Introduction
This is the story of a Ministry of the Government of India. A dull, Uninspiring theme, you will exclaim. But it is a richly evocative saga.
Here are drama and passion, illimitable human suffering, heroic
endeavour. Within the confines of what a Ministry set out to do and
what it accomplished, you find every element of a Greek tragedy. Only
everything is multiplied a thousand fold. You have men whose reason
is overthrown; men plunged into the depths of anguish. Impenetrable
gloom shrouds the story of their purgatory. But, as in ancient legends,
there is expiation and the slow return to blessedness. These then are the
ingredients of our chronicle.Footnote 1
The above quotation commences the official account of the Indian state's response to the influx of millions of refugees from Pakistan at independence. This narrative was published in 1967, two years after the formal winding-up of the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. The 230-page volume was published to provide the definitive account of the story of rehabilitation. While the purple prose of the prelude is not sustained throughout the publication, the themes of tragedy, loss, redemption and restoration are recurring. This paper reveals how the particular experiences of mass migration in the Punjab were universalized in The Story of Rehabilitation and earlier official accounts. It argues that the Indian state sought legitimization through a master narrative of its successful handling of the Punjab's refugee crisis. This account not only occluded the more problematic Bengal migration story,Footnote 2 which was ultimately to encompass greater numbers, but also homogenized a complex and highly differentiated Punjab refugee experience.Footnote 3
The paper also explores how Punjabis themselves have recounted the process of rehabilitation. Migrants’ memories utilize the stereotypes of Punjabi self-reliance and industry which have found their way in a minor key into the official accounts.Footnote 4 Primarily, however, they contest the master narrative's emphasis on the state's role in surmounting India's post-partition refuge crisis. Given documentary evidence of considerable state intervention in Punjab, if not in Bengal,Footnote 5 this raises the questions:
• how reliable are testimonies of self-settlement;
• what circumstances caused individuals to seek refuge in community stereotypes of self-reliance;
• how typical are the experiences of enterprise and self-help which are now part of the staple of first hand accounts of Punjabi migrants?
In order to address these questions, this paper looks in detail at two narratives provided by Punjabi migrants from Pakistan. It sets these alongside that provided by a Punjabi who made the reverse journey from Amritsar to Lahore in 1947 to assess whether there are commonalities in the omission of the details of state assistance across the national and religious divides. Finally, the paper hypothesizes whether research on the Untouchables’ resettlement experiences would resolve some of the dissonances between state and individual accounts of refugee rehabilitation. Before turning to these questions, it is necessary to consider how official accounts addressed the violence which had precipitated the mass migration in the Punjab region between August and November 1947.
Two observations can be made. Firstly, there is no acknowledgement that the state manifestly failed in its duty to protect minority citizens. This failure at the outset of the independence of the Indian and Pakistan Dominions is not only conveniently overlooked, but over-compensated for by the emphasis on the Herculean efforts to assist refuges. Secondly, recourse is either made to the fact that the violence was insensate and thus unstoppable, or blame is displaced onto the ‘other’. This results in conflicting official accounts in which the Punjab massacres are seen as simultaneously being planned by the para-military organizations of the ‘other’ and as spontaneous irrational outbreaks.Footnote 6 Current research on the violence is sometimes confused by these conflicting historical discourses. The Story of Rehabilitation represents the official tendency to portray the violence that caused the two-way flight of some ten-million Punjabis as insensate, spontaneous and uncontrollable. The partition violence is a one-off event which is aberrational and inexplicable. This understanding which has been challenged by a range of authors absolves the state from both complicity and failure to safeguard minority interests.Footnote 7 At the same time it generates the reader's pity for the refugees who have been overtaken by events in which they did not play any part.
Once the uncontrollable and spontaneous nature of the violence is established, the Indian state enters the narrative with respect to the unprecedented problem of providing safe escort from Pakistan for the millions on the move. The circumstances in which the Punjab Boundary Force had to be wound up are glossed over, because it might encourage consideration of the role of state functionaries in violence, or at least raise difficult questions concerning why law and order could not be maintained.Footnote 8 But the role of the Military Evacuation Organization (MEO) which replaced it following an agreement between India and Pakistan is trumpeted in overseeing what became a virtual exchange of population in the Punjab region.Footnote 9 Despite misgivings, fears for the security of minorities along with the need to utilize properties and land to accommodate incoming refugees determined this policy. Further government control over the migration process was exerted by settling rural refugee populations together in assigned districts. The Joint Evacuation Plan agreed on 20 October, 1947 between the Indian and Pakistan MEOs set a December target for the evacuation of ten-million refugees from both sides of the Punjab. The gravity of the situation and the sterling work done by the Indian Army is built up in a series of statements which concludes with the comment by the Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation broadcast on 11 January, 1948 that, ‘the distance between the people and the Army has been obliterated by the magnificent work done by our officers and men in the hour of need’.Footnote 10
The sense of engagement with the suffering of the refugees is sustained through references to their fear and brokenness. Yet what is most important for the narrative is to build up the epic nature of the dislocation arising from partition.
