Partition: Bahawalpuris' long journey to Rajpura

Sarika Sharma

SHAMDU. If only signboards could tell history, those travelling by GT Road would marvel at the stories of despair, hope and success lived by its people in the last seven decades.

Just off the highway on the outskirts of Rajpura, 28 km from Patiala, the signboard leads you to not one but two Shamdus — one, oddly named Shamdu Camp, home to Dakaut Brahmins knocking at your car asking for ‘Shani daan’ every Saturday. The other is Shamdu, the old village, the bylanes of which are oblivious to the struggles the settlers lived through as they fled from Bahawalpur in Pakistan 75 summers ago. A few, though, live to tell the tale.

The mobs had turned murderous, with Hindus and Sikhs being targeted in the newly created Pakistan. People were fleeing to India in trains, on carts, and even on foot, reaching the makeshift camps set up by the Indian government for the biggest human migration in history.

Summering in the UK at the time of Partition, Sadiq Mohammad Khan, Nawab of Bahawalpur state, had appealed to his people to not leave; the urban areas had been particularly peaceful. The richest princely state in the region, pre-Partition Bahawalpur was spread over 45,000 sq km, its border touching Rajasthan and Punjab; Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalnagar were the two district headquarters. It had a population of 20 lakh. Of these, 83 per cent were Muslims, 13 per cent Hindus and the rest Sikhs and Christians among the minorities. Inhabiting urban areas, the Hindus, mostly traders and shopkeepers, were considered prosperous. Most Sikhs were based in villages.

As signs of trouble started showing in August, Hindus and Sikhs decided to leave. The worst attack on the minorities took place on September 26. A convoy of 2,000 Sikhs which had left Bhattian camp in Rahim Yar Khan district was attacked; only about 650 are said to have survived. Constantly in touch with the Maharaja of Patiala, the Nawab asked him if his people could settle in his lands. “My father and the Bahawalpur Nawab were very close. The two decided that the Bahawalpuris would come here and the Muslims from Patiala would go to Bahawalpur. They would be escorted by our armed guards till the border, where after the Bahawalpur guards took them to safety and vice-versa,” says Capt Amarinder Singh, son of the erstwhile Maharaja of Patiala, Yadavindra Singh. They were settled at refugee camps organised at Maharani Mohinder Kaur’s farm in Hirabagh, the royal race course that is today’s Tripuri locality in Patiala, and Shamdu in Rajpura. The Maharani was to play a major role in the rehabilitation, providing food and health facilities.

The Nawab returned to Bahawalpur only on October 1, and by late November, most Hindus and Sikhs had left for India, some reaching Patiala, others beginning new lives in cities, towns and villages along the border states. A few moved further on in search of ‘home’.

A new township for refugees at Rajpura was not on the Government of India’s plans. Author Horace Alexander, in his book ‘New Citizens of India’, writes, “This was only the site of a temporary camp where the Bahawalpuris were concentrated on their arrival in India.” That perhaps explains the anxiousness Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had expressed in a letter on March 20, 1949. Communicating with Union Minister of Rehabilitation Mohanlal Saksena, he brought to his notice “a rather urgent matter” — the Bahawalpuris in Kurukshetra (where the government was sending Bahawalpuris of Punjabi extraction) and Rajpura camps.

“It is not quite clear who is responsible for the Rajpura camp, the East Punjab Government, or Patiala State, or the Centre. It appears that the East Punjab Government is not prepared to do much about it. Patiala State can hardly be expected to do anything. The result is that inevitably the Centre has to move in the matter,” he wrote. It is likely that when the Maharaja of Patiala set up a refugee camp for Bahawalpuris at Shamdu in Rajpura, many more began joining their community.

Nehru’s letter had been a result of direct intervention by Bibi Amtus Salam, a disciple of Gandhiji, who had taken upon herself the task of resettling refugees in Rajpura. And throughout the phase of resettlement, she, along with Rameshwari Nehru, honorary director of the Women’s Section of the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, and educationist Lajjawati Hooja, kept going back to Nehru whenever the situation turned desperate.

Meanwhile, the Rajpura camp had been swarming with refugees whose numbers were so huge that they had to battle water and food scarcity. Nehru mentions both challenges in the letter. Stories of those hard days have been passed on from one generation to another.

With no food and no work, Chetan Ahuja and his three brothers would go looking for coal left after refuelling of the trains along the railway line, gather whatever they could from the coal dust to sell to the halwai for Rs 2-3, and buy food for the family, that included his parents and two sisters.

From 4,735 in the 1941 census to 23,310 in 1951, Rajpura’s population had risen dramatically, courtesy the Bahawalpuris. Today, nearly 70,000 live here, besides those at Tripuri in Patiala, times and fortunes having changed for most.

Ahuja, now 84, owns one of Punjab’s most famous furniture houses, his business spread over various towns of the state and Haryana. He was 10 at the time of Partition. It has been 75 years, but some memories never leave him. How his father’s Muslim friends came to drop them off at the railway station, the dismembered bodies in the house near Abohar where they thought of settling first, the karah prasad they partook of at Ambala on Baisakhi in 1948, the days they went hungry, settling at Khanna, where floods forced them to leave and relocate to Rajpura, this time for good.

