Hymns in Blood Read online

  To my father

  For that boundless love which touched so many hearts

  Khoon ke sohile gaviai Nanak rat ka kungu pae ve laalo

  The paeans of blood are sung, O Nanak, and blood is

  sprinkled in place of saffron

  —GURU GRANTH SAHIB [722]

  Contents

  Foreword

  A tree of love starts to blossom

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Afterword

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise for Hymns in Blood

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Nanak Singh

  AS I START writing these lines today, I have this gnawing pain in my gut—a feeling of futility about everything that I have read or written since 1929. Everything’s gone down the drain. My dreams of seeing this country stand tall and united have crumbled into dust. My eyes—yes, the same ones that had witnessed Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs sip from the same glass of water—are mute spectators to the carnage unfolding before us. They have seen brothers drink each other’s blood. How I wish the good Lord had closed these eyes forever, spared them the trauma of having to see what they have seen!

  One short year. That’s all it took to bring our nation to this calamity. Who could have imagined it?

  And surely, it is nothing but sheer mulishness on my part that I am using this book to bring Muslims and non-Muslims on the same page at a time when people consider it foolhardy to even mention both in the same sentence. I won’t be surprised if some of my readers find this book swimming against the prevailing currents, but there is nothing that I can do about it. It feels like I am being compelled, that there is some strange and powerful force at work—a force that is driving me, driving my conscience and driving my pen to write this.

  But what lies behind this compulsion of mine?

  Maybe it was this picture imprinted in my eyes, one that will continue to shine bright till the day that the shadow of death arrives to cast a pall around it. An image of my beautiful and vibrant Punjab, which I have not just seen with my eyes but also experienced with my soul. Much of my childhood and youth were spent in a milieu where the Muslim and non-Muslim communities lived in complete harmony; where they didn’t just live as peaceful neighbours but were ready to sacrifice their lives for their neighbours’ sake; where every plate of food and glass of water was shared.

  Pieces of that picture lie shattered around me today, and this novel is an attempt to show my readers some of those pieces. But this book isn’t just a novel; it is a reflection of the ache in my heart, the scream from the very pits of my stomach, the wail from the depths of my soul. In writing this book, my pen has relied on the tears flowing from my eyes as much as it has on the ink from my inkpot.

  Everyone around me speaks of the numbers. How many Sikhs have been massacred; how many Hindus have been killed; how many Muslims have been slaughtered. But for this unfortunate writer, the biggest casualty was humanity itself. How does it matter if the victim has the long hair of the Sikh, the shikha of the Hindu or the circumcision of the Muslim? The blood coursing through their veins is the same colour of red, the tears flowing from their eyes have the same salt. Try as I might, I haven’t been able to discern any difference in the grief-stricken wails of a Hindu, a Sikh or a Muslim mother as she cradles the lifeless body of her son.

  Ah! Which evil eye has cursed our blessed land to shatter the unity of our people into so many fragments? Who brought the embers of discord in our midst to unleash flames that haven’t just devoured decades of peace and amity but also brought the fires of Hell to our very doorstep?

  How did this happen and who was responsible? Was there a hidden force that caused this unprecedented destruction? There is no short or easy answer to these questions and I would request my readers to be patient and take the time to read these ten or twelve extra pages before I commence the novel itself.

  Many of my countrymen would regard 1947 as an auspicious year, one that would usher in the long-awaited independence to India. But to me, this was an accursed year for our country. Our conception of an unbroken, undivided India that had evolved over centuries crumbled to dust before our very eyes. And the cause of this destruction wasn’t some foreigner—we, our own people, were responsible.

  Of course, the devil that is usually blamed for this catastrophe is the Angrez; his devious stratagem is often called the Two-Nation Theory, a poisonous seed that quietly germinated inside Mr Jinnah’s brain before emerging in the form of the demand for ‘Pakistan’.

  Pakistan! Who would have thought this bizarre demand for Pakistan would end up breaking our country and dragging our society to such depths? Who knew that the blood flowing from the birth of Pakistan would turn our land crimson? Who would have imagined that my fellow Indians—brothers who had lived next to each other for generations—would lust for each other’s blood? Who could have even dreamt that Indians—the same ones who remembered Iqbal’s ‘Saare Jahan se Accha’, the ones who passionately sang the refrain ‘Indians we are and India is our land’—those same Indians would unsheathe their swords and daggers to behead their brethren? Who would believe that the gods and angels of this ancient land would strip one another’s daughters and sisters naked and dishonour them in public? That they would loot and burn tens of thousands of homes and leave their inhabitants to face the elements without a roof on their heads?

  Ah! How I wish this accursed year of 1947 had never emerged, that our country had been spared the death and destruction that it wrought!

  ‘India’s become independent!’ I hear these cries of celebration all around me. Yes, India is free from the clutches of the British. But did we care to think of the exorbitant price that we have paid for this independence? Let some of the statistics speak for themselves. Some four lakhs or maybe even five lakhs killed by knives and swords, bullets and bombs; around two crores rendered homeless and facing untold hardship as refugees in distant lands; seventy or eighty thousand girls and women abducted and vanished without a trace; around one and a half lakh men and women forced to change their religion; wealth and property to the tune of around two thousand crore rupees burnt or destroyed; and perhaps around five thousand crores rupees worth of silver, gold and jewels looted.

