Blog : A Short Collection of Partition Poetry

Lately, I’ve been having these deep conversations with my mother on the concept of Partition between India and Pakistan which occurred during the late 1940’s. Here’s a collection of poetry excerpts written by authors inspired by/having experienced the crisis that’s still persists today. 

PROSE #1 : MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie

I was born in the city of Bombay in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? At night. On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai,  had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time. 

POETRY : Broken Bengal by Taslima Nasreen 

There was a land watered and fruitful

People of that land used to swing on festive days

Just as the golden paddy swung in breeze,

There was a land which held happy fairs

Merging the smell of soil in soil

When autumn clouds held fairs in the sky.

There was a land of mangoes, jackfruits 

Where one could get soaked to the skin

Returning home in rain then faintly tremble,

Or bask in the sun after the fog cleared.

PROSE #2 : THE NIGHT DIARY by Veera Hiranandani

July 18, 1947

Dear Mama,

Something very strange happened today. Three men came to our house this afternoon. I don’t know why they came. Amil and I were doing homework. Dadi sat at the table writing letters. Papa was at the hospital. The men knocked on the door. One of them was a teacher at our school who always dyes his gray hair red. His beard is the color of a chili pepper. Dadi told us both to go into the kitchen with Kazi, so we did. 

All three of us—me, Kazi, and Amil—peeked around the corner. The men spoke so quietly I could only hear bits and pieces of sentences, words and names I had been hearing Papa talk about to Dadi, seen in the headlines from their newspapers. I turned over the words like puzzle pieces in my head, wondering how they were supposed to fit together: Pakistan, Jinnah, independence, Nehru, India, British, Lord Mountbatten, Gandhi, partition.

Dadi nodded and nodded, and the air smelled like the smoke from pipes. Then she finally closed the door and turned around. Her eyes were big, and she and Kazi kept giving each other secret looks. Kazi disappeared into the kitchen. I finished my work and helped him clean some green beans and chop the garlic and ginger into the tiniest pieces you ever saw, but Kazi didn’t tell me anything and I could tell he didn’t want to.

Love, Nisha

POETRY : Broken Bengal 

There was a land – yours, mine, our forefathers’?

Some suddenly halved this land of love into two.

They who did it wrenched the stem of the dream

Which danced like the upper end of the gourd,

Dream of the people.

 PROSE #3 : The Night Diary 

July 18, 1947

Dear Mama,

I wondered what that meant, to be free from the British. Why were they allowed to rule over us in the first place? Didn’t they have their own people to worry about? I thought about the men at the door. They seemed calm in that way grown-ups get calm before they get very angry.

“Remember when Papa used to tickle us?” Amil said, turning on his side toward me.

“He hasn’t done that in a long time,” I replied. When we were little, Papa would tickle us to wake us up. It’s so strange to think about that now. I remember trying to like it since Amil liked it so much. Amil would throw his head back and squeal for more. I would grit my teeth and try not to push Papa’s hand away. It made me feel like I was falling off a cliff. I asked Amil why he was thinking about that.

“Because I wish he was still that way,” Amil said, and turned on his back again.

He closed his eyes and I could hear his breathing slow down. I thought about the old Papa, the one who tickled us. Had Papa changed that much? Or had we just gotten older?

Love, Nisha

INTERVIEW #1 : Surinder Shani, 81, retired architect, UK

In Rawalpindi, my family ran a grain store in the centre of the city which was predominantly Muslim. We are Sikh but my father was friends with the Muslims. They used to talk about poetry together.

We moved to Jalandhar in India because of partition. There was riots forcing the Muslims to go to Pakistan. My uncle said we should go and occupy the Muslims’ houses as people were leaving. My father was reluctant but he was forced to do it by his brother.

As the Muslim family were leaving the house - I remember because I was there, about 12 at the time - my father apologised to the owner, an elderly gentleman, saying how sorry he was that this was happening. My father promised to look after the house. And the man said, please just look after my books they are more important to me than the house. Then a day later we heard that they were all killed by a Sikh mob on the way to Pakistan. They didn’t reach the border.

 PROSE #4: Our Moon has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita

They found the old man dead in his torn tent, with a pack of chilled milk pressed against his right cheek. It was our first June in exile, and the heat felt like a blow in the back of the head. 

The departed was known to our family. His son and my father were friends. He was born in the Kashmir Valley and had lived along the banks of the Jhelum River.

[The house they found him in] was barely a room. Until a few months ago, it had been a cowshed. Now the floor had been cemented and its walls were painted with cheap blue distemper. The landlord had rented out the room on the condition that no more than four family members could stay there. More people would mean more water consumption. The old man was the fifth member of the family, and that was why he had been forced to live alone in the Muthi refugee camp, set up on the outskirts of Jammu City, on a piece of barren land infested with snakes and scorpions.

Ours was a family of Kashmiri Pandits, and we had fled from Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, earlier that year. We had been forced to leave the land where our ancestors had lived for thousands of years. Most of us now sought refuge in the plains of Jammu, because of its proximity to home. I had just turned fourteen, and that June, I lived with my family in a small, damp room in a cheap hotel. 

One afternoon I went to the camp to meet a friend. He hadn’t turned up at school that day, as his grandmother had fainted that morning from heat and exhaustion.