In less than five months more than four million refugees had poured
into India. They had to be received and provided with temporary
accommodation, fed and clothed, given interim relief, preserved
against the inroads of disease that follows in the wake of tragedies of
such dimensions and then dispersed to sites of permanent rehabilitation.Footnote 11
For it is in dealing with these unforeseen and unprecedented circumstances that the state receives its legitimization. Ultimately, it is not the refugees, but the state's representatives who are the heroes of the narrative. ‘For its operations’, the report's author writes of the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, ‘its resources were slender beyond belief. For its operations it had hardly a single precedent. With pity and compassion as the driving power, it had to devise schemes as well as the strategy for their execution. And unlike as in certain other fields of national enterprise, there was no help sought from abroad, nor was any forthcoming’.Footnote 12 In language borrowed from the New Testament, the report continues to describe the Ministry's ‘indefatigable effort to bring healing to these bruised masses of humanity, to wipe their tears, apply balm to their wounds, assuage their hunger and thirst, clothe their nakedness’.Footnote 13 The state's role is thus eulogized with respect to the relief measures designed to feed, clothe and shelter the refugees. The enormity of the task is again stressed, this time in terms of the poor physical and psychological condition of the refugees.
Again the narrative is designed to evoke sympathy for the refugees and admiration for the state in its tackling of these enormous needs. The role of the various state agencies in addressing the ‘refugee problem’ had been painstakingly recorded in an earlier Government publication of 1948 entitled, Millions on the Move.Footnote 14 From the outset Nehru had been acutely aware of the need to counteract the ‘stress (that) had been laid in newspapers throughout the world on the destructive aspect of the recent happenings’. He was especially keen to produce the right publicity about the ‘work done on rehabilitation, relief and evacuation’.Footnote 15
Millions on the Move initiated the vision of a uniform refugee migration experience. This became associated with iconic images drawn from the Punjab of men, women and children with their heavily laden bullock carts travelling across tracks of ground inundated by the monsoon rains; trains with not only their carriages, but running boards and roofs, packed with refuges. In Bengal, however, people moved much more by steamer. Even in Punjab, the reality was different from the standard portrayal. There was considerable anticipatory migration by the wealthy moneylenders and businessmen from Lahore. It was the poorer Hindus and those who were less politically sensitive who were left as acute migrants to scramble for safety in August 1947.Footnote 16 Even the wealthy who had left it late to depart could buy their way to safety. It is a little remarked fact of partition migration history that the British Overseas Airways Corporation transported 28,000 people from Pakistan in the period 15 September to 7 December, 1947. This was in addition to the twice daily service from Lahore to Amritsar run by the Indian National Airways.Footnote 17 Such passengers could look down on the burning villages and ant-like refugee columns traversing the Punjab's killing fields. On the rare occasions when the elite travellers were inconvenienced it reached the highest levels of Government. Nehru noted with displeasure early in October 1947, an incident when a flight direct from Peshawar to Delhi had to set down at Lahore because of slight engine trouble and its ‘occupants had been stripped of all their belongings’.Footnote 18
In addition to status, the uniform understanding of the migration experience in Millions on the Move does not reflect fully on the gendered dimension which has been the focus of much recent work, especially with respect to the recovery of abducted women.Footnote 19 By October 1952, just over 8,000 women and children had been rehabilitated from Pakistan. Recovery was in some instances forced and involved separation from children and new family ties for an uncertain reception in the land of the abducted women's origin. The task of recovery was nevertheless actively pursued by the state agencies as it was seen as important for Indian honour and building the nation in the wake of partition. Just as women were not in charge of their own fate with respect to recovery, so in the words of Ravinder Kaur, ‘they do not author’ their partition history.Footnote 20 Official accounts constitute them as ‘victims’ who can be statistically accounted for, but whose range of experiences is condensed in the generalized partition narrative.
