My Personal Motivation Behind Promoting “A Deep Dive into Histories of Our Families/Cities/Villages”

Worldwide experience tells us that people without a sense of their past cannot have a clear idea of their future. Disconnect with our own authentic history is a major reason why the current generation of Indians have lost the ability to express collective aspirations.

Whenever someone asks me “Where are you from?”, a simple but important question that is a key element in defining a person’s identity in India, I end up giving the following long-winded explanation which is an admission of my rootless status rather than a direct answer: “My father’s family came as refugees from Lahore, my maternal family was uprooted from Peshawar and later from Kashmir which was their second home. I was born in Delhi of post-Partition India.”

I come from a family of refugees who were driven out of their ancestral homeland from that region of Undivided India that came to be arbitrarily declared as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan following the bloody Partition of India in 1947. My maternal as well as my paternal families landed in Delhi as penniless refugees to whatever little was left of India after the traumatic break-up of 1947.

The tag of belonging to a family of refugees from Pakistan became a permanent source of hurt and anguish, because it signified the loss of my regional, linguistic and cultural identity. My ‘Indian identity” is, therefore, secondary to my identity as a person born to a family of refugees from Pakistan.

I have never been comfortable calling myself a Dilliwali, even though I was born in Delhi, because Dilliwalas, whose families have lived in Delhi for centuries, do not recognize me as one of them. Neither can I claim to be Lahori or Peshawari just because my father’s ancestral home was in Lahore and mother’s family was based in Peshawar and Rawalpindi. Nor can I call myself a Kashmiri even though my maternal grandparents were state subjects of J&K where they had a second home.

One can easily become a New Yorker by simply being born in that city or living there for some years, but a Punjabi or Gujarati cannot become an Andhraite or Maharashtrian by living in Andhra Pradesh or Maharashtra for any number of years. This is because in India rootedness in one’s regional, linguistic and cultural identity is no less important than one’s kula, jati, occupational (varna) or religious identity.

Apart from the loss of ancestral homes and material assets, due to the holocaust of 1947, people also meant losing life-long friendships, centuries-old neighborhood or village bonds, cultural-roots, age-old traditions, historical memories, and much else that is irreplaceable. For instance, my father was able to connect only with two or three of his childhood friends who studied in the same high school with him because their families also sought refuge in Delhi. He had no idea where all other fellow Hindus from his village had vanished. Nor was he able to connect with his other school friends.

Likewise, my mother also maintained lifelong closeness with just three of her friends from Peshawar who studied with her in the Presentation Convent School. Their families had also settled down in Delhi after 1947. My maternal family lost track of all their neighbors and close friends because they had no idea how many survived and where the survivors settled down. However, they did manage to connect with most of their relatives who managed to get out of “Pakistan” alive.

I was born on April 6, 1951, three and a half years after the Partition. Despite the hardships and trauma of the Partition losses, the atmosphere at our home was far from mournful. During my growing up years, even though one often heard nostalgic accounts of life in pre-Partition Lahore and Peshawar from my father, mother, aunts, uncles and my Nani, (sadly, my paternal Dada-Dadi did not live long after the Partition), they were not designed to fill our hearts with hatred for those who had forced my maternal and paternal families to flee from their ancestral land as destitutes. Till the end of their lives both my parents yearned to go back and at least see what had become of what was once their homeland, especially their homes and neighborhood.

The sense of loss and trauma due to being driven out of our ancestral land never left me or my parents because:

• The big leaders of those days, especially M.K.Gandhi and the Government of India led by Jawaharlal Nehru, treated the refugees from Pakistan with utter callousness. The Government of India and the “tallest leaders” of the Congress party did not even give the refugees the right to mourn the loss of their homes and ancestral lands. It was considered politically “provocative” to mourn the slaughter of dear ones or dwell on the trauma of being hounded out of Pakistan, lest the Muslims who chose to stay back in India feel aggravated.
• The Government of India did precious little to help refugees rebuild their lives in post-Partition India. My parents used to describe how when a group of Hindu refugees took shelter in abandoned mosques of Delhi during the months of heavy monsoon, M.K Gandhi forced them to vacate those mosques without caring about where they would go with their little children, pregnant wives and old parents during monsoon or the freezing winter months of Delhi. Mass protests were organized outside the Birla House he was staying in at that time. But Gandhi remained unmoved. This left the Hindu refugees dumbfounded. They realized that they would have to fend for themselves and gave up on all hope from the government. In any case, most Hindu and Sikh families were too proud to wallow in their misery and victimhood. They just took it upon themselves to rebuild their lives from scratch through sheer hard work and a Never-Say-Die attitude.
• Since many of our relatives who came as refugees got scattered in different parts of the country, with each having to struggle hard to grow their roots again, the extended family links inevitably weakened, so much so that I would not recognize some of my second or even first cousins if I per chance bumped into them on the street. The absence of a close-knit and culturally rooted vibrant community left a serious vacuum in my life.

My Father’s Escape from Lahore: My Dada’s family lived in a village on the outskirts of Lahore. To the end of his days, my father talked of his village with great nostalgia, especially his daily trips to bathe in the Ravi darya (river). He knew Persian and Urdu, apart from English. His second name, “Kishwar’ was his pen name since he was a budding shayar during his youth. He did shayari in Urdu and Persian but did not know how to write in Hindi because in those days, Hindi was not taught in schools or colleges of that region. He was very public-spirited and deeply involved with Hindu organizations—possibly Hindu Mahasabha, and was therefore, on the hit list of Islamists. Sadly, I never probed him about it.

Once the Partition riots started, my Dadi sent my father to check on the safety of my Bua who was married into a wealthy business family based in the historic town, Nankana Sahib. My father and Dadi both doted on my Bua. But by the time Papa reached Nankana Sahib, my Bua’s family had fled their home. He had no idea if they survived the mayhem. Nor did he know where they had gone. When he landed at the station close to his village, he was met by a Hindu policeman who told him to avoid going anywhere near his village since jihadis were looking for him. In any case, his parents and brother’s family had already fled. Not a single Hindu family was left in the village. Once again, he had no clue whether they were still alive and if they had escaped, what destination they chose because India’s leaders had neither prepared people for Partition nor for the transfer of Hindu population from Muslim majority regions that became Pakistan.

My father was traumatized by the fact that he was left behind, without anyone to guide him where to go. He walked all alone at night to Lahore Railway Station, witnessing signs of mayhem and bloodshed all along the route. Somehow, he escaped the killer mobs and managed to get into one of the trains packed with Hindu refugees. Fortunately for him, this train was not stopped by jihadis who were massacring train after train loads of fleeing Hindus. My father was virtually penniless when he landed in Delhi because whatever little money he had carried with him to reach Nankana Sahib and back was exhausted. He did not even have a change of clothes. It took weeks before he managed to locate his parents, the families of his brothers and sisters.

He was too proud to live on charity or government doles, so he took on whatever odd jobs came his way till he landed a decent job with a leading British insurance company.

Till the very end of his life, my father remained obsessed with the memory of his narrow escape from murderous mobs and the loss of his homeland. He lived to be 92, but in the last ten years of his life the only subject that gripped his mind was the experience of escaping killer mobs and his life in Lahore. That experience left scars that never healed but I avoided probing him for more details because those stories filled my heart with unmanageable grief and rage. Now I regret very much that I did not video record accounts of his life in Pakistan, his flight to India and what it took to starting afresh as a penniless refugee in Delhi.

And yet, he remained an incurable idealist in ways that often harmed his own interests. For instance, he refused to accept housing plots that were being allotted (for a payment) to Hindu refugees from Pakistan on the ground that as a proud citizen of Bharat, he did not want to carry the “refugee” tag in his own country. Papa remained firm in his resolve that he would rebuild his life through hard work. His idealism also led him to always stand up for the underdog, including in his office, even if it meant inviting the wrath of his corrupt bosses.

In the initial years he lived in rented accommodation but soon after my birth in 1951, the British Insurance Company he worked for gave him a luxurious accommodation because he was perceived as exceptionally energetic and sincere in his job. The first such accommodation was the first floor of a big haveli that belonged to the family of a Nawab of the Jung family who fled to Pakistan because he was very active in the Partition movement. That haveli named Hameed Manzil was situated next to Cinema, which was a premier theatre in those days on the main road of Darya Ganj.

