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In this excerpt from an interview with Kavita Puri from 2017, Poonam Joshi recalls the stories her mother Nirmal told her as a young child. She describes Nirmal’s experience of fleeing newly independent Pakistan for India in 1947. Nirmal was born in Lahore in 1930 and lived a happy childhood until Partition abruptly changed her and her family’s lives. In this clip, Poonam describes how Nirmal, her sister Urmil and their mother fled their family home in Lahore after a Muslim neighbour warned them that they were in danger of being kidnapped. 

Although they escaped this immediate threat, the three women continued to fear sexual violence on their long journey from Pakistan to India. This fear stayed with them once they arrived in India, leading Nirmal’s mother to ask a stranger for refuge at a train station because she feared for their lives. 

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.

POONAM JOSHI:

So she talks about, you know, people starting to leave, about news coming of the break-up of India and Pakistan, of her father not believing that India is going to be partitioned and insisting on staying at home and looking after the home because of course they were all going to come back home at the end of it. And the decision to leave came about, one of the neighbours, a Muslim neighbour, I'm afraid I don't know his name and I wish I'd ask my mother what his name was. So this was somebody to whom she tied a rakhi. So they had this brother-sister relationship and he came and he said, “look, I've just been to a meeting and they're going to come and take your daughters tomorrow. You have to get them out of the house”. So I guess the idea would be abduct and rape, abduct, rape and kill. Abduct, rape and keep in a relationship. And my grandfather still didn't want to leave. So my grandmother was in her 40s. So it was my mother who is 17 and it’s her younger sister who is 14. And my grandmother said, “right, I'm going to leave with the girls even if you're not coming with me”. So the neighbour helped and took them, I'm guessing it would have been in a horse and cart, to the station. I'm not entirely sure what happened on the way but my mother talked about the neighbour being physically attacked at some point and injured along the way. And he got them onto a train, and my mother's story was that she had heard that the train that came after everyone was killed on. So she talked about this neighbour saving their lives and always feeling very indebted to him for doing that. And then she describes being at the station, I don't know if it's along the way, I don't know if it’s when they get to Jalandhar, which is where they ended up. But she described her mother and my Mum and her younger sister Urmil [0:08:30] feeling very frightened that there was some news of a cafila, a caravan of Muslim refugees going the opposite direction. She talked about this sort of imminent fear of violence and fear of rape still hanging in the air even though they had left Lahore and Pakistan, and that my grandmother approached a Sikh man at the station and said, look, can you take us in, I don't know if we are going to be safe if we stay at the station. So the Sikh family took in my mother and her family. I'm not clear on how long it was for. I don’t know if it was for a few days or a few weeks but I think once again, another story of incredible kindness of, this time, a stranger, who took them in and protected them.