Beloved town of bhera

Remembering the Beloved Town of Bhera:
Reminiscences of a displaced Hindu

Gian Sarup
gsarup@verizon.net

Bhera is a town that is cherished even by those who had to flee it en masse and for ever in very dire circumstances. The town continues to evoke a sense of a paradise lost for our generation of men and women who had to leave Bhera in 1947. We have very warm memories of our childhood in our ancestral town, our place of birth, and our watan.

I am a 73-years old Hindu from Bhera. In 1947, I was a 13-years old kid who had moved to the 9th class in the Kirpa Ram Anglo-Sanskrit High School, popularly known as the Arya High School. I still remember the poem, “Hubb-ul-watani,” (love for one’s native land) in our Urdu textbook for the Seventh Class. The poem started with the lines, “Dilli mein ek sitar niwazi ki jaan thaa, aur jaan se aziz tha Dilli ko jaananta.” This sitar player accepted an offer of “khilat-o-zar” from the Royal Court of Hyderabad, and one day he set out on his journey to Deccan in a carriage sent to fetch him. When his carriage reached near the famous Jama Masjid, the sitar player looked at the grand sight and asked the gadibaan (the driver) whether Hyderabad would have a mosque like Jama Masjid. The driver replied that there were several beautiful mosques in Hyderabad but there was none like the Jama Masjid of Delhi. By the time a few more of the city’s landmarks, each judged as unmatched by the gadibaan, went by, the carriage had reached the banks of river Jamuna. The sitar player could not help asking once again if they had a river like Jamuna in the environs of Hyderabad. The driver told him that there was a river there, but it was no match to the enchanting Jamuna of Delhi. The sitar player could not take it any more, and told the driver to turn back to Delhi where he would make do with much less but would be at home in his watan!

Patriotism once used to be basically local, centered on hometowns. Your town was the axis of your attachments and pride. We used to be nourished on local hubb-ul-watani. Our emotional ties were centered on all manner of things associated with the town. Bhera’s heroes and characters, its boli and humor, its history and folklore, its festivals and celebrations, its food and confections, its bazaars and mohallas, and its places of worship and even orchards became the facets of our local pride. The very name of the town became a core component of our being.

When the Hindu and Sikh families left Bhera and other places in West Punjab for India at the time of country’s partition, a large number of them found their way to Delhi. After this huge influx of Punjabi refugees, Delhi became largely a Punjabi city. There are scores of localities in Delhi that are predominantly populated by the now grown up children of these refugees from Pakistani Punjab, yet there are only four localities in Greater Delhi that were named after the towns in West Punjab: Gujranwala Town, Multan Colony, Bhera Enclave, and Miyanwali Nagar. Bhera Enclave is located in the northwest sector of Delhi. Bherochis started building their houses there toward the end of 1970’s, as much as three decades after they had arrived in India. Their hubb-ul-watani beckoned them to resurrect for their future generations a sliver of Bhera, nearly four hundred miles southeast of their ancestral hometown on the banks of river Jehlum. In the office of the Enclave’s Community Center, the lead plaque tells the visitors, “The residents of Bhera Enclave fondly remember BHERA – the city of their ancestors.”

