Combating state narratives about partition and 1971 through oral histories with Anam Zakaria
The Partition of the subcontinent resulted in one of the bloodiest partitions in history and caused the rapid displacement of millions of people overnight. In this episode, Anam shares her personal journey of learning more about 1947 and 1971, the importance of collecting oral histories to combat state narratives and what she hopes her books can achieve.
What led you to start researching and learning more about Partition and why did you decide to use oral histories to add to your work?
I grew up in Punjab, Pakistan. Punjab was one of the two provinces that was partitioned in 1947, and it was very much part of the oral and popular mainstream discourse around me. I grew up hearing stories from my grandmother, who was in her early 20s at the time of Partition and used to work at a refugee camp for people who were displaced because of Partition. I heard about the bloodshed and about the blood-strewn trains that would come in.
Partition was also part of the education curriculum and evoked again and again outside of school, through the media and politics. My research into Partition began coincidentally, my first job after I graduated from university was with a local nonprofit called Citizens Archive of Pakistan iCitizens Archive of Pakistan. I was in charge of the oral history programme in Lahore.
As part of my day-to-day work, I had to go out and find first and second-generation Pakistanis to record their stories. It was as I was sitting with these people, 60 years after Partition and hearing their memories of Partition, of what life was like prior to Partition, of what Partition did to them, the way in which it uprooted their lives, the way in which that nostalgia was ever present six decades later that it evoked something in me.
I started to realise there as a lot more to Partition than I knew. There was more that the statistics we heard about, more than the state narratives and the dry facts and figures we read about in school textbooks. Also, depending what side of the border you are accessing these stories, you will come across very different narratives. I realised that some of the stories I heard growing up were absolutely true but, there are also other narratives that tell us about the experiences of how people across the border, across different geographic, social, and class lines experienced 1947.
I realised it was very important for me to access those stories if I wanted a better understanding of my own past and the way in which it shapes my present. This began my quest.
I worked for the Citizens’ Archive for a few years, and then I completed my tenure and continued doing this research because through these oral narratives, I was coming across history that I had never heard about or had access to. They went beyond the history textbooks. These were stories of divided families and their stories of trauma. The stories were of people who said it was their dying wish to be able to visit their homes once more.
I’ve been looking at Partition through an intergenerational lens because I do not believe that historical events, conflicts or violence are static or that we can leave them behind. I believe they remain an ongoing process and journey that continue to have ongoing implications and impacts. I work across generations with school children as well to understand how they look at the past, how it informs their identity, how they look at those who quote on quote are constructed as the enemy, and how that informs their politics as well.
This has been an ongoing journey for me as well. Partition took me to Kashmir, and that later took me to Bangladesh. I have recorded these oral histories across all the South Asian countries that I have had the opportunity to visit, in the hopes that I can bring them forward for the new generation, so they have access to a less myopic, distorted, and prejudiced past.
You mentioned earlier that your grandmother became a refugee because of Partition. In Pakistan we heard these stories because they are part of the curriculum and national discourse but what ends up happening is people are put into monolithic categories and we will only get to hear from one side. We will here about Muslim refugees and the violence perpetrated against the Muslim community. On the other side of the border, they focus on the Hindus and the Sikhs with the Muslims as the perpetrators.
In the last couple of decades, especially the 2010s onwards, there has been a revival of interest in Partition. You seen a lot of younger generations interested in learning more about the history with India, in Pakistan and even in Bangladesh. The stories we hear come from Punjab and there is a reason for that. Punjab saw immense violence, an overnight kind of violence and an overnight exodus. People had to flee and left their homes locked behind them. That trauma continues to affect us today.
When people look at Partition, including when I began my work, I looked at stories of Punjab. I also come from Punjab, so it became a personal story for me. As we know, this only scratches the surface. What we realise as oral historians, as archivists, as scholars, that there is so much more to this story. If you were in Bengal, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or other parts of what was then India, you experience Partition differently. It was also different based on your social class and based on your politics. Some people chose to move across borders, some were part of the Pakistan movement. Others had no choice but to flee to save their lives. There were also different experiences across genders.
