The Children Who Crossed
Updated: 16 hours ago
Ramanjit Singh
Across the Canal: An Imagined Conversation
This conversation is fiction. Jeeto and Rafiq never existed, but every loss they speak of is drawn from the testimonies, diaries and records in the essay below.
October 1947, near the Kasur–Ferozepur road. Two foot convoys have been halted by soldiers on either side of a dry canal while the road ahead is cleared. One is going east to India, the other west to Pakistan. On the eastern bank sits Jeeto, a Sikh girl of nine from a village near Sheikhupura, a torn strip of orange-and-gold phulkari tied round her wrist. On the western bank sits Rafiq, a Muslim boy of ten from a village near Nakodar in Jalandhar district. His feet are bleeding through rags. The children are the only ones close enough to the water to hear each other.
Rafiq: Oye. Why are you holding that cloth like that?
Jeeto: It's from my sister's phulkari. Amrita's. She and Bebe were stitching it for her wedding, a little every night by the lamp. It wasn't finished. When we ran, it caught on a thorn bush and tore, and she tied this piece on my wrist so I wouldn't get lost. I'm keeping it for her.
Jeeto: At night she used to sing me the song about the little sparrow who couldn't find her nest. I don't know all the words. She was going to teach me the end. (She presses the phulkari to her mouth.) Now I'll never know how it ends.
Rafiq: Where is she?
Jeeto: (looking at the ground) She was walking at the back with my Chachi. When we stopped at night, she wasn't there. Bapu went back to look. He came back alone and sat down, and he didn't eat his roti. He put his face in his turban and his shoulders were going like this. (She shakes her own shoulders, very small.) I never saw Bapu cry before.
(Rafiq doesn't say anything for a while. He picks up a stone and puts it down again.)
Rafiq: They took my Zubeida Apa too. She's fourteen. She used to plait my hair when I was small and call me her little prince. The men came at night. Ammi held my mouth so I wouldn't shout. I bit her hand. I didn't mean to. She didn't even pull it away.
Jeeto: Bapu says there's a list. The government will find them.
Rafiq: My Abba says that too. A list. (quietly) But at night I heard him tell Ammi that a list is just paper.
Jeeto: What does that mean?
Rafiq: I don't know. Ammi cried when he said it.
Jeeto: Every night I tell Waheguru to send Amrita back. I say it a hundred times, so he can't miss it.
Rafiq: I ask Allah for Zubeida Apa. Every night.
Jeeto: (crying) Does your God listen to girls from our side?
Rafiq: (thinking hard) I don't know. Maybe there's only one, and he's just very tired. There are so many people asking.
Jeeto: Then ask him for Amrita too. And I'll ask for Zubeida. Then he'll hear it twice.
Rafiq: (nodding, his eyes filling) Twice is better.
(The soldier passes between the two crowds. Both children look down at their feet until he has gone.)
Jeeto: Do you know where you're going?
Rafiq: Lahore. Then somewhere called Lyallpur. Abba says we'll get land. Ammi says land is not the same as home. She says it every night, and then she stops talking. She used to sing to my baby brother. (He stops.) She doesn't sing anymore.
Jeeto: Is your baby brother with you?
Rafiq: He was. In the camp at Ludhiana he got the sickness where you can't stop going. He was so hot. Ammi kept wetting her chunni and putting it on his head. In the morning he was very quiet, and then they took him. (His voice cracks.) I still save him a bit of my roti. Every time. I don't know why I do that.
Jeeto: (after a long pause) I save one for my Dadi. She couldn't walk. They left her sitting under the neem tree with water and a blanket, and she said, "Go, go, I'll come later." She kept waving. I kept looking back and she kept waving, and then the dust came and I couldn't see her hand anymore.
Rafiq: Will she come?
Jeeto: (very quietly) No.
(Jeeto starts crying without making any sound, wiping her face with the phulkari. Rafiq looks away to give her privacy, the way his mother taught him.)
Rafiq: Don't cry. If you cry, I'll cry.
Jeeto: You're ten.
Rafiq: (his chin shaking) I know.
(Now they are both crying. Neither of them tries to stop.)
Jeeto: On the train, before we got off, Bapu put his hand over my eyes. I saw through his fingers. (She stops.) I see it every night. When I close my eyes, it's there. So I try not to sleep.
Rafiq: I saw the canal near our village. There were people in it. Ammi pulled my head into her chunni and said, "Don't look, it's only cloth." But it wasn't cloth. I knew it wasn't. And I didn't tell her I knew, because she was trying so hard.
Jeeto: My Bebe holds my hand so tight it goes white. Even when we're sitting. Even when we sleep. She's scared that if she lets go I'll be gone too, like Amrita.
