Where The Ends Are So Abrupt

- Ramanjit Singh

Several major cities of Punjab; Rawalpindi, Sialkot, Ferozepur, Amritsar and Lahore are situated just few kilometers from the border. I often wonder what affects a border this close has on the psychology of people who live near it, how it affects their views about the people on the other side, how it affects their day to day lives as barbed wires separating the once united communities are just a short distance away.

Lahore and Amritsar, Sialkot and Jammu, Rawalpindi and the Indian border (approximately 75 miles away), Kasur and Ferozepur, along with countless villages divided by the border. This division is anything but natural. Its suddenness is so extreme that one might exclaim, "This can't be, this just can't be." The train lines, which once facilitated the movement of thousands across towns and villages for decades, now abruptly halts at an artificial line dividing the two parts of pre-Partition India. This division impacts all of us, but it is particularly significant for those living near the border.

They are so close; they are practically right next to us.

Author Jennifer Yusin's term describing the ungraspable logic of this separation as "geography of trauma" can aptly be applied on how Sialkot is split from its twin city of Jammu. Sialkot is about 7 kilometers from the Indian border. On a clear night, one can see the city lights of Jammu from Sialkot. On a clear day, one can see the snow capped mountains of Jammu and Kashmir from Sialkot.

History of any city is intertwined with its people and their culture. It is also intertwined with the relationships a city nurtures over time with other cities and towns that are situated close to it. Sialkot's proximity to Jammu is one such example. In pre-Partition Punjab, Hindu Dogras once formed a sizable minority in Sialkot and Muslims formed a sizable minority in Jammu. The economic development of Sialkot is well known where Muslim artisans and Hindu-Sikh entrepreneurial class together developed the city and made it one of the major industrial cities of pre-Partition Punjab.

In the book titled, 'Fieldwork in South Asia: Memories, Moments, and Experiences', author Ali Khan writes this about Sialkot,

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Another evidence of the close proximity between the two cities is also mentioned in this article,

"They (workers) would travel to and fro daily by train running between the two cities. The rail fare from Jammu to Sialkot was only 4 annas, equivalent to 25 paisa of today. A special small train comprising one large couch having carrying capacity of 200 passengers, would make few sorties between the two cities. The passengers travelling between R.S Pura and Sialkot had to pay only 1 anna as fare.

During summer months, on Sundays in particular, many groups of people from Sialkot would come to Jammu for picnic at the Ranbir Canal banks where they would have dip in the icy cool water of the canal to beat the heat. Bringing with them buckets of mangoes and milk in the bottles, they would cool these in canal and enjoy consuming the same."

Just like Lahore-Amritsar, a similar story is about the proximity between Kasur and Ferozepur. A mere 20 kilometers or less in a straight line separates the two cities yet the border has created a distance that is unsurmountable. In most cases these bordering towns and cities are less developed than the rest of the cities located in the interior. Both the business community and the provincial governments hesitate to invest in these towns because of their proximity to the border. Sadly, these towns that once were thriving and completely integrated with the rest of the country have now become a living legacy of the pre-Partition era.

Centuries old connections between these two cities abruptly came to an end in 1947. Once a railway line connected Ferozepur to Peshawar. Hussainiwala-Kasur Railway link in Ferozepur was also called the "Gateway to Lahore". Hundreds of people from towns like Kasur, Lahore and Ferozepur used to disembark here to work in the mechanical engineering workshop which was situated just across this station. Around 1912, this track also saw the first run of the Punjab Mail that once linked Bombay to Peshawar via Lahore (link to article).

The severing of these ties, the utter tragedy of allowing a land so deeply connected to its people, history, and economy to be divided by the British—with the complete backing of the feeble political class—simply because one side refused to coexist with the other, was an illogical decision. Both countries continue to bear the consequences of this mistake to this day.

The Partition failed to recognize the full potential of future prosperity that all communities could have enjoyed if the country had stayed united. It overlooked the opportunity cost of losing access to the vast Indian market for agricultural products and missed the chance to incentivize business investments from the rest of India. People from Sialkot could have sold their products in Bombay or Calcutta. Kasur and Ferozepur could have served as the Gateway for West Punjab and the Northwest Frontier Province, facilitating freight and passenger rail traffic to the rest of the country. Access to a larger Indian market for their products could have further bolstered Punjab's economic dominance in a united India.