I think we still have not began the process of unearthing all of these different versions of how Partition was experienced. There is so much more work left to do and there is an urgency now because we are losing that generation. As we lose the generation that experienced Partition, we also lose that nuanced history and their firsthand experiences.
For our audience, who might not know about Partition, how would you describe what it was and the events that led up to it?
I can answer this question in many ways. First is the macro history level and the history of colonisation. When we talk about Partition, we often forget to talk about the British colonisation of India and how religious identities became crystallised and how these communities were pitted against each other. This eventually culminated in the bloodshed we saw at Partition.
There is a long struggle prior to Partition of the Muslim community and their desire to stay within a united India but under a different framework which was not accepted. When we look at Partition today, we only see it as a demand of the Muslims, but if you go deeper a lot of scholars have studied Partition and the role Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha played and the different interests which intersected at the time for Partition to become a reality.
I often quote a woman I interviewed in Lahore who said, “I thought Partition meant that I would be able to come to Pakistan in winters and eat oranges in Sargodha and go to India in summers and have mangoes in Ambala.”
If someone asks me what Partition was or what it meant, to me the most powerful way of understanding it is through people’s stories. It means waking up when you are 5 or 12 or 40 or 80 and being told you have to leave home right now. That the place you have always considered home is no longer your home and you can never go back. Imagine what that means, it means not only leaving the neighbourhood you lived in, the only home you may have known but also leaving behind religious heritage like the huge losses that were incurred by the Sikh community for example. A lot of their religious heritage is in the part of Punjab that is now part of Pakistan.
Partition also meant rebuilding your life from scratch, often without many of your family members, neighbours, friends, and communities. It meant not being able to attend funeral prayers and weddings because families were split apart. It meant speaking to an Indian sister whose sibling is in Pakistan and the difficulties they have had to face over the years just to meet each other. After Partition, the borders became very hostile. Despite being porous initially, the 1965 war over Kashmir made the borders more rigid and it became difficult to cross over.
Partition also meant living in the midst of this larger political conflict that you have stakes in, but you were not asked if you wanted to participate or not. It was a process where you were never part of the decision-making process, and you never fully realised the impact it was going to have on you. I often quote a woman I interviewed in Lahore who said, “I thought Partition meant that I would be able to come to Pakistan in winters and eat oranges in Sargodha and go to India in summers and have mangoes in Ambala.”
I also interviewed a gentleman who was a teenager at the time of Partition and his family supported the Congress, but he supported the Muslim League and therefore the Pakistan movement. He decided to leave on his own terms because he had this political and religious fervour, but what he did not realise at the time was that he was not going to be able to attend his parent’s funerals or some of the most important events in his family’s life because they were all in India.
Partition means an immense sense of uprootedness and loss and an aching desire to cross the border. It means bloodshed and memories of that arduous journey that many people took. I have interviewed people who walked for over a month to get to what they were told was supposed to be their new home, but it was completely unfamiliar territory. I have done interviews in border villages where people can still see their homes because they are just a few kilometres away, but they can never cross again. Partition means all these things and that is what Partition did to people.
Initially, depending on the social class you were in, a lot of people ended up in refugee camps with nothing. They had to rebuild their entire lives and those losses remained with them. I remember interviewing someone several decades after Partition and she almost fainted after the interview because it was so difficult for her to recall those memories. Partition remains a part of people’s lives and stories. That is what Partition was.
I will also say Partition was, this violence between Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities because it manifested that way. The colonial history of India has to be looked at, the pre-Partition past has to be considered to see how it manifested. Amidst these stories of violence, there were also so many stories of people risk their lives to save others, to those who now belong to the so-called enemy community. There are stories of Hindus and Sikhs who risked their lives to save Muslims and stories of Muslims who risked their lives to save Hindus and Sikhs. That is also Partition, the stories of how humanity prevails sometimes amidst the most horrific, violent moments too.
Are there ongoing repercussions of Partition?
One of the serious repercussions of Partition was religious identities became crystallised at Partition and were further reinforced and exploited after 1947 by nation states to instil a kind of patriotism in citizens which was based on hatred and hostility of the other.