Rafiq: Ammi counts us. All the time. One, two, three. She used to say four. Now she says three, and then she stops and looks at nothing.
Jeeto: Do you think our houses miss us?
Rafiq: Ours has a blue door. Abba painted it before Eid. The paint was still sticky when we left; I put my hand on it. (He opens his palm and looks at it, as if the blue might still be there.) My hand is on our door forever now.
Jeeto: Ours has a mango tree in the courtyard. Bebe made makki di roti on the chulha under it and the whole house smelled of smoke and saag. I can still smell it if I close my eyes. (She closes them. Her face crumples.) But when I open them, it's just dust.
Rafiq: Who lives there now?
Jeeto: Maybe someone like you.
Rafiq: (quietly) And maybe someone like you will live in mine. Will you tell them to be careful with the door?
(Pause.)
Rafiq: My Chacha says your people did it. Burned our village. Took Zubeida Apa.
Jeeto: (slowly) My Chachi says your people did it. To our village. To Amrita. To Dadi.
Rafiq: (after a long time) Did you do anything?
Jeeto: I'm nine. I only know how to do my slate and feed Bholi.
Rafiq: I'm ten. I only know how to fly kites and run fast. I didn't do anything either.
Jeeto: Then who did it?
(Neither of them can answer.)
Rafiq: (wiping his nose on his sleeve) There was a Sikh man in the next village. He sent a boy on a horse to tell Abba they were coming. That's why we're alive. Abba made me say his name ten times so I'll never forget it. Sardar Kartar Singh. Sardar Kartar Singh.
Jeeto: A Muslim chacha who sold bangles hid Bebe and me in his back room for two days. He gave me his own food and didn't eat. He gave me a red glass bangle so I'd stop crying. (She holds up her wrist. There is half a bangle left.) It broke on the road. I kept the half.
Rafiq: So there are good ones. On both sides.
Jeeto: Then why does everyone say there aren't?
(A whistle blows. On both banks adults begin standing, lifting bundles, calling names. Jeeto's mother grabs her arm without a word.)
Jeeto: (fast, desperate) Rafiq! If you see a girl called Amrita, she has an orange phulkari with the same flowers as this, and a cut on her chin from falling off the charpai. Tell her Jeeto is waiting. Tell her I kept her piece. Tell her she can still finish it. Tell her I didn't forget her. Please. Please tell her.
Rafiq: (shouting, stumbling as his father pulls him) If you see Zubeida, she has a little mole here, near her lip. When she's frightened she hums. If you hear a girl humming, it's her! Tell her I'm sorry I bit Ammi's hand! Tell her I was being brave!
Jeeto: I'll look! I'll look everywhere!
(Jeeto pulls the half bangle off her wrist and throws it across the canal. It lands in the dust in front of Rafiq. He picks it up and holds it tight against his chest.)
Jeeto: So you remember me!
Rafiq: I'll remember! I'll come back one day! I'll find your village!
Jeeto: Then hug Bholi for me! She's on your side now! Promise!
(The convoys move apart in opposite directions. For a while the two children walk backwards, waving, until the dust between them is too thick to see through. From the eastern road a small voice keeps calling "Amrita!" From the western road another keeps calling "Zubeida!" After a time, there is only the sound of feet.)
Many years later, in a small house in Faisalabad, an old man kept half a red glass bangle in a matchbox in his cupboard. He never learned what happened to a girl called Amrita though for the rest of his life he turned his head whenever a woman with a scar on her chin passed him in a bazaar. In Ludhiana, an old woman kept a faded strip of unfinished phulkari folded inside a book, the last stitches still hanging loose. Whenever she heard a girl humming somewhere nearby, she would stop whatever she was doing and listen, just in case.
The Youngest Refugees
Ask anyone who was a child in Punjab in 1947 what Partition was, and you rarely get a date or a boundary. You get a smell, a sound, a single memory that never faded. A bullock cart lying on its side. A canal with things floating in it that a five-year-old was told not to look at. A mother's voice telling you to keep walking and not to turn around. The politics arrived later, in school textbooks. The experience arrived first, through the body.
