Recording memories of a lost culture

Sarika Sharma

As we commemorate 70 years of the Partition of India and continue to hear more and more stories of pain, there are so many that will go unheard, or rather untold. But not Shakunt Nanda’s. Her daughter, Delhi-based Reena Nanda, has fulfilled her wish of saving her memories — of not just what was her personal loss, but of an entire culture that fell apart — in her book, From Quetta to Delhi.

Nanda was one of the founding members of the Conservation Society Delhi and conducted heritage walks in Mehrauli, Nizamuddin and Red Fort in the 1980s and 1990s. But her love for all things sepia-tinted seems to have come from her mother’s realisation of the importance of history and culture that evolves over centuries, but is sadly destroyed by a few lines on a map.

The author says that the aim of the book is recording her mother’s recollections of her life that encompassed Quetta, Jhang, Lahore and Delhi. “She wanted me to write down her descriptions of Punjabi customs because they would be forgotten. Her idea of Partition was different from others; she carried memories of love and tried to forget the bad ones.”

Punjabi folk songs and idioms are as fundamental to the book as to a Punjabi household of that time. When Shakunt’s grandfather made the decision to move to Quetta from Jhang, her grandmother vehemently opposed it, saying ‘Jeda sukh Chajju de chhabare, oh na Balkh na Bukhare’ (the comforts of one’s hearth are not to be found in either Balkh or Bukhara).

Baba Farid and Gurbani were easily quoted in Shakunt’s house:

Dekh parayee chopdi, na tarsayeen jee,

Rukhi missi khake thanda paani pi.

(Do not have heartburn and envy looking at the buttered rotis of others. Eat your own dry roti with cold water.)

When the kids in the house would chatter in English, Shakunt’s grandmother would often rattle off the rhyme ‘ABC, tu kithe gaiye si, Main London Queen nu vaikhan gaiye si!’ The verse is still popular in Punjabi households.

The artless prayer expressing the practical and simple nature of the Punjabi peasant was commonly heard:

Ram mera beli

Mainu paade ucchi haveli

Mainu paade majhaan gaawaan

Behnaan Ram nu naan visarnan

(Ram, you are my friend. Bless me with a big house. Bless me with cows and buffaloes. Sisters never forsake Ram)

The folk idioms and songs were passed down by Shakunt to the author, who feels the book can be an introduction to Punjabi culture for the younger generation as not many books in English are devoted to Punjab.

And Punjabi, Nanda says, was a way of life in their house even after they shifted to Delhi. Her mother told them stories about the customs and rituals of birth, marriage and the siapa relating to death, other customary laws of relations between sexes outside legalised marriage like flirtations, often liaisons, between devar and bhabhi and jija and saali. “The institution of sautan shows that Punjabi society accepted that men were non-monogamous. Traditions of hospitality and generosity to strangers were sacrosanct as was also the relationship with the gwandi (neighbour), no matter whether he was of the same religion,” she says.

Nanda’s generation may have been too young to understand Partition, but she feels the “generation of deracinated Punjabis” is the victim. She feels the Partition also changed the Punjabi way of life. In the afterword of the book, she says that the modernity that Punjabis have embraced has “no foundations” and is “hollow”. “I cannot identify with it. I am at a crossroads; I do not know who I am, having lost all sense of Selfhood and Community. Today I ask, as Bulleh Shah did, ‘Bulleh ki janan main kaun?’ (Bulleh, who am I?)”