When we look at Partition, we think of 1947. As I mentioned earlier, Punjab saw a lot of violence and a mass exodus of people as they moved across the new borders. It unfolded overnight. In other places, it was much protracted and fractured. In Bengal for instance, migration happened in a more fractured way and continued many years after Partition. There are other places where people woke up and did not know whether it was still India or if it had now become Pakistan. The lines continued to change, in some instances stories from border villages mentioned that after the 1965 war, even the 1971 war, certain villages were taken by the Indian Army while other villages were taken over by the Pakistani Army. These geographic realities continue to shift. Not everything was cemented in 1947 but continue to unfold.
One of serious repercussions of Partition was religious identities became crystallised at Partition and were further reinforced and exploited after 1947 by nation states to instil a kind of patriotism in citizens which was based on hatred and hostility of the other. After Partition, your religious identity became synonymous with your national identity. This idea that Pakistan is now for Muslims and a particular kind of Muslim and India is for Hindu and a particular kind of Hindu was reinforced.
When this happens, you need to sit down and wonder that if you belong to a privileged group and the majority religious community what is happening to religious minorities? What happens to Pakistani Hindus? What happens to Indian Muslims? You do not have to look too far for the answers, our news reports are full of stories of the violence minority communities are subjected to. The constant sense of the loyalty tests these communities have to undergo and having to continue to live on the margins in many cases. In this sense, the repercussions of Partition are very much ongoing. This is felt most gravely by the communities on the margins, by religious minorities.
The repercussions of Partition are also being felt in Kashmir. My first book took me to Kashmir, to the line of control to look at the stories and experiences of Kashmiris from their perspectives. India and Pakistan have a lot to say about Kashmir, but it is rare to hear the voices of Kashmiris and the experiences they have on an everyday basis. So, there are regions like that which continue to face ongoing violence, antagonism and a masculine sense of nationalism that erodes people’s rights every single day.
There are also many more stories from families who were divided because of Partition. The two sisters I mentioned earlier, one of them has passed away. One became Indian and one remained Pakistani and due to visa issues they were not able to see each other often. This is the everyday lived reality of these divided families and the way Partition continues for them everyday.
There are many different levels where the repercussions of Partition continue to be felt both politically and personally. It is still ongoing. There have also been subsequent events, if you can call them that, like the 1971 war. That war further cemented this sense of religious identity and became synonymous with a particular type of nationalism which had very serious impacts and implications for religious minorities. When I interviewed some people from Thirupakur and Sindh where there is still a large Hindu community, they mentioned that during 1947, they never really faced any violence or backlash, but they did after the 1971 war.
This is why, when I look at Partition, I do not look at it as a static event but something that is ongoing and continues to unfold. Post-Partition events and wars have left different imprints both on the memory of Partition and on the experience of Partition survivors and subsequent generations as well.
How is nationalism reinforced post-Partition?
In 2016, Gallup Pakistan did a survey and I do not remember the exact number but over 70% or something of Pakistanis had never met an Indian. The number is likely to be alarmingly high on the other side too. So, in absence of meeting each other, in absence of being able to speak to each other, what are we left with? That is where these TV shows, movies, popular discourse and TV anchors etc have a real impact of children’s perceptions of each other.
Dialogue and storytelling have the power of humanising each other. You can see each other beyond this figment of your imagination where the other is a monster.
I have seen this first hand because apart from the oral history work that I do, I also work with school children. When I was working with the Citizens Archive, I was also running the Exchange for Change programme which connected school children in India and Pakistan. After I left Citizens Archive, I continued to do these virtual exchanges between students on a smaller scale. Whenever I would enter classrooms in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, what becomes evident as we move further away from Partition, is that our mindsets are becoming more rigid and hostile.
Many students and children much younger than me, I would say the fourth or fifth generation after Partition have received a particularly packaged view of the past. That entails a very selectively violent history. Depending again what side of the border you are on, you will hear about different types of violence, violence against a particular community perpetuated by the other community which is perceived as an enemy state.
Now you have these young children, almost refusing in many cases to even talk to each other. At the same time this is why I think technology, podcasts, social media, and dialogue can have an enormous impact because I have seen what happens when these students do talk to each other. I have seen what happens when dialogue has been initiated between them. After 20 or 30 minutes of conversation, they ask me when we are going to do it again because they are just like us.