The haveli had a large private compound and a playground not visible from the main road. The building had been taken over by the Govt of India appointed Custodian of Evacuee Properties which in turn leased it to the company my father worked for. Unlike Pakistan, which took over all Hindu properties in one stroke by enacting the Enemies Property Act, the Indian government led by Nehru and influenced by Gandhian pieties, unilaterally declared that it would return all those abandoned properties to Muslim families who decided to come back after having opted for Pakistan in 1947. This was being done at a time while Pakistan was carrying out a near total ethnic cleansing of Hindus. Pakistan had shut all doors and left no window for Hindus to go back to claim their ancestral properties. But Nehru’s government welcomed the pro-Partition Muslims with open arms.

During our years in Hameed Manzil, we lived in lonely splendor. We had no connect to the Muslim dominated neighborhood behind that haveli where some Hindu families had purchased the few houses abandoned by Muslims who left for Pakistan. A majority of Muslims of the walled city continued staying in their old mohallas since Gandhi and Nehru made special arrangements for their safety and pleaded with them not to leave India.

So successful were these pleadings that the Nawab who had left behind Hameed Manzil and other assets suddenly landed in Delhi sometime in 1954 – all set to reclaim his Hameed Manzil and several other properties which were under charge of the Custodian. One fine morning, he barged into Hameed Manzil accompanied by a contingent of policemen and started shouting at my mother to vacate the house. I was barely three or four years old at that time. But the memories of that day are deeply etched in my mind

Even though my father had gone to his office and she had no way of reaching him since we did not have a telephone in the house at that time, my mother stood her ground and warned the imperious but uncouth Nawab not to dare enter the premises we were living in. She told him in a firm voice that he should reclaim the property from the Government of India since my father had no dealing with the Nawab’s family, nor had he forcibly taken over his claimed property.

Nehru’s government had passed a law that Muslims returning from Pakistan would be welcomed with open arms and their properties taken over by the Custodian would be returned to them without much ado. With his high-powered political connections Nawab Jung (the father of Najeeb Jung, the former Lt Governor of Delhi) managed to get an order in his favor and my father had to vacate Hameed Manzil.

By then, most of the foreign insurance companies were nationalized and merged into the Life Insurance Corporation of India. The experience of being shunted out must have been traumatic for my parents but fortunately, the next house allotted to my father by his company was far better. It was a small bungalow in the midst of sprawling lawns at 7 Bhagwan Das Road in the heart of Lutyens Delhi, within walking distance of the Supreme Court of India.

I can’t remember how many years of my childhood were spent in that house. All I remember is that those were very happy years even though we did not know or have any of the neighbors living in the colonial bungalows of Bhagwan Das Road or the neighboring Tilak Marg. This was again a rootless existence.

My father was the youngest of three brothers and a sister. And yet, he had to support the families of his elder siblings, nephews and nieces because those families took much longer re-establishing themselves. Saddest of all was my Bua’s plight. Her husband was the spoilt son of a wealthy merchant. Therefore, he was not used to earning his living. For years, my Bua’s family survived by selling some silver utensils and gold that they were able to bring with them plus some help from my father.

Because my father was doing exceptionally well at his job (that is why he was given such luxurious accommodation at such a young age), two of his corrupt and incompetent bosses – Saligram Dewan, and K.R. Puri felt threatened by him since he did not fall in line with their misdoings, especially when it came to injustice done to junior staff. In addition, Dewan Saligram was very unhappy that the company had allotted the Bhagwan Das Road Bungalow (which today houses a whole complex of modern bungalows for IAS officers) to my father. He wanted that house for himself. Unlike the Nawab of Hameed Manzil, he could not get my father evicted through “legal” means. Therefore, he conspired with K.R. Puri to get my father transferred to a small town named Hoshiarpur in Punjab.

