition in India itself (compare to the many museums and monuments devoted to memorializing the Holocaust in western countries).
But a full knowledge of the true history, including these personal testimonials, is extremely important, for a number of reasons. First, it adds to the historical record, and makes it harder for extremist (communal) groups on both sides of the border to distort the story, or to put all of the blame for today’s problems on the other party. Second, a fuller knowledge from a position of historical distance might help everyone address the lingering trauma the event created (it’s no accident that the person heading this operation is a psychologist), so we can start to address the root causes of this kind of violence.
only ‘fools’ who refuse to understand the concept of ‘honour’ will make such statements like this. It is a painful episode and using 21st century American values to judge the behaviour of folks during partition is tantamount to mocking the dead and the living.
I agree with their position and they have survived to raise a very smart grand-daughter. Talking about a painful past with a generation that has nothing to do with it only lets resentment fester. Have they forgiven and moved on ? I suppose so. Further, why relive the pain – better to bury it.
39 · Kush Tandon said
Your picture, is indeed, simple. I agree that there was no time for ‘what ifs’ – because were there time, I’m sure a lot of men and women wouldn’t have made such an irrevocable decision, and reconsidered their decisions and weighed alternatives, or figured out a different way to get to India (some ways were safer than others, but involved more waiting; ). It’s a horrible choice to make, and if one were to think thorough this chain of actions, I doubt one could even have the nerve to carry it out. I find the stoicism (refer upthread) with which many families faced partition to be remarkable.
I have some idea of what I’m talking about – my entire family (including all relatives by marriage) were partition refugees or their descendants. Some of them were clued into the political situation, others were not. And if you think it took a lot of time for people to figure out that in those days rape could lead to ostracism, you’re wrong. For instance, one of my older aunts was hastily married off despite a promising academic career, because some guy in the neighborhood looked at her the wrong way and drove around our house sometimes. In some families (like mine, for instance, in days past) any hint of unsavoriness in a woman’s past was considered shameful. Even though people recognized that the woman was not ‘at fault.’
That rape-honor besmirched-ostracism theory was an intellectual exercise that took people days to ponder is mistaken.
Thanks for the condescension, though.
Speaking of the Partition movies, GARAM HAWA with Balraj Sahni and Farooq Sheikh was another good film.
A couple of commenters have mentioned the pros and cons of memorializing any tragedy, regardless of its historical significance. Growing up in India among many displaced Punjabis who came to Delhi, UP and Bihar after the Partition with nothing but the clothes on their backs, I did not hear much reminiscing of their wonderful Lahore days or grief over the lives lost during what was the largest and most brutal exodus in human history. Perhaps it is an Indian trait not to dwell on past tragedies. Indians who lost their relatives or children to the plague, pox and malaria during the same era as the Partition, and to the ongoing Hindu-Muslim riots, floods and drought that routinely wipe out villages for hundreds of miles, tend NOT to memorialize. Stoicism? Fatalism? Who knows!
Quickly skimmed through this piece, and it documents Gandhi’s takes on women who chose to die voluntarily as well as on others whose families refused to recognize them once they were rescued/abandoned post-abduction, among other things. Don’t know anything else about the researcher, though.
that does seem to be the case. My father who was born pre-WWII always says – “dont talk about negative stuff, it is not good for your soul”
lets say that there was high probability that the women would have been raped/murdered (incidentally i hope we are all clear on the fact that the act of rape with the objective to “dishonor” a particular group to which the said women belong already presumes that women have no autonomy, and they they are somehow important and valuable “properties” of the group, just like high profile “targets” of “prestige”–such as parliaments– in modern warfare). let us also assume that the probability was about 90%. why would it be rational to trade 10% chance–indeed, any chance– of survival for certain death? there must, therefore, have been additional factors that increased the relative costs of the 10% possibility of survival so that some women voluntary chose certain death now. also it is hard to believe that the decisions were completely “voluntary”, since as someone asked above, why weren’t there suicides in this particular case? but if they were “voluntary” (we are stretching the meaning of the term here considering the situation and the status of women i indicated above), then the earlier argument applies. that is why i think portmanteau is absolutely correct.
