Mr. Harindar Singh’s story

Further Info

This story is part of Independence Stories and was made in a 5-day workshop at Easton Community Centre with members of the Asian Day Centre. The workshop focussed on the personal “Independence” stories of Bristol based people from South Asian backgrounds, reflecting life in India and Pakistan, and the legacies of partition.

The workshop was led by Bristol based digital animation artist Tajinder Dhami, Aikaterini Gegisian and Paddy Uglow from the Bristol Stories team, with extra support by Nathan Hughes.

Independence Stories was produced by Asian Arts Agency in partnership with Watershed, Bristol Stories, Asian Day Centre and Images of Empire Archive, and was supported by Awards for all and Quartet funds.

Transcript

Our community is like a little village; all six and related friends, relatives, and at that time, ’47, I seen from the roofs there’s fires burning in Lahaur.

I understood that people were killing each other: the Sikhs were killing the Muslims, and the Muslims were killing the Sikhs. There was trains coming back and forward full of Sikhs and Muslims, both sides one killing the other.

The elder people said that there may be people coming to kill us so they prepared a defence. We got all the knives and the swords and whatever we could to fight back if there was any people to get us and the last thing was that the elders that used to read the news and everything else said that 15th August was the last day that there was control. After that, 15th of August, there would be no control and everybody would kill everybody else that they seen.

And so, on the 15th of August, the elders got together and they took a train to Bikaner, which is away from the border. I remember that there was about twenty families; children, women, some older men and whoever was about. We got the train and we went to Bikaner and there we stayed for about six months as people coming from the war zone. I remember that, although I was a child that Ghandi died, and a big news came through that Ghandi died – somebody shot him, with three bullets, and everybody was really sad and, you know, shook up. And so that was another thing at that time.

But all this problem, as I can see, was due to the partition of Pakistan and India, and then we did hear there was so many killings – friends, relatives, everybody… we were lucky to get out alive. As we know now, there was a million people got killed and this was a very very bad very very sad thing for Indians or Pakistanis to have people, relatives, getting killed due to somebody drawing a line to say “This is yours, and this is yours.” And so it was a very very bad very very horrible situation, but I’m lucky that we got out of it alive and I don’t think this sort of thing is good for anybody.

It will always be in my mind that these fires, people killing each other, these fires and a hate – a hate relationship – builds up and stays in your mind, that these people can kill each other without any feelings… anything. They just kill for the pleasure of it, and it’s all to loot whatever you can get and the people and the government look at it as just nothing, and they should realise a million people is a million people, and nowadays if just one person gets killed there’s a world… everything’s in the news [this story was recorded at the time of great media coverage of a the missing child]: one person got killed, but when a million people get killed they want to try to forget it. I don’t think this will ever be forgot.

Credits

Indian archive pictures created by Images of Empire, used under copyright licence.