![]() Minutes before they were to be killed, a cease-fire was announced. “One dead body here, one dead body there. The townspeople were ushered out to a playground, where the previous day’s captives had been doused with oil and burned alive. When armed men eventually found them, they were hiding in an attic packed with about 300 others from the town. For days, she and her mother hid from rioters who were looking for Hindus to kill and loot. Her town had been reduced to ash and rubble. They took her, and they pierced the spear through her body. “She was crying, ‘Don’t kill my son, don’t kill my son.’ Then they took her daughter from her. “My aunt was wearing white trousers, I remember,” she says. ![]() Her uncle was a tax collector who had made the error of filling their suitcases with cash - unnecessary weight that had kept his family from running fast enough, Kumari said. Not even when she heard her dog Tom barking for her.įrom the holes in the roof, Kumari saw her uncle and his family being killed by men with spears in the street. Not when she felt pangs in her stomach after three days without food. Kumari’s family is Hindu they were living in an area that would soon become Muslim-dominated Pakistan. ![]() Sudershana Kumari, an 8-year-old Hindu girl who witnessed a massacre in her home town in PakistanĮven as a girl, Sudershana Kumari’s survival instincts were sharp enough to know that staying quiet is sometimes the best option.Ĭrying out would have given away her hiding place - a rooftop in her native town, Sheikhupura, where Kumari, her mother and dozens of others lay, watching the carnage on the streets below. These are the stories of some of those who survived. Why did that temporary insanity take over?” “It is still hard to understand why those things happened. If you emphasize the death and violence, that tarnishes the achievement,” he said.Īnd partly, he said, it may be because Indians and Pakistanis themselves still find it difficult to discuss those horrors openly and honestly. “At the time, there was an impetus to portray the moment of independence as a triumph - that after 200 years of colonial rule, the British could part as friends. Partly, Hajari says, that may be because of how the events were depicted by British sources. A partition museum will open this week in the Indian city of Amritsar, containing items that were brought over from Pakistan by refugees.īut outside southern Asia, the brutalities of partition were not widely broadcast. “Some people say they had temporarily gone crazy,” Hajari said.Īrchives on both sides have collected video and oral testimonies of the horrors. Many who lived through those times describe madness taking hold. ![]() “When you broke a branch, red would come out,” she said, painting an image of how much blood had soaked the soil in India. These were called “blood trains”: “All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors,” Hajari wrote in his book.Įven the fruit on the trees tasted of blood, recalls Sudershana Kumari, who fled from her home town in Pakistan to India. #Train to pakistan pdf full#(Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)īungalows and mansions were burned and looted, women were raped, children were killed in front of their siblings. Trains carrying refugees between the two new nations arrived full of corpses their passengers had been killed by mobs en route. Indian soldiers walk through the debris of a building in Amritsar during unrest after the partition of India and Pakistan in August 1947. Their economies were deeply intertwined, their cultures were very similar.”īut after partition was announced, the subcontinent descended quickly into riots and bloodshed. “When they partitioned, there were probably no two countries on Earth as alike as India and Pakistan,” said Nisid Hajari, the author of “ Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition.” “Leaders on both sides wanted the countries to be allies, like the U.S. The legacy of that violent separation has endured, resulting in a bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan. Muslims in modern-day India fled in the opposite direction. Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan, a country that would be Muslim-controlled. ![]() Estimates of the number of people killed in those months range between 200,000 and 2 million. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, an event that triggered one of bloodiest upheavals in human history.Ībout 14 million people are thought to have abandoned their homes in the summer and fall of 1947, when colonial British administrators began dismantling the empire in southern Asia. NEW DELHI - The massacres began soon after the British announced partition: Neighbors slaughtered neighbors childhood friends became sworn enemies. In this September 1947 photo, Muslim refugees clamber aboard an overcrowded train near New Delhi in an attempt to flee India. ![]()
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