Punjab carried the heaviest share of that experience. The political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed, who spent years collecting more than two hundred survivor accounts from both sides, estimates that between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people died in Punjab alone, somewhere between half and four-fifths of all Partition deaths in the subcontinent. Roughly ten million Punjabis were uprooted. Muslims moved west towards Lahore, Lyallpur and Montgomery; Hindus and Sikhs moved east towards Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ambala and Delhi. Nobody counted the children separately. They were simply part of the caravans, the trains and, too often, the dead. Ishtiaq Ahmed, IIC lecture
For decades the histories written in Lahore and in Delhi had little room for them. Each new state told 1947 as the price of freedom, and each was quick to name the other side's crimes. Ilyas Chattha, the historian whose work on Pakistan's refugee camps underpins much of what follows, argues that this nationalist framing sanitised what ordinary people actually lived through. Urvashi Butalia, whose oral histories in the 1990s opened the subject in India, made a similar point more bluntly: children are hard to place in a history, because they leave so few documents of their own. What we know about them comes from the margins: a missionary's diary, a social worker's memoir, a line in a legislative debate, and the memories of old men and women who were once seven or nine or twelve. Chattha, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
This essay pieces those fragments together, keeping to Punjab and keeping both banks of the Ravi in view. A Muslim girl in a Kasur school compound and a Sikh boy in the Kurukshetra camp did not know each other. Their months of hunger, fear and loss, set side by side, look almost exactly alike.
March 1947: The First Fires
For many Punjabi children, Partition did not begin in August. It began five months earlier, in the first week of March, when the Unionist ministry of Khizr Hayat Tiwana resigned and the province slid towards open communal war. Rawalpindi district burned first. The British official count put the dead at around 2,000 over ten or twelve days; Sikh accounts put the figure at 7,000 or more. Ishtiaq Ahmed records that about 80,000 Sikh and Hindu families left their homes in the north-west after those weeks, long before anyone knew where a border would run. Ishtiaq Ahmed
Thoa Khalsa, a largely Sikh village in Rawalpindi district, became the most remembered of these places. The attack began on 6 March and the village held out for three days. On 9 March, its defence leader, Sant Raja Singh, chose to kill the women of his family rather than let them be taken. His son Bir Bahadur Singh was sixteen. He watched his father call his seventeen-year-old sister, Maan Kaur. She moved her own plait aside so that the blade would find her neck. Twenty-six women of the family, aged roughly ten to forty, died the same way, and many others jumped into the village well until it could hold no more. Open magazine, A Father's Decision
What stays with you about Bir Bahadur's account, recorded when he was eighty-two and living in Kurukshetra, is not only its horror. It is that he still defended his father's choice as the best one available. A teenager who has seen his sister die by his father's hand has to make the event bearable somehow, and the language of honour and martyrdom gave him a way to carry it. Seen through the eyes of a child psychologist, that conviction is part of the wound itself. In the same interview he also said that his family should have trusted the Muslim friend who had offered them shelter.
The other side of the line had its own March. In Amritsar's Chowk Prag Das, Muslim families who had lived in the neighborhood for about a century were persuaded to hand over their weapons in exchange for promises of safety. That afternoon an armed gang came for them. One family, remembered in a later account under the name Zainab, fled to the roof of a mosque already strewn with bodies. When they were found, Zainab's husband jumped from the roof with their two small children under his arms. She saw all three dead in the street below. A Sikh doctor alerted the army, and soldiers moved her and about twenty other Muslim women to safety. She reached Lahore that August. The Friday Times, An Amritsar Tragedy
By the time Cyril Radcliffe drew his line, then, many Punjabi children had already learned two lessons that no child should learn. The first was that neighbors could become killers within an afternoon. The second was that their own families might decide that death was safer than capture.
August to October: Caravans, Trains and Canals
The Radcliffe Award was published on 17 August 1947, two days after independence. Over the following three months the two Punjabs emptied into each other. Families walked in foot convoys that could stretch for miles, rode bullock carts piled with whatever could be lifted, or crammed into goods wagons and onto carriage roofs. Children were carried, dragged, put up on carts, and sometimes lost in the crush at a station or a river crossing. Ravinder Kaur records a Sikh family from the Sargodha canal colonies whose caravan ran to about ten miles. They sent their children and young women ahead on army trucks, and the father later said this was why the children were spared the worst of what the road held. Ravinder Kaur, Journal of Punjab Studies
Not every family had that choice. Baljit Dhillon was five when her family was woken in the night near Lahore and told to leave at once. Seventy-five years later, what she remembered from the journey east were overturned bullock carts, villages on fire, and headless bodies drifting in a canal. Hussan Zia, a boy travelling the other way by truck, remembered vultures at work beside the road, and the weight of a gun he had been given to hold. CNN, Lives Torn Asunder
The trains became the most feared places in Punjab. On 24 September 1947, a train carrying some 3,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees out of West Punjab was attacked at Kamoke in Gujranwala district, about twenty-five miles from Lahore. Most passengers were in open livestock wagons. Pakistani police counted 408 dead; Indian accounts claimed thousands. G.D. Khosla wrote that around 600 young girls were carried off. Comparable attacks on Muslim trains moving west happened in the same weeks around Amritsar and in the Sikh princely states, and the dead arrived at Lahore station in the same open wagons. Kamoke train massacre
The southern crossings saw some of the worst suffering. By late September more than 400,000 people had passed through the Ganda Singh Wala and Hussainiwala crossings near Kasur and Ferozepur. A convoy of between 40,000 and 60,000 Muslim peasants set out from Faridkot state; Chattha estimates that only about 20,000 reached Kasur, many with sword and gunshot wounds. Those who did arrive were mostly widows and children, because the men had been killed and the young girls taken along the way. In Lahore, an engineer told a foreign journalist that he was digging mass graves in advance for the next convoy. Chattha, 2018
The roads also held acts of rescue, and children noticed them. In Ludhiana district, a Muslim family survived because a friend of the father's in the next village sent a horseman to warn them before the attack. Elsewhere a Sikh doctor, a Muslim neighbour or a Gurkha escort walking beside the train made the difference between a family that arrived and one that did not. Children remembered these people for the rest of their lives, often by name.
