There are moments in life when everything seems to mysteriously point you in a specific direction and you start wondering if maybe some cosmic force is at work.
I have been listening (I should say entranced by) the podcast “Empire” hosted by Anita Anand and William Dalrymple. The first series was dedicated to the British Empire (they are now doing a second one about the Ottoman Empire), and the episode about the Partition of 1947, on top of being absolutely heartbreaking (Anita Anand mentioned William Dalrymple being a cry baby, but I could not keep my eyes dry either), touched upon the theme of grandchildren, the third generation, visiting the trauma experienced by their grandparents. They were explaining how the generation who lived through that horror never, ever spoke about it, whether they were Indian or Pakistani, or even British. This comes on the tail of my last post (here) about Angela Findlay’s book, “In My Grandfather’s Shadow,” where the grand-daughter of a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer dedicated decades of her life to trying to understand her ancestor and the times in which he lived.
The three people who participated in that episode of the podcast had family who were right there, in India, at the time of the Partition. Anita Anand’s family was originally from the part of Punjab that became Pakistan, and they fled their home and ended up in a refugee camp. Anita’s mother was only a baby. William Dalrymple’s father, very young at the time, was on the British side and would later on dodge questions about that time until his very last breath. This is a man whose renowned historian son lived in Delhi and dedicated his life to interviewing people and writing book after book about India, yet died without having uttered a single word about the events he had witnessed during the Partition and the bloodbath that followed. After his death, the family found photos of him sitting at a dinner table with all the men who played such a crucial part in these events: Lord Mountbatten, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, Nehru, Gandhi. He was right there, but could never speak about any of it, and it is now William Dalrymple’s own son, the grandson of that man, who’s become part of an initiative that not only works at collecting testimonies of displaced refugees of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, but also gives them a chance to visit their childhood communities and villages using virtual reality (Project Dastaan) and recently wrote the book Five Partitions, the Making of Modern Asia. Last but not least, Kavita Puri wrote and produced an acclaimed three-part series, Partition Voices, on Radio 4 in the UK and she’s the author of Partition Voices, Untold British Stories, among other notable work. She explains at the beginning of the podcast how, at the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Partition in 2016, she realized that her father who’d been there NEVER spoke about it, and it was the same for everyone from the South Asian community around her. The subject was “unmentionable.” Because the suffering was so horrific. But also because there is so much guilt and shame attached to it.
“You have to be asked,” says Anita Anand at some stage during the podcast. “And someone has to listen.” But someone’s grandmother, I forget which, also says:” Why do you want to talk about these disgusting things?” Clearly, it is a combination of things that make it possible, even conceivable, to open that box of sealed suffering: questions being asked, ears, and heart, and mind willing to listen, and sufficient time having passed, too.
But how important it is to finally give a voice to all that suffering.
Katia Novet Saint-Lot 