Project MUSE - from The Other Side of Silence. From Chapter One. The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history. Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan. By far, the largest proportion of these refugees—more than ten million of them—crossed the western border that divided the historic state of Punjab, Muslims travelling west to Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east to India. Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted these movements; many people died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 2. British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate), but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always, there was widespread sexual savagery: about 7. Thousands of families were divided, homes destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned. Astonishingly, and despite many warnings, the new governments of India and Pakistan were unprepared for the convulsion: they had not anticipated that the fear and uncertainty created by the drawing of borders based on headcounts of religious identity—so many Hindus versus so many Muslims—would force people to flee to what they considered . People travelled in buses, in cars, by train, but mostly on foot. Called kafilas, the great columns of people could stretch for dozens of miles. The longest of them, said to comprise nearly 4. India from western Punjab, took as many as eight days to pass any given spot on its route. This is the generality of Partition: it exists publicly in history books. The particular is harder to discover; it exists privately in the stories told and retold inside so many households in India and Pakistan. The people on the other side are moving. Source:www.sageramana.org . I grew up with them: like many Punjabis of my generation, I am from a family of Partition refugees. Memories of Partition, the horror and brutality of the time, the harking back to an often mythical past in which Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs lived together in relative peace and harmony—these have formed the. My mother and father come from Lahore, a city that is loved and sentimentalized by its inhabitants and that lies only twenty miles inside the Pakistan border. My mother tells of the dangerous journeys she twice made back there to bring her younger brothers and sister to India. My father remembers fleeing Lahore to the sound of guns and crackling fire. I would listen to these stories with my brothers and sister and barely take them in. We were middle- class Indians who had grown up in a period of relative calm and prosperity, when tolerance and . These stories—of looting, arson, rape, murder—came out of a different time. They meant little to me. Then, in October 1. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her security guards, both Sikhs. For days afterwards, Sikhs all over India were attacked in an orgy of violence and revenge. The Other Side of Silence (Critical Survey of Contemporary Fiction) print Print. With the sanction of other European powers. Title: The Other Side Of Silence Author: Stephan Freytag Subject: the other side of silence Keywords: Read Online the other side of silence, the other side of silence PDF, Download the other side of silence Created Date. From Chapter One The political. Women’s Voices from Kashmir and The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Many homes were destroyed, and thousands died. In the outlying suburbs of Delhi, more than three thousand were killed, often by being doused in kerosene and then set alight. They died horrible, macabre deaths. Black burn marks on the ground showed where their bodies had lain. The government—after Mrs. Gandhi's death, headed by her son Rajiv—remained indifferent, but several citizens' groups came together to provide relief, food, and shelter. I was among the hundreds of people who worked in these groups. Every day, while we were distributing food and blankets, compiling lists of the dead and missing, and helping with compensation claims, we listened to the stories of the people who had suffered. Often, older people who had come to Delhi as refugees in 1. The stories of Partition no longer seemed quite so remote: people from the same country, the same town, the same village could still be divided by the politics of their religious differences and, once divided, could do terrible things to each other. Two years later, working on a film about Partition for a British television channel, I began to collect stories from its survivors. Many of these accounts were horrific and of a kind that, when I was younger and heard them second or third hand, I had found hard to believe: women jumping into wells to drown themselves so as to avoid rape or forced religious conversion; fathers beheading their own sons and daughters so the children would avoid the same dishonourable fate. Now I was hearing them from witnesses whose bitterness, rage, and hatred—which, once uncovered, could be frightening—told me they were speaking the truth. Their stories affected me deeply. Nothing as cruel and bloody had happened in my own family so far as I knew, but I began to realize that Partition. 