Girls Taken, and the Children Nobody Wanted
If a boy's danger in 1947 was death, a girl's was capture. Abduction ran through every account of the Punjab violence, on both sides, and the girls taken were often barely in their teens. At the Hanfia school camp in Kasur, the American volunteer Hladia Porter noticed that there were almost no young girls among the twenty thousand survivors of the Faridkot convoy; they had been carried off on the road. The Punjab police chief of the time later put the number of women and children missing in the province at more than 100,000. Chattha, 2018
The two governments responded by treating recovery as a matter of national honour. On 6 December 1947 they signed an Inter-Dominion Agreement to search for abducted persons and send them back. India's Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act of 1949 then defined who counted. Any female of any age, and any boy under sixteen, found after 1 March 1947 living with someone of another community could be classed as abducted and returned, whatever they themselves wanted. Brown History, The Unwanted Children of Partition
The numbers were contested from the start. Pakistan's official reports listed roughly 50,000 Muslim women and children abducted in East Punjab and the princely states, and India's listed about 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women and children missing in the West. Butalia's own estimate for both sides together was around 75,000. Mridula Sarabhai, who led India's recovery operation, believed the official Pakistani-side figure for 1948 was perhaps a tenth of the real number. By 1955, 20,728 Muslim women had been recovered from India and 9,032 Hindu and Sikh women from Pakistan. Behind each name on those lists, the LUMS archive shows, sat details of village, caste, family and the circumstances of capture. LUMS, Partition Abductions 1947
The children born to these women after abduction were the hardest case of all, and neither state wanted them. Partition had been drawn on religion. A baby with a Muslim father and a Sikh or Hindu mother, or the reverse, belonged to no one under that logic. Families that would take back a recovered daughter often would not take her child. Many women were told to leave the children behind with the father's family; others gave them up to institutions such as Sharda Ashram before returning home. Some recovered women refused to go back at all, because going back meant abandoning a child. Outlook, Orphans of the Partition
Kamlaben Patel, Mridula Sarabhai's deputy, ran camps for recovered women in Lahore, Amritsar and Jalandhar from 1947 to 1950. Her memoir, later published as Torn from the Roots, describes women being exchanged across the border like goods and the impossible choices forced on mothers. A study drawing on these accounts notes that, among the unclaimed children, boys were readily taken in by Sikh families, while many girls ended up as domestic servants or worse. The painter Satish Gujral, then a young man in Lahore, spent those months helping his father rescue abducted women and get them to safety, work that later fed directly into his canvases. Women Unlimited; Maitreyi College study; APNA, The Painter who painted Partitioned Punjab
The Orphanages of the Two Punjabs
There were orphanages, on both sides, though they were improvised and never enough. Most grew out of the camps: children found beside dead parents, or simply alone at a railway station, were gathered up by soldiers, missionaries and volunteers and handed to whoever could feed them. Only slowly did the new governments build anything resembling a system, and they built it around a mixed population of orphans, widows and recovered women who were all labelled, in the official language of the time, as "unattached" or "destitute".