A poignant example of the hubb-ul-watani of a Bherochi Hindu is the content of the last rites (antim-sanskaar) of his death in Delhi. Joginder Nath Kapur was the son of a prominent Kapur family of Bhera. His father owned the largest iron shop in the town’s main bazaar. Kapur Sahib, as we used to address Joginder ji, matriculated from the Arya School and got his B.Sc from a college in Lahore. He taught Science and English in his alma mater in Bhera and also coached its hockey team for a while. In Delhi, he started a large private coaching college (Delhi Public College) that catered to thousands of refugee students like me who worked fulltime in offices and attended its classes in the evenings to appear as private candidates for university exams. For a science teacher, Kapur Sahib was highly proficient in Persian. Whenever the regular tutor for our Intermediate Persian class went on leave, Kapur Sahib would step in and teach us Persian poetry by translating and explicating Rumi, Saadi, and Firdosi! Once in a while, on public demand in the college functions, he would recite in his inimitable style the sorrowful poem, Ek saarson ka kafila, shauq-e-watan dil mein liye, aazad sab afkaar se, athkelian karta hua, wapis tha ghar ko jaa raha” by Vakil Abdul Hamid Sahib. When this noble son of Bhera died in 1987 in Delhi, the last rites at his Kirya-Karam ceremony included a discourse, “The Historical Importance of Bhera: A respectful tribute to the memory of Swargya (Late) Joginder Nath Kapur,” in Hindi. I cannot think of a more touching gesture of a people’s regard for their place of origin. The lecture was delivered by Dr. Birbal Gandhi of Bhera Enclave. It is a four-page long document in chaste Hindi. I can translate here only the last line of this address: “The efforts of the Bhera Welfare Society succeeded in securing [enough] land in the West Delhi area for the construction of houses by displaced Bherochis so that the name of Bhera lasts for long (ta ke Bhera ka naam qaaim rahe).

The generation of our children knows the names of the towns their parents and grandparents had come from, but generally have little, if any, interest in the history or the character of these places. Newer generations generally do not speak Punjabi at home, though they understand it. They can neither read nor write Urdu. Their grandparents are not there any more; their parents, uncles, and aunts do not reminisce about Bhera that often in their presence. Born and raised in India and some foreign countries, not many among them are looking forward to visiting their ancestral hometowns in Pakistan. Professor Kalpana Sahni, the daughter of the late Prof. Bhisham Sahni, has been one heartening and notable exception. On a visit to Lahore, she undertook a trip to Bhera where she tried to locate the home of her ancestors in the Sahniyan da Mohalla. She wrote a very evocative piece, “The persistence of memory: Another country, an ancestral village, and remembrances that spill across time and borders.” It originally appeared in Outlook (October 30, 2000), an Indian weekly newsmagazine, and can now be found on several web sites on Bhera, such as www.merabhera.com or www.geocities.com/hbugvi . Prof. Sahni’s desire to visit her father’s ancestral town and home must have been kindled over many years of listening to her family’s remembrances of the old times, accounts of her forefathers’ move from Bhera to Rawalpindi, mention of sundry characters from Bhera, and conversations in what she calls the give-away Punjabi of Bhera (see Note 1). Her father’s writings inspired her as well. Bhisham Sahni’s last novel, Mayyadas ki Marhi, was set in Bhera. The original novel written in Hindi came out in 1988. Its English version, The Mansion (also translated in English by her father), was published by Harper-Collins in 1995. She apparently has had a very Bhera-nurturing family environment.

Our generation’s emotional bond with Bhera might have faded quite a bit, (dil bhi kam dukhta hai, woh yaad bhi kam aatai hein), but it never withered. In India or outside of it, when we come across someone from Bhera or a nearby town, we greet them heartily as our watanis. In the spring of 1982, I had taken some of my relatives from India to show them around Chicago (about sixty miles east of the town where I have lived since 1972). Not far from the Shedd Aquarium, I spotted a gentleman who looked like an Indian or a Pakistani taking pictures of the scenery. He must have noticed me, too. At one point he approached me and asked if I could take a few pictures of him with Lake Michigan for the background. I readily took the shots he wanted, and we started chatting when I discovered that he was from Mandi Phularwan, a town hardly 12 miles away from Bhera. He was Dr. Aijaz Sarvar Gilani., vacationing by himself in the United States. We immediately felt connected like watanis, exchanged our addresses, and wondered aloud how we two strangers, born and raised in two towns so close to each other, were destined to run into each other in Chicago of all the places! Just before we took leave of each other, he asked if I knew how well Hindus from Phularwan were faring in India. I was moved by his concern to know how well the folk, who were once a part of his hometown community, were doing in exile. I was sad to disappoint him, for I did not know of anyone from Phularwan. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he left in his tourist bus.