incidentally about half of my mom’s family died in riots in bengal; my grandmother does not like to talk about it either.
ok i read though most of the piece (not surprisingly did not take long, the actual content is about 20% of the article). i generally agree with it, but was aesthetically repelled by the vocabulary and complicated sounding, but relatively simple points that a high schooler should be able to understand. all the rhetoric aside it makes the point i (and umpteen others) made within parentheses above (not a great achievement, by the way, on my part). the one somewhat interesting part was the implication that gandhi changed his position due to economic reasons (i.e. the expenses to the state of having to provide for these “rejected” women). but i would require far more evidence (which could have replaced all the “complicated” postmodernist musings).
Regarding the deaths of the women, while there is definitely some tie-in to the honor killings that plague various communities, in that women were killed to protect their “virtue†from being forcibly taken from them, I find it hard to fault the people involved in the killing, given the circumstances. I’m reminded of a Firefly quote regarding what happens to people when they are captured by Reavers “They’ll rape you dead, eat your flesh, and sew your skin into their clothing. And if you’re very, VERY, lucky… they’ll do it in that orderâ€. I think people who truly believe that they are facing that type of immediately imminent scenario are operating under a different decision-tree framework.
I can see blaming misogyny for treating women as dependants (to the extent that they had no say in the decisions) and in the feeling that women who had been violated were “damaged goods”. However, I think to dismiss the impact of rape and the suggestion that all women facing such a scenario would much rather be “the third wife” of their rapist is just as callous as the automatic assumption that a woman must be killed so she can’t be raped. Rape is a form of torture and these women were probably looking at multiple and repeated violations (if the histories of Rwanda, Serbia etc. are anything to go by) with no guarantee that they wouldn’t be murdered afterwards. Even if they did survive, I’m pretty sure that for many women, the psychological trauma (I’ll assume they weren’t left with any physical “souvenirs” of the event) would be very significant. Some women (by no means all) could very well prefer an immediate death to that scenario. The “honor” being protected could be that of “virtue”, but it could also be that of “freedom from violation”.
Speaking only for myself, if I truly believed that there was a good chance that my dependents were going to be tortured and irrevocably damaged and very likely killed at the hands of someone else and I would be powerless to stop it, I think that the idea of killing them myself (as quickly and painlessly as possible under the circumstances) would, at the very least, cross my mind.
57 · sigh! said
seconded. i am also annoyed by this kind of writing, gives serious history a bad name. and also agree that her primary sources did most of the work for her. although i am very sympathetic to economic readings of many phenomena, and it is a good explanatory factor on many occasions, but I’m not convinced either that Gandhi’s dance on the subject was motivated by economic factors. Morally, for a leader to say anything against the acceptance and re-integration of abducted women into their homes would be reprehensible. i’m, however, struck how the abducted women were referred to as ‘sluts’ by some bigots, and also by the fiction the author used as a primary source. the story about the woman whose husband takes her back after she has been kidnapped, and asks her, “did you anything sinful?…..,” and at the same time says, “let’s forget about the past” was exceptionally instructive. i can’t imagine how much damage was to done to people’s emotional health as a result of the partition. also – the article speaks only to hindu women who were returned from abductors’ homes, but does not present an analysis of muslim women who were returned to pakistan. the big point the article makes, which is non-controversial enough and unoriginal as well, is the treatment of women as non-autonomous entities who first are used to dishonor the community they originate from, and then when they begin to integrate after displacement, are uprooted without consent. and when they go back, they are not accepted unconditionally or even abandoned. thanks for pointing that out in your comment, sigh!. ps: the thought that motivated my comment was exactly this:
and of course, it becomes important to consider other costs, like you mention.
Indians have the most puerile attitude towards sex and women.
Human dignity requires us to not only recognize the communal violence of the Partition but the barbaric “honor” killings. Prosecute those animals who took women’s lives to “save” honor. Throw their “sorry” posteriors in jail and throw the key away.