However, religion unexpectedly took center stage in the political discussions of the 1940s, making all other issues seem less important. There was little mention of the financial and economic benefits that all communities, particularly in Punjab, would have experienced if India had stayed united. While religion was a topic of conversation, I wish someone had countered with discussions on financial prosperity, market access, and progress for everyone.

Engaging everyone in this pointless religious conflict, stemming from a fear of coexistence, was a tragic blunder. The mentality of our Urdu, our Hindi, our Islamic versus Hindu culture, the us versus them mindset, has cost us dearly. We would have witnessed a different Punjab, a more prosperous Punjab, but it seems that those who desired partition were fine with it. They sought power and achieved it.

It is worth being precise about what those pairs were. They were not rival cities eyeing each other across a frontier. They were a single economy, a single social network, a single set of habits. Twenty kilometers separated Lahore from Amritsar, a short trip by rail, less than the journey many people now make to work. A cloth merchant could take the morning train from Amritsar, do his business in Anarkali, and be home for the evening meal. Students at Government College kept rooms in one city and families in the other. Sialkot's sports-goods workshops sent their output down the line to Jammu; Jammu's timber and fruit came back the other way. Kasur and Ferozepur shared the Sutlej the way two villages share a lane.

The timetable is the best evidence we have of that intimacy, because a timetable records not what people said about themselves but what they actually did. Read the Punjab pages of any pre-1947 railway guide and you find services scheduled with the frequency of a suburban network: not the cautious once-a-day connection of a border crossing, but the casual repetition of a route nobody thought about.

Then, in the space of a few weeks, a barrister (Cyril Radcliffe) who had been in India barely five weeks and who never walked the fields he was dividing drew a line through the middle of it. The Award was signed on 12 August 1947 and its details made public on the 17th, two days after the two states it defined had already come into being. Whole districts learned which country they were in from a radio announcement. This is the source of the abruptness. A border that grows out of a war or a river or a mountain range accumulates slowly; people adjust their lives to it over generations. This one arrived fully formed, overnight, through the middle of settled ground.

The railways make the severance visible in a way that maps cannot. A boundary on paper is a line; on the ground it is a set of endings. At station after station the rails simply stop, not at a terminus built for the purpose, but a few hundred yards past the last platform, in a field, where the ballast gives way to weeds. Signal cabins were left facing an empty direction. Level crossings kept their gates for years, guarding a track on which nothing would ever come. The Sialkot–Jammu line, laid in the 1890s, was cut through the middle and both halves became stubs; Jammu, which had had a railway since the nineteenth century, then went without one for the better part of thirty years. Of all the crossings in Punjab, exactly one survived as a working link, Attari to Wagah, and even that carried a train only intermittently, on sufferance, decades later.

The same abruptness runs through everything the border touched. Canals begin at headworks in one country and irrigate fields in another. Roads that were the natural way to the next town became roads to nowhere, and the next town had to be reached, if at all, by a detour of hundreds of miles through a single official gate. Shrines ended up on the wrong side of their congregations. Kartarpur sits about three miles from Dera Baba Nanak: for seventy-two years pilgrims stood at a raised platform on the Indian side and looked at it through binoculars, close enough to see the dome, far enough to require a passport, a visa and a journey of days.

This is the particular cruelty of living near a border of this kind: closeness and access become inversely related. Farmers on both sides work fields within shouting distance and speak the same dialect of Punjabi with the same idioms and the same jokes, and cannot telephone one another. Villages that were split down the middle kept their name on both sides, so that the same place-name now appears twice on the map, in two countries, referring to two halves of one settlement.

And so the sentence at the beginning is not rhetorical excess. Anyone who has stood at one of these endings, where a rail line runs out into a field, or a road stops at a fence, arrives at the same thought, in the same words. This can't be. The land does not agree to it. The language does not agree to it. Only the line does.

Reference article: Lost History of Sialkot