Hindus and Sikhs visiting their hometowns in Pakistan are overwhelmed by the warmth (bahut piyar mohabbat naal milde ne) with which the people greet them there. In 1978, my younger brother, then a British citizen, took a short trip to Bhera via Lahore from Delhi. On his return to England, he wrote me a series of letters about his visit to Bhera. He writes in one of his letters:

I talked to a few Muslims, but those who came to know that I am a Hindu who is here on a visit, were overjoyed and started talking about the good old days when Hindus and Muslims lived together as brothers. I will never forget the Muslim co-passenger who did not let me buy my bus ticket from Bhalwal to Sargodha [he paid for my ticket]. Another passenger offered me tea en route. One of the Muslim servants of Mr. Telreja (a Sindhi Hindu in Lahore) pressed me to go and see a Punjabi movie on his expense.

Our hubb-ul-watani warms our hearts to learn how prosperous once Bhera was. The entry on Bhera in the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1908) reads: “ . . .the town was the largest and most prosperous commercial town in this part of the Province, having a direct export trade to Kabul, the Derajat, and Sukkur, and importing European goods from Karachi and Amritsar (1908, Volume VIII: Behrampur to Bombay, p.100). Around 1975, my younger brother made a special trip from Harrow to the India House Library in London to get a photo-copy of the page from which the above quote is reproduced.

The same sentiment of love for Bhera hurt us when we came across dispatches on the town’s decline. In the 1950’and 1960’s sixties, visitors reported a depressing picture of Bhera as a declining town. I have not read Balraj Sahani’s book in which he talks about his visit to Bhera. The impression I got from a conversation with his brother Bhisham Sahni, a senior colleague of mine at Delhi College, was that Balraj ji had found large parts of the town in a state of utter desolation and ruins. It depressed us to learn that the town had fallen into such a sorry state. Sometimes I buy travel guides on Pakistan, especially if they have something to say about Bhera. One of these books, published in 1990, reports:

Old towns were washed away by the rivers and replaced by new towns on safer ground. Some have just died; Bhera, near Sargodha, for example, used to be a flourishing place. It was an ancient town where Sher Shah [Suri] built a beautiful mosque. There were shrines which attracted pilgrims. Bhera was a center of Moghul local government. It was plundered by the Durrani, repopulated by the Sikhs and prospered under the British when it became the most important city for miles around. Then as the canal colonies flourished, other towns grew and Bhera waned. Local government was moved [in fact the local administration was downgraded from a tehsil to a sub-tehsil status, though the court was not removed]. Having sustained a lot of damage in 1947, it is now a ghost town. (Insight Guides: Pakistan. 1990, p.180).

My heart kind of sank when I read the last characterization, and wondered why the rundown condition of Bhera had not gotten any better during the thirty years between Balraj Sahni’s impression and the summation in this travel book (it had many superb pictures but none of Bhera; a sinking ship?).

For the last few years, we have been getting some reassuring news. We hear of a resurgent spirit of Bhera, though some parts of the old town remain in a moribund condition. It may no longer be news for the residents of Bhera, but we learned only recently that the town had been getting Sui gas for quite some time and has a public water supply system. The town now has a Government Degree College, an Inter College for Boys, and a Girls Higher Secondary School, the institutions it did not have in the pre-Partition days. The access afforded to Bhera by the Lahore-Islamabad motorway has been another happy tiding. The town now has a population of 33,600 (2001), compared to the rough estimate of 28,000 we used to hear before the partition. Several new colonies have sprung up around the old town. However, information on the condition of the satellite villages of Bhera is hard to come by.

One wonders what happened to the two hamlets of Khan Mohammad Da and Haathiwind on the bus route from Bhera to Bhalwal. Folks in one of these villages used to “harvest” shora left as residue by evaporating shallow pools of water in embanked plots of arid land. No commercially available map of Pakistan shows these old villages and others like Bathuni. I did succeed in finding the neighboring village of Hazurpur in my Lonely Planet Travel Atlas for India and Bangladesh (1995, p.12 and 16). This atlas is my proud possession, because it maps also show Haranpur, my father’s place of birth, and also Jalalpur (Sharif), my mother’s place of birth (my Nannaka shehar). The three towns of Bhera, Haranpur, and Jalalpur -- all three situated on the banks of Jehlum -- have been variously linked to Alexander’s battle with King Porus in 326 B.C. In terms of geographic origins then, our ancestry is indeed a tapestry of ancient strands. Our family could not bring much personal stuff with us when we left Bhera, but the most treasured things my mother made a point of carrying on her were two Phulkaaris and one Baagh. She gave one precious heirloom piece to each one of her three daughters-in-law when they came as brides to our house in Delhi. One of these pieces was stitched by our paternal grandmother in Haranpur, the other by our maternal grandmother in Jalalpur, and the last of the three by our mother in Bhera!