The attitudes towards sex and women’s liberation are festering carbuncles leftover from the British Victorian rule that continue to infect Indian psyches. We should have 0 tolerance for anyone admitting honor killings.
Melbourne Desi, you are the one who clearly has no concept of “honor”. “Honor” as defined by those men who chose to murder their own families is primarily about control and societal status. It is the same medieval thinking that plagues Saudi Arabia and much of the middle east today and probably still much of India that views female sexuality as an overt threat to male dominated hierarchy. The control over and access to women by men is a commodity that defines their social standing and respectability in the community at large.
That these women were murdered was not meant to protect the women’s honor, but rather the status of the murderers themselves who would have lost standing because of their failure in maintaining exclusivity of sexual access to their women. The fact that the survivors of rapes were in turn shunned by their own families and ostracized shows this to be true.
/feminism
Camille @47,
I didn’t say that victims should be silent ; what I said was that they shouldn’t cry over the shoulders of growing children. During that time it is best for the children that the parents be an epitome of strength rather than weakness. If the parents want help for any reason whatsoever then they better take some alternate help outside the immediate family ( though i do understand that this sometimes becomes difficult in the south-asian context ). Otherwise this a recipe for normal relationships within the family to become poisoned. Now after some age if the children want to connect with their ancestral history then maybe parents can cry over their children’s shoulders.
53 · Floridian said
I agree totally. I saw Garam Hawa a few weeks back. It is a powerful & moving film. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I feel it is one of the 10 best movies ever to come out of India. I found it in my local Bay Area library & picked it up, having heard a lot about it. Back in desh, in the 80s, DD had shown it but I was too young to figure it all out. Sahni’s brother Bhisham wrote Tamas, which was made into DD miniseries by Govind Nihalani. I haven’t seen it since DD, & yet I recall it vividly so indelible the images are in my mind. These would be the 2 best movies about partition in the West.
I blogged about my Dad’s experience during partition a long time ago. I think it’s a good idea to collect such personal history and learn from it.
Some insight to the reasons behind the honor killings in various communities during Partition may be gained by looking at the degree of historical prevalence of such killings in these communities during normal times. This is a tricky issue: people might have behaved in ways that seem hard to justify in hindsight, but those were crazy and paranoid times, and I am reluctant to judge people who lived through it, and their decisions, too harshly. But if there are cases where all the women died, and the men lived to tell the tale, it does look a tad suspicious.
As it happens, a while back I did some oral histories with my relations in Delhi, who happen to be from the same village as Bir Bahadur. I spoke especially with women who survived, including several who jumped into the local well in an attempt to kill themselves, but didn’t drown. It seems clear to me that it’s hard to fit modern concepts of agency and free will into this situation. The women seemed very clear that death was the right decision to have made at that time. At the time, the village was surrounded by a Muslim mob; all were convinced they were going to die. I don’t think therefore it was a case of preserving masculine honor as it was the honor of the community, the religion. They were falling back on an old Sikh v. Muslim script – one that dated back to historic battles with the Mughals: the women die at home and then the men die fighting. This idea is supported by the fact that there were also a few men who jumped down that well in an attempt to kill themselves. What happened instead in this particular village was that very shortly after these terrible actions (the beheadings, the suicides in the well) was that army trucks pulled up and the survivors (naturally, mostly men who hadn’t yet had their chance to die) were rescued and taken to India.
Ruchira mentioned the documentation of the (jewish aspects of the) holocaust as a comparison with what happened at Partition, but even with the holocaust, it is only the Jewish aspects that are very well documented and advertised.In contrast, the destruction (some estimate ~80% of the total Roma population) of the Roma (Gypsies) is never really talked about or publicized. To some extent, this is because the Roma themselves are reluctant to speak about it (for similar reasons to many Indian survivors of Partition) but it is also because they are still heavily discriminated against in Europe (their tragedy is often ignored, eg.: http://www.geocities.com/~Patrin/pariah-ch9.htm
and
http://query.nytimes.com/beta/search/query?query=roma%20mauthausen (the story is at the second link).).
