There She Is

-Ramanjit Singh

I took some of the Partition related photographs and ran them through the Artifical Intelligence based image enhancer software to see how the old black and white images can be colorized, unblurred and enhanced. Here are some results.

The following photograph is of a Sikh refugee family taken by Margaret Bourke-White for the Life magazine. When I looked at this picture, I noticed the little girl standing at the back of the room. Her face tells a lot about the pain of forced migration and of the uncertain future that lies ahead of her.

Taking her snapshot and running it through AI image enhancer reveals the clear, unblurred photogaph of the child.

There she is, her gaze reaching across 78 years to meet ours. The distance has collapsed. We understand her pain. Her sad face can no longer conceal the trauma of horrors witnessed. We see her now, truly see her, though her future remains unknown. Did she find happiness and peace? Or did she struggle to survive in the shadows of an indifferent world? Her fate is unknown, but this moment, captured forever in this photograph, tells us exactly what she was going through.

If you want to understand trauma, all you have to do is look at a child's face. Children do not hide pain. Their faces reflect the trauma of an entire community, humanity's crimes laid bare. Their faces are a mirror to everything we do wrong in society. Seeing their faces during India's greatest social rupture is remarkable evidence of Partition that no book or article can fully describe. All you have to do is look at a child, and you will understand everything.

When leaders make momentous decisions, they rarely ask how children will suffer. The children's cries went unheard. They carried on, emotionally shattered, many without their parents, most without their loved ones, bearing scars that never healed, wounds they carried until their final breath.

One of the great unknowns about Partition is the effect it had on young children who saw the violence first hand and carried that trauma the rest of their lives.

These enhanced photographs bring to life the events of Partition which are often emotionally detached from us. The lack of color and clarity often misses the human element and fails to convey the trauma of that tragic event. History becomes obscure, unimpactful, when the very faces of people we are seeing are unknown, too distant for us to relate with.

With color and clarity, we can now use AI to make history more relatable, the distance of time can now be bridged.

The next photograph taken by photojournalist Max Desfor shows a queue of children lining up for water in a Muslim refugee camp in Delhi. I first colorized the photograph and then took one of the faces of the children to bring it back to life. Refer to the context of this photograph.

During the the Partition of India, Muslim refugees, evacuated from areas of unrest in New Delhi, line up for water with any type of container at Purana Qila, the old fort, in New Delhi, India, on September 17, 1947. This is the only water tap within the camp, where it takes anywhere from one to three hours to get water. There were an estimated 20,000 people at this refugee camp with little food or water and just the barest of housing facilities. The people here do not know what plans their government has for them or how long they will stay.

Now using AI to enhance the face of one of the children.

There she is, her face accusing us of horrors we inflicted. She is lost in the madness that surrounds her, numbed by the realization that her entire world has been shattered. Every moment is a test of survival, every breath shadowed by the dread of what calamity will strike next. Her face reflects humanity's depravity, a child asking why she was born if only to witness such horrors. Her eyes burn with anger, betrayal, an unforgiving grief that will haunt her forever. There were millions of children just like her, lost in the chaos of our own making, their childhoods stolen, their innocence destroyed.

A Sikh woman in a camp in Rawalpindi after the March 1947 violence

There she is, someone's mother, someone's grandmother. The family she struggled her entire life to nurture and sustain was shattered by the mob in one savage moment. Now she finds herself adrift in a sea of refugees, each carrying similar grief, each haunted by similar horrors. The murders started in Rawalpindi, and her face bears witness to everything she saw, the violence, the bloodshed, the unthinkable cruelty. Her torn clothing, her disheveled hair, her hollow eyes, all speak of survival at an unbearable cost. She barely escaped with her life, but many weren't that lucky. The dead she left behind haunt every step she takes.