In West Punjab, Lahore became the centre. The government began collecting unaccompanied children from camps, hospitals and stations and placing them in the Milli Darul Atfal, the national children's house, set up in Bahawalpur House in Mozang. Widows and women without family went to the Darul Aman Zanaana. "Rescued" Muslim women, often with small children, were housed in the Darul Muhajirat, in a wing of the mental hospital on Jail Road. Hindu and Sikh women and children recovered in Pakistan waited in the Sir Ganga Ram home before being sent across to India. Pakistan's central cabinet agreed in May 1950 to pay a third of that home's costs, and in January 1952 the Punjab refugee minister told the provincial assembly that Rs 100,000 had gone to the Darul Atfal. Chattha, 2018
Private and religious charities carried much of the load. In Lyallpur, the Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam took refugee orphans into its yateem khana, although a Pakistan Times reporter also accused it of turning camp orphans away. In Lahore, older institutions such as the Poor Children Home, the Strangers Home and Mrs Inglis Home took in children who would otherwise have been on the streets. Mission schools did the same: the Mission Girls School in Narowal took six orphaned children from a single camp, and Kasur's orphans were later moved to a hospital ward at Forman Christian College in Lahore. In 1950 Lyallpur's district officials launched a fund for a "destitute house" for orphans, raising Rs 60,000 of a Rs 100,000 target within months. Chattha argues in a 2022 study that these efforts laid the foundations of Pakistan's modern charitable institutions. Chattha, Partition's Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan
In East Punjab, the best known of these places was the Gandhi Vanita Ashram in Jalandhar, whose building dates from 1948. It was first used to hold abducted women and children brought back from Pakistan. As those women were returned to their families, it became a home for destitute widows, their children and unattached children from the relief camps. A team of Bengali social workers who inspected it for the central rehabilitation ministry counted 1,235 destitute women and children there, plus 134 children with no one at all. Kasturba Sevasram at Rajpura and other homes run by the Kasturba Gandhi Memorial Trust took in women with their dependent children. Decades later, a researcher visiting the Jalandhar ashram met a woman who had arrived as an orphaned baby and had lived there ever since. Ashoka Gupta, Seminar; Punjab Social Security Department; SOAS oral history notes
Amritsar produced one of the most remarkable acts of care, by a single man. Bhagat Puran Singh had spent years in Lahore looking after a disabled boy left at the gate of Gurdwara Dehra Sahib in 1934, whom he named Piara Singh. In 1947 he arrived in an Amritsar refugee camp of more than 25,000 people with, by his own account, five annas in his pocket. With almost no medicine he dressed wounds, begged food from nearby colonies and gathered the sick and crippled whom no one else would take. That work became Pingalwara, the "home of the crippled", which still runs in Amritsar today. SikhiWiki, Bhagat Puran Singh
For every child who reached a home, many more were absorbed informally. At Hanfia camp, women came every day asking to adopt babies, and the camp committee handed infants over against a name and address. Mothers who had been sent to the cholera ward came back to find their babies gone. Butalia found that small boys were often taken less as sons than as labour. Some "adoptions" were really about property: the West Punjab rehabilitation ministry had to order that orphans and widows be allowed to register land claims in their own names, after relatives tried to claim on their behalf. Lyallpur lawyer M.A. Aziz suggested in the Pakistan Times that orphaned boys aged seven to twelve be sent to military schools as assets of the new state. In 1952, legislator Khadija Begum told the Punjab Assembly that the homes were neither sufficient nor satisfactory and that orphaned children were begging on the streets of its cities. Her words became part of the debate on the Punjab Children Bill that same year.
Growing Up in the Camps
For the children who survived the road, the camp was often more dangerous than the journey. Cholera, dysentery, malaria, measles and pneumonia moved through crowds of tens of thousands with almost no sanitation. Then came the floods of late September and the first cold of a Punjab winter, which killed people sleeping in the open with nothing but the clothes they had walked in.
On the Pakistani side, Lahore's Walton camp was the largest, and the provincial towns had their own. In October 1947, a British doctor with the Christian relief medical units reported a death rate of 600 a day in one camp of 150,000, and 200 a day in a camp of 80,000. By mid-December, more than 1,200 people had died of cold in the Lahore camps; on a single Sunday that month, 79 died in Walton alone. Narowal's three camps, holding some 80,000 refugees, had one doctor between them until late October. Katherine Cox, a Church Mission Society worker, walked into the Corn Mandi camp there and found two children lying on the ground with cholera just inside the gate. One was dead before she left an hour later. Chattha, 2018
The Hanfia High School camp in Kasur gives the closest view we have of children's lives inside one of these places, through the diary of Hladia Porter. Most of the wounded children there were between four and eleven, and several little girls had to be carried to the dressing room each time because no one was with them. On the night of 17 September two infants died of hunger because their mothers' milk had dried up and there was none in the camp. Milk from cows abandoned by Sikh farmers came to twenty or thirty quarts a morning, rationed between the sickest adults and hundreds of children; a feeding bottle cost a dollar in the bazaar, which the volunteers could not afford. Porter asked three women whose own babies had died to nurse two motherless infants; each refused, saying the child was not hers. One of the three had lost an arm at the shoulder. Porter, frustrated and exhausted, carried the two motherless infants to the women's hospital herself. One of them died.