The general attitude of the Roma and of many Partition survivors is to avoid remembering their experience; as I read somewhere (I could not find a link) when a Roma was asked about why they don’t speak about their experiences in the holocaust, their response was to ask why they should remember and keep fresh such terrible memories. I think this is more natural, as opposed to the one prevalent in Judaism, where memory and remembrance of terrible injustice and tragedy have probably become a means to ensure survival.
Agree with the 0 tolerance part. However, how would British Victorian values be repesented in honor killings? Perhaps that was more of an Islamic influence in India? At the same time, when you read old Indian folklore and religious history, there are some pretty wacked out ideas about sex and women there too. So, to be fair, India’s attitudes are more than likely a mix of many influences.
OK so how many women interviewed were kidnapped in fairy tale fashion, made the third wives of muslim men, given a home, property, respect and treated humanely?
The fact remains that most of these women would have been raped continuously in various ways. After much physical and mental TORTURE, the few to survive just that alone, may have been murdered anyway.
Given a choice of the lesser of two evils, I would prefer my own husband to kill me in a quick, painless way, while I close my eyes and remember God.
Thanks, amardeep, for posting about such an important project. Two things: My family left Sindh around and during partition and I’ve long felt that the partition stories of my grandparents, extended family, and other Sindhis is a big missing piece in the recorded history of partition. About 10 years ago, after writing a thesis length paper on partition politics in Sindh in a course with Ayesha Jalal, I had the idea to start collecting stories from survivors I knew – my grandmothers and others of their generation. I didn’t get far because of resources and time, but also because I got discouraged when I came away with basically the same narrative from my three informal interviews — they would talk about life in Sindh, reminisce about the healthy communal relations between hindus and muslims. But once they got to the period just before partition, they would say something along the lines of “then things got bad. people from outside sindh came, started trouble, and fighting began … then we left … and came to india.” The actual details of partition and their departures from Sindh, they didn’t — or rather, were unable to share. There was a block. I guessed it was too painful to even remember, but I also wonder whether I wasn’t framing my questions in the right way … I am a huge fan of the StoryCorps project, and wish there was a citizen-driven oral history project like that in India and elsewhere to record these stories in a systematic manner …
I also wanted to mention a wonderful book on partition that I read a few years back: BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES: REEXAMINING PARTITION THROUGH A FEMINIST LENS, by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin. In this feminist reading of India’s partition, the authors set out to record the testimonies and memories of women caught in the violence, dislocation, and displacement of 1947. BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES incorporates text from their interviews with women survivors, social workers, government functionaries with government documents, confidential reports, parliamentary debates, letters and diaries. They use a combination of commentary and analysis, narrative and testimony, to enable us to counterpoint documented history with personal testimony, hereby allowing women to speak for themselves and be heard.
The stories that we hear in this volume are voices of women impoverished as a result of Partition, women affected but not devastated by Partition, social workers whose lives changed dramatically, and women who were liberated by the catastrophes. All of these accounts yield to a discussion of the following themes: violence, abduction and recovery, widowhood, women’s rehabilitation, rebuilding, and belonging.
Although BORDERS AND BOUNDARIES focuses on Punjab, the site of maximum relocation and rehabilitation in the Partition experience, I would love to see a similar study that focuses on experiences of other regions and communities affected by Partition, including Sindhis.
read sardarnis comment @ 68 for a better understanding of why the partition killings may have occurred.
Thanks for the information sandhya. Are there other non-fiction accounts that you or others are aware of? I can understand the need to try to block the memories as a survival mechanism, but it is part of history and I hope the stories are recorded before they are completely lost. I’m hoping that sufficient time has passed and the region now has enough of a sense of distance and also the leisure and resources to reflect (sometimes you don’t have time when you are nation building) to be motivated and able to ensure that the information is recorded.
Amardeep, thank you for writing about this.