  These are the barebone estimates of the price that we have paid for our country’s independence. But beyond that, think of the intangibles! We have lost our invaluable sense of humanity, our territorial unity, our fraternal ties. Aren’t these also a part of that price?

  Maybe we should have risked everything in a direct confrontation with the mighty British empire. Like Stalingrad, it might have left half our population dead or wounded on the battlefield and reduced our cities to rubble. Maybe we would have lost the battle and maybe we would have died fighting and maybe we would have been left penniless. But we would have preserved our humanity and our sense of national identity. Where is the humanity of those sons of Mother India today when they display these ghastly garlands fashioned out of the mutilated breasts of women? Where did our sense of national unity take flight when the warm embrace between brothers became a sword at the neck, a knife in the back? We are raping our own sisters, setting fires to our homes with our own matches, breaking into our chests and trunks with our own hammers.

  ‘The Angrez are brutal … the British are malicious … the British are satanic
rulers who control us through a Divide and Rule policy…’ We have been narrating these stories in our country for two hundred years. But think about it—should we blame the British or should we also dwell upon the blindness of the Indian? The one who walked with the lamp of liberty for two hundred years and still stumbled into the abyss with his eyes wide open.

  The British did exactly what was expected of them, one would be foolish to expect anything else from a foreign ruler. The fault lies in our own mentality; even after two centuries of experience with British machinations, we were unable to evade the trap they laid for us.

  For three quarters of a century, hundreds of thousands of patriots rallied under the banner of the Congress to wage a non-violent campaign that eventually defeated a power as mighty and cunning as the British empire. But did we really think that they would accept the verdict honourably, pack their bags and sail back to England? If he were to behave honourably, he wouldn’t be called the Angrez, now would he? No sir! He had one final move up his sleeve and when he played that move on the chessboard of Indian politics, we saw our winning hand turn into crushing defeat.

  And what was this diabolical move? To pull back all his pieces and push forward a pawn called Jinnah. This was like offering to kill the snake poised on your enemy’s chest. If the blow kills the snake, you profit. And if it kills the enemy, you profit still.

  On one hand, Independence was finally knocking on India’s door. And on the other, you had Mr Jinnah beating his little drum and shouting ‘Pakistan! Pakistan!’ at the top of his voice, even as he practised the dictum ‘We won’t play, and neither will we let you play.’ One side was chanting slogans of Akhand Bharat while the other was conspiring to carve up the country into pieces. And while the British embarked on the charade of inviting the parties to set up an interim government as a first step in the transition to full independence, the Muslim League stepped up its own campaign. Its shrill cries for Pakistan were now accompanied by dire threats of violence.

  The British had been working for a while to prepare a fairly detailed plan to accord dominion status to India, but each attempt to move forward was thwarted by Jinnah’s insistence on Pakistan. Some of the country’s finest political minds grappled with this conundrum but failed to come up with a viable solution.

  The Congress leaders tried to placate Mr Jinnah with a series of concessions in the hope of keeping the country together, only to face disappointment after each meeting. Jinnah’s demands kept growing and his jaws appeared to open ever wider to swallow each offer of compromise. The structure of an interim government was ready, but couldn’t get moving until the representation of the Muslim League in the government was settled. From Lord Wavell and Lord Mountbatten to Pandit Nehru—everyone tried their best. Even a great leader like Mahatma Gandhi took the initiative to personally go across and meet Jinnah. But like a novice drummer’s monosyllabic rhythm, Jinnah was stuck on his ‘I will not accept; I will never accept’ refrain.

  With no resolution in sight, the British government resolved to get around the intransigence of the Muslim League with an announcement on 15 August 1946 inviting the Congress to form the interim government. Jinnah’s storm troopers responded with unrestrained fury. Muslim League leaders across the length and breadth of India started to deliver incendiary speeches that often ended with chants calling for ‘Direct Action’. You may have thought that this was just a moment of insanity, but when a Direct Action Day was announced, you could see it take a menacing shape before our very eyes. Sure enough, the first round of this infernal cannon was fired in Calcutta by none other than Huseyn Suhrawady, prime minister of the Bengal Council. A week of relentless violence left the streets of the metropolis littered with corpses. Some twenty thousand persons were killed and around fifty thousand left wounded. The damage to property alone was estimated at around ninety crore rupees.

  But the embers of the communal fire ignited in Calcutta didn’t remain confined to the city. Fanned by the inflammatory speeches of Suhrawady and Jinnah acolytes, the flames rapidly spread to Assam, Delhi, Dhaka, Bombay, Nagpur and Noakhali. They engulfed Bihar and scorched the United Provinces before entering our land, Punjab.