On the Indian side, Kurukshetra was built for about 100,000 people and soon held roughly three times that number. The government screened Disney films in the evenings to crowds of up to 15,000, and in December 1947 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed refugees doing drills and gymnastics, a programme meant to keep despair at bay. In 1948 the Red Cross trained refugee girls there as nurses. In Lahore before the exodus, the DAV College hostel held around 50,000 Hindus and Sikhs waiting to cross (APNA). In Amritsar the camps swelled with arrivals from the west, many wounded and with nowhere to go. Punjab Partition Forum, Kurukshetra; Cartier-Bresson at Kurukshetra; ICRC photo archive
Camps were not only places of loss. Schoolboys from Kasur turned up each day to help dress wounds, and the Hanfia committee organised milk for the children out of almost nothing. In the mission hospital at Ferozepur, an American nurse recorded a wounded Muslim woman who had lost her own baby and chose to nurse an orphaned Hindu infant. Porter's diary also describes two orphan boys who trailed after her through the camp, giggling at the nickname the other helpers gave them, and who came back from their first bath in weeks shining with pride. Even in Hanfia, some children still laughed.
Partition and the Mind of a Child
No one in 1947 had the vocabulary for what these children were carrying, and no one had the means to treat it. Both Punjabs had a handful of psychiatrists and fewer psychologists. The relief effort counted rations, blankets, vaccine doses and burials; a child who stopped speaking, or screamed at night, was simply a child who had been through the riots. The psychiatrist Sanjeev Jain has pointed out that the colonial Indian Medical Service was the one imperial service dismantled at independence rather than inherited, and that the burden of caring for Partition's psychological casualties proved too heavy for either new state. Sanjeev Jain, The Conversation
The camp records still let us see the symptoms, even if nobody named them. Volunteers described children who lay apathetic on the ground as if nothing more could hurt them, and others who panicked at any approach. When cholera vaccine finally reached Hanfia in late September, many children refused it or spat it out, and one medical student needed half an hour to dose a single little girl who shrieked as though she were being killed. Adults who had lost everything often spoke first of revenge. A young farmer recovering in the camp told a nurse that, once healed, he meant to kill Sikhs. Children grew up around that talk, absorbing grief and rage together. Chattha, 2018
Read with today's clinical knowledge, the testimonies from both Punjabs fall into recognizable patterns. There is traumatic memory in the strict sense: flashbacks and nightmares triggered decades later by a train whistle, a fire, or a crowd's noise. There is broken attachment, where a parent died, disappeared, or was so shattered that they could no longer comfort anyone. There is survivor's guilt, strongest in those who escaped while a sister or mother did not. And there is a deep, lifelong homesickness for a village or city that could never be visited again, which runs through almost every interview with people who were children at the time. When Jain and his colleague Alok Sarin showed first-person Partition accounts to present-day mental health professionals, nearly all of them identified symptoms that would now be treated with therapy and, in some cases, medication.
The children found their own ways to cope. A 2021 study of 1947 Partition Archive interviews looked closely at three survivors who were between five and fourteen when they fled, all of whom had seen violence. As old people, they kept the worst memories at arm's length by shifting perspective mid-story, telling a scene as if from outside, and by laughing at moments that were not funny. All three spoke of wanting to go home. Bir Bahadur Singh's insistence, seven decades on, that his father's sword had been the only honorable choice belongs to the same family of defenses: a story a sixteen-year-old needed in order to live with what he had seen. Kalra and Zysk, Journal of Student Research
The adults around them often made speaking harder. Rameshwari Nehru, who led women's rehabilitation work in India, wrote that it was not appropriate to describe in detail what refugees had told her, only that it had been inhuman. Families did much the same at home. Partition was something that had happened, not something you talked about at dinner. Even the mentally ill were sorted by religion. The largest asylum in northern India was in Lahore, and in the months after independence its patients were listed and exchanged across the border, Hindus and Sikhs housed in buildings and tents in Amritsar and Muslims sent the other way. Saadat Hasan Manto turned that exchange into his story Toba Tek Singh; Jain and Sarin found in the archives that it had really happened (The Conversation). Law and History Review
The damage did not stop with the children themselves. A University of Delhi study published in Psychological Studies in 2023 used the Danieli Inventory for Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma on the children and grandchildren of survivors living in India. It found notable intergenerational trauma in both generations, with grandchildren scoring numerically higher than children, although the gap was not statistically significant. Survivors who never spoke about 1947 passed it on regardless. The first book to look at Partition through a psychiatric lens, The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India, edited by Sarin and Jain, only appeared in 2018, more than seventy years after the event. D. Satyanand, the first professor of psychiatry at AIIMS, had argued soon after independence that mental health depended on a feeling of belonging. For a generation of Punjabi children whose sense of home had been cut in two, that was exactly what had been taken. Psychological Studies, 2023; Media Diversified
The evidence is lopsided, and it is worth saying so. Most of the published psychological work draws on Hindu and Sikh survivors living in India. The experience of Muslim children who crossed into West Punjab is known mainly through camp records, newspapers and assembly debates rather than through studies of their later lives, and that gap still needs filling.