Dialogue and storytelling have the power of humanising each other. You can see each other beyond this figment of your imagination where the other is a monster. You also see they are just ordinary children, ordinary people just like you. The sad part is that, you know, these initiatives as fantastic as they are, unfortunately have a relatively small outreach compared to state projects and textbooks and what is taught through the media. The impact is limited, but the impact is also transformational. It is powerful and it trickles down to other people. That is really where my hope lies.
Your work started with Partition, what led you to want to learn more about 1971 and what happened in Bangladesh?
There is a lot of silence around 1971 in Pakistan. We do not hear much about it and we do not like to talk about it. For those who are less familiar with this history, 1971 is when Bangladesh was born out of a very bloody war with Pakistan. After Partition, Pakistan was made up of West and East Pakistan. East Pakistan was present-day Bangladesh. These two parts were together for 24 years in which the Bengali people and other ethnic minorities were subjected to their human, linguistic, political, cultural and social rights being trampled on. Eventually, violence was unleashed.
Growing up in Punjab, I did not know much about 1971 at all and when you compare it to the information about the 1947 Partition there is very little in our mainstream discourse. There is silence in our textbooks. We talk about it briefly, but it is brushed away and just limited to a few paragraphs. So, I grew up without much knowledge or curiosity about 1971.
My work on Partition led me to 1971 for a few reasons. One was when I was working with the Citizens Archive, while I conducted oral history interviews I began to hear anecdotes, pauses, silences and experiences that indicated 1971 was more than I knew about. For instance, someone would say I was posted in East Pakistan, and we were incredibly discriminatory towards Bengali people. We had to refer to them with derogatory names and we had stereotypes about them. This went back to colonial history. The British had this theory, the martial race theory, which believes certain races are seen as superior and others as weaker and more inferior. Bengali’s were typecast as inferior, weak, feeble, and lazy so this racist ideology was used against them.
After Pakistan’s birth, this ideology continued to be deployed against Bengali people. In many of the interviews I have conducted in Bangladesh, Bengali people feel that their colonial legacy continued post-Partition. They were never really decolonised until 1971 and even today, they continue to have their own challenges. When I started to hear anecdotes and narratives like this, I knew there was more. When I was taught about 1971, I was taught that it was an Indian conspiracy because India could never really come to terms with Pakistan’s birth and wanted to take revenge so it broke Pakistan. Even the way we refer to 1971, the language we use is of loss, of dismemberment, the loss of East Pakistan and separation.
The other reason I was became curious about 1971 was because as I began working on the partition in India and Pakistan and quickly realised there was no one narrative of Partition. As I mentioned earlier, depending on what side of the border you are on, you come across a different history. State histories have always been institutionalised in selective ways. In Pakistan, Partition is linked to nation making, independence and triumph. There is a sense of victory. Even the bloodshed and violence that came with Partition is often described as a sacrifice, as martyrdom for nation making. In India though, there was a sense of loss and a breakup of the motherland which was blamed on the treacherous Muslims who broke India. I would encourage people to read Aisha Jalal’s work if you are interested in the multiple factors which came together to facilitate Partition. As I looked at these two different experiences of Partition, I began to think more about 1971. In 1971, Pakistan described it as a loss, but for Bangladesh it was the War of Liberation.
My book 1971: A people’s history from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, began as this personal journey of learning and unlearning the history that Pakistan has chosen to forget. I also wanted to know how that same history is remembered in Bangladesh, both at the state and citizen level and to what extent have states been effective at silencing that history. For instance, in Pakistan, I did not know until I did this research, but there was a small, but important community of activists, intellectuals, journalists, who protested against military action in East Pakistan and the violence against Bengalis in 1971. I recorded their interviews. I went to Bangladesh, and I recorded so many stories that gave me access to a history that is mine, but I never knew anything about. I entered schools and I looked at how children are taught about this history and how that informs the perception of Bangladesh, of Pakistan, and how this history is remembered in India as well, which did absolutely play a very pivotal role in the birth of Bangladesh. As you know, in Pakistan, that Indian role overshadows everything else.