Suddenly there was a commotion, and my friend jumped down and said, ‘I think a relief van has come.’ While he ran, and I ran after him, he told me that vans came nearly every day, distributing essential items to the camp residents: kerosene oil, biscuits, milk powder, rice, vegetables.

By the time we reached the entrance of the camp, a queue had already formed in front of a load carrier filled with tomatoes. I also stood at the end of it, behind my friend. Two men stood in front of the heap, and one of them gave away a few anaemic tomatoes to the people in the queue. He kept saying, ‘Dheere dheere. Slowly, slowly.’ Some people were returning with armfuls of tomatoes. My friend looked at a woman who held them to her breast and he winked at me. Meanwhile, some angry voices rose from the front. The tomatoes were running out, and many people were still waiting. They had begun to give only three tomatoes to each person. In a few minutes it was reduced to one tomato per person. A man in the queue objected to two people from the same family queuing up. ‘I have ten mouths to feed,’ said one. An old woman intervened. ‘Do we have to fight over a few tomatoes now?’ she asked. After that, there was silence. 

I looked at my friend. There was nothing to say. We returned to our private spot and threw two half slices in front of the cow. We were fourteen. I often think of that moment. Maybe if we had been grown-ups and responsible for our families, we too would have returned silently with those half tomatoes. At fourteen we knew we were refugees, but we had no idea what family meant. And I don’t think we realized then that we would never have a home again.

POETRY : Broken Bengal by Taslima Nasreen

They shook violently the roots of the land

And people were flung about who knows where,

None kept account of who perished who survived.

Residents of Bikrampur landed on Gariahata crossing

Some came to Phultali from Burdwan,

Some fled to Howrah from Jessore,

From Netrokona to Ranaghat,

From Murshidabad to Mymensingh.

PROSE #3 : THE NIGHT DIARY

July 19, 1947

Dear Mama,

More bad things are happening. When Amil and I walk the mile to our schools, we pass lots of things. Since Papa is the head doctor for the Mirpur Khas City Hospital, the government gave us a large place to live in, much bigger than anyone I know. We have our bungalow, and a coop for the chickens, the flower and vegetable gardens, and the cottages where Kazi and the groundskeeper, Mahit, live. As we walk closer and closer to town, we pass the hospital. Then we pass the jail where all the people have to go when they do things like steal from the markets. Dadi says it’s not a jail for the murderers. The murderers go somewhere else. I always try to catch a prisoner’s eye when I go to school, since I can see them through the fences. I feel bad for them. Usually they stole because they were hungry. But sometimes there are truly bad ones, too, who just want to be bad, who hurt and steal just for fun. I think I can tell who’s bad and who’s not. The bad ones smile real big. The good ones don’t.

Our schools are right next to each other, Mine is smaller because not all girls go to school, but Papa says it’s important to be educated. Today when we walked to school, two older boys started following us. Sometimes this happens. Sometimes they chase Amil, but usually only to scare him. He runs faster than anyone I know, so he always gets away. This time though, the boys started throwing rocks at us. A small one hit the back of my head. Amil pulled my arm and we broke into a run. Amil led us through the alley and some gardens, then back onto another dirt road. We found a cluster of mango trees and hid behind them.

“Why did they do that? What did you do?” I whispered at him.

“It’s because we’re Hindus,” Amil said. He looked around and started to whisper again. “There are lots of places all over India where the Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims fight one another all the time now. Just not here, yet. Kazi tells me what he reads in the papers. That’s why those men came to the house yesterday. They said the Hindus should leave, and they don’t want Kazi to live with us.”

“Because he’s Muslim?” I asked, but Amil didn’t answer as he ran into the house and to our room where he worked on his drawings until dinner. I thought about those boys. They were Muslim. Everyone knows who is Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh by the clothes they wear or the names they have. But we all have lived together in this town for so long, I just never thought much about people’s religions before. Does it have to do with India becoming independent from the British? I don’t see how those two things go together.

Nobody ever mentions the fact that you were Muslim, Mama. It’s like everyone forgot. But I don’t want to forget. The truest truth is that I don’t know any other children whose parents are different religions. It must be a strange thing that nobody wants to talk about. I guess we’re Hindu because Papa and Dadi are. But you’re still a part of me, Mama. Where does that part go?

Love, Nisha

POETRY : Broken Bengal by Taslima Nasreen 

The outcome was inevitable, 

As when you release a wild bull in a flower garden. 

Two parts of the land stretch out their thirsty hands

Towards each other. And in between the hands

Stands the man made filth of religion

INTERVIEW #2 : Patricia, 75, retired nurse, UK

I come from three generations of the British Raj in India. We went to Pakistan when I was five years old. I remember getting on a train in a crowd. There was this British man and his son. They were absolutely silent. I was much older when mother said his wife and daughter had been raped and killed in front of them.

Then somewhere, it must have been not far from the border, the train was stopped and men started shooting everyone on the train. Dad had rolled us in our bed rolls to hide us. Everybody on the roof died. There were a lot of babies crying. When we got to Pakistan we were taken to a transit camp. Eventually we got passage to England.

I went back to India in 2010 and a man I was talking to turned to his friend and said “she was on the trains”, and it just said it all. The fact that it was so clearly understood meant so much to me. In India, people all know about it; in this country, nobody knows what it means.