4 - Sacrifice and Hard Work: Martyrdom as Theodicy

Summary

We are not sharanarthi that we have come into your refuge [sharan]. Arre we have sacrificed and come. You have not made any sacrifice.

—Bhanwarilal

‘A lot of people call what happened to them during the Partition as “sacrifice” [kurbaani], that we have sacrificed this for the nation. What do you think about this?’ I asked Lata and Kulbhushan. Lata and Kulbhushan were an elderly Partition survivor couple who lived with their eldest son in Pitampura, New Delhi. They had been married for more than 50 years. While Lata was 4 years old at the time of the Partition, Kulbhushan was 10. Although Lata was too young to remember the Partition, Kulbhushan vividly remembered the day his family was forced to flee their village in district Dera Ghazi Khan.

‘So what else? If this is not sacrifice then what is it? So many lives were lost, what is this?’ Kulbhushan asked rhetorically in reply. ‘We brought nothing from Pakistan,’ Lata added in a firm but gentle voice. Kulbhushan, reminding me of the stories he had shared with me during our last conversation, said:

We had absolutely nothing. Some people had brought a little money or something. We had nothing. We were in deep trouble. [My] Father had died there, we were all small-small. My [eldest] brother, I had told you, you know that he had been finished [killed] there and he was very healthy.

Kulbhushan's father and brother had been lynched by a mob of Muslims. The mob had begun by burning their shop. When his father and eldest brother fled the scene and hid in a nearby farm, the mob followed them there. Cornering both father and son in the fields, they savagely hacked both of them with swords. While his father died on the spot, his brother succumbed to his injuries later.

‘I remember you told me, he had been killed with swords,’ I acknowledged.

‘Our homes, everything was divided, everything…. When he [brother] was in Dera Ghazi Khan hospital, who knows how many wounds were there on him, on his neck, his eye, over here, here.’ Kulbhushan patted parts of his body to indicate the various places his brother had been wounded. ‘He had a finger that was cut off, this.’ Kulbhushan held up the index finger of his left hand.