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Interview conducted on the 31st of October 2022
"I come from a village in North India, more precisely Northern Punjab, adjacent to the Jammu and Kashmir border, just six miles away. The village was only 5% Hindu, with the rest being Muslims. However, the economy was controlled by Hindus. There was only one Muslim-owned shop in the entire village. Despite this, we lived peacefully, with no animosity between the two religious communities. We respected each other's way of life, and everything went smoothly.
The Partition, which came unexpectedly, caught us off guard. We weren't expecting it to happen so soon; nobody expected it. I'd say about ten days before the Partition was announced, we learned that Rawalpindi, the village I come from, would be a part of Pakistan. I have six brothers, and five of them were working outside the village while I was still a student. We only had occasional family gatherings.
Three months before the Partition, we all met in Jabalpur, where one of my brothers lived. At that time, we were reading in the newspapers that the country would be partitioned. We thought it would be wise to get our family out of the village, and the responsibility fell on me, despite being a student. I went to each of my relatives, one after the other, explaining the situation, what was going to happen, and suggesting our collective plan.
One of my sisters lived nearby; she was married with two children. It was my first visit to her place, and they were already aware of the situation and agreed to come with me immediately. I took them to Jabalpur, and gradually, I brought my mother and two other sisters out of the village. That's how the entire family relocated to Jabalpur.
I left everything in the village and never returned. We arrived in Jabalpur as refugees but declined any government assistance, such as refugee camps, free transportation, or land allocation. I later learned that the rest of the Hindu families from our village also managed to escape. They must have had some arrangement with the government because I don't know how anyone could make it out of there without any loss of life. Perhaps the other villagers helped them; our village was unique in that sense.
Anyway, the political tension upon our arrival in India was unlike anything I had ever experienced. When I saw the refugees walking in, there were so many of them. It was heart-wrenching to witness their broken condition on the streets of Amritsar and Delhi. We considered ourselves lucky because, before the real suffering began, we had already left our village, and arranged for a house and a means of livelihood in Jabalpur. There was no one and nothing left for us in that village in Pakistan.”
Aaryan Sinha is part of »Guest Room: Damarice Amao & Matthias Pfaller«.
Check out his Artist Feature “This Isn’t Divide and Conquer”.