Bhera continues to inspire love and pride for the town among the new and old generations of its current residents. Their hubb-ul-watani is reflected in their dedicated efforts to put Bhera on the internet map. They have invested huge personal resources to set up several websites on Bhera. Besides the Wikipedia’s site on Bhera, there are web sites that have been set up by individual Pakistani Bherochis. The website by H. A. Bugavi is perhaps the oldest site, distinguished for its genuine concern for the historical assets of Bhera. The other by Ali Javeed appears more systematic and open to contributions from Bherochis who had to leave the town in 1947. Their websites cover the town’s history, architecture, mosques, abandoned temples and the Sikh gurdawara, and the illustrious lives of its distinguished sons. Visiting these sites comes close to a sort of pilgrimage for those of us who have been away for so long and have felt banished and cut off.

Now that Pakistani visas have become relatively easy to obtain, it has encouraged the Hindu and Sikh expatriates to visit the town. If one can, someone of our generation (born and raised in Bhera) should spend a few days to study the changes the town has gone through. My brother got less than four hours to spend in Bhera. He and his host, the late Mrs. Kamala Sahni of Salam, took the circular drive around the town, went to the Railway Station from where they followed the road to Ganjwala Darwaaza and on to the Chowk, and parked the car in Gopal Bahri’s katra. From there, they took a walking trip to the DhoanaN wala Mohalla where we were born and raised, visited the Jhugi wala Mandir (adjacent to the ChhaintaaN wali Masjid), looked at what was once our father’s shop (still vacant and locked up), found in total ruin the facing shop of Hafiz Lilari (Rangraze) who dyed the chunnis of Hindu girls in the local spectrum of colors, took a stroll in the Guru Bazaar, walked to the Jeetu da Maidaan to meet Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah at his clinic, and to a few other places. Besides the overall impressions of the town, my brother also shared with me some precious bits of information that were closer to our hearts.

“Massi Durgan’s house, adjacent to ours, was a tibba, the upper story of our house was not there, but other houses in the mohalla looked . . . reasonably intact and were occupied by refugees from the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana. As I and my escort (Dr. Fazal Qadir Shah’s son) entered the mohalla, I saw a lady washing clothes inside the deori, at the very place where our mataji (Mother) used to wash our clothes. I am sure the hand-pump is still there. It was day time and no man [being present] at home, it was not appropriate to speak with the orthodox lady who was inside our house.

Now nearly thirty years later (since his 1978 visit), we find ourselves old and frail to travel and visit the town we left behind. People of our generation (my elder brother is 78, and younger brother 68) make do with our very precious remembrances of Bhera and visits to its web sites. When we manage to get together, we hardly tire of talking about Bhera, much to the apparent boredom of our wives whose parents were from three different towns in Pakistan: Pind Daaddan Khan, Sialkot, and Jampur near D.G.Khan. One day we brothers sat down and prepared a schematic map of our DhoanaN wala Mohalla (named after the Hindu caste of Dhawans) as it existed in the pre-Partition days. We numbered all the houses inside the mohalla and in the alley leading to it from 1 to 30, and prepared a companion list of the names of the families that lived in these houses until 1947. Unlike most Hindu neighborhoods like SahniyaN da Mohalla, our mohalla and a few others were gated neighborhoods with their circumscribed boundaries. The Hindu mohallas were generally named after single Hindu castes, but their resident families often belonged to other castes as well. In our Mohalla, for instance, we had only one Dhawan family, but also one Bahri, one Khanna, two Kapur, four Malhotra families, and a few other castes.