The Story of Rehabilitation, presents a similar uniform refugee narrative to Millions on the Move with the emphasis on the state's guardianship role. This standard account again glosses over the immense differences both in refugee experience and the state's responses to the Punjabi migrant community. Ironically, politicians who carved out new careers as refugee spokesmen, in many instances were to avoid or mitigate the indignities and losses of the majority of those who they represented. The Story of Rehabilitation is not only careful to portray the ‘success story’ of the huge refugee camp at Kurukshetra in Haryana, but to provide a standardized picture of the refugee experience. There is no hint of the different levels of provision, depending on the refugee's status which Ravinder Kaur has recently pointed out regarding the treatment of Punjabi migrants in Delhi.Footnote 21 Whether refugees could afford their own food rations, for example, determined whether they would be directed to a life under canvas in the Edward and Outram Lines of the vast Kingsway refugee camp, or be accommodated in concrete barracks at the Hudson and Reeds Lines.Footnote 22 Later, permanent housing projects were undertaken on a status basis with varieties of plot size, streets and availability of services depending on the refugees’ wealth. The clearest indication of the State's maintaining old caste and gender hierarchies in refugee rehabilitation was seen in the provision of separate colonies for Untouchables and for young widows. With respect to the latter, the Delhi authorities established control over social behaviour by ensuring that the women did not go outside the camp without the permission of female social workers.Footnote 23 Building materials were inferior for the poorer types of accommodation with the result that throughout the early 1950s the newspapers recount tales of building collapses as a result of heavy monsoon rains. The worst facilities were provided for Untouchable refugees who were also housed away from the main localities. Fifty houses collapsed in the 1950 monsoon rains at the Haripura Refugee Colony for Untouchables in Amritsar. Their occupants were promised speedy repairs following protests outside the District rent Controllers Office. Yet seven years later, the monsoon rains were still bringing house collapses and fatalities in their wake.Footnote 24
The Story of Rehabilitation concludes with the refugee problem surmounted and the displaced population now fully integrated into the nation-building activities of the Indian state. The migrants have made the transition from helpless destitutes to fully-fledged citizens, in part because of their own resilience. The main factor has however been state agency. ‘In the Western Region, thus the Rehabilitation Ministry can look back with pride on the accomplishment of a near miracle . . .’ the report concludes,
The new environment has transformed the refugee into a purposeful citizen of India. Truly it may be said of the Rehabilitation Ministry that its functioning has been a two-way blessing. It channelised the country's compassion and beneficence that they might serve the refugees in the hour of trial and reaped for the nation an enrichment of spiritual and material resources.Footnote 25
This master narrative of refugee rehabilitation has come under increasing challenge.Footnote 26 Even in Punjab, which experienced a single torrent of migration rather than the prolonged waves of refugees in Bengal which continued during the 1950s, migration was not just a single journey. Many Punjabis, especially those from an urban background, travelled from place to place in their new homeland before finally settling permanently. Indeed for some families there was to be years of wandering.Footnote 27
Despite its failures to address the intricacies and inadequacies of the rehabilitation process, the official account nonetheless points to the fact that the solution of the refugee problem impacted heavily on nation-building and political development throughout the subcontinent. The need to coordinate resources to deal with the refugee influx, meant that the most important embodiments of the early post-colonial Indian State were the Emergency Cabinet Committee, chaired by Lord Mountbatten, and the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. The latter had an ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the non-state agency Central Relief Committee founded by the All-India Congress Committee in late July 1947. This new body bypassed traditional agencies such as the Public Works Department and, according to Ravinder Kaur, displayed ‘a reformist zeal and urgency’ which was different from the institutions inherited from the colonial state.Footnote 28
Turning from a top-down to a bottom-up perspective, it is still not fully acknowledged that for millions of individuals in North India, their encounter with the post-independence state focused solely on its responses to the problems arising from partition-related mass migration. At the most basic level, they needed to seek shelter, food and necessities from the state. Official histories provide a homogenized view of the refugee-state encounter. In reality this was determined by the cultural (literacy) and social capital (political connections) which refugees brought to their encounters with administrators who worked in the various agencies which dealt with rehabilitation. Indeed much of the new historical understanding of the resettlement and rehabilitation process is derived from the petitions which relatively privileged upper caste refugees presented to influential Congressmen and refugee representatives who forwarded these requests to Government.Footnote 29
The scale on which the national and Punjab governments provided resources for housing, feeding, educating and providing work for refugees has not always found its way into historical accounts. The East Punjab Government for example had spent Rs. 190 millions on relief and rehabilitation by January 1950. Rehabilitation costs, excluding industrial and vocational training schemes, work centres and housing schemes, came to over Rs. 44 millions. Relief measures in the refugee camps came to Rs. 99 millions while over Rs. 44 millions worth of loans had been disbursed to refugees.Footnote 30 Government set aside, for example, Rs. 15 lakhs as grants of Rs. 500 each for petty shopkeepers and Rs. 35 lakhs as loans of Rs. 5,000 each for small-scale industries and workshops.Footnote 31 Refugees were also given until 22 December, 1947 to tender for the leases of factories abandoned by Muslims.
