Many like Zakariya were forced to flee their homes, desperately clinging onto any valuables they could and escape towards an unknown future. There was chaos, a lack of control by the authorities, and general fear – a fear of an uncertain future, a fear that threatened the safety of their lives and their families and daughters. While the Boundary Commission had decided on the line that created India and Pakistan, the people on the ground were uncertain of the complete ramifications that the drawing of the line would have on their lives. The violence unleashed the mass forced migrations of millions, overnight turning them homeless and into state refugees. They had not chosen this path, the politicians had. Yet they were paying the price, with their lives shattered and livelihoods lost. The overriding narrative of partition is the accompanying violence; it is difficult to discuss this period without mentioning the senseless, and indeed, the intended violence that engulfed the region. It did not matter whether or not you were directly affected by the violence because most people will have experienced the repercussions of it, like Zakariya who fled before the violence claimed the lives of the people he grew up with. They witnessed the mass movement of people, which saw the demographic transformation of their neighbourhoods. They saw neighbours fleeing, either from the violence or from the ensuing violence that was spreading and engulfing everyone. It is difficult to fully understand how this region succumbed to the frenzy of violence in August 1947.

The historic region of the Punjab dominates the north-western portion of the contemporary subcontinent. It is divided into the province of Punjab in Pakistan and the states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh in India. The region itself has many natural boundaries, with the Himalayas in the north, the Rajputana Desert in the south of the Indian Punjab (hereafter East Punjab), and the Cholistan Desert in the south-east of Pakistan Punjab (hereafter West Punjab) leading to the international boundary with India. The region takes its name from the five rivers that join to form the mighty Indus, which flows from the Kashmir region right through the heart of Punjab and into the Arabian Sea. It is therefore often referred to as ‘the land of five rivers’ – Punjab is derived from the Persian words of Punj (five) and aab (water). The melting snow from the bordering mountain range and heavy summer rainfall from the monsoon provide the water for the five great rivers.

These five great rivers have dominated the geography, inspired literature, fed the people of this fertile land and, within their flows, carried the tales of love and poetry that feed the emotional and aesthetic needs of the people. Like the land, the rivers were also divided and since partition, only the Sutlej and the Beas flow through East Punjab, while West Punjab has the five rivers flowing through the province, namely the Jhelum, the Chenab, the Ravi and the Sutlej, all tributaries of the Indus. Historically the rivers of Punjab have played an important part in the development of the region under colonial rule and form the backbone of the region.

As a region, Punjab has been home to the first known Indian civilisation in Harappa and many other empires. Punjab formed the main invasion route to the Indus plains. Consequently, the people of Punjab are mainly descendants of Aryan tribes that invaded India from the north-west. This led to an assimilation of different tribes and many of the great Punjabi castes such as the Jats and Rajputs are a product of the movements and amalgamation of Iranians, Turks, Afghans, Arabs and the indigenous population.

It is 5 December 2013 and I have just attended a lecture by Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, at Foreman Christian College, Lahore. He was giving a talk on Khan Ghaffar Badshah Khan, the great leader from the Frontier. At the same time, Gandhi was also launching his book Punjab: A History from Aurangzeb to Mountbatten. All these fragmented pieces are brought together later in the day while I am attending a dinner for Rajmohan Gandhi and I sat there chatting with Najum Latif, talking about Indian nationalism, the twonation theory and Punjabi nationalism. We were meeting after many years; the first meeting was at Government College Lahore while I was doing my PhD on the partition of India. We are conversing in Punjabi and through his stories he takes me back to the days of his childhood in pre-partitioned Punjab, more specifically in Jullundur, where his ancestral roots are. He laments about the state of Punjab and why it should never have been partitioned; he is one of the few survivors of that generation that witnessed this great calamity himself as a child. Uprooted, unsettled, traumatised and ultimately disappointed in outcomes. No politician asked people like him or that generation whether they wanted a divided land. Instead, they were sold dreams, aspirations and division.

Ten years after completing my PhD thesis, I revisit my own work that was never published in its entirety. After visiting Lahore at the end of 2013, I felt that it is even more relevant today. There is a need for many to understand why this happened, though the answers may never be truly known. Many friends and colleagues were still discussing and debating the events of 1947. I also noticed that there seems to be a great deal of interest in partition and what happened in Punjab among many people.