I wanted to sift through those larger narratives and states narratives to look at that more nuanced history. This is what led me to look into 1971. It has been one of the most difficult journeys that I have ever undertaken but also one of the most important journeys for me as a Pakistani because I do believe that we do not talk about it enough. Not only in Pakistan but in the entire region. We do not realise how defining it has been to our nationalism, to our educational curriculum, which was revised after the war, to Pakistan’s nuclear policy, to what is happening in Kashmir today, and to our regional policies as well.
As the grandchild of people who were refugees because of Partition, what does the term refugee mean to you and what do you think it meant to your grandparents?
I will preface my answer by saying that I have privilege, and I do not have lived experience of being a refugee. I do not have lived experience of displacement. Even within my family, there was a lot of privilege. My grandparents from my maternal side were in Lahore at Partition and my grandmother volunteered at a refugee camp. She nursed many people in refugee camps who were coming in terrible condition from across the border. She used to tell me the stories of how people arrived, of their physical conditions, of their emotional wounds. Now that she has passed away and people ask me what Partition reminds me of, it’s her stories that I come back to. It leaves a bloody taste in my mouth even today.
On my paternal side, they had to leave Batala for Lahore and move into an evacuated property. These are properties that communities took over. These are properties that were left vacant by those who had fled for the other side. The refugees coming from the other side took refuge in these properties and made it their new homes. They also had a lot of privilege that others did not, so I cannot speak about it from that kind of lived experience but from the stories I have recorded from Kashmir, from people who continue to live in camps after 30 years, I can say there is an immense sense of uprootendess, fear and longing. Despite building new homes, the memories live with you.
When you have to flee, you leave many immediate family members, friends and relatives behind and sometimes you can never see them again. In Kashmir for instance, I recorded stories of people whose families are divided by the Neelum River, which acts as the line of control, the de facto border in Kashmir. During the winter months, when the river would shrink, people would try to speak to each other across the river. There are stories of people diving into the river because they were so desperate to just hold their mother or their father or their siblings once more. There are others who never got the chance to see their loved ones again. It is all of these things. There is an immense sense of fear and loss.
Know the power of storytelling. Turn to your own families and ask them for their stories with urgency because they will not be around forever. I have already lost so many people whose stories I wish I had recorded.
What would you like people to learn from your work and how can our listeners support your work?
I think that what I have learnt the most through these oral narratives is that you may not know as much as you think you do. That has been my personal experience. You should go into the experience was the desire to unlearn. You should know that what you learn through textbooks even if they are not distorted will be limited and there will be a certain social class, gender or privileged community bias. There are many stories out there and many experiences which never make it to the pages of our history books.
Know the power of storytelling. Turn to your own families and ask them for their stories with urgency because they will not be around forever. I have already lost so many people whose stories I wish I had recorded. I wish I had the opportunity to record and hear my grandfather’s experiences of Partition, but I began this work long after he passed away. I wish this was something someone had told me earlier. Through listening to people’s stories, you will gain a much more nuanced understanding of history that you will never get from conventional sources.
That is how you can support my work, because my work is about documenting as many stories as possible. If you are able, learn from the people around you and carry on the work. Also, if you can, please read my books. I hope the stories resonate with you. These are stories from people who trusted me with their life stories, they really wanted these stories to reach other people. I would love for you to read those stories as well.
If you have any school projects in mind, especially projects with the youth, get in touch. My website is anamzakriya.com. I am always looking for opportunities to collect oral histories, connect younger generations, create tolerance and peace. So, if you are doing interesting work, get in touch. I would love to hear more about it and see if I can meaningfully contribute.
Guest: Anam Zakaria
Anam Zakaria is an award-winning author, freelance journalist and the co-founder of Qissa, a storytelling platform for immigrants. She writes frequently on issues of violence, memory, narrative making and the construction of the ‘other’. Her work has appeared in Dawn, Al Jazeera, The New York Times and CBC among other media outlets and has been translated into several languages. Her latest book is 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.
You can follow Anam and her work on: X, Instagram and LinkedIn.
If you are interested in learning more about Partition, please read through the links below:
Nani (Grandmother)