Homecoming?

Refuging from Unsolicited India to India

“We have to go to the other side.” A phrase that can change your life. What would you choose? You might take a second and absorb what is really happening. But this is not what my great-grandmother did. She took everything she could, leaving all her jewelry and livelong’s savings behind, and started her journey to the “other side” with three kids.

On her way from unsolicited India (now known as Pakistan) to India, she had no food, no money, and no security. Two of her kids lost their lives on the way to finding a new home, but her only hope was to protect her third kid. All this happened as early as 1947 and even before when the talks of partition and the consequences had already started to show. I reconnected with all these stories through my grandparents and great-grandparents. I have no idea how much truth lies behind this journey, but who would even know how much is true when you are subjected to the atrocities of Partition?

Why did this partition happen? Would the refugees get a place to stay? Will this ever end? Or is it going to get worse? All these questions had different answers: the Indian answer, the Pakistani answer, the British answer. But nobody had the answer that would suffice the realities of life then.

My family and the thousand other families who were serious subject to these problems had their own answers. Their problems did end for a bit but, the repercussions never stopped. 

The human mind works in two different directions that is truth or false, and distinguishes between these processes by engaging multiple cognitive processes and brain regions. The prefrontal cortex helps with reasoning and judgment, while the hippocampus recalls relevant memories to check facts. The anterior cingulate cortex detects contradictions or inconsistencies, signaling potential errors, and the amygdala processes emotional responses, which can provide instinctive clues when something feels wrong. These areas work to assess information and recognize falsehoods critically.

But when you are exposed to a varied range of trauma or sequential bad experiences, your brain fails to understand what’s true or not. It creates no distinction between factual and non-factual parts, and we as humans, care the least. We were busy taking sides of which side of the partition to pick and whether our religion and race would get a place. This is what happened to my grandmother’s father who like millions, lost a knowledge of what was true or false. He left his land in Pakistan by burying all his jewelry in the soil. When he came to India after 1947 and settled down, he went back to Pakistan after a few years with his friend to look for their buried gold. Pakistan, a country he did not know though he had known it when it was not Pakistan. Reaching a place, you called home but seeing a billion other families budding there, he knew he did not just go there for the gold but also for the satisfaction of being back home. His friend got his jewelry but when he reached there, he realized the memory of where he left his gold had faded away. He saw houses built on his own land and failed to clearly distinguish between what was true and false. Then, a policeman came and got his friend his gold back, but my grandmother’s father was completely lost.

Imagine living in a place that is not really your home but you are forced to call it home to start a new life altogether. With no hope my great-grandparents, had to start a life in India. They had no start, no vision, but just one aim- survival.

They first settled in Kurk where they were given shelter in refugee tents, then traveled to Rohtak, then to Samhalka, and after being unemployed for days, came to Delhi in search of work. People then and even now, call us refugees. But we identify ourselves as fighters- who dared to survive one of the biggest revolutions in the world.

But this was just not it. What started as a bare announcement as news- Dusri tarah jana hai, soon became a place for terror. The Indian subcontinent became a place for war. Over the night, civilized citizens turned into demented killers and killers turned into rapists. This gave rise to a communal war. If a hundred men were reported killed by one community, the other community made sure that it doubled the score. There were no holds barred on what was and what was wrong. No one was spared. Children, women, and even the old had to face the repercussions of this set fire. This was just the start of the communal wars that were to begin. It was not just India or Pakistan anymore. It was Hindu, Muslims, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Marwaris, Kashmiris, and many other religions that turned back against each other.

The lifestyle, economy, and culture faced a huge pushback. The development under British rule was ruined by this partition. A war between Hindu and Muslim- it just started with this but ended up consuming every part of the society including Sikhs, Rajputs, Sindhis, Punjabis, and many more.

And if you ask me today, whether these repercussions ended or not, my answer would be no. We are subjected to “partitioned products”, “Pakistanis”, and even “half Indians”. And to be honest, my family has not yet figured out what to call themselves as well. Even after staying in India for over 70 years, and having a well-established business, we have not been able to call this place our home.

Whenever as an adult I have an ancestral discussion with my friends and hear them bragging about their grandparents having their roots in Delhi and India since the very start, I realize how my family must have felt. They are Indians who are still called immigrants. And how can one accept or call a space home that hasn’t even accepted them properly?

The trauma of resettling and starting your life all over again is something that the decision-makers of partition forgot to think of properly. My grandparents would still shed tears while recollecting memories of partition war and their pain would scream through their eyes. After some time, ‘refugee’ was not just a term for us, but a word that casts all our emotions. The minds of people stopped understanding what’s true and what’s false and there was just one feeling that left unsaid- Is it homecoming?

There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India, and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth, which had no name, we laid- fighters.

This was my story, what's yours?

Write to me at poorvik35@gmail.com