1/2 The Other Side Of Silence THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE PDF If you want to have a destination search and find the appropriate manuals for your products, you can visit this website providing you with many The Other Side Of. Title: Other Side Of Silence Author: Tanja Hueber Subject: other side of silence Keywords: Read Online other side of silence, other side of silence PDF, Download other side of silence Created Date: 20160904030050-04'00'. It falls more into the category of intellectual discussion rather than practical 'how to' guide. The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Springin. Rachel Carson and Animals. The Other Side of Silence: Rachel Carson’s Views of Animals. The other side of silence ted allbeury 9780583133890 The divisions were there in everyday life, as were their contradictions: how many times have I heard my parents, my grandmother speak with affection and longing of their Muslim friends in Lahore, and how many times with irrational prejudice about . I could no longer pretend that this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else. Even as I say this, it sounds strange to me. As a feminist, I have been only too aware, sometimes painfully so, of the need to fold back several layers of history (or of what we see as fact) before one can begin to arrive at a different, more complex ? Perhaps it was because the initial assumption I brought to my search was a simple one: the history of Partition, as I knew it, made no mention of women. As a woman and as a feminist, I would set out to . That would, in a sense, . There are, of course, no complete pictures. This I know now: everyone who makes one draws it afresh. Each time, retrospectively, the picture changes: who you are, where you come from, who you're talking to, when you talk, where you talk, what you listen to, what people choose to tell you—all of these affect the picture you draw. I realized, for example, that if it had been difficult for . To whom would they have spoken? Who would have listened? I realized too that something I had not taken into account was that, in order to be able to . The men seldom spoke about women. Women almost never spoke about themselves; indeed, they denied they had anything . Or, quite often, they simply weren't there to speak to. And what right did I, a stranger, an outsider, have to go around digging into their lives, forcing them to look back to a. Especially when I knew that the histories I wanted to know about were ones of violence, rape, murder. For a while, then, I held back from speaking to women: there were so many layers of silence encoded into these histories, I told myself, that perhaps I could make my exploration by looking elsewhere—surely I would still be uncovering some of the silences. I turned therefore to some of the very . Newspaper accounts, a memoir, and other sources helped me to piece together a story: a story of love and of hate, a story of four lives and two nations, a story that brought me back to the histories of women—the story of Zainab and Buta Singh. Zainab was said to have been abducted as a young Muslim girl while her family was on the move to Pakistan in a kafila. No one knows who her abductors were or how many hands she passed through, but eventually she was sold to a Jat from Amritsar district, Buta Singh. Like many men who either abducted women themselves or bought them, Buta Singh performed the . The story goes that, in time, the two came to love each other. They had a family: two young girls. Several years after Partition, a search party on the lookout for abducted women traced Zainab to Amritsar, where she was living with Buta Singh. It was suspected that Buta Singh's brother—or his nephews—had informed the search party of Zainab's whereabouts. Apparently, their concern was that Buta Singh's children would deprive them of the family property, that their share would be reduced. Like many women who were thus . She was forced to leave. Newspaper reports describe the scene as a poignant one: the entire village had assembled to see her off. She came slowly out of her house, carrying her child and clutching a small bundle of clothes. Her belongings were stowed in a jeep, and as she boarded it, she turned to Buta Singh and, pointing to her elder daughter, is reported to have said, . Her parents had been killed, but the family had received grants of land in Lyallpur as compensation for property they had left behind in Indian Punjab. Zainab and her sister had received their father's share, and an uncle had been allotted the adjoining piece. Rumour had it that it was he who had been the moving spirit behind Zainab's rescue: he was keen the land remain in his family, and he wanted that Zainab, when found, should marry his son, which would then ensure the property would remain with them. The son had no interest in marrying Zainab, and as the story is told, he was reluctant in part because she had lived for many years with a Sikh. Discussion on this issue went on in the family for some time, and Buta Singh occasionally received snippets of news from neighbours and others who kept him informed. Meanwhile, Buta Singh pleaded his case wherever possible—but to no avail. He tried to go to Pakistan, but this was difficult. One day he received. Zainab's family, it seemed, was pressing her to marry. Buta Singh sold off his land and put together some money, but he had not bargained for the difficulties of travel between the two countries. He needed a passport and a visa, for which he travelled to Delhi. Here, he first took the step of converting to Islam, thinking perhaps that it would be easier to get to Pakistan as a Muslim. Buta Singh thus became Jamil Ahmed. And he applied for a passport and a nationality: Pakistani. If that was what would get him to Zainab, that was what he would do. But acquiring a new country, especially in a situation of the kind that obtained at the time, was not easy.
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