The government aim throughout the rehabilitation process was to prevent dependency. Training centres and loans were designed for refugees to re-establish their own businesses, even if this only involved putting up wooden stalls on approved sites. Industrial homes were set up for widows in such cities as Amritsar to give them training in embroidery, tailoring, spinning and weaving of tape, ‘to enable them to earn independent living in due course’.Footnote 32
The East Punjab Government established rural housing schemes for Pakistani migrants. It also provided loans for food and fodder, the purchase of seed and bullocks and the reconstruction of houses and wells. Such support helped the Hindu and Sikh agriculturalists who had vacated the rich irrigated districts of West Punjab for the poorer pickings of East Punjab. Even so, a system of ‘graded cuts’ had to be applied as there was insufficient land available to fully compensate the refugee farmers.Footnote 33 According to the classic account, Out of the Ashes by M. S. Randhawa who was appointed special revenue officer for refugee settlement, tractor loans alone mounted to 3.2 million rupees.Footnote 34 Between September 1947 and March 1951, RS. 40 millions were disbursed to displaced cultivators.Footnote 35 These measures were to lay the foundations of the Indian Punjab's Green Revolution two decades later.
The East Punjab government also addressed the needs of urban refugees through its building of new satellite towns such as Faridabad and Rajpura, as well as the provision of training and funding for refugees to set up their own businesses. The development of Rajpura on the Grand Trunk Road, 15 miles west of Ambala, cost Rs. 20 millions. It was termed ‘one of the biggest experiments of the Government of India in building a well planned and simple yet dignified home for refugees’.Footnote 36 Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the former West Punjab Hindu capitalist class drawn from the Arora and Khatri communities was to abandon Punjab altogether and relocate to Delhi and Bombay.
Both the Indian and East Punjab Governments thus brought considerable resources to bear in meeting the needs of Punjabi refugee. This was funded through use of the inherited sterling balances and the funds raised on the population as a whole under the refugee tax. The paltry support provided in comparison by the West Bengal government reflected its weaker fiscal base, lack of support from the Centre, and the fact that migration in the region was regarded as a temporary rather than permanent phenomenon. There was thus no exchange of evacuee property as in the Punjab region. In the circumstances, the authorities in Calcutta could do little more than provide basic immediate relief. While refugee camps in Punjab had closed as early as 1948, a decade later, the camp population in Calcutta alone stood at 800,000. One-third of their inhabitants had spent anything from six to ten years living in these squalid surroundings.Footnote 37 The government's response was to disperse refugees with its attendant human costs and resulting tensions with neighbouring states such as Assam which were reluctant to receive more refugees. The most ambitious and controversial dispersal scheme involved moving over 25,000 families to the 270,000 cleared acres of forest at Dandakaranya in Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.Footnote 38 The Andaman Islands and the remote Sunderbans region of West Bengal were other dispersal sites. The Bengal refugee experience was clearly not the stuff of national myth-making.
In respect of the Punjab however, the levels of expenditure and organizational effort, were not completely divorced from the rhetoric of such works as The Story of Rehabilitation. Yet this degree of state assistance is seldom acknowledged in the personal testimonies of Punjabi partition migrants. Is this simply the result of the unreliability of first hand accounts, or is this too simplistic an understanding of the gap between individual and state accounts?
Refugee accounts
The past decade has seen a growing number of studies of the Punjabi migrant experience in such varied localities as Delhi, Amritsar, and Ludhiana.Footnote 39 These accounts have utilized a range of documentary sources, but at their heart has been the recovery of previously silenced refugee voices. What is striking is the dissonance between these first hand testimonies and the account provided in official histories. This process will be illustrated in the three extracts below. Before turning to these, it is necessary to reflect on the methodological issues raised by first-hand accounts of partition and its aftermath.
The accuracy of memory of partition can be clouded not just by the lengthy passage of time, but by the fact that forgetting and selecting memories from a time of trauma have been strategies necessary for everyday life to continue thereafter. Memories will be individual in that what is forgotten and recollected will vary according to circumstances, both at the time and as a result of subsequent life events. It is however increasingly recognized that there is a strong collective element in personal recollection. Individual memories that do not conform to community historical narratives may be distorted or suppressed. Refuge in a generalized public discourse may of course save the individual from embarrassing personal details. This could be seen, for example, in suppression in line with community notions of honour, of family memories with respect to the sensitive issue of the abduction of women. Individuals may also refer to community discourses rather than personal narratives when they fit better the self-image they wish to cultivate.