Hindu refugee children in Jammu

There she is, a young mother holding on to her children, the weight of her entire family pressing down on her shoulders. The life she once knew is gone. Now she wanders through unfamiliar streets, lost and uncertain. Look at the boy beside her, his eyes waver with confusion and fear, trying desperately to comprehend the chaos unfolding around him. Her hand grips a bundle, perhaps all they have left. The toddler in her arms clings tightly, too young to understand but old enough to sense the terror. Her white dupatta, once a symbol of purity, now wraps around her like a shroud.

Hindu refugee women and children at Amritsar railway station

Enhancing one of the faces in the crowd.

There she is, one face among the rescued, one survivor of Lahore's massacres. Her silence screams across seventy-eight years. Her gaze still waits for help that will never come. I can only bear witness to this moment, this expression of trauma crystallized in time. We cannot reach her. She belongs to another world, another era, sealed away by history. But God, it feels like yesterday. We replay Partition in our minds, the violence, the terror, the abandonment, and we are helpless because time has stolen any chance we had to intervene. These faces are gone. These moments are lost forever. Yet she stares at us still, demanding we remember, refusing to release us from the guilt of what was done.

Here are some additional photographs.

Viceroy Mountbatten in Lahore (July 1947)

Old and dying Muslim man with his family, somewhere in east Punjab. Photograph by Margaret Bourke White (Time Life)

This is one of the most iconic and disturbing images of Partition, and it demands we stop and truly see it. A family stranded on the roadside, abandoned by the endless caravan of refugees who cannot afford to wait. But this family stays. They will not leave their dying grandfather alone, dying of exhaustion, even though staying might mean their own death. Watch the woman fan his face as he takes his last breaths, protecting him from flies in his final moments. This is humanity at its most beautiful and most tragic, tenderness in hell.

And there she is, beside him, sits his granddaughter. Look at her. Her hand pressed against her face in complete exhaustion. Her legs worn from miles of walking that children should never walk. Her eyes staring at us with confusion so deep it breaks through time itself, Why is this happening? Why must I watch grandfather die like this? Why has the world become so cruel?

She is a child bearing witness to death, sitting in the dirt beside a man who should have died peacefully at home, surrounded by family in comfort. Instead, he dies here. On the roadside. In the dust. And she can only sit and watch, too tired to cry, too bewildered to understand.

Sikh Gurdwara in Lahore, 1946 (Margaret Bourke White). Probably Dera Sahib near Maharaja Ranjit Singh samadh.

Lahore street, 1946

Lahore, probably Delhi gate, 1946

Refugees crossing a bridge, rainy season in Punjab, August, 1947

Hindu and Sikh refugees from west Punjab taking shelter in the Golden Temple, March-August 1947

Refugees headed to west Punjab

This was a Sikh & Hindu refugee column originating from Lyallpur

Trauma of migration, a Muslim refugee family near Walton camp, Lahore

There she is, the matriarch, once the foundation upon which an entire family stood, once the living embodiment of continuity and tradition. Now she walks through dust and displacement in a Lahore refugee camp. Her weathered face tells the story of nearly a century, if she is in her late eighties or early nineties here, she entered this world in the 1860s or 1870s, in an India still reeling from the 1857 revolt. Her parents and grandparents lived under Mughal twilight and British dawn. They survived one world ending. And now she, who has already lived through empires rising and falling, finds herself exiled in her final years. History has come full circle, and this time, she is the refugee.

You can view original, black and white photographs here in the Photograph section of this Forum.

I sometimes think that I'm making a "mistake" of identifying the refugees as Hindu or Muslim or Sikh. Knowing full well that some of the consumers of this content will use it to further spread hatred amongst us. The purpose of this is not to create a “us versus them” narrative and further divide the people. Its purpose is to convey the sentiment that people of Punjab suffered regardless of their religion. We suffered, all of us suffered, and every one of these photographs shared here is a representation of our community, our Punjabi community, that fell into an orgy of violence, which to this day is still struggling to understand.

What we see in this montage, is the chaos that engulfed Punjab. Punjab of five rivers, Punjab that once existed from Delhi to Peshawar.