People of our parents’ generation are gone from this world, and ours is the last generation that has personal memories of the good old Bhera of our childhood and also of our trail of woe and survival to the Wagah border. We know first hand the price our parents’ generation and ours paid in the grand drama of the birth of two nations as it was enacted in Bhera. Pakistanis who are our contemporaries from Bhera witnessed these events from the other side. They are the audiences who may have some resonance for our roodad (narrative). It will be nice to hear from them on how the things and events I talk about here looked to them from the other side.

When most people got caught up in the vortex of the religious strife and brutal reprisals of 1947, some righteous, God-fearing persons held their heads well above the swirling waters of hatred and revenge. The Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera, who were able to escape to India after 15th August 1947, owe their lives to two such men, both of them true Muslims and great men. One of them was the native son of Bhera, Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha. He was the one who single-handedly dissuaded the Muslim mobs of tenant farmers and villagers from acting on their plans to kill and plunder the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. The Muslim mobs had gathered one morning near one of the city’s gates to launch their attack. Their drums had kept their sinister beat all through the previous night to rally the believers. Mobilized by the countryside Mullahs to avenge the killings of Muslims in the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of India, the mob was all worked up to start a bloody reprisal against the kafirs. We learned that Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha confronted the brigands early that morning. At one point, he took off his turban and put it at the feet of the mob leader(s) and begged them to turn back to their homes and leave the Hindus and Sikhs of Bhera alone. He told them that Hindus and Sikhs had lived in Bhera for centuries in peace with Muslims and they owed them at least a safe passage for the sake of Bhera’s past and fair name. His prominent stature in the community (see Note 2) and his heart-felt appeal persuaded the mobs to disperse. His hubb-ul-watani for the hometown and his faith combined to save the day for the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Our present and coming generations should be indebted to this very righteous person.

Someone looking through the archival papers of the late Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha would find many a letter written from India by Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs who had individually conveyed their gratitude to him for saving the lives of their families and community in 1947. Our father, Hori Lall, also wrote to Sheikh Sahib in the mid-1950s, thanking him deeply for his intervention that saved our lives. In 1978, my brother made it a point to visit Sheikh Sahib’s house in Bhera to pay his respects to the memory of our singular savior. He wrote about it, “On our circular tour of the town, we stopped at the residence of the late Sheikh F. H. Piracha as I wanted to pay my respects. Unfortunately, his son [very likely, Ehsan-ul-Haq, who later became a junior minister in Bhuto’s government], was not at home.” The web site by the Prince Brothers (http://bhera.sitesled.com/piracha.html) has an excellent article in Urdu on this pre-eminent khaandaan of the Pirachas. It recounts the illustrious careers and contributions of its members to their nation and the town of Bhera. I wish its authors would consider it fit to include this act of profound humanity by Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha in their biographical essay on him and also arrange to include a picture of him.

The other savior of Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs was a tall, handsome Muslim Captain attached to the army contingent that was sent to Bhera for safely escorting our evacuation-train to the Mandi Bahauddin refugee camp. A few miles from Bhera near Hazurpur, the train was stopped by a large mob of marauders drawn from the neighboring villages. They were waiting there to ambush the train. The Captain ordered his men to open fire in order to deter the mob. He succeeded in scaring them to disperse, thus stopping the attack and saving the lives of Bhera’s Hindu/Sikh men, women, and children. Some of the attackers must have been injured and a few perhaps even got killed. His Muslim and Sikh soldiers removed the tree trunk from the railway tracks that the attackers had placed there to halt the train, and the train resumed its journey to Malakwal and onto Mandi Bahauddin. At Mandi Bahauddin Railway Station, I saw quite a few Hindu elders (one from our mohalla) take off their turbans and lay them at the Captain’s feet as a gesture of their deep gratitude for saving them, their womenfolk and children. He was uneasy at this gesture and just stepped back from the turbans, telling the Hindus that what he did to save them and their families was a matter of duty for him. He surely was a true Muslim, a gentleman officer, and a karmayogi for whom a duty performed was its own reward. We do not know this officer’s name or the place he was from, but his face will ever remain hallowed in our memories. He was a stranger, but a great benefactor. May God bless his soul.

