Father lost in violence, Dr Iqbal Kaur Soundh recalls Partition trauma in writings

Neeraj Bagga

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, August 14

An 85-year-old Dr Iqbal Kaur Soundh has not forgotten the horrors of Partition which scarred the country and uprooted families. Retired from Guru Nanak Dev University where she was on the panel of Bhagat Namdev Chair, Dr Soundh deftly wrote about traumatic stories of the Partition in books for the posterity to preserve with the underlying message of not to tread the path of communalism.

Her book “Batwara” poignantly essays the pangs of the Partition while her edited book “Budhe Theh Di Hook” (hook means voice of agony) contains 35 stories by an equal number of writers on the subject of the Partition. The book includes her one story while Sujan Singh’s “Manukh Ate Pashu” won widespread accolades.

As a nine-year-old living in Chajjalwadi village along with her six siblings and parents, the year 1947 caused a personal agony she could not forget for the rest of her life. People from her own community brutally killed her father Gahal Singh for standing up for the Muslims of his native village.

The memories of her father holding a lantern to escort the distressed Muslims to a safe location like the camp set up at Khalchian village on Jarnali Sadak (as GT Road was then popularly called) from where trucks used to ferry them to Pakistan are still fresh in her mind. She recalls that one night a Muslim was killed in their village. She recalled the presence of Bebe Umri who used to ask the non-Muslims of her village: “Does this country belong to you or not?”

She recalled that several kiosks came up at Tangra village where people sold potable water to refugees to earn a living. A childless Nambardar in her village had got hold of a teenage girl from a “Kafila”. After her continuous sobbing and persuasion, the Nambardar allowed her to return to her family.

Dr Iqbal Kaur Soundh saw families packing their bags in the darkness of night, heading to refugee camps to catch the next truck, bus and train to reach their new country Pakistan, while they left behind their houses in which they had lived for generations.