This was a big jolt and caused a permanent setback to my father’s promising career prospects. They did not know a soul in that part of Punjab because the culture and social composition of East Punjab which became part of India was very different from that of West Punjab from where my parents had been pushed out during 1947. And yet my father did not let the “punishment posting” and being cut off from his Partition traumatized family keep him from working hard with devotion in the most selfless way.

The Plight of My Nana’s Family: My mother’s family also narrowly escaped being massacred. Though my Nana and Nani were based in Peshawar, they had a second home in Srinagar where they spent their summer months. My Nana and his brothers had studied in Prince of Wales College in Jammu and were state subjects of J&K. In fact, my Nana had planned to settle down in Srinagar, where his two other brothers and a Chacha who was a Tehsildar in Kashmir, already lived. That is why my Nana had purchased orchards and built a house in Srinagar several years before the Partition.

My mother’s family could not go back to Peshawar once the Partition riots broke out after the announcement of Direct Action Day by the Muslim League. But Srinagar was not safe either. When Maharaja Hari Singh opted in favor of joining India, by way of revenge Pakistan’s ruling junta created an uprising in Kashmir, accompanied by a full-fledged invasion. Starting October 22, Pakistan sent its regular army soldiers disguised as armed Kabailis (hill tribals) and launched an offensive to annex all of Kashmir, with Srinagar as their special target. They not only looted and burnt down Hindu villages and neighborhoods but abducted, raped and brutalized countless Hindu women and girls while slaughtering Hindu men who refused to convert. Sadly, this history has remained undocumented. Tragically, even a well-educated community like Kashmiri Pandits failed to document what they and Hindus of POK had to undergo.

The Pakistani army had come close to capturing Srinagar airport to cut off Srinagar and the Valley from India. Patel was eager to deploy the Indian army and drive them back right at the start of the invasion and recover all the occupied territories that became POK. But Nehru did not mind their occupation of Gilgit, Baltistan, Muzaffrabad, Mirpur, Kotli, Rawalakot, Sudhnoti, Maveli, Neelam etc., because his dear friend Sheikh Abdullah did not want a Punjabi-dominated POK with a large Hindu population to be part of J&K since he could not become the unquestioned Kashmiri leader of a mixed population. Nehru agreed to send the Indian army only when Srinagar was about to fall.

My Nana’s family with six young daughters, including my mother, plus two young sons were rescued by the Indian army and airlifted from Srinagar at the nick of time. A couple of hours delay and they may not have survived. My Nana had to stay behind because the air force gave priority to women, girls and children.

He reached Delhi several days later. Recently, I learnt from my two surviving Masis that after they landed in Delhi, the relief camp they stayed in was near the Safdarjang airport. The Indian army took care of this camp because Nehru’s civilian government was in no position to handle such work. I curse myself that I did not have the heart to probe my parents and grandparents as to what it meant to live in a make-shift relief camp and what it took to rebuild their lives from scratch. Luckily, my Nana was well educated. So, he got a good job as Branch Manager of a leading British Insurance Company with a luxurious office in Connaught Place above Marino Hotel. But he had eight children to look after—with at least three daughters of marriageable age.

I was shocked to learn from my Masi that the modest house my Nana’s family made their home after they got out of the relief camp had to be purchased by my Nana on payment of a pagdi.  The government did not provide them any accommodation. This was in old Delhi, not far from Jama Masjid. This small first floor house had been abandoned by some Muslim family.

After being hounded out of Pakistan, living in Muslim dominated area near Jama Masjid was not a happy choice. In the immediate neighborhood of my Nana’s house, there were only four Hindu families, including one family of Kashmiri Pandits who had migrated to Delhi about a century ago. They lived in a secure, well-guarded haveli. The other three families were also Partition refugees from different parts of West Punjab. The entire neighborhood was dominated by Muslim families who were encouraged by Congress leaders to remain in India after 1947. In the bazaar, there were a very small number of Hindu-owned shops. Otherwise, that neighborhood was akin to living in Pakistan, under the shadow of several small and big masjids.