  The Muslim League had intended to use their Direct Action campaign and its accompanying spectre of communal violence as a political tactic to scare the country’s non-Muslim population, and to gain additional leverage over the Congress. But it turned out to be a double-edged sword and the ravenous flames of religious passion didn’t feed on the non-Muslims alone; they also turned towards the Muslim community and consumed many of them. The attacks on Hindus in Bengal were avenged against Muslims in Bihar; the Frontier Province settled scores for Bihar, and Punjab retaliated against the violence in the Frontier Province. Death and destruction were spreading through the country and every attack and counter-attack stripped away a layer of compassion from the soul of India. Young men were being killed for no fault of theirs and mothers around the country were grieving their loss, but Mr Jinnah was unmoved; each conflagration seemed to make him harder, more implacable.

  The Congress leadership, meanwhile, had accepted the invitation from the British, and on 1 September 1946, an interim government, headed by the Congress, assumed formal charge. The Muslim League also formally announced its decision to boycott the government, adding fuel to the communal riots raging across several states. The result was entirely predictable. The interim government failed to get off the ground, and the expanding circle of violence led the British to renew their efforts to broker a compromise between the Congress and the Muslim League. But Jinnah remained adamant, and the stalemate continued.

  Jinnah’s obduracy eventually forced the Congress to bend. Senior leaders of the Congress who had resolutely proclaimed that ‘there would be no negotiations with Mr Jinnah until he gave up his demand for Pakistan’ now started to sing a different tune. To be perfectly honest, they surrendered to Jinnah’s will by accepting his claim for ‘Pakistan’ and burying forever their own dream of an Undivided India.

  But let’s move on and turn our attention to the state of affairs in our own province of Punjab, where another battle was taking place—this one between the Muslim League and the coalition government. The League was desperate to head the government in the Punjab, but had failed to achieve its ambition. The formation of a coalition government in Lahore meant that Jinnah’s desire to see the Islamic banner unfurl across the state remained a mirage. Neither the Sikh leaders nor the Hindus were so naive as to take Jinnah’s promises at face value and extend their support to the League. Gruesome stories of the havoc wrought by Muslim League zealots on the Hindu and the Sikh communities in towns and cities across Alanabad, Pothohar and the Frontier Province were still too raw to contemplate such a thought. The League had mobilized hordes of poor and uneducated peasants in the name of Islam and incited them to go on a rampage against the non-Muslim minorities in these regions. Their homes looted and destroyed, thousands of Hindu and Sikh families had been forced to leave their ancestral lands to join caravans of refugees snaking across the countryside towards the relative security of eastern Punjab.

  The concessions and assurances being offered by Jinnah to the Hindu and Sikh leaders in lieu of their support for a Muslim League government in Lahore were categorically rejected. The actions of the Muslim League towards the minorities spoke louder than its words. There was no way that the Hindus and the Sikhs would accept a subservient status under a party that had already revealed its true colours.

  The swearing in of Malik Khizar Hayat as chief minister of a coalition government supported by the Congress and Akali Dal sent a wave of anger through the Muslim League. They decided to move heaven and earth in opposing the coalition, launching a campaign of civil disobedience and even threatening Direct Action.

  For the satanic cabal of the League, Punjab was now the stage where they could perform their diabolical campaign to sow chaos and unrest. Laws were broken with impunity, and it wasn’t until their gangs started to board trains wi
thout tickets and rob unsuspecting passengers that the government machinery started to rouse itself from its slumber. The Muslim National Guard was declared an unlawful organization and several senior League leaders from the Punjab, including Sir Firoz Khan Noon, Nawab Mamdot, Begum Shahnawaz, Shaukat Hayat and others, were placed under arrest. But if the government expected the Leaguers to back off, it was sadly mistaken. Their agitation started to acquire a menacing character even as they stepped up their Direct Action campaign against the Khizar government.

  It was perhaps too much to expect the feckless Khizar Hayat to stand firm amidst these swirling currents. As demonstrations against his government spread from Punjab to the neighbouring Frontier Province, Hayat beat a hasty retreat by removing all restrictions on the activities of the Muslim National Guard and ordering the release of the League leaders. And if we needed any further evidence of his pusillanimity, he provided it by going across to the governor on 1 March 1947 to unceremoniously tender his letter of resignation.

  The reactions were quite predictable—jubilant celebrations among the Leaguers and a wave of anger and disappointment among the Hindu and the Sikh communities. Master Tara Singh joined several Hindu and Sikh leaders at the Assembly Hall in Lahore on 4 March to shout ‘Death to Pakistan!’ and other similar slogans. Later on the same day, a huge crowd of Hindus and Sikhs gathered at the Guru ka Bagh grounds in Amritsar and swore that they would lay down their lives to prevent a Muslim League government from being foisted upon them. That gathering also came up with a chilling new slogan:

  If it’s Pakistan that you want

  It’s the graveyard that we grant!

  Khizar’s letter of resignation had clearly opened a Pandora’s box in Punjab. The furtive manner in which it was delivered gave rise to all manner of speculation and the air was rife with conspiracy theories.

  As the sun rose on 5 March, its rays glistened on the crimson hues of blood that had been shed on the pious earth of Amritsar. For the first time since anyone could remember, the people of Punjab turned upon their own brothers. What an irony that it happened to be Holi! The festival of colours was being celebrated in the most macabre fashion with the blood of friends and neighbours!