“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die “– Jean-Paul Sartre
The quote pretty much sums up the history of mankind. Time and again a personal or political agenda is propagated in the garb of social welfare and an excuse to exterminate and destroy the possible “threats” to human society. In the midst of this chaos, our supposed stakeholders tend to forget about the millions of people on their land who are more concerned about how to get their next meal than worrying about which country has more powerful weapons. There is no doubt that in times of war there is not a single person who does not suffer, but what we need to realize is that social and economic divisions play a major role in deciding the degree of distress faced by the different sections of the society. People who are already burdened with layers of oppression even during normal conditions are worse affected as their lives do not matter to anyone in the very first place. Such was the case, of the Indian Partition.
When millions of people were forced to move out of their motherland and become victims of communal violence, there was a huge population of people whose sufferings go unaccounted. Unaccounted, not because there is no equipment to cover them, but because they were already invisible. Sex workers, child brides, untouchables, widows, and orphans – these are the kind of people who were and are anyway excluded from any social prioritization, naturally, we have no idea what they went through. Following is one such account of a child bride who was caught in a web of unfortunate events during the time of Partition.
Sushila Devi, eldest daughter of the family was married to a lawyer (22 years old) at the age of 13 in 1945. After her marriage, she moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh. She recalls having a very loving husband and family. The family was so well off that she was adorned with kilos of gold at the time of her wedding and their house was no less than a seesh- mahal. Being Hindus, when the news of Partition started going around, her family were one of the first few who started looking at moving out of the Muslim dominated country. She remembers her husband traveling back and forth to Siliguri, West Bengal (which also happened to be her maternal house), buying land and shifting whatever wealth they could. Being just a child, naturally she never really realised the gravity of the situation. For her, nothing was more important than being the good homemaker she was destined to be. All she knew was her husband was a very hardworking person and she never dared question his actions. Then slowly, communal violence started to seep in. She recalls very vividly that one time when she from the safety of her house witnessed the beheading of Hindu women who were performing Gangaur rituals near her house. One could see the horrors in her eyes when she talks about the incident. This alarmed the family particularly and one by one people of her family were transferred to India. Sushila Devi was reluctant to move out of her beautiful palace where she had all the luxuries on her footsteps and go back to the extreme poverty she came from. The only person who could give her some solace, her husband, was not around. When the time came for her to leave the house and go back to India, there was nothing she wanted to take with her. According to her, she thought the move could not have been permanent and her husband was capable enough to buy her anything she needed. For her, going back to Siliguri was like going on a long vacation to the hills. Little did anyone care to enlighten her about the perils her family was in; till date, she does not understand what Partition was all about, communalism and swaraj are alien terms and the British rule was just like any other government. She refused to call the two bedroom hut her home and longed to go back to the palace she belonged to. After the death of her in-laws, her husband started suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He could not take the blow of losing all his wealth at a go and business in those days was slow. The man who loved his wife to the moon failed to even acknowledge her anymore. All he would do was walk around the house with a stick in his hand and guard the place.
One can remember her telling stories about how she hears the sound of the walking stick even now. A couple of years later he too left Sushila Devi all by herself. Widowed at the age of 18, childless and with no source of income, all her hopes of having her old life back were shattered. Her maternal family would not take her back as lok-laaj in our country is far greater than humanity and love.
Scrapping off the little her brother-in-law was providing her with, she adopted her sister’s son and he became the only reason for her to survive. Gradually she started renting out parts of her house and providing her son with all the education she could have. Being a young widow and a single mother was not easy. She always had to be guarded against the prying eyes of the men around her. Even getting out of the house to buy ration or taking the child to the doctor were things she dreaded. No one wanted to take this liability.
Today, Sushila Devi is no more. She passed away two years back leaving behind the now three-storeyed house and lots of gold for her son and his family. Days before her death she surprised everyone by presenting her wish to donate her eyes after her death, “Let my eyes see what I could have seen” she said.
Author: Shiksha Goyal