Voices from Both Punjabs
Khushi Muhammad was seven and had been at school for about a month when Partition reached Aloona Tola, his village in Ludhiana district. Sikh refugees arriving from the west pressed the village's Muslims to leave, and then the village was attacked. He remembers young girls being taken and many women killed. His mother, Fatima, was shot in the elbow and hid first in a well and then in a haystack; she was later found working in a Chamar household. The family scattered, some to a camp at Bhattian and some into Malerkotla state, before walking in a caravan to Sirhind and on to the camp at Ludhiana. They crossed in a goods train, with Gurkha soldiers walking alongside to keep attackers off, reached Lahore, and moved on through Lyallpur and Toba Tek Singh before settling at Chak 302 GB, where each family member was given an acre of land. 1947 Partition Archive
Gulzar Singh Sandhu, later a well-known Punjabi writer, was twelve and living in the village of Sunni in Hoshiarpur district. Its Muslim vegetable growers had joined in the Independence Day celebrations on 15 August. When the danger grew, the village suggested they convert, and they were given iron karas and yellow turbans to wear. It was not enough. A band of outsiders identified them anyway. Sandhu watched his best friend, a Muslim boy named Noora, killed in front of him, and saw Noora's sister carried off. Later, two Muslim girls who had escaped their abductors came back to Sunni asking for help, and this time the villagers hid them and drove off the men who returned for them. Sandhu later put what happened in Sunni into his writing. Punjab Partition Forum, via Hindustan Times
In Kasur in September 1947, a small Muslim boy arrived at the Hanfia camp with people who were not his family. A woman in the camp recognised him as the son of a local policeman. His mother had taken the children across to visit her relatives in East Punjab, and all of them had been killed except this boy. Someone ran to fetch the father, and within ten minutes he was there, with his son wrapped around his neck. Porter, who recorded the scene, also recorded mothers who never found their children again. Chattha, 2018
When Porter went back to Lahore that autumn, she visited the new hospital at Forman Christian College and found the orphans she had nursed in Kasur. They saw her, ran to her, and clung to her, crying that their mother had come. She wrote that she wished she could adopt every one of them, and wondered what would become of them and of the country they now belonged to.
Sikka Khan was a six-month-old Muslim baby in the village of Phulwal in East Punjab. His father died trying to flee and his mother took her own life, but a Sikh family took him in and raised him. His brother Sadiq, ten years old, barely made it to Pakistan alive. Seventy-four years later, after volunteers who run YouTube channels to reunite Partition families traced them, the two brothers met at Kartarpur in January 2022. Washington Post
Thousands more memories like these are held by the 1947 Partition Archive, the Citizens Archive of Pakistan and the oral history collections at SOAS, many of them recorded from people who were children when Punjab was divided.
Witnesses in Charcoal, Paint and Photograph
Some of the truest records of what Partition did to Punjab's families were made by artists rather than officials. Sardari Lal Parasher was vice-principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore when he left the city with his family and little else. In the refugee camps he commanded, at Baldev Nagar in Ambala and later in Delhi, he walked among the refugees at night and drew them on whatever scraps of paper he could find. He was a skilled portraitist, yet he deliberately left the faces unrecognisable. His figures turn away from the viewer, huddle under shawls, or burst out of the edge of the page in despair. The drawings work like snapshots: quick, unfinished, made in mud and flies. History for Peace, Witness to Loss
Satish Gujral, a young Lahori who spent the summer of 1947 helping his father rescue abducted women, painted almost nothing but Partition between 1947 and 1950. Mourning, Return of the Abducted, Dance of Destruction, The Rehabilitated and The Condemned all date from those years, and Days of Freedom came a few years later. His figures are wrapped in shawls and bent by grief, their limbs stretched and their faces twisted; hands with swollen knuckles reach out or are held back. The palette is earth brown, black and deep red. In his paintings the drama is carried by the body, where Parasher's sketches catch a passing moment. The illustration at the head of this essay borrows from both: the shawl-wrapped grieving women and heavy hands from Gujral, the turned-away mother and the quick charcoal line from Parasher, with a child at the centre looking straight out. APNA, The Painter who painted Partitioned Punjab; Astaguru
