MEMORIES OF PARTITION, COURTESY BBC

Date: 07 Sep 2007

Comment:

My Uncle's story
BBC Memoryshare Editor on behalf of Bobby Friction's uncle's memory of 14/08/1947 - 16/08/1947
I spoke to my Taya-ji. My Taya-ji is my Dad’s oldest brother, three years ago. People didn’t really talk about partition in our family they said they went through it was hard and it was a struggle. 

I sat down with him. And I was just intent on finding out what happened. 
And he told me that basically they were living in a house in Lahore and they had great relations with all their Muslim neighbours and all their Sikh neighbours and he said it was literally BANG out of the blue. Because there were no newspapers there wasn’t 24 hour TV and he just said there were words to the effect of there was going to be a new country called Pakistan and a country called India. And they didn’t think that Pakistan would be a Muslim state or that India would be Hindu or Sikh state. They just thought there were going to be two countries. 

He said one night he got woken up and the whole family woke up and there were like hundreds of young Muslim men outside their house including his next door neighbours. He says he remembers very clearly, some of his next neighbour’s friends and they all had swords out and all they were doing were shouting “Allah-O-Akbar” which means god is great. And nothing else. 
He said that at that point he realised they were saying “You’re leaving. You’re getting out of here. You’ve got to go.” 

And he literally there and then turned around and the whole family started freaking out. They packed everything, they literally just got their clothes, got money and got jewellery, sneaked out the back of the house, he said. And for about five miles that night they crawled through the fields. Cos they didn’t want to get found. As they crawled through the fields and they slept in the fields they had to hide in the fields and they found dead bodies in the fields and saw the dead bodies in the fields and literally did that for a couple of days and managed to get into a bit of a convoy of people leaving and managed to cross the border. 

And he said that with such dignity, without any hate without any anger at all. He just reported to me as a matter of fact. And when I think about that and I think about what I’ve been through I’m not worthy. 


You can see Bobby Friction tell his story on BBC Asian Nation, at: 
www.bbc.co.uk/asiannetwork/a... 

Bobby Friction is Asian Network's flagship Specialist Music DJ. He presents 'Friction' every weekday except Wednesday 10pm-1am, bbc.co.uk/asiannetwork 


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