Most personal testimonies of refugee resettlement have been recorded with migrants from middle class and above backgrounds.Footnote 40 Indeed there is a parallel here with the documentary record which provides a supposedly uniform refugee experience which is in reality that based on a narrow range of communities, primarily drawn from the Hindu Khatri and Arora castes and the Sikh Jats and Khatris. Few records of interviews exist for the experiences of Chamars, Sunars and Tarkhans, despite their demographic significance within the Punjabi Hindu and Sikh populations.Footnote 41 The upper caste migrants as such were not totally dependent on state provision, but rather possessed the pre-existing skills and contacts that determined the ability to restore the partition losses. It is precisely from these social groups that the tendency to fail to acknowledge state intervention is most pronounced. This is both because of internalization of stereotypes of Punjabi self-sufficiency and because of silences arising from both successes and failures in accessing a corrupt everyday state. It may thus be that the emerging dissonance between state and refugee accounts of resettlement rests in part on the oral sources available to historians.
Oral accounts in sum are as limited and constructed sources for the historian of partition and its aftermath as are documentary records. The omission of details of state assistance in refugee rehabilitation could thus be the result of faulty recall, a desire not to tarnish the community notion of self-reliance, to uphold family pride, or obscure embarrassing details of bribery and use of influence to acquire property. These processes can be seen at work in the extracts below which are representative of a much larger corpus of oral testimony relating to Punjabi refugee rehabilitation in that they omit the role of the state in the process.Footnote 42
The first account is drawn from an interview Ravinder Kaur conducted with Swaram Raj, an elder in a commercial Punjabi Hindu family which had migrated from Lahore to Delhi in 1947. The family had run a successful clothing retail business for over a generation known as Krishan Lal Mehr Chand enterprise. It restarted its business in Delhi with considerable success. Rehabilitation according to the sentiments expressed below apparently owed everything to the family's hard work and God's blessing and nothing to the state's rehabilitation processes.
We never took anything from the government. It is because God has always been kind to us. We bought a shop here and in Benaras and our business took off very well. It was due to the grace of God. We met kind people and everything became alright. Our ancestors’ good karma kept us going.Footnote 43
The extent to which divine intervention is used to explain the restoration of partition-related losses is common in many oral accounts. It reveals not only traits of fatalism and religiosity, but can foreclose what might otherwise become uncomfortable discussion of rehabilitation. Swaram Raj's family did in fact interact with the state and its restored fortunes depended to a much greater degree on this than is initially acknowledged. The family had sufficient wealth to buy a property from a widow in Karol Bagh, a Delhi suburb that had been largely abandoned by Muslims, thereby illustrating that social and commercial capital brought by migrants in this, as in many instances, smoothed the rehabilitation process. Karol Bagh was however designated as a residential, rather than a commercial locality. This meant that the family could not legally trade from the premises with the result that, ‘government officials had been troubling us and were not being helpful’.Footnote 44 The matter was resolved when the traders paid Rs. 16,000 to an influential official whose wife had bought saris from the shop. The shop could then operate as an authorized business. Shortly afterwards, the family's fortunes were further enhanced when the whole locality was declared a commercial area, thereby greatly raising property prices. ‘We had bought (the property) Swaram Raj's nephew recorded in another interview, ‘as a residential property, so we gained immensely from the conversion’.Footnote 45
A similar account of lack of state involvement on the surface emerges from an interview conducted with Sardar Gurcharan Singh Bhatia in Amritsar in November 2002. He was a retired railway official whose family had migrated to India from the Sialkot district of Pakistan in 1947. Before partition the family had considerable landholdings as well as owning a brick kiln business and a commissioning agent shop for foodgrains. In response to a question concerning the government's role in their resettlement, he emphatically replied that they had no assistance, before supplying an almost stereotypical narrative of Punjabi self-reliance.