The camera saw the children too, though most of its pictures have faded into a grey distance that makes 1947 feel further away than it is. In There She Is, written for the Punjab Partition Forum, Ramanjit Singh ran a set of Partition photographs through AI enhancement tools to sharpen and color them, precisely so that the faces would come forward again. His argument is that children's faces carry the trauma of a whole community, and that leaders deciding borders seldom looked at them. In Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a Sikh refugee family, his eye goes to a small girl at the back of the room, already marked by a migration she did not choose. In another Bourke-White image from East Punjab, a Muslim family will not leave their dying grandfather by the roadside while the convoy moves on; a woman fans him, and his granddaughter sits beside them, worn out and bewildered. Other frames show Hindu women and children crowded on the platform at Amritsar station, Hindu and Sikh families sheltering in the precincts of the Golden Temple, and a Muslim family outside the Walton camp in Lahore. Singh hesitated over naming each family's religion, for fear the pictures would be used to stir hatred, and decided the opposite lesson was the one that mattered: Punjabis of every faith suffered the same way, and the children show it most plainly. Ramanjit Singh, There She Is
What, finally, does the children's Partition tell us? First, that suffering in Punjab was symmetrical even when its tellings were not. The Muslim infant who starved at Kasur and the Sikh girl at Thoa Khalsa belong to one history, not two. Second, that the new states thought of children chiefly as property of the nation. Boys were imagined as future soldiers and citizens. Girls were treated as community honour to be recovered. Children of mixed parentage, who fitted neither nation's design, were the most likely to be left behind. Third, the orphanages were real and they saved lives. Lahore's Darul Atfal, Jalandhar's Gandhi Vanita Ashram and Bhagat Puran Singh's Pingalwara in Amritsar all did what they could. But far more children were absorbed quietly, as adopted sons, servants, or beggars on city streets, and their stories are mostly lost.
The last lesson is the one the psychiatrists are still writing. The children of 1947 grew up, married, ran shops, taught school and raised families in Lyallpur and Ludhiana, Lahore and Amritsar. Many did well. Most carried Partition with them all the same, and some of it passed to the next generations whether or not it was ever spoken. The question 1947 still asks is not whether children can survive mass violence; plainly, many can. It is whether anyone stays beside them long enough to help them carry it.
References
Ilyas Chattha, After the Massacres: Nursing Survivors of Partition Violence in Pakistan Punjab Camps, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28:2 (2018)
Ilyas Chattha, Partition's Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan, Indian Economic and Social History Review (2022)
Ishtiaq Ahmed, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: lecture, India International Centre (2013)
Ravinder Kaur, The Second Migration: Displacement and Refugees from Rawalpindi during Partition, Journal of Punjab Studies 14:1
A Father's Decision, Open magazine (2013), on Bir Bahadur Singh and Thoa Khalsa
Parvez Mahmood, Partition Stories: An Amritsar Tragedy, The Friday Times (2022)
Lives Torn Asunder: The Children of Indian Partition, 75 Years On, CNN (2022)
Partition Abductions 1947, LUMS Archive
Sayantani Upadhaya, The Unwanted Children of Partition, Brown History (2023)
Orphans of the Partition: The Perilous Journey of Women, Outlook
Kamla Patel, Torn from the Roots: A Partition Memoir, Women Unlimited (2006)
Impact of Partition and Displacement on Refugee Women and Children, Samvedna, Maitreyi College (2023)
Ashoka Gupta, East is east, west is west, Seminar 510 (2002), reproducing a refugee homes inspection report
Gandhi Vanita Ashram, Jalandhar, Punjab Department of Social Security
Bhagat Puran Singh, SikhiWiki
Sanjeev Jain, Wounded Souls: 75 Years After India's Partition, Survivors' Trauma Has Still Not Been Recognized, The Conversation (2022)
Intergenerational Trauma in the Context of the 1947 India–Pakistan Partition, Psychological Studies (2023)
Ananya Kalra and Eva Zysk, An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the Emotional Experience of the 1947 Partition Survivors, Journal of Student Research (2021)
Archives of Sexual Violence: Some Testimonies from the Partition of India, Law and History Review
Gouri Sharma, Legacies of Partition in Mental Health, Media Diversified (2018)
Khushi Muhammad Jut, 1947 Partition Archive
The girls were safely escorted to Pakistan, Punjab Partition Forum, after the Hindustan Times
Two brothers were orphaned and separated during India's partition. They have reunited 74 years later, Washington Post (2022)
Nehru at Kurukshetra camp, April 1948 and Cartier-Bresson, games in Kurukshetra camp, Punjab Partition Forum
Prajna Parasher, Witness to Loss: Parasher's Partition Sketches, History for Peace
The Painter who painted Partitioned Punjab, Academy of the Punjab in North America
Satish Gujral's Artistic Response to Historical Trauma, Astaguru
Ramanjit Singh, There She Is, Punjab Partition Forum (2024, updated 2025)
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