Family chronicles of Partition - Jamal Kidwai
"I went alone for a stroll to the nearby posh Liberty Market. I stopped at a juice shop and asked for mixed juice in Hindustani. Since there was no response from the shop owner, I asked again. He looked at me scornfully and said, ‘Agar itni Urdu jhaadni hai to Karachi mein jaake juice peo’ (If you have to talk in Urdu, then go have your juice in Karachi). That’s when I was first introduced to the term mohajir and realized the antagonism towards Urdu speaking migrants in Pakistan. I innocently told him that I was from Delhi. Suddenly the juice owner became apologetic, quickly made me a glass of juice and also refused to take any money.."
THE tragedy of the Partition can be revisited from many prisms. The most common is the brutal violence and displacement that shaped the formation of India and Pakistan. In this article I will not address that aspect; instead I want to try and sketch an anecdotal history by dwelling on incidents in my family which, in their own manner, invoke the tragedy of the Partition. These incidents, sometimes comic and at other times tragic, show how the Partition created new and largely artificial identities relating to notions of citizenship, culture, kinship, family and politics. It also shows how our understanding of these concepts became expressive, on the one hand, of a kind of common sense and, on the other, left these same concepts unresolved and unexamined.
Unlike thousands of Hindu and Muslim refugees who were forced to migrate at the time of the Partition, my family members, who belonged to the Barabanki district of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, migrated to Pakistan voluntarily. Many of them went to the newly created Pakistan in the early 1950s because they thought there would be better opportunities of employment. They were also convinced that borders would remain soft and fluid and they would be able to carry on their connection with India through regular visits to their homeland. Several of them continued to move back and forth between Lucknow/Barabanki and Lahore/Karachi. But then came the 1971 war and things changed dramatically between the two nations. It became increasingly difficult to get visas and permission to visit India.
Through my childhood and as a teenager till the late 1980s, I went for the summer holidays to our native village in Barabanki where we were joined by Pakistani cousins. Though visas were difficult, their parents made sure that they visited our village at least once every two years. Unlike our parents and our uncles and aunts from Pakistan, my cousins and I were from a generation that was born and bought up after the Partition. In other words, we were in many ways first generation Indians and Pakistanis. We as children were also influenced by the nationalist jingoism that was a contribution of the 1971 war, in which India defeated Pakistan; cricket matches added colour to this (in those days an India win was rare).
As children we would invariably be divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups. We would have long arguments about who would win the next war, whether Imran Khan was a better all-round cricketer than Kapil Dev; we would even divide ourselves into Indian and Pakistani teams when it came to playing cards, scrabble, cricket or antakshari. These competitions and arguments brought small but interesting victories. Like once when in the course of an argument, a Pakistani cousin pulled out a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a far slicker plastic tube than our usual Indian toothpaste which came in tin tubes and was easily rusted. He was taunting us about the quality of the toothpaste tube which, of course, proved how backward India was compared to Pakistan. At this point one of us from the Indian team noticed that ‘their’ tube had a mark ‘Made in India’. Nothing gave us more joy than that and the Pakistani team was not only defeated but was left embarrassed for the rest of the holidays. (Material wealth and consumer goods was one area where Pakistan, with its imported goods from the US, was far more ‘developed’ than India and it gave us great pleasure to puncture that aspiration.)
Ironically, the antakshari competition was always won by the Pakistani team, because they were more in tune with the old and latest film songs than us Indians. But then Hindi cinema was never considered specifically ‘Indian’. That was one shared heritage of which all of us were proud of. All year round, the Indian team would religiously collect old issues of Stardust and Filmfare for the Pakistani cousins. The other such shared heritage were the mangoes of Barabanki. The Pakistani cousins would proudly boast to us how they successfully convinced their friends back home in Pakistan that the best mangoes on earth came from Barabanki...
Read more: http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/632/632_jamal_kidwai.htm
THE tragedy of the Partition can be revisited from many prisms. The most common is the brutal violence and displacement that shaped the formation of India and Pakistan. In this article I will not address that aspect; instead I want to try and sketch an anecdotal history by dwelling on incidents in my family which, in their own manner, invoke the tragedy of the Partition. These incidents, sometimes comic and at other times tragic, show how the Partition created new and largely artificial identities relating to notions of citizenship, culture, kinship, family and politics. It also shows how our understanding of these concepts became expressive, on the one hand, of a kind of common sense and, on the other, left these same concepts unresolved and unexamined.
Unlike thousands of Hindu and Muslim refugees who were forced to migrate at the time of the Partition, my family members, who belonged to the Barabanki district of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, migrated to Pakistan voluntarily. Many of them went to the newly created Pakistan in the early 1950s because they thought there would be better opportunities of employment. They were also convinced that borders would remain soft and fluid and they would be able to carry on their connection with India through regular visits to their homeland. Several of them continued to move back and forth between Lucknow/Barabanki and Lahore/Karachi. But then came the 1971 war and things changed dramatically between the two nations. It became increasingly difficult to get visas and permission to visit India.
Through my childhood and as a teenager till the late 1980s, I went for the summer holidays to our native village in Barabanki where we were joined by Pakistani cousins. Though visas were difficult, their parents made sure that they visited our village at least once every two years. Unlike our parents and our uncles and aunts from Pakistan, my cousins and I were from a generation that was born and bought up after the Partition. In other words, we were in many ways first generation Indians and Pakistanis. We as children were also influenced by the nationalist jingoism that was a contribution of the 1971 war, in which India defeated Pakistan; cricket matches added colour to this (in those days an India win was rare).
As children we would invariably be divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups. We would have long arguments about who would win the next war, whether Imran Khan was a better all-round cricketer than Kapil Dev; we would even divide ourselves into Indian and Pakistani teams when it came to playing cards, scrabble, cricket or antakshari. These competitions and arguments brought small but interesting victories. Like once when in the course of an argument, a Pakistani cousin pulled out a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a far slicker plastic tube than our usual Indian toothpaste which came in tin tubes and was easily rusted. He was taunting us about the quality of the toothpaste tube which, of course, proved how backward India was compared to Pakistan. At this point one of us from the Indian team noticed that ‘their’ tube had a mark ‘Made in India’. Nothing gave us more joy than that and the Pakistani team was not only defeated but was left embarrassed for the rest of the holidays. (Material wealth and consumer goods was one area where Pakistan, with its imported goods from the US, was far more ‘developed’ than India and it gave us great pleasure to puncture that aspiration.)
Ironically, the antakshari competition was always won by the Pakistani team, because they were more in tune with the old and latest film songs than us Indians. But then Hindi cinema was never considered specifically ‘Indian’. That was one shared heritage of which all of us were proud of. All year round, the Indian team would religiously collect old issues of Stardust and Filmfare for the Pakistani cousins. The other such shared heritage were the mangoes of Barabanki. The Pakistani cousins would proudly boast to us how they successfully convinced their friends back home in Pakistan that the best mangoes on earth came from Barabanki...
Read more: http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/632/632_jamal_kidwai.htm
