When the Doors of Home Closed : Stories of Partition, Courage and New Beginnings

When the Doors of Home Closed : Stories of Partition, Courage and New Beginnings

Tomorrow is Independence Day, a day when the flag will be hoisted and patriotic songs will be sung to celebrate the remarkable journey our country has made since 1947.

But today, on the eve of Independence Day, I found myself looking at another side of freedom as I had the opportunity to visit the Partition Museum and Cultural Hub at the historic Dara Shukoh Library in Delhi for an event commemorating Partition and remembering the refugees who came to India.

As a student of history, I have been familiar with partition. We have read about the political negotiations, the Radcliffe Line, the violence, the trains crossing borders and the creation of two nations. I have also had a long career as an administrator, as a Collector, as someone who has signed off on relief, rehabilitation and resettlement in one form or another for over three decades. I thought I understood displacement as a subject. Yet, today for the first time, in a truly physical way, I understood what displacement feels like from the inside as I walked through the partition museum.

Here, history stopped being a chapter in a textbook. It became a ration card, a ledger. An old electricity meter, a newspaper, some  photographs, some post cards, a refugee tent and above all, memories.

Partition displaced more than 20 million people across the subcontinent. Such huge numbers sound impersonal but museums like this one make us look beyond the number.

During the event, my interactions with Shri.Salwan and the Luthra siblings who spoke about their experiences and memories gave me glimpses of what displacement really meant. 

Imagine being told that the town where your family had lived for generations was suddenly in another country and you had to leave your own house behind and literally flee. 

Urmila Luthra said that when their train from Pakistan reached Anritsar, India the Muslims celebrated because their train had come safely so they too would go back safe. She had seen burning houses from their uncle's home in Jhelum where they taken refuge. Later, during their visit to Pakistan in 2006 they could go their school in Sargotha whose whitewashed walls had Sanskrit inscribed on them.

The Partition museum is housed in a historical mughal, british and contemporary structure and has nine halls dedicated to different themes with objects, documents and photographs donated by various families who had migrated. The refugees could not bring back their immovable properties but some of them managed to get their valuable jewellery or moveable assets. 

When they lost their homes or property it was not just a physical loss but a loss of comfort of their own home and living under canvas tents in cramped spaces at Purana Qila and areas around Humayun's Tomb which became refugee camps. They had to stand in long queues for food and essential supplies with ration cards.

 I was extremely disturbed looking at a ration card in the museum imagining the plight of people who may have owned homes, farms, shops and businesses who became refugees. Their identity changed almost overnight and they were forced to encounter uncertainty in places like  Kingsway Camp, Faridabad, Ulhasnagar camp in Mumbai and other places which became makeshift shelters. Yet they survived and moved towards rebuilding their lives. 

According to the 1951 Census, refugees constituted 28.4 per cent of Delhi's population.

That statistic made me look at Delhi differently.

The city we know today was shaped substantially by people who arrived here after losing almost everything.

Land was acquired. New settlements came up. Barren spaces were transformed into thriving neighbourhoods such as Lajpat Nagar and Kingsway Camp. Faridabad was developed as a model township, particularly for more than 30,000 people displaced from the North-West Frontier Province.

People started businesses again. They built schools, created institutions, educated their children. They entered new professions, rebuilt families and communities.

The refugee who had stood in a queue for rations became a shopkeeper, teacher, entrepreneur, professional, artist, administrator or political leader. This transformation is one of independent India's great untold stories.

Some of the smallest exhibits told the biggest stories. I was particularly moved by an exhibit of a ledger book of Sardar Harbhajan Singh Bhatia, retrieved decades later from his former home in Okara, now in Pakistan. A ledger is an ordinary object while a business is functioning. Once that business, town and country have been left behind, it becomes evidence of an entire lost life.

There is another extraordinary story of Priyanka Mehta, who visited her maternal grandmother's home in Lahore. The family which is living there now, had preserved the old electricity meter of the house. They had kept it because they thought that someday someone from the original family might return. They gave it to her  when she went. Imagine someone preserving an old electricity meter which became priceless because of it's memories. 

The story also reflects the fact that borders divided people, politics created nations but ordinary human beings were still capable of preserving someone else's memory for them.

For the Hindu Sindhi community, partition meant something even more profound. They did not simply leave individual houses or towns. Their entire geographical homeland remained in Pakistan.The museum recreates something of the Sindh they left behind  its beautiful woodwork, carved doors, architecture, neighbourhoods and shared cultural spaces. Standing there, one begins to understand that homeland is not merely land, it is language, food, music, architecture, customs, festivals.