How do you judge a community? One way is to look at the great men and women it has produced from its ranks (the elitist measure). The other way to evaluate a community is to look at its average member (the common-man measure). Judged by the first (the best person) standard, Bhera wins hands down. The exemplary stand of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq in saving his town’s Hindus and Sikhs from a sure massacre brings credit not only to his person and his family, but also to the entire community of Bhera’s Muslims. S. Radhakrishanan, a philosopher and a former President of India, portrayed the “best man” view of a society in these words: “When the wick is ablaze at its tip, the whole lamp is said to be burning bright.” It surely applies to Bhera, and its people can rightfully take pride in the radiant nobility of Sheikh Fazal ul Haq.

Judged by the other, “common man” standard, Bhera’s Muslims acquitted themselves quite well. We, the departed Hindus and Sikhs, have to recognize the essential decency of the Muslim folks of Bhera. If men like Sheikh Fazal-ul-Haq and the Muslim Captain saved our lives, then the Muslim commoners of Bhera can be said to have spared our lives. The local Muslim community did not seek to harm, much less to annihilate, the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. We are grateful to all those who by their decency and restraint made it possible for us to leave the town in relative peace and safety. Except for one case of fatal stabbing of a Hindu boy, Bayya (son of Ram Lal Mandharia) and one case of arson (Lall Kuppi’s kiryaana shop in Guru Bazaar was set on fire), we were let go unharmed from Bhera. Few towns in West as well as East Punjab could match Bhera’s record of good sense in those trying times of collective insanity when the sanctity of human life and the honor of women did not seem to matter any more.

Before our special train left Bhera’s railway station one day in September, 1947, a batch of Muslim National Guards (the Muslim counterpart of those days to the Hindu RSS) showed up in their green uniforms and lined up on the platform in a “Guard-of-Honor” formation to bid us farewell. We watched them from the windows of our railway compartment, not knowing what to make of this entirely unexpected move. We were at that time more concerned about the oppressive heat in our railway compartments. We were packed like herrings in the train; several families stuffed in each small compartment, and as many as 7,000 Hindus and Sikhs (along with the baggage they could carry on their person from their homes to the railway station) squeezed in eight or nine railway bogies. The crowding made the inside of the train feel like an oven, even when all the windows were kept wide open. At one point, one Muslim national guard, Baalu (for Iqbal), who used to work as a sweeper for a Kapur family in our mohalla, approached the head of this family and advised that we better close the windows. It did not make any sense; he did not tell us why the windows need be closed. He kept pleading though. Before he went back to be with his fellow-guards, he made sure that we were going to shut all the windows. The gentleman returned after a while to ask why we had kept one window open. We told him that it would not shut. He suggested we better place a trunk (suit case) or even a rolled-bedding against the window to cover it. We sensed something was remiss, something ominous to befall us. It was only when the train suddenly stopped just a few miles from the station and we heard rapid firing by the escort soldiers that the full scope of the peril we were in dawned on us. It became clear why this caring person was so much concerned about the open windows. He knew of the planned attack, but could not divulge it.

Naturally, it is hard for us to forgive the out-of-towners from the surrounding villages (including a few from the town itself), who could hardly wait to kill the Hindu and Sikh men, and carry away their women and cash and jewelry as maal-e-ghanimat. Once turned back from the gates of Bhera by the pleas of Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha, most of them showed up again a few weeks later to waylay the special train for the evacuation of the town’s Hindus and Sikhs. Before our train was stopped a few miles away from Bhera, we could see from the window chinks a few of these folks running by the side of our train. They had axes and spears in their hands, and those who did not have a donkey or a camel were carrying cots on their heads to bring back the booty. These laggards were trying hard to reach the site of planned ambush in time so as not to miss on their share of the spoils. When the train stopped at the barricade that had been set up for the purpose, the main body of raiders came rushing from behind the embankments of a canal to attack the train. The Captain promptly ordered his armed men to open fire, making the mobs retreat and find shelter behind the embankments. But for the effective protection provided by the armed escort, Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs would have been a captive target for butchery in the stalled train