Krishna #67:
There have been some attempts to chronicle the plight of the Roma during WWII in the last couple of decades. The effort has been directed by both Roma activists in Europe as well as non-Roma human rights advocates. Please see my review of Isabel Fonseca’s outstanding account of Roma history and suffering in her book Bury Me Standing. Efforts by Fonseca and others was successful in admitting this mostly forgotten history into the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Interestingly enough, Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel opposed including the Roma among the Holocaust sufferers. He felt that the Holocaust should be a memoriam dedicated solely to Jewish suffering. Fortunately Wiesel was overruled.
While of course the human suffering was the most tragic dimension of Partition, the severe blow dealt to Punjabi and Sindhi culture/language was another major loss (not sure if Bengali culture and language was affected much). Gurdas Mann in the song Punjabiye Zubaane (written by Shiv Kumar Batalvi) likens the Punjabi language to a woman, and says that in 1947 she suffered a stroke and never got back on her feet again.
I strongly disagree with folks who want to forget the past, or think the indian thing to do is to pretend it never happened…
Folks, this is how things get repeated – this is also why documenting the various communal killings in india/pakistan/bangladesh continues to be so important – whether the appalling massacre of innocent sikhs in 84 or the expulsion of kashmiri hindus in the 90s or the gujrat violence against the innocent muslims of ahmedabad in 92 – we need to create systems of governance that can deal with this phenomenon and we can never understand them if we dont document them and try to get justice for the targets of violence.
The violence of the indian partition is NOT an isolated or unique phenomemon. It is instead a particularly ugly form of south asian politics, its been around for a long time and will continue to flourish until we expose its root dynamics and create education and systems to counteract it…
My grandparents shifted to Pakistan right before partition were assigned a house vacated by Hindus. My grandparents locked up their house in India thinking they’d be back in a few months. A few months after partition the Hindu family came back with a Pakistani police escort. The family had hidden their life savings in wall of one of the rooms. They were allow to take all their cash, gold and jewelery. I guess there must have been an agreement to allow people back, or may they had enough influence or cash to get it done.
sandhya, thanks so much for the text reference. This description was strikingly similar to stories within my family. I could be wrong, but I suspect that my grandparents’ silence is one of tremendous grief. I think they relive their experiences, however horrific, each time they hear the phrase. I wonder how much of this is PTSD or some other psychological coping mechanism — I think they remember, but even describing what happened is too awful for them.
I think in some ways Sindhis got shafted more than Punjabis from Partition. Lahore is after all still a Punjabi city, even with the loss of its Hindus and Sikhs. Karachi on the other hand is an Urdu-speaking, Mohajir city, where ethnic Sindhis have minimal presence or influence. In fact their culture and language are mocked and despised by the migrants and their descendants.
Also, Punjabis fleeing during Partition at least could go to Punjab (albeit the other side of Punjab). No part of Sindh came to India, the fleeing Hindu Sindhis settled in alien (to them) places like Gujarat and Bombay, where it was hard to preserve their heritage. Granted that no one was thinking of preserving culture in the immediate post-Partition milieu.
My father, and parts of his family lived through (and were displaced by) partition. He has told us a few stories of that time, including the time he nearly carried out honor killings. As a young teenager, he was left with a sword and the women and children of his village while the men went to try to defend the village. He was told that he would have to kill the women if the men were unsuccessful in dedending the village. Apparently it did not come to that, and they were able to flee. He made it clear that he thought dying by his sword was a better than the alternative. Including for himself. He did not expect to live through that night, one way or another. His mother and sister survived Partition with him, as did many other women (and men) of his village.
I only know his story. I never asked my grandmother or aunt about it. Would they, or any of the other women have volunteered? I don’t know. Surely they could have overpowered a teenager if they didn’t want to be killed in that fashion. Would I have volunteered? As a Sikh woman in Punjab in 1947, in the midst of all that chaos? I don’t know. Maybe.
I do think that amongst most Asian cultures, there is this “get over it” feeling. Ask a Chinese person who was alive during the Sino-Japanese War. Stories of atrocities during that time are met with similar “get over it” reactions. It’s considered gauche and futile, or wrong, to recount bad times.
Amardeep, if you get the chance, look at the CAP in Pakistan (the Citizens’ Archive Project, I believe). It’s something like a record, both oral and transcribed, of our family members who were alive and remember Partition (among other things).
Dear One,
You are doing a remarkable ‘sewa’. Where are you located…? We are doing a huge projct on this subject. The first phase has already rolled out with an exhibition on sikhism that was inaugurated at Gurudwara Bangala Sahib.
Please visit http://defenders-of-dharma.blogspot.com/
Warm regards
Gautam Vig
This is unbelievable….
I mean..i never had any idea about the misery that people faced during partition. I m a hindu from India(UP).My origins are totally from U.P. and have no connection with Pakistan what so ever.
But its so terrible to listen about all those who faced this tragedy. I know that nothing can be done for those who are dead but atleast for those who are alive,
if there is anything that we can do..we will do… I dont know about others but i am in.
In todays world, people go psychic by mere carreer threats and these people…they faced something that cant be described in any language…
How strong must these people be….
On a personal note…I believe its a disgust to know that womens were raped and murdered… because i believe that whatever fight it is, however big it is…
womens shall be shown all the respect…
yeah if offcourse you are not a coward…you will show respect..
but i guess we ahd too many cowards during that time that behaved in such an inhuman way…
Curse them ….Seriously curse those bastards…..
— they would talk about life in Sindh, reminisce about the healthy communal relations between hindus and muslims. But once they got to the period just before partition, they would say something along the lines of “then things got bad. people from outside sindh came, started trouble, and fighting began … then we left … and came to india.” The actual details of partition and their departures from Sindh, they didn’t — or rather, were unable to share. (Sandhya’s post)
I know this post is old but I didn’t see this before so I’ll comment, maybe it’ll help. My grandmother (from the Gujrat district of Punjab in Pakistan) always says the same type of stuff about the village my family is from (incidentally, the village my family is from, halfway between Rawalpindi and Lahore, was historically prone to raids by Pashtun people from NWFP and Afghanistan during the winter time, so the outsiders in this case are the Pashtun people of her day, they also took over the village during those horrible partition days and did pretty horrific things to many of the Punjabi Muslims in the village too, but Hindu’s and Sikh’s got the worst of it because they were outright forced to leave). She says everyone was like a family, but there were also some boundaries between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindu’s (i.e – no intermarriage, don’t step in someone else’s kitchen, but all the kids in the village went to the same school etc). Also, caste, as oppressive as it can be in some instances, had alot to do with village harmony, everyone from my family’s village, regardless of religion, was Gujjar, and this tended to be the binding tie, even if you weren’t from the same religion, you belonged to the Bradri, or, if I translate this into english, its something like “Caste Brotherhood” or “Greater Family”.
My family ended up being on the “right” side of the border, but many of the Sikhs and Hindu’s didn’t and therefore had to leave, but before they left, they asked my family to put all of their gold and jewelry in a safe place for them so they didn’t have to take it on the train to India. My grandmother says this was a really emotional event and everyone wept and sobbed over it alot. When a few years passed, my great-grandfather went to India and delivered it to them. Many of them settled in Kanpur. Up until my great-grandparent’s deaths, and before the mass exodus of my family and community from Pakistan to North America, many of the Hindu and Sikh’s kept in very close contact with my family and often wrote letters of longing for the good old days. Everyone blamed the “outsiders” and to this day my grandmother trusts only Punjabi’s (she’s happier if they are also Gujjar). After partition, people of different castes settled in my family’s village, and my grandmother says there was alot of resentment between the newcomers and old settlers, regardless of the fact that they were all Muslim. The newcomers came mostly from Jalandhar, and the ones that were upper castes took alot of the village property, while the old settlers saw their influence in the village erode.
I’ve always wondered where the children of the Hindu’s and Sikhs who were once part of my family’s village are, and how they are doing.
amardeep,
is the most fake person i have met online, moin mian naam tho correct dho
regarding sucide by hindus and sikh women u will never understand, what they went thru in west punjab