You can build another house but how does one recreate a homeland? And yet the Sindhi community carried Sindh  through language, enterprise, culture, food and memory wherever their people settled.

Another gallery speaks about rebuilding relationships. The Mianwali Gazette, for example, helped refugees from Mianwali scattered across India to remain connected. Places of worship became spaces where memories of lost hometowns could survive. Communities recreated social bonds that Partition had torn apart.

Many survivors rarely spoke initially about what they had endured as they simply did not have time to grieve They had to find jobs, restart businesses, build homes and feed children. They had to build a new life and found little time to grieve or speak about their loss. 

Only decades later did many begin speaking about their childhood homes, often to their grandchildren. Perhaps that generation carried its trauma quietly because it wanted its children to inherit opportunity rather than bitterness.

There is something particularly meaningful about the museum being located in the historic Dara Shukoh Library which has witnessed centuries of change. Dara Shukoh is remembered for scholarship, intellectual curiosity and his engagement with different religious and philosophical traditions.

The building passed through several lives before falling into disuse. Today, restored and adapted, it has become a place for remembering one of the most painful episodes in modern Indian history. A building that survived history now preserves history.

The first Partition Museum was established in Amritsar in 2017 by The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT). The Delhi museum followed at the Dara Shukoh Library in 2023.

What impressed me greatly is that this is truly a people's museum. The objects, photographs, oral histories and personal memories come from families themselves.

There was one moment during my visit that has stayed with me. I stood before a magnificent old carved wooden door in the museum.  As I stood beside it, I suddenly wondered about the millions of people, whose doors  just closed behind them. I imagined about everything they left behind.  A courtyard where children had played.

A tree planted by a grandfather. A family shop.

The neighbourhood school, the familiar street.

The temple or gurudwara.Neighbours who had celebrated festivals and weddings together.

The sound of one's mother tongue spoken everywhere around you.

Lady Kishwar Desai deserves enormous appreciation for her vision and persistence in creating these spaces of memory. To recognise that the rapidly disappearing voices of Partition survivors needed to be recorded and then to transform that idea into institutions where future generations can encounter those voices is a remarkable contribution to preserving India's social history.

I would also like to compliment Deepali Khanna and the team associated with the Delhi museum for creating a space that does not merely display history but allows visitors to feel it.

This is certainly not an easy history to curate.

It has pain, violence and displacement. Yet the museum does not leave feelings of hatred in the visitor. Instead, its journey gradually takes us from loss and refuge to rebuilding, relationships, hope and courage.

That balance is important, which is why our young people must visit the museum .

I particularly wish young Delhiites would come here. To a generation born decades after the Partition, 1947 can easily become another date or year in a history textbook which it shouldn't. 

Young people who shop in  Lajpat Nagar,  Khan  Market  or pass through Kingsway Camp or travel around Delhi should know something about the people who built these neighbourhoods

They should see that ration card, the refugee tents, the ledger brought back from Okra, the electricity meter preserved in Lahore because history understood through human lives teaches something textbooks cannot.

It teaches us empathy and resilience. 

It teaches us how quickly the security we take for granted can disappear.

It teaches us the dangers of hatred and division.

The people who arrived as refugees did not spend the rest of their lives looking only at the doors that had closed behind them.

They opened new ones.

The museum has a lovely concept called The Post Box of Your Dreams and Hopes. Visitors can leave messages to the past, the present or the future.

So my dear young people, come and listen to these stories of history, because soon there will be no living generation that remembers 1947 firsthand.

Tomorrow, when the national flag rises, let's celebrate Independence Day a little differently.

Let's remember the refugee standing in a ration queue, the mother protecting her children in a camp,  the businessman beginning again from a roadside stall. The Sindhi family carrying its homeland within its language and culture.

And the millions whose names will never appear in a history book.

Independence and Partition came together in August 1947.One brought the joy of freedom.

The other brought unimaginable loss.

Remembering the suffering does not diminish our celebration of Independence. It deepens our understanding of what freedom means.

Every Delhiite should visit the Partition Museum at least once. And if you have children or grandchildren, take them with you.

Let them see. Let them ask questions.

Let them understand that the freedom we celebrate was accompanied by an enormous human price  and that the India they inherited was built not only by those who fought for freedom, but also by millions who lost their homes and still found the courage to begin again.

Perhaps that is the lesson I carried home today.

Freedom gave India a new beginning but the refugees of Partition showed us the courage it takes to begin again.

R. Vimala, IAS Retired, 

Former Resident Commissioner & Secretary, Government of Maharashtra

Founder, AnirvedShakti Foundation

PhD Research Scholar, Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay