Ek Hamara Bhi Sundar Thikana Tha

                       My new release in Hindi with lyrics written by Ardamanjit Singh Sandhu

http://open.spotify.com/album/6fquMPzbow3edMNoK23Vvu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B9iEXEGPmA

https://music.amazon.in/albums/B09TWK3PWN?marketplaceId=A3K6Y

https://music.apple.com/in/album/ek-hamara-bhi-sundar-thikana-tha-single/1612680695

Ardamanjit Singh Sandhu’s masterly and beautiful poem Ek Hamara Bhi Sundar Thikana Tha [We Too Had A Beautiful Homestead Once], is especially poignant with the memories of a happy mixed coexistence before the burden and weight of history ended it with a hastily drawn line on a map where there had not been one before. WWII-battered British imperial colonialists confronting a powerful independence movement in India, used the line to artificially carve out two countries based on religion from the territory of British India, an experiment that failed in 1971.

Vivid reminiscences of those good days and times invoke the beautiful homestead that Ardamanjit Singh’s family once had in a little village in Sialkot District, the verdure of the fields and the fresh rippling breeze, the frequent warm and affectionate interaction with friends and neighbours—"a story in its own right.”

The disruption of a virtual idyll of harmony is reflected in a changed status-quo, brought on by the suddenly sprung traumatic Partition of India by the British in 1947, begging the question: “Where was God, when people were killing each other?” Growing, deepening tensions with the sectarian communal and religious violence stoked for political ends by religious hardliners, were a rude awakening. “Someone considered a friend metamorphosed from a human being into a monster” overnight, as it were, “a flaming torch in hand and an ultimatum on the lips” for a gruesome ethnic cleansing in the offing: “Get out from here, leave this village! The days of carnage are here!” 

Reduced brusquely from compatriot to alien-status, “overwhelmed by a peculiar edginess, frightened at heart” and fearing for their lives, the horrifying experience of being forced to flee, leaving behind ancestral homes and properties as minority refugees never to return, finds stark, minimalist expression:

Chappals on the feet, and a bundle on the head,

The body was walking, but the soul had been left behind at the old homestead.

For the columns of displaced refugees on foot and riding truck and train “convoys that started, the journey was long”, frightening “drums sounding”, “heavy rain clouds thundering”, armed mobs clamouring for blood en route to another country over the new borders drawn up by the British.

Reaching their destination in India to be housed in Refugee Camps, separated here and there from friends and family, the refugees started life over, missing the ambient idiosyncratic “mahaul” of the native village left behind: “it was just not the same anymore”. Annual Independence celebrations invariably evoked memories of the community of old. The wounds and pain of Partition still cut deep with a tormented, imploring lamentation to God:

What fault was it of mine that I was punished like this?

Whatever did I do for such disaster to strike?

Decades later, with life at its last round, those bygone days still stir a yearning to go back there one day, if ever God grants this wish. The reader’s empathy with the poet nevertheless wrestles with the fact that it would mean going across the militarized frontier, each side still deeply suspicious of one another, with a nuclear arsenal and military forces arrayed against each other, separated by decades of political strife and wars.

And the Poem’s closing refrain has an elegiac cadence as it reiterates:

What days those were, what times they were,

We too had a beautiful homestead once.

No illusion but an experienced, cherished reality of a simple, good life without conflict.

As Ardamanjit Singh writes:

LEST WE FORGET

While we celebrate our Independence Day each year, let's also spare a thought for the millions of people who suffered due to the Partition of Undivided India. This Partition triggered the biggest mass migration of populations in modern history – estimates have put the count at over 10 million, who crossed to ‘either side’ of the Radcliffe Line. To make matters worse, they underwent untold miseries and tragedies along the way - attacks, killings, kidnappings, rape etc.

The hapless people travelled by road, rail, on foot and even on ships (between Bombay and Karachi). These displaced persons now suddenly found themselves to be refugees. Having lost everything – land, property, business, belongings etc, all of them had to make a new beginning of their lives in a new and uncertain environment.

My family belonged to Sialkot District and had to relocate into India when Pakistan was formed. My father, then Captain (later Lt General) Jaswant Singh, on his own initiative organised a Refugee Camp at Daska and facilitated the evacuation of over 100,000 Hindus and Sikhs to India. He, along with his family, later came in a ‘special train’ at the end of October 1947.

My maternal grandmother, who had got separated from the rest of the family, walked with a ‘kafila’ (a large group of people) for over three days in sporadic rain, and managed to reach India via the Dera Baba Nanak border. While recalling the event, she would often say, “Saadhe kapde bhij gaye san, tey jootian tut gayian san”(our clothes got wet, and the chappals broke). She was housed in a Refugee Camp in Amritsar, till located some weeks later by my grandfather.

It is to my family’s credit that they harboured no hatred or rancour, in spite of having been uprooted from their centuries-old homestead and recalled memories of good times with nostalgia.

Although I have penned this Poem in remembrance of those who suffered this traumatic event, in a broader sense it speaks on behalf of displaced peoples all over the world who have, time and again, been forced to leave their homeland due to no fault of theirs.”

© Ardamanjit Singh Sandhu

New Delhi, 2022.