Image above: Refugees look at wreckage after an attack during the mayhem in Partition, 1947. Below, first from bottom: rare stamp from the pre-partition period.
Partition
Brothers Reunited 63 years after Partition
THE PENINSULA
Taxila, Punjab, Pakistan
A 78-year-old Sikh pilgrim from India celebrated the best Vaisakhi festival of his life when he stumbled into his long lost brother while visiting the Sikh Gurdwara, Punja Sahib, in Hasanabdal - near Taxila and Rawalpindi/ Islamabad - in Pakistan.
It was an emotional reunion this week between Sardar Kartar Singh and Chaudhry Sultan Mehmood after the partition of the subcontinent separated them 63 years ago.
So many things had changed in the intervening decades, including the religion of the brother left behind in newborn Pakistan, but not the blood that ran in their bodies.
At the time of partition, a Sikh family settled in Islam Mughal, a village in Tehsil Pattoki, were forced to flee to newly carved out India but a son got left behind in the terror. Later, the young man converted to Islam and was given the name Chaudhry Sultan Mehmood.
His four elder brothers settled in Pind Jhogi, a village in Tehsil Jeera of Ferozepur District in East Punjab. At the time of partition, Sardar Kartar Singh was the father of one child, but now he has eight children and over two dozen grandsons and granddaughters, while Sultan is also a senior citizen and father of many children.
Kartar Singh's wife, Pirbinder Kaur, said she was happy to see the family reunion.
She urged the Pakistani government to allow Sikh pilgrims to visit their native towns where they used to live before partition.
She said a large number of Sikhs fled from various areas which now form part of Pakistan after the partition in 1947, including Sialkot, Lahore, Kasur and Nankana Sahib, to East Punjab in India but were never allowed to visit their native villages and ancestral houses where they lived before partition.
April 18, 2010
Conversation about this article
1: Surinder (Massachusetts, U.S.A.), April 21, 2010, 12:08 PM.
There are many such cases ... the person left behind was always coerced to convert to Islam. Pakistan made sure after Partition that Sikhs were never really allowed to even visit their former homes. This is uncivilized behaviour, plain and simple.
2: Indy Gill (New York, U.S.A.), April 28, 2010, 12:19 PM.
The irony is that in future the converted Sikh boy's generations (adherents of Islamic faith) will most probably create similar circumstances of fear, death and havoc inspired by their Islamic faith and teachings, for Sikhs. And one day, who knows, people may once again have to go through the same ordeals and forced conversions, but not at the hands of outsiders but by their own who themselves were simply forced into Islam. Sadly, this vicious cycle has not stopped for over a thousand years and, the way things are, there seems to be no end in sight either!
3: Mahendra (Framingham, MA, U.S.A.), June 23, 2010, 4:31 PM.
Why does it always happen that those left behind in Pakistan seem to have converted? Is the same true in the reverse?