After seventy years of independence, the partition of India and its wider ramifications continue to resonate and reverberate. This is particularly palpable in the region of Punjab, which bore the brunt of the associated partition violence, resulting in millions of people being forced to migrate, forever severed from their ancestral lands. The generation that witnessed this grand project in history, which informs and defines the region, is fading away in numbers, but the small numbers that survive still talk about the events as if it were a recent memory. Najum Latif migrated from Jullundur as a child in 1947. When I met him in 2013 he emotionally recited this poem by Ustad Daman to me in Punjabi, the language it was originally composed in. While reciting it, he had been transported back in time to the pre-partitioned Punjab. The sadness, the nostalgia and the loss were palpable:

The painful loss and the lack of closure continue to haunt many individuals like Latif. For poets like Daman, who lived unassumingly by Badshahi Masjid in Lahore, there was ample material in post-colonial Pakistan to lament about. The remnants of this bygone era are everywhere, from the often-crumbling buildings to the often-melancholic memories, and serve to remind us of a different age and time: the food, the language, the dress, the vibrant and hearty Punjabi and the plains of the Punjab that connected people are now divided by a hostile boundary. There is a constant reminder of these divided histories while travelling between the two Punjabs; one only needs to casually observe the place names of shops which are frequently located in the ‘other’ Punjab.

There are very few studies which examine the impact of partition on the Punjab's urban and industrial development. Apart from a few key works such as Ian Talbot's work on Lahore and Amritsar, and Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya's work on urban capital centres in South Asia, a crossborder dimension is almost totally absent. But we can learn a great deal from these comparative approaches. Ludhiana and Lyallpur's growth post-1947 is a story of two towns, separated by an international border but sharing many common features. They provide the background and environment in which refugees emerged as new contributors and citizens to cities’ growth. Refugees, contrary to state efforts, migrated to localities that presented them with the most opportunities or where they could utilise their kinship networks. The large volumes of refugees flooding into these two localities fundamentally changed the cities and it is this process that needs to be examined. How did the state, industry and displaced persons respond to this challenge?

These cities, as we have noted earlier, form important case studies because of their economic transformation since 1947. Their growth in recent decades has owed much to the prosperity of the Punjab arising from the Green Revolution, the influx of labour from other parts of the region and the flow of overseas remittances. The foundation of this growth, however, was based on the formative years following partition. This saw a huge influx of refugee labour and capital and also, especially in the case of Lyallpur, witnessed considerable government assistance. Ludhiana was also able to benefit from the decline of its industrial rival Amritsar because of its close proximity to the new international border with Pakistan. So how did these two minor towns, of colonial Punjab, emerge to become the industrial and financial capitals of a divided Punjab?

As part of the Fact-Finding Organisation, G. D. Khosla interviewed 1,500 women. Writing shortly after the incidents, he provides many accounts of women who were subjected to rape, abduction, mutilation and had their bodies completely violated both mentally and physically. Some had to endure public humiliation, others in the presence of their own family members. Khosla states, ‘One of the kidnapped girls, relating her experience, said that she had been raped in a most inhuman manner and passed on from man to man till [sic] she completely lost all sense of feeling’. Khosla's objective was to document the violations by Muslims against Hindus and Sikhs, but these crimes did not have a religion. They were crimes against humanity, but society at the same time allowed these to happen as they were happening openly. Indeed, Ayesha Kidwai argues that rather than the perpetrators being rustic simple folk, this was a ‘systematic elite patriarchal consensus’. People with the power and means to carry out these crimes and then cover their tracks led to the systematic exploitation of innocent lives. Ganda Singh in his journal account of the partition days also notes that Shaukat Hyat Khan, who was the revenue minister in West Punjab, suspended the official of Lyallpur district due to ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘instances of molestation of young girls by volunteers’. Our national histories barely touch upon these national crimes which remain largely hidden and obscured behind the patriotic and nationalistic agenda. Collective, individual and community memories have little space in this, as it has the potential to subvert the meta-narratives weaved around a narrow nationalistic agenda.

Debating the Crimes

Gandhi's response to these crimes was - ‘We must cleanse our hearts. But even if our hearts have not been cleansed, we can still do what is clearly our duty. Self-purification means that we purge our hearts’. Indeed, following on from the violence that was unleashed after independence, there were attempts by the political leadership to quash and condemn the actions of the perpetrators. Prominent Sikh leaders such as Master Tara Singh (Akali Dal leader) and Udham Singh Nagoke (member of Punjab Legislative Assembly) issued a joint statement, appealing to both Hindus and the Sikhs to stop all retaliatory violence.

Defining the post-1947 relationship between India and Pakistan, and given that seventy years have lapsed, the partition of British India in August 1947 remains a watershed in the subcontinent's history. Underlying this is the juxtaposition of Jawaharlal Nehru's famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech on the eve of independence, and the millions of people in Punjab who woke up not knowing which country they belonged to. The jubilation of independence was simultaneously marked by carnage, and so the memory of decolonisation/ independence/partition varies greatly, depending on which side of the border you were, where you were within that, and who you were as an individual. How have historians captured these experiences and voices?

