“When you are forced
to leave what has been your family’s home…the place where you were born and
made to think is yours forever, you remain a refugee for the rest of your life.
It never goes away.” says Maryam Babar, recounting her story from the 1947
partition of India. Maryam was born in 1941 in Hyderabad, Deccan to a
Scottish-Indian family. Her father was a landlord and her family was related to
the then prime minister of Hyderabad.
The
first few years of her life were perhaps trouble free. “In the summers, our
beds would be covered in jasmine flowers to keep the room fragrant and cool”
she recalls. Even a secure childhood up to that point, and a well-placed family
could, however, not insulate Maryam from the shadow of the partition. While
initially, after the partition, she and her siblings were in Scotland with their mother, the new
situation began to sink in when she returned to India in 1949. She recounts hearing news of ‘police action’ and of
‘Hyderabad going under siege,’ as well as “horror stories of...havoc, raping,
killing, and looting.”
But things truly came home when thousands of rioters gathered around the building while Maryam and her family were inside. She recalls her mother speaking to her father about carrying a pistol with her, not to defend the family against the mobs, but to kill her children in case the mob reached them. By later that year, her family felt that conditions had become too unsafe for them, and they moved via Bombay and London, finally to Karachi.
But things truly came home when thousands of rioters gathered around the building while Maryam and her family were inside. She recalls her mother speaking to her father about carrying a pistol with her, not to defend the family against the mobs, but to kill her children in case the mob reached them. By later that year, her family felt that conditions had become too unsafe for them, and they moved via Bombay and London, finally to Karachi.
To
her child’s mind, however, it was not as if they were leaving their country to
be in another one, only that they were going to settle in Karachi. It was
probably not so easy for some of the grownups to re-settle in Karachi, though. “[My
father] took giving up his homeland as something that was inevitable and he
strongly believed in letting go of the inevitable. My mother on the other hand,
couldn’t get over it all her life. She used to compare each and every aspect of
life in Karachi with what we used to have in Hyderabad” says Maryam.
There
were no traumatic geographical shifts after that, though, she did live
elsewhere. She met and married her future husband in 1960 at
Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. But fate finally brought her again to India in
1992, after travelling to a number of other countries with her husband, who was
a diplomat. In 1996, she settled in Peshawar permanently, started her own farming
business thereafter and continues to manage it today.
No
matter how widely you travel, or how long you live elsewhere, though; the roots
are a strong pull. “I’m living in a home that I absolutely love but I’ll always
know that this is not where my roots are.” Says Maryam.
The original version of this article was initially published in The 1947 Partition Archive
No comments:
Post a Comment