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In this extract from an interview with Kavita Puri, Gurbakhsh Singh Garcha discusses how, in the violent aftermath of Partition in 1947, women across India and Pakistan were often forced into marriage with attackers from another religious community and subjected to abuse.

He describes two different relationships between Sikh men and Muslim women that he witnessed as a child during the fallout of Partition. In one story he recalls that his uncle rescued a Muslim woman from being killed in a massacre, and they ended up falling in love and getting married. He also remembers a relative who participated in the violence of Partition and took a young Muslim woman by force. As a child, he witnessed this relative abuse her.

About Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices

In 2017 BBC journalist Kavita Puri led a project to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India. Through interviews, the Partition Voices team directly documented the experiences of those who lived through this traumatic time and subsequently moved to Britain, as well as stories from their children and grandchildren. The testimonies recall epic journeys and forced migration, violence, partings with friends and family, and the end of Empire, with some speaking about these events for the very first time. The outcome of this project was an award-winning three-part series for BBC Radio 4 titled Partition Voices, and later an acclaimed book of the same name. The full recordings and transcripts from Partition Voices are archived at the British Library Sound Archive, with collection reference C1790.

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

One of my uncles had gone and rescued a young lady because her family had been massacred. He went and rescued her and took her out of there. He was a handsome Sikh young and she was a very pretty lady. This was just a rescue mission which he had performed. But she then got attached to him because she saw him as her protector because she wasn't sure about the rest of the population around, but she could trust that he had saved her from being killed. And slowly it became a sort of love affair. He got very fond of her and she got very attached to him.

KAVITA PURI:

Did she convert?

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

Well, she had to I think, yeah. Because she would live in that surrounding, she couldn't live as a Muslim, in a Sikh household as a wife.

KAVITA PURI:

But I suppose she wasn't taken by force, was she?

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

No, no. She was just rescued and saved from being killed. And it was a very slow process that she then thought that she had nowhere to go. She had no family left and she had no wish to go to Pakistan as a stranger. She had nobody there and she found him as the person she could rely on and he grew to rely on her because he slowly took over this sort of management of him, managed him. He changed as a person.

KAVITA PURI:

And what about the other situation that was not...

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

The other one was very... that was very... that really was horrid. I didn't... that really affected me greatly. I thought... I hated that man.

KAVITA PURI:

So tell me about him.

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

He was a relative of my big uncle's, powerful uncle's distant relative. He was there in that house, which I frequently went to, because my uncle's son was a year older than me, and we used to play together, and he had all the things that I didn't because it's a very rich house. And this man had brought this Muslim woman and she was really distressed. You could see that she was totally terrified and a good-looking woman. And he wanted her to obey him, do everything she did. At one point, he made her lick a spoon with pork fat, made her lick it. And as a Muslim woman, she knew what it was, and she was told what she had to do it.

KAVITA PURI:

And you saw him do that?

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

Yeah, and she was so distressed. And I didn't want to, I didn't want to see this happen. It made me cry and I went home.

KAVITA PURI:

He was probably raping her as well, wasn't he?

GURBAKHSH SINGH GARCHA:

Very likely, yeah. This was what, I mean, we didn't quite understand the concept of rape at the time. I didn't. But that must have been the case.