Fighting for freedom, running for life and finally settling down:One woman's story

The first time she heard the word “Pakistan” was during a train journey from to Lahore in 1945 or 1946. By the months leading up to August 1947, buildings being set on fire had become a daily sight, Mrs. Vats recalls. Around 20 years old at the time, she was a freedom fighter, and had once gone to the railway station at the height of the Quit India Movement in 1942 to board a train to Hyderabad in response to Mahatma Gandhi's call to fill up jails across the country.

While she was unable to find her way then to what constitutes India’s geography today, since her brother found out about her plan and brought her back home just as she was leaving, going there was an eventual inevitability. Just before India attained its independence, in around June 1947, Mrs. Vats and other children in the family were sent away to Jalandhar to live with her elder sister and her husband. In Jalandhar, Mrs. Vats witnessed so much gruesome violence and suffering that she did not feel like eating her meals.

They eventually moved to Shimla, the new capital of Indian Punjab, where his office was re-located. But it was not easy for her parents to let go their old life. It started with disbelief. Her father thought that it was only a matter of time before law and order would be restored, and had no intention of leaving Lahore. He had property and savings he had built over a lifetime, and he therefore, stayed back in Lahore for two more months after August 1947. During these two months, he lived inside the office building where he worked, since the mobs could not attack it.

Her mother also suffered during these two months. She would often lose her concentration while cooking rotis and end up burning her fingers, which would continue for a few years after the Partition.

In Shimla, the family moved into a government accommodation. Life in Shimla was tough, she says. The family did not have money to buy enough warm clothes for the city’s cold winter, although the situation improved when her father received compensation from the government. Her elder brother, who had earlier joined the British Indian government in Multan also moved to Shimla, which helped the family.

But it was one thing to find some financial stability, quite another to come to terms with what had just happened to their lives. Her father was deeply grieved by the loss of a lifetime’s worth of property and savings, as his retirement was nearing and he had to provide for his children.

Eventually, though, fate had a way of moving everyone on, for the better. After her marriage, Mrs. Vats has lived in Shimla, Nagpur, Bikaner, and finally Ajmer where her husband retired in the 1980s. She currently resides with her son, daughter-in-law and grandsons in Ajmer, Rajasthan.

The original version of this article was initially published in The 1947 Partition Archive 

To know more about 1947 Partition Archive, visit their website here