So we did all sorts of odd jobs, my sisters made shawls, taking materials from the bazaar; for some time I sold home-made soap. We also managed some income by ironing people's clothes, all these menial jobs to survive and earn two meals a day.Footnote 46
Bhatia's family, like numerous other migrants, had brought little with them, in part because of the suddenness of their flight from Pakistan, but also because they were convinced that they would be returning home in a few months, once the violence had died down. Bhatia recalled, ‘The Muslims also said, “This is going to be temporary, for a month or two.”. . . We gave the keys to those Muslims—such were our relations with local Muslims’.Footnote 47 This is a common theme in oral accounts with memories of burying precious items in gardens as well as of temporarily handing over the keys of properties to Muslim neighbours for their safe keeping until return. The strong psychological need to come to terms with their reversal in fortunes, once permanent return became impossible may explain the emphasis such individuals place on their agency in the rehabilitation process.
As with the Lal family in Delhi, this is, however only part of the story. Further on in our interview, Bhatia admitted that their fortunes improved when his father who was a poet got a job with the government radio station at Jullundur, reciting ghazals and when he became employed on the railways. This at first sight appears an odd career development given the family's background. In all probability, however, Bhatia secured his posting under the state reservation scheme for displaced people. The Ministry of Railways agreed in 1948 to reserve 15,000 vacancies in grades III–IV for refugees.Footnote 48 This was one of a number of educational and employment preferences designed to assist refugees. In addition to this state employment, Sardar Gurcharan Singh Bhattia continued, ‘Then our claim was met. And so we gradually picked up’.Footnote 49 Here he is referring to the role of the state in overseeing evacuee property claims in which refugees received compensation for the possessions they had abandoned in Pakistan. In reality, therefore, despite Bhatia's earlier claims that the state had done nothing for them, it had provided both employment and overseen the process of property compensation. This may not have fully restored the family's fortunes, but it could not claim to have been abandoned to its fate. Gurcharan Singh Bhatia's deafening silence with respect to state intervention is however a common rather than an atypical element in first hand accounts of the aftermath of partition.Footnote 50
It is instructive at this point to compare these accounts with that of a Muslim Punjabi migrant to Pakistan. There are fewer oral accounts of the migration experience than have been collected in India. Nevertheless it is clear that the West Punjab state diverted massive resources to refugee rehabilitation and yet despite this, migrants seldom acknowledge its role.Footnote 51 The following interview is typical of the emerging discourse on refugee rehabilitation in Pakistan. The familiar themes of self-reliance and omission of details of state assistance are present. A careful reading between the lines, however, brings the state into view and provides clues regarding its excision from the family memory. Khawaja Zubair, the present day proprietor of the Pak-Punjab Carpet House which occupies a large plot of land just off the Mall in Lahore close by the Governor's House, migrated at the age of 14 with his parents from Amritsar. According to him, the family had been involved in the city's carpet industry for the last ‘five or six generations’. Khawaja Zubair provides evidence of remarkable improvisation with respect to the acquisition of raw materials and capital in order to re-establish business activities in Lahore. The interview again superficially reads as part of the common discourse on Punjabi refugees’ self-reliance in which the state is excluded.
One day an old artisan of my father, Musa Chuha, came to my father and told him that when he migrated from Amritsar he brought with him an unfinished carpet of my father's. If my father could arrange a little wool he would be able to finish it and it would sell for Rs 500 or Rs 600. So my father called an artisan, Mistri Muhammad Din, who used to manufacture looms for my father at Amritsar and asked him to manufacture one for him. This loom was installed in a deserted temple at Gumti Bazaar, inside Lohari Gate. Since there was no woollen factory in Pakistan at that time, my father went to Landa Bazaar and purchased a few woollen sweaters there. My mother unwove them to get the woollen thread. By using cauldrons at home we dyed the thread. And that's how the first carpet of Pakistan was manufactured.Footnote 52
Yet, Government assistance is lurking in the background as in most self-settlement accounts. Earlier in the interview, Khawaja Zubair had revealed that his father had ‘got himself allotted a shop inside Lohari Gate’. This enabled him to restart his business. Further on in the interview, he referred to the setting up of a loom in a deserted Hindu temple in Gumti Bazaar. The sensitivity surrounding the use of abandoned places of worship means that this action could not have gone unnoticed. Both the Indian and Pakistan authorities were keen to avoid accusations of the desecration or misuse of sacred space. Khawaja Zubair's father could only have continued to use the abandoned temple with the acquiescence of the local officials. It is not possible to prove, but is likely that what could have been a lengthy process was expedited either by utilising contacts with longstanding fellow Kashmir residents of Lahore, securing the support of migrant Amritsari Muslim League politicians, or by providing a ‘consideration’ for local officials. Whatever the circumstances, despite the family's narrative of self-reliance, the state and its officials remains an important facilitating influence.