In such an environment, Hindu refugees had no physical or cultural space to rebuild community life and celebrate its festivals. There was not a single mandir in that entire neighborhood since it existed under the oppressive shadow of Shah Jahan era Jama Masjid. Even when I stayed at my Nana’s house for some years of my childhood, the only Hindu children I got to play with were the kids living in servant quarters of the wealthy Kashmiri Pandit family. The Pandit family had grown up but unmarried sons and daughters but no young children.

The families of my father’s sister and sister-in-law also found shelter in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods in the walled city where they too lived constrained lives without any scope for rebuilding their community lives. Therefore, my Nana tried moving into a Hindu area by purchasing a plot outside the Muslim dominated old city. But before he could start building a modest home, the supposed Muslim owner of that plot returned from Pakistan to claim his property kept safe under the care of Government of India appointed Custodian of Muslim properties. My Nana was devastated when that plot was taken away and handed over to the Muslim owner without any compensation to him. It was a very major financial setback from which he took years to recover because he had borrowed money and put every rupee he had saved to buy that plot.

As mentioned earlier, this perverse policy was in sharp contrast to the official policy of the government of Pakistan which took over all Hindu properties in one go by enacting the Enemy Properties Act. with no chance of any Hindu daring to go back to their ancestral homes. Some years later, he was offered a plot in the refugee colony set up in Nizamuddin area of South Delhi. But my Nani, a strong-willed woman put her foot down. With her memories of being hounded out of Peshawar, followed by Srinagar and living very constrained lives as refugees in the Hindu minority Jama Masjid area, she did not want to move to yet another area where there was a chance of living like an oppressed minority, fearing communal persecution.

In the meantime, my Nana was in for more shocks. Just as he was beginning to rebuild his new life in Delhi from scratch, in mid 1950’s, Sheikh Abdullah declared state takeover of Hindu lands in the guise of “land reforms”. In one stroke my Nana lost all the land he owned in Srinagar. Till then I remember crates of apples and other exotic fruits coming to my Nana’s house in Delhi. All of a sudden, the arrival of Kashmiri fruits stopped. My Nana bore even this loss with yogic calm but it all took a heavy toll of his health and morale. And yet, he never let his children or grandchildren feel any scarcity or insecurity. I have only happy memories associated with my maternal grandparents’ home.

It amazes me as to how and why my parents did not fill our minds with hatred or hostility towards those who drove them out of their ancestral homes.  I guess they did not want to mar our lives with bitterness and hatred.  As a result, our upbringing lacked a sense of Shatru Bodh.

Blocking Memories of My Family’s Uprootment: During my childhood years, one could not help but over hear small tit-bits of conversation between our relatives and family friends about life in pre–Partition India. My Nani could never get over the trunk-loads of expensive silks, brocades and jewelry she had stocked for the weddings of her daughters. But as I began to move towards adulthood, the Partition stories began to upset me more and more deeply. Therefore, I began blocking not just those memories but also my curiosity about my family history. I did not want to know about that past because the predicament of my family caused deep anguish and pain, which I could not handle in a calm manner.

For instance, even though I visited Kashmir several times during and after the dark years of insurgency, I never ever tried to visit the area where my maternal grandfather’s family used to live. I knew my Nana’s house was in Wazir Bagh and his younger brother, who was the Raj Vaidya of Kashmir, in all likelihood lived in Raj Bagh. Let alone, wanting to trace out where exactly they lived, I never ever went to either of these two neighborhoods.

Deep Yearning to Visit My Ancestral Land: Despite such painful memories associated with my ancestral land, I grew up yearning to visit Pakistan.  During my school years, whenever our teachers asked us to write an essay on the place we would like to visit, most of my classmates would write about exotic foreign lands or famous tourist sites in India. My essay always centered around the desire to visit Pakistan, especially Lahore and Peshawar. My parents were also keen to visit Pakistan and revisit their homes and neighborhoods. They too had not recovered from the permanent severance of their ties with their ancestral homeland. It is a matter of deep regret for me that I failed to fulfill this wish of theirs even though I went to Pakistan at least four times to participate in conferences and meetings organized by human rights organizations involved in Pakistan.

The few times I visited Lahore & Peshawar, it caused me tremendous emotional stress. I was supposedly in a “foreign country” but unlike visits to other foreign countries, it was not my “Indian” identity that asserted itself because as an “Indian” I lose my right to claim my ancestral land.

