is the most fake person i have met online, moin mian naam tho correct dho

regarding sucide by hindus and sikh women u will never understand, what they went thru in west punjab

I know this post is old but I didn’t see this before so I’ll comment, maybe it’ll help. My grandmother (from the Gujrat district of Punjab in Pakistan) always says the same type of stuff about the village my family is from (incidentally, the village my family is from, halfway between Rawalpindi and Lahore, was historically prone to raids by Pashtun people from NWFP and Afghanistan during the winter time, so the outsiders in this case are the Pashtun people of her day, they also took over the village during those horrible partition days and did pretty horrific things to many of the Punjabi Muslims in the village too, but Hindu’s and Sikh’s got the worst of it because they were outright forced to leave). She says everyone was like a family, but there were also some boundaries between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindu’s (i.e – no intermarriage, don’t step in someone else’s kitchen, but all the kids in the village went to the same school etc). Also, caste, as oppressive as it can be in some instances, had alot to do with village harmony, everyone from my family’s village, regardless of religion, was Gujjar, and this tended to be the binding tie, even if you weren’t from the same religion, you belonged to the Bradri, or, if I translate this into english, its something like “Caste Brotherhood” or “Greater Family”.

My family ended up being on the “right” side of the border, but many of the Sikhs and Hindu’s didn’t and therefore had to leave, but before they left, they asked my family to put all of their gold and jewelry in a safe place for them so they didn’t have to take it on the train to India. My grandmother says this was a really emotional event and everyone wept and sobbed over it alot. When a few years passed, my great-grandfather went to India and delivered it to them. Many of them settled in Kanpur. Up until my great-grandparent’s deaths, and before the mass exodus of my family and community from Pakistan to North America, many of the Hindu and Sikh’s kept in very close contact with my family and often wrote letters of longing for the good old days. Everyone blamed the “outsiders” and to this day my grandmother trusts only Punjabi’s (she’s happier if they are also Gujjar). After partition, people of different castes settled in my family’s village, and my grandmother says there was alot of resentment between the newcomers and old settlers, regardless of the fact that they were all Muslim. The newcomers came mostly from Jalandhar, and the ones that were upper castes took alot of the village property, while the old settlers saw their influence in the village erode.

I’ve always wondered where the children of the Hindu’s and Sikhs who were once part of my family’s village are, and how they are doing.

I mean..i never had any idea about the misery that people faced during partition. I m a hindu from India(UP).My origins are totally from U.P. and have no connection with Pakistan what so ever.

But its so terrible to listen about all those who faced this tragedy. I know that nothing can be done for those who are dead but atleast for those who are alive,

if there is anything that we can do..we will do… I dont know about others but i am in.

In todays world, people go psychic by mere carreer threats and these people…they faced something that cant be described in any language…

How strong must these people be….

On a personal note…I believe its a disgust to know that womens were raped and murdered… because i believe that whatever fight it is, however big it is…

womens shall be shown all the respect…

yeah if offcourse you are not a coward…you will show respect..

but i guess we ahd too many cowards during that time that behaved in such an inhuman way…

Curse them ….Seriously curse those bastards…..

You are doing a remarkable ‘sewa’. Where are you located…? We are doing a huge projct on this subject. The first phase has already rolled out with an exhibition on sikhism that was inaugurated at Gurudwara Bangala Sahib.

Please visit http://defenders-of-dharma.blogspot.com/

Warm regards

Gautam Vig

I do think that amongst most Asian cultures, there is this “get over it” feeling. Ask a Chinese person who was alive during the Sino-Japanese War. Stories of atrocities during that time are met with similar “get over it” reactions. It’s considered gauche and futile, or wrong, to recount bad times.

Also, Punjabis fleeing during Partition at least could go to Punjab (albeit the other side of Punjab). No part of Sindh came to India, the fleeing Hindu Sindhis settled in alien (to them) places like Gujarat and Bombay, where it was hard to preserve their heritage. Granted that no one was thinking of preserving culture in the immediate post-Partition milieu.

sandhya, thanks so much for the text reference. This description was strikingly similar to stories within my family. I could be wrong, but I suspect that my grandparents’ silence is one of tremendous grief. I think they relive their experiences, however horrific, each time they hear the phrase. I wonder how much of this is PTSD or some other psychological coping mechanism — I think they remember, but even describing what happened is too awful for them.

Folks, this is how things get repeated – this is also why documenting the various communal killings in india/pakistan/bangladesh continues to be so important – whether the appalling massacre of innocent sikhs in 84 or the expulsion of kashmiri hindus in the 90s or the gujrat violence against the innocent muslims of ahmedabad in 92 – we need to create systems of governance that can deal with this phenomenon and we can never understand them if we dont document them and try to get justice for the targets of violence.

The violence of the indian partition is NOT an isolated or unique phenomemon. It is instead a particularly ugly form of south asian politics, its been around for a long time and will continue to flourish until we expose its root dynamics and create education and systems to counteract it…