Explanations for the dissonance between state and individual accounts of rehabilitation
A number of possible explanations for the conflicts between state and individual accounts of rehabilitation have already been touched upon. The latter were no less selective and influenced by legitimization needs than the more obviously constructed national discourse. Oral historians have just as much as official accounts tended to present a universalized refugee experience which is in fact drawn from that of a narrow section of the migrant population. This has unintentionally in their case skewed a record which anyway was influenced by family and community psychological needs to present a theme of struggle and self-endeavour. The need to restore a sense of pride and agency was undoubtedly a factor in the passing down of individual experience. Family and community loss of ‘izzat’ (honour) amongst the traumatic events of partition almost necessitated a discourse of self-reliance. It could draw on Orientalist stereotypes of Punjabi enterprise, self-reliance, industry and courage which had been constructed over the hundred years of colonial rule in Censuses, Land Settlement Reports and District Gazeteers. Indeed it was so pervasive that it became internalized by the region's communities. Even official accounts, such as The Story of Rehabilitation which were designed for state legitimization repeated as we have seen these readings of the Punjabi character.
Moreover, many refugees had no choice, but to fend for themselves in the absence of any other support. They thus lived up to the stereotype of self-reliance. In such circumstances, they would have no place for the state in their personal history of recovery. But as we have seen above, those individuals who did receive state support or permission for their activities have not readily acknowledged this fact. There is more to this than merely an alignment of personal memory to community history and a desire to restore izzat. It may also be more than the simple fact that support was deemed insufficient to warrant acknowledgement. Central to understanding these complexities are issues surrounding the power relations between the state and refugees and the corruption which accompanied the rehabilitation process. Suffice it to say that these are hardly acknowledged, either in official accounts or in first hand testimonies.
Recent work on the partition has revealed the extent of the corruption which surrounded the rehabilitation process. The Punjabi migrant historian Raghuvendra Tanwar has declared that,
Attractive statements supported by huge statistics indicating the dimensions of the resettlement efforts were routinely issued, sadly these statements concealed a whole body of corrupt decisions of injustice and unfairness. This trend increased as days and months passed for as long as the resettlement measures continued.Footnote 53
Such an acknowledgement naturally did not find its way into Millions on the Move or The Story of Rehabilitation.
Corruption was a feature of local level administration in the colonial Punjab as elsewhere in India.Footnote 54 It greatly increased during the Second World War in the wake of shortages and state controls of basic commodities such as wheat, sugar rice, kerosene and cloth. Indeed an important element in the Muslim League's rise to power in the Punjab was its exploitation of the grievances of Muslim farmers and townsmen who maintained that the predominantly Hindu-staffed civil supplies department was favouring co-religionists at their expense.Footnote 55 In early 1947, a leading Punjab Muslim League figure, Sir Firoz Khan Noon, warned that such discrimination might result in riots.Footnote 56 Muslim officials were not, however, immune. In May, 1947, Sadat Malik, the Ration and Food Inspector of Gujranwala, was arrested for embezzlement.Footnote 57
Partition brought increased government controls and temptations for officials with the beginnings of what became known later as the ‘licence permit Raj’. The Amritsar Cloth Merchants Association sent telegrams to Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Pratap Singh Kairon, East Punjab's civil supplies minister, in November, 1947 complaining that, ‘Cloth control has brought in its wake nothing except rampant corruption, favouritism and the black market. It has lowered the morality of public and Government servants’.Footnote 58 Most refugees, however, experienced corruption and nepotism with respect to the allotment of the vast amounts of abandoned property, including shops, houses and factories. While some refugees sought to exploit the system by exaggerating their losses in order to receive excessive compensation, the worst abuses involved locals who sought to pass themselves off as refugees, officials who accepted bribes and politicians who tried to lay their hands on property. When the East Punjab Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation, Sardar Ishar Singh Majhail, addressed a press conference in Amritsar on 12 December, 1947, he was forced to admit that members of the Legislative Assembly were attempting to lay their hands on all the factories and workshops’.Footnote 59 The highest profile for corruption was however provided by the West Punjab's first post-independence Prime Minister the Nawab of Mamdot. In April 1950, a bench of the Lahore High Court found him guilty of corruption and abuse of power. These charges related to his acquisition in September 1947 of nearly nineteen-hundred acres of land in the Montgomery district out of evacuee property.Footnote 60
Some indication of the scale of official corruption in East Punjab, can be gleaned from its Pakistan neighbour. The West Punjab Anti-Corruption Department reported in September 1952, that during its three years of operation it had dealt with over 500 cases involving civil servants.Footnote 61 This figure may in fact just be the tip of the iceberg. It is unlikely that incidences were significantly lower on the Indian side of the border. With respect to the latter, in May 1951, for example, four persons working in Amritsar's assistant Custodian of Evacuee Property office were charged with the misappropriation of 12 tolas of gold that had formed part of the property recovered from abandoned Muslim houses. The accused included an advocate and a treasury clerk.Footnote 62
This pervading atmosphere, together with the delays arising from inter-dominion disputes over the value of abandoned property, made the processes of securing compensation traumatically long-winded. When cases were resolved, it was often so late in the day that a sense of resentment towards the state was more prevalent than one of gratitude. This may explain at least in part the silence of refugees with respect to the compensatory processes involving abandoned evacuee property. On the other hand, those who were politically well connected could speed through the bureaucratic process and turn the prevailing dislocation to their advantage. Hints of this are provided in the accounts by the Lal family of Karolbagh, Delhi. But again in such ‘irregular’ circumstances, there may be a reluctance to acknowledge state intervention. What is more difficult to explain is the silence which lies at the heart of accounts like Sardar Charan Singh Bhatia, when state support also took the form of employment preference.