In Pakistan, I always felt I was a Punjabi Hindu returned to her homeland which had been usurped by many who had no legitimate claim over it. I found myself coping with unexpected rage which had never found an outlet because for Hindus to yearn for their homeland, in what came to be called Pakistan, is considered politically incorrect. I think Hindu refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan (perhaps even Burma) are among the only group anywhere in the world who are denied the right to even yearn and mourn for the homeland they lost.

I distinctly remember how at the meetings of Pak-India Friendship Forum that I attended in Lahore or Peshawar, my soul would rise in revolt every time I heard Pakistani delegates complain self-righteously that they “feared” India because they felt Hindus had not made peace with the establishment of Pakistan. They were convinced that we still harboured secret fantasies of Akhand Bharat (Undivided India) and had imperialist designs on their mulk (nation). How I wish this was true! Unable to stomach their virulent Hinduphobia, in 1990s, I withdrew from all such organizations which claimed to work for Pak-India friendship.

The truth is that Hindus at large or the successive Indian governments have made no attempt to annex territories that became Pakistan but the Islamists within India and Pakistan have never hidden their agenda of Ghazwa-e Hind—that is converting whatever remains of India into Dar ul Islam—an extension of Pakistan.

During one of my visits to Lahore, I asked my host to take me to the village on the bank of river Ravi where my father’s family used to live. This was mainly because my father wanted me to go see his village. But the experience was very unpleasant. As I was making enquiries about the location of my father’s house on the basis of some of names my father had given me, at first a couple of very old persons of working-class background began giving me highly exaggerated accounts of my grand-father’s wealth and generosity. For example, I was told, he would give them a heavy silver coin for every sack of grain they carried for him. This made no sense at all. I sensed they were conning me in the hope of getting a handsome tip. Then all of a sudden, a group of very aggressive women descended on us and asked me in a very hostile tone: “You give the appearance of coming from a reasonably well-off family in India. Why then have you come to claim your long-abandoned house? You have no business to come snooping in our village!”

This left me stunned. There was no question of my claiming even an inch of land or my grandparents’ home in that village. But even my desire to see it was viewed with incredible hostility.

However, my experience of visiting the particular neighborhood in Peshawar where my mother’s family lived was not so harsh. My mother had given me only this tip—they lived in a particular neighborhood (I forget the name) not far from the house of the famous Bollywood actor, Prithviraj Kapoor. I walked around that mohalla for about two hours but things had changed so much that no one could help me find either the Kapoor family’s house or my Nana’s house. The most poignant moment was discovering a tiny nondescript shop selling old silver and brass items. I chanced to find small brass murtis of Ma Lakshmi and Ganesh which were obviously recovered from some traditional Hindu house where these tiny murtis were likely to have been enshrined in the modest puja sthal within the kitchen – of the kind one finds in traditional middle-class or village-based Hindu families. I promptly purchased whatever appeared to have a connection to Hindu families who were hounded out of that neighborhood. I gifted the two pieces to the Partition Museum in Amritsar.

I also visited the Presentation Convent School of Peshawar where my mother had studied but since none of the old generation of Irish nuns were likely to be alive, I chose not to talk to any of the teachers or the principal.

In addition, my mother had given me the name of one of her school-mates who was from one of the most illustrious families of Peshawar. She was the daughter of an ICS officer and married to an army general. I walked into their bungalow very hesitatingly but was overwhelmed by the spontaneous warmth I received at their home. They insisted I spend a few days with them, which I happily did. The memories of those three days still fill my heart with warmth.

But other than that, I never tried to explore my family history. Even though as an editor Manushi, I frequently interviewed freedom fighters, social and political activists, literary writers, artists, scientists, political leaders and plenty of ordinary families, my wilful attempt to erase the painful memories of Partition from my conscious self, meant that I grew up without a sense of my family history. It is ironical that this should happen to the educated elite of a country which had a millennia-old history of recording in detail Vanshavalis spread over hundreds (even thousands) of years of not just ruling dynasties but also ordinary families of all jatis and varnas.