Shamlal Anand (85), too, is a successful businessman, “one of the richest” in Rajpura. He was in Class V at Dera Nawab Khan during Partition, but the family did not move out until December. “The Nawab had requested us not to go. But when a Hindu house was set on fire, we decided to migrate. It was all okay until we reached the last station in Bahawalpur, McLeodganj, in a goods train. Muslim goons had been robbing entire trains and all our savings and jewellery were gone. We, 10 of my family and 50 others, got down at Abohar and occupied a deserted Muslim home.” But since there was no work, Anand family moved to Alwar and set up an atta chakki. “The local traders looked down upon us, belittled us for being refugees. We couldn’t take water from the same well too.” A year later, the family came to the Kurukshetra camp and in 1951, to Rajpura. “Rulde hoye aaye si, but we worked hard. The rich Bahawalpuris couldn’t rise here, it is the small industrious ones that did,” he says. Anand himself started out as a daily-wager, worked as a commission agent in Rajpura mandi, set up a pipe factory, travelling 500 km a day sometimes for marketing his products, and now runs many businesses.

Businessman Purshottam Alreja, whose family came here in 1948, tells how, competing with the local baniyas settled near the railway station, Bahawalpuris would sell sugar and ghee at cost price, the profit coming from the sale of empty bags and tins sold to the bardana and scrap dealers.

Meanwhile, a skill centre, beside Bibi Amtus Salam’s Kasturba Sewa Mandir, offered the refugees training in carpentry, soap-making, weaving khadi, candle-making, China ware, handmade paper, etc.

In the last 75 years, this place has turned from a refugee town to an industrial town, courtesy the Rajpura Development Board, which was replaced by Pepsu Development Board that is still responsible for development of the town along with Tripuri. Incentives for industry brought jobs through special schemes. Rajpura today spreads as much to the left of GT Road as it does to the right. But at the time of Independence, it was a small railway station, thinly populated, its land uncultivable, thorny kikkar trees dominating the landscape, a biscuit factory being the only major enterprise. However, this is the story of Rajpura town where urban Bahawalpuris settled. Around 150 families also live in Shamdu village; sarpanch Varsha Rani is a Bahawalpuri.

At the village, Murli Ram, who was 10 in 1947, is one of the few surviving Partition witnesses. Like most Bahawalpuris, his family came to India by train, were robbed of all belongings at McLeodganj, lived in Abohar for a year, at the Kurukshetra camp for another, Faridkot for a year-and-a-half, Jalandhar next and moved to Rajpura only when it was announced that Bahawalpuris who settle here would be given land. However, Murli Ram says many of those who came with him left soon after because the land was uncultivable. He, though, still cultivates the 8 acres the family got. Those who moved further away from the town got 12 acres.

In his book ‘Out of the Ashes’, Director-General of Rehabilitation MS Randhawa shares how rural Bahawalpuris were settled at Shamdu and around and given lands and homes abandoned by the Muslims who left for Pakistan. The urban populace was given homes in the new town. A 100-yard plot had a room, kitchen, bathroom and verandah.

Today, Rajpura has become the ‘rajdhani’ for Bahawalpuris scattered across the country — Delhi, Ranchi in Jharkhand, Dhulia, Kalyan and Thane in Maharashtra, Surat in Gujarat (where many shifted before Partition and are in garment business), Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, as also several places in Punjab, including Tripuri, Bassi Pathana, Samana, Abohar, Fazilka and Amritsar, and Sonepat, Kurukshetra and Karnal in Haryana. Besides the resilient genes, people credit Mahashay Shanti Prakash, the first MLA from the community, followed by the late Raj Khurana. A three-time MLA, Khurana organised a Bahawalpur Mahapanchayat in Haridwar in 1993, which was attended by around 10,000 community members. He also gave them Bahawalpur Bhawan. Today, his son Tarun Khurana is director of Bahawalpur Bhawan and Kasturba Sewa Mandir.

A tightly knit community, Bahawalpuris prefer to marry among themselves, which has seen a change of late. The elders know this is inevitable, but there are newer challenges — retaining the culture and language. “The young feel ashamed of speaking Bahawalpuri, a variation of Seraiki (also spoken by Sindhis and Multanis),” says Alreja, who, along with others, has been trying to develop a script of the language.

There are not many of them anymore but most from the generation that witnessed Partition have a burning desire to go back to Bahawalpur one last time. Chetan Ahuja says he can reach his home without a guide. Murli Ram, 85, strains his ears to listen, but his eyes glint at any mention of Bahawalpur. Shamdu is home, but that was home too. 

Counting the dead

According to GD Khosla, former Chief Justice of the then Punjab High Court and chairman of the fact-finding commission on events of Partition, of a total of 2.5 lakh non-Muslims, only 70,000 were left alive in Bahawalpur. “Between 70,000-80,000 migrated to India and the rest (1 lakh) could not be accounted for. They had either perished in the mass massacres or had been forcibly converted to Islam,” he writes in his book ‘Stern Reckoning’.

Food trail

Like language, Bahawalpuri food is distinct too. Deepak Kumar from Shamdu says his teachers would say, ‘You eat lakkad and phool ki sabji’, referring to the bheesan (lotus stem) that was rustled up as both sabzi and pakore and sehjan flowers, respectively. Sohan halwa is a rich winter delicacy.

I still remember my father’s Muslim friends coming to the railway station to bid us goodbye. It was such an emotional moment. — Chetan Ahuja

Rulde hoye aaye si, but we worked very hard. The rich Bahawalpuris could not rise here, it is only the small industrious ones that did. — Shamlal Anand

In pre-Partition times, our family was into trade of fabrics. My Dadaji would come to Safdarjung in Delhi to buy stuff and sell in Bahawalpur. — Tarun Khurana

Many of those who came to Shamdu with me left soon after because the land was uncultivable. It was a jungle and had kikkar trees all around. — Murli Ram

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.