The actual event or process was marked by one of the greatest migrations in the twentieth century, resulting in approximately 14.5 million people being forced to cross the newly created borders of India and Pakistan. The majority of these people came from Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province and Bahawalpur state on the Pakistani side and from East Punjab, the East Punjab princely states, Delhi and United Provinces on the Indian side. Migration in Bengal was on a much smaller scale in August 1947, although, unlike in Punjab, it was drawn out for many years. The communal violence, which prompted this mass movement, resulted in an estimated death of one million people. This figure continues to be a contentious issue and will be examined in greater detail in chapter four. The migrants experienced intense trauma arising from the loss of property and family members, and, as a result, of being forcibly exiled from their ancestral homes and lands. Sadly, even today, families bear the physical and psychological scars of this forced migration that was accompanied by reprehensible violence and crimes that, as a society, we have not been able to fathom.

Writing Partition History

The celebratory spirit of hard-fought freedom has largely defined much of the official histories produced in India, Pakistan and Britain,4 and at the same time they have played down the disruption, dislocation and ordeals inflicted on ordinary people effected by Partition. The colonial interpretation is generally viewed through the successful transfer of power rather than the success of the freedom movement.

The partition-related violence adds to what is undoubtedly one of the most violent centuries, characterised by conflict, genocide and persecution at a truly global level. The birth of India and Pakistan was therefore completely overshadowed with communal violence, particularly in Punjab. Since independence, India has continued to experience numerous violent episodes of communal violence and so it seems remarkable to find places like Malerkotla that defy this prevailing perception. This is even more remarkable given that in 1947, when the province of Punjab was being carved up to create the new states of India and Pakistan, Malerkotla remained a safe haven for people while the rest of the surrounding districts were engulfed in some of the most horrific violence recorded. Among this picture of chaos, indiscriminate violence and brutality, there is another history of partition, that of the harmony and friendship shown by communities towards each other. This is often overlooked by the studies of partition, which tend to focus on the destruction and disruption caused by the partitioning of the Punjab province. Much more has been written about Malerkotla in recent years, as a model of tolerance, inter-communal relations, inter-religious harmony and so on. The town is a powerful reminder of what is possible if the prevailing political and social forces desire peace and harmony.

Malerkotla's experience in 1947 also sheds light on a number of wider issues and complexities behind the breakdown in law and order. Within Partition Studies little is written about the absence of violence in 1947, partly because it questions the received histories of the East Punjab Muslims’ sacrifices in the achievement of a Pakistan homeland, and within ‘Sikh’ East Punjab discourse it is an unfortunate reminder of a different and more tolerant plural history. By focusing on the violent nature of communalised histories, both nations can be justified in promoting and maintaining the current stance which continues to endorse division rather than reconciliation. Yet, if for a moment more accounts of cross-communal collaboration were recognised more widely, it would challenge the often jingoist state discourse.

As people left, abandoning their homes, land and their earthly possessions, they did so in the hope of either returning once the violence had settled down or in the hope of a new ‘promised land’. Making that momentous decision to abandon everything they had known previously and leave required courage but many people did so under pressure due to the ensuing violence and not because of choice. Recent research has begun to expose the human tragedy of this migration process and the differential migrant experiences. Moreover, the conflicts between the state and the individuals are clearly visible. Little is known about why urban migrants, who unlike agriculturalists were not directed by the state, settled where they did. Was this because of former business contacts or family connections in a locality? Did they follow the lead of relatives who had already completed their journeys in a kind of chain migration? Was it purely chance, arriving at the ‘wrong’ railway station that ended their migration? The journey to the ‘promised land’ was filled with uncertainty and these questions are poorly understood. But individual accounts of migration based on research in Ludhiana and Lyallpur help us in addressing some of the issues raised by these questions.

These two localities provide a comparative dimension to experiences of migration in both East and West Punjab. Both Ludhiana and Lyallpur experienced rapid growth in the post-partition period, which in part can be attributed to the refugee influx and will be examined in greater detail in the next chapter. Historically, there were patterns of migration between Ludhiana and Lyallpur even during the colonial era when the canal colonies were constructed. This pattern of colonial migration has in turn influenced the partition-related movements. When families were fleeing, the state was hardly in control and so people utilised their own pre-existing family and business connections in settling down. This is an area that is hardly explored in Partition Studies. In the vast landscape of Punjab, the story of these two cities is important in trying to understand the transformation of land, space and people from the colonial to the post-colonial. These cities and their people tell a story, which resonates not just within its metropolis boundaries but they speak of the wider transformation of two nation-states.