Consequences of Willful Amnesia: Not only did I miss out on recording my grandparents’ life stories but even that of my parents, aunts—masis, tai ji, tau ji, bua, and close family friends. This, even though I was a student of history at the most prestigious university in India, namely Jawahar Lal Nehru University. If we had paid heed to our own family histories and learnt to see the social-political reality through the prism of their lived experience, we would not have fallen prey to the devious and fraudulent histories concocted by the self-styled Commie historians who came to dominate academia as well as social and political discourse in the public domain.

Towards the end of his life, my father incessantly talked about his life in Lahore and the trauma of being hounded out of his ancestral homeland, being separated from his family and finding his way to Delhi all alone amidst murder and mayhem all around. Far from taking notes or video/audio recording those memories, I tried to block those accounts from entering my mind. It is only after both my parents died and almost all of my relatives who had lived in pre-Partition India passed away that I began to lament my failure in probing and recording their stories.

Today, when I ask myself, ‘Who am I?’ I get very superficial answers because I have lost connect with my ancestral history. I have no idea what it meant for my parents, grandparents and other ancestors to live in a region which experienced wave after wave of Islamic conquests and what it meant for them to hold on to their dharmic identity under hostile regimes. I also did not ask my grandparents as to why they chose to flee as homeless, penniless refugees in 1947, instead of embracing Islam—a choice that would have allowed them to continue their comfortable life in their ancestral land. It pains me to think that I did not even ask them how they survived in refugee camps in Delhi and what it took to rebuild their lives from scratch.

Over the years, most members of my extended family did settle down to a comfortable middle-class existence in Delhi, the city I was born in, as well as in cities like Amritsar, Jaipur, Chennai, Dehradun, Srinagar, Mumbai etc. But some never recovered and experienced severe downward mobility. Over time, the bonds got weakened because for some decades every family was busy in reconstructing their lives.

And yet, I still managed to stay connected in some measure to my family’s predicament. The Partition stories heard during my childhood left an indelible mark on my mind and heart because they made me feel rootless and lacking in a firm sense of identity that is found among people who are part of a closely knit communities rooted in their regional, dharmic, cultural and linguistic identities.

Consequently, the current generation of our family hardly feels any connect with the holocaust of 1947. Some of them are so westernized that they are even averse to identifying themselves as Hindus—an identity that was so sacred for our ancestors that they bore lethal forms of discrimination and wave after wave of genocidal violence but chose not to convert or abandon their dharmic identity. Many youngsters in my family—my nieces and nephews– cannot speak, let alone read Punjabi. To the best of my knowledge, very few, if any, have read any Hindu scriptures. The elite schools they studied in made sure that the only language they can read and write in is English। Most of them are unable to write in Hindi, let alone Punjabi.

I am among the very few in my family who made it a point to learn the Gurmukhi script, can speak decent Punjabi and can read and write comfortably in Hindi, including its literary classics. I also resisted getting westernized. Therefore, I stayed rooted in my dharmic identity despite my formal education in a convent school and later in Miranda House which in those days was among the most westernized in its orientation. I also survived the deracinated culture of Jawahar Lal Nehru University (where I studied history) and which prided itself on being the citadel of Ultra Left politics.

Today, many of my cousins and most of my nephews and nieces are either living abroad or are planning to move there.

Consequences of Losing Cultural, Regional, Linguistic and Dharmik Identity: In the Indian sub-continent, for millennia we were taught to value our multi-layered identities. For example, apart from the identity that one inherits on account of belonging to a Kula (extended family) most Hindus feel deeply attached to their village/town or city identity. No matter how far they move from their ancestral village or town, most Indians retain those connections. It is fairly common for Indians who have migrated to America, Europe, Australia or any other country, to stay connected with their village roots. Those who can afford it, even come and build schools or improve the civic infrastructure in their villages. When people migrate from rural areas to cities, they invariably move together with their “village brothers” and invariably come to those urban centres where people from their village are already settled. It is through these networks that they find jobs in cities or regions far away from their home state without the help of modern employment agencies. They also prefer to live in clusters where people from their native place are settled.