Ravinder Kaur has intriguingly raised the issue of Untouchable perceptions in her work on Punjabi resettlement in Delhi. There, as elsewhere, the state treated Untouchables as forming a separate refugee category. Chamar migrants from Lahore were provided with mud huts in a pre-existing Harijan colony called Rehgar Pura near Karol Bagh. ‘They were, as was the norm, given jobs as sweepers with the municipality or encouraged to set up shop as shoemakers’.Footnote 63 Thus maintenance of the traditional caste hierarchy was accompanied by poorer provision of facilities. Untouchables were at the bottom of the pecking order when it came to both accommodation and employment preferences for refugees. Nevertheless, although the assistance they received from the state was ‘paltry’, it was the first time that they had received any systematic support. In their testimonies, ‘the credit for their social and economic success is duly given to the government. This is something that is often avoided by the upper caste Hindus since it challenges the myth of their own role in successful refugee resettlement’.Footnote 64 More research is required. Nonetheless, the evidence which is emerging is that those Punjabi refugees who received the poorest state provision are in fact most likely in their testimonies to reproduce the official state discourse on resettlement as it is provided in such narratives as Millions on the Move and The Story of Rehabilitation.
Conclusion
The refugee problem threatened social order and the dislocation of caste, class and gender hierarchies. For this reason the early post-independence Indian state devoted considerable resources to deal with the situation in its most acute form involving Punjabi migrants. It also sought to legitimize itself in dealing with the humanitarian issues arising from mass migration. The securing of moral authority through the rehabilitation process was significant, given the earlier failure to protect minority rights and the complicity of officials in the massacres which sparked the migrations. The production of official accounts such as The Story of Rehabilitation was crucial to this legitimization process. While such writings produced a standardized account of refugee experience which diverges from a far more complex reality, they were not merely rhetorical productions, given the large amount of resources devoted at national and state level with respect to the Punjab refugee crisis.
The recent emergence of oral based accounts has provided a diametrically opposing narrative of the rehabilitation process in which the state is conspicuously absent. Both psychological needs and the restoration of community pride called for understandings which played down state agency and emphasized personal autonomy. The colonially constructed stereotype of Punjabi pride, courage and self-reliance provided a ‘myth’ with which to inform first hand accounts. At the same time, the culture of corruption encouraged the silences surrounding the state in personal narratives. It reduced the effectiveness of state provision for many refugees. Simultaneously its existence created embarrassment for those who flourished in this environment through their utilization of wealth and political connections. The temptation to hide these personal details by passing down a community influenced memory of self-reliance cannot be overlooked by oral historians.
Finally it is important to acknowledge that the overwhelming upper class character of oral testimonies may have exaggerated the downsizing of the state's role in the ‘history from beneath’ of rehabilitation. Wealthier refugees were not only more likely to buy into the Punjabi myths of self-reliance, but to have the most to hide in terms of their dealings with the state. Poor migrants on the contrary had little power or ability to access the state on their own terms. They were, to put it bluntly, in no position to bribe officials to ease the rehabilitation process. Yet, however ‘paltry’ and discriminatory was the state's response to their needs, it represented, especially for Untouchables, a radical break with the past. They had nothing to lose by acknowledging their gratitude for this assistance. It is thus likely that if further recovery of the Untouchable experience of the aftermath of partition is undertaken, the yawning chasm between the official and first hand accounts of the rehabilitation process may be somewhat narrowed.
