Why?

Today marks the 60th anniversary since the Partition of India. Last night I watched a documentary on BBC 2 about it: Partition: The Day India Burned. It’s worth seeing. Yes, it had the curse of drama reconstructions laid upon it, but those moments were thankfully outweighed by plenty of archive footage, and most importantly, eye-witness accounts told by Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and the British who were caught up in this terrible event. I hadn’t appreciated before that up to 15 million people were made homeless by the redrawing of the boundaries, and up to a million people were slaughtered. 

 

There were terrible moments relived by the eye-witnesses. One old man (who just before partition had been in jail for assault) was completely unrepentant about the fact that he had lost count of how many people he had killed with his sword, after all "they were trying to kill us". But for me the most dreadful part was when an elderly Sikh broke down as he told of the moment when, as a teenage boy, he watched his father behead his own sister to prevent her from being captured and raped by Muslims (such rapings, practised by all sides, were common). And his sister was not the only woman to be executed – all the womenfolk in his village were killed by their menfolk, and there were no struggles. The women went to their deaths quietly.

 

The last word was given to another Sikh, whose grandfather had tried to persuade, unsuccessfully, the authorities to let Muslims continue living in harmony in their village. He said that as a young boy, who couldn’t understand why his boyhood friends had to leave, and neither did they. He said he asked "why" at the time, and now, 60 years later, he still asks the same question: "why?".