The same holds true for Jati biradari bonds. These are also a crucial component of multi-layered identities in India and have proven to be a far more valuable source of support and protection in times of need than all the systems put together by modern state agencies or institutions, especially the police and judiciary, which were in fact designed as the biggest sources of tyranny and exploitation.

Those who are part of close knit village and/or Jati communities (for example the Marwaris) have a very vibrant community life and invaluable support systems. They take care of poorer among Marwaris and try to pull up those who fell behind due to some mishaps or tragedies. They are also able to get their inter-family, intra-family as well as business disputes resolved through the mediation of jati-biradari panchayats. Such settlements are expeditious, unlike the state-run judicial institutions and come without incurring any cost. This way of settling disputes in a non-adversarial manner through the agency of community elders prevents the breakdown of communities and families because the conflicts are resolved by respected elders who wish to keep the community bonded together. Unlike judges and lawyers of Sarkari courts, they have no interest in prolonging and exacerbating conflicts.

The millions who came as partition refugees lost the village, community, jati, biradari bonds because uprooted families settled wherever they could find opportunities to earn a livelihood. Even in government created refugee colonies, plots or housing was allotted in bureaucratic manner with no regard for keeping people or kinship groups together. As a result, Punjabi Hindus, as also Kashmiri Hindus and Bengali Hindus who came as refugees from West and East Pakistan are among the most deracinated cultural groups in India. Bengalis fell for Communism and the educated elites among Punjabi Hindus became so westernized that they gave up even on their mother tongue Punjabi.

The Role of “Sarkari Education” in Deracinating Indians: Sadly, this amnesia and lack of interest about their civilizational roots and ancestral history is not confined to children of partition refugee families. The political leaders who inherited power from the British colonial rulers, imposed on us an education system that alienated people from their own culture, faith, traditions and Bharatiya Gyan Paramparas (Indian Knowledge Traditions) that were kept vibrant for millennia through intergenerational learning. India played the role of a Vishwaguru only so long as we stayed rooted in honing and building on our Native Knowledge Traditions. So long as we valued community bonding and collective well-being, we prospered intellectually, materially, spiritually and emotionally.

It is time we recognize that people without a sense of their past cannot have a clear idea of their future. Disconnect with our own authentic history is a major reason why the current generation of Indians have lost the ability to express collective aspirations. They are trained to assert only individual ambition. As a result, we are witnessing a rapid breakdown of communities, families. The “modern education system” has blocked inter-generational imparting of knowledge traditions.

Today, we have crippled ourselves intellectually, spiritually, culturally and even linguistically by adopting as our own the worldview of those who came to enslave and colonize us. As a result, we have lost the power to resist and combat the fake and malicious narratives about our history, culture, economy, social organization, polity, faith traditions and civilizational heritage.

We have accepted the fault lines they engineered in our society as the basis of our social and political identities. Our colonial rulers deviously imposed new political identities on our society (such as SC, ST, BC, OBC, MBC, EBC and so on) which are tearing asunder our delicate social fabric and even family life. They have pitched every community against the others so that the social and political arena have become battlegrounds for ugly and unholy power battles.

Blind westernization has come to be seen as the main route to progress and advancement.

The pre-colonized India of 1200 years ago produced Vishwagurus in every domain—be it literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, technology, medicine, art, music, architecture, wealth generation, ecological management, agricultural and industrial production. Even during Islamic and British rule, the Indic Knowledge Traditions did not suffer as grievously as they did in the post-British India. The so-called state managed “Sarkari modern education system” is mass producing deracinated Indians and unemployable, unskilled brigades of disoriented youth.

Today, the best educated among us aspire to be intellectual coolies of the West. Managing to get an admission in a western university followed by a job permit and citizenship of America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or one of the European countries is considered the acme of achievement. Today, whoever can afford it, is keen to escape India because of the feeling that talent cannot flourish in India, that our internal divisions are tearing asunder our society and even our families.

This can begin to change only when we make efforts to understand what contributed to the all-round grandeur and prosperity of the pre-colonized Indian civilization, the bonds that kept it together as well as the factors that led to its tragic decline. No better way to start this journey than to start with our own family histories.