Why people killed each other 1947 partition?
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Answer:
“I still don’t know what happened,” remarks Ranjit Kaur toward the end of our interview.
“Why did we have to move?” she softly asks, staring at me, then through me, as her voice trailed off. Her gaze turned down toward her folded hands and she paused. She is genuinely perplexed, I can tell.
More than 70 years have passed and she hasn’t been able to reconcile Partition in her mind. Her family was attacked by a mob in their ancestral village in Narowal district, West Punjab, when they fled. She looked up at me again and her gaze hit me like a bolt. A lump began to swell in my throat but I fought it back. So many thoughts streamed through my mind: How unfair was this history? How could she live her full life in exile still wondering, seven decades later?
But this isn’t Kaur’s story alone. As she reminds me, “The only consolation was that millions of us were in this together.”
When asked about her attackers, she says, “I don’t know who the killers were. We had never seen them before. We didn’t recognize them. They weren’t our Muslim brothers and sisters in the village.”
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I’ve spoken to hundreds of individuals while the project I work on has preserved the life stories of more than 8,000 Partition witnesses since 2010. For us, a new picture of violence and what truly went wrong at the time of Partition is emerging. It is helping us put to rest many myths surrounding this history and misconstrued narratives that are often used to serve vested interests in the public sphere.
As newly kindled flames of communal violence today begin to flare across India and Pakistan, it is time we take another look at this history with access to a brand-new data set of oral histories and modern analytic tools. Much of the remembrance today about Partition is limited to artistic depictions, literature, and our emotional reactions. This was necessary and is wholly understandable as it helps us relate to what our ancestors have experienced. However, it is time now to intellectualize this history and look at it from an objective lens, learn to identify the triggers and spread this knowledge, lest we repeat the same mistakes.
What happened then and how is it increasingly more relevant today?
This month marks 73 years since India and Pakistan’s birth, and the subcontinent’s freedom from British imperial rule. In 1947 some 563 native kingdoms were merged with Britain’s South Asian territories, collectively known as “British India.” They were then reorganized into two new countries on the basis of religion: India and Pakistan. India took the name of the former British territories in the region and maintained much of British India’s original legal infrastructure.
The provinces of Punjab and Bengal were divided between India and Pakistan and the public polarized along religious lines. Mass communal violence broke out during the transition to democracy and the resulting power grab.
A common narrative many of us grew up hearing is that Hindus and Muslims began killing each other in a mad frenzy, leading to such a horrifying bloodbath that it is impossible to understand what truly took place. “Our people went mad,” I have heard often.
Yet, after gathering thousands of oral histories, we are finding today that most people did not participate in the violence and were largely innocent victims. In addition, a vast majority surprisingly do not harbor ill feelings toward the “other” religion. Importantly, in a significant finding, for the vast majority of the cases, like Kaur’s, victims did not recognize their attackers. And so, contrary to popular understanding, friends and neighbors didn’t kill each other indiscriminately. People didn’t turn on each other suddenly, in the name of religion, but rather offered protection to each other.