As we moved farther from the blessed land of Bhera, our troubles started multiplying and getting real bad. The long stay in the Mandi Bahauddin camp was marked by unnerving uncertainties, hardships, and a cholera epidemic in the camp. On the reassuring side was the presence of a battalion of Baloch regiment posted at the camp to guard it. After several weeks of stay in the camp, the Bhera’s Hindus and Sikhs boarded another refugee train that would take them from Mandi Bahauddin to the Indian border. The 44-hour long journey from Mandi Bahauddin to the Wagha border via Lala Musa (this journey in normal times took no more than three to four hours) was a frightening passage. But we were fortunate to make it safely to India. We got down from the train at Attari railway station and kissed the soil of India.

To be uprooted from your native lands, family homes and means of livelihood and to have your “dukh-sukh di saanjhi” community scattered across a thousand towns were an enormous dislocation for our parents’ generation. What they ended up facing was contrary to the history as they had known it. They had believed that kingdoms and governments could change, but the people (raiyyat) stayed put in their towns and were left largely untouched. The events as they transpired left them heart-broken. They had to leave for an unknown place in India and start a new life in a new setting. Any hope of returning one day with their ousted communities to their hometowns had disappeared fast. They realized that they and their children have been banished for ever and the keys to their houses they carried on them were no more than mementos. It took them decades of struggle and untold hardships to resettle. Most made it eventually in the new country, while countless others languished on the way to an ever elusive recovery. Yes, the anguish of our irreversible displacement has been hard to overcome.

Just as erstwhile rivals, who once pursued the same prize in town, become mellow over time, the sole inheritors of Bhera have started to empathize with the town’s disinherited people of 1947. The dispossessed have for long been resigned to whatever hand the fate had played for them and the inheritors of Bhera did not show any visible triumph in seeing us leave the land of our forefathers. The wounds of our loss have crusted, if not disappeared. The two sides now get together, talk, and write without serious recriminations and hurts. They see each other from the distance of time and space, and no party appears diabolic to the other any longer. There is a noticeable nostalgia for the times when we lived like neighbors without any running battles. A couplet form Momin says it all:

Kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi chah thi, kabhi ham mein tum mein bhi rah thi,
Kabhi ham bhi tum bhi thai aashnaa, tumhen yaad ho ke na yaad ho.

Once we and you had good will between us,
Once we and you had a way between us;
Once we and you were also friends,
Now you may remember it or you may not.

The overall amity among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in Bhera of the pre-Partition days was based on the concept of shared “ann-jal-hawah,” common life experiences, and a joyful pride in everything Bherochi from its phenian to mehndi (henna). Our pride in Bhera served to bind us, making us all feel that we were better than the people of neighboring towns! We were immensely proud of the town’s long history and the great persons the town had produced in different fields. When it comes to the mystic bond of shared ann-jal-hawah, the town’s Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs savored roties made from the locally grown wheat, drank the “salubrious” water from its Jehlum-fed aquifers, breathed the refreshing (“khush-gawaar”) air of Bhera, and basked in its “balmy” sunshine. With apologies to Faiz, we may slightly reword one of his couplets (see Note 3) from “Raqeeb se.”


[Hum] pe bhi [bikhra] hai uss [ufaq] se [khursheed] ka noor,
Jis mein beeti hui [subhoan] ki [jhalak] baaqi hai

The Sun spread its rays from the same horizon on us as well
The glimpses of those luminous mornings are still with us.

In the realm of common experiences, we all learned to take our first steps and to walk on Bhera’s terra firma, picked up its boli for our mother tongue, and partook of its romantic legends of Heer-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahiwal. When we went to school, we started learning Urdu from Class I, English from Class V, Hindi in VI, and Persian or Sanskrit in Class VII onwards. Exposure to a steady set of common influences had created a sort of common cultural ethos for the town.

Not too distant in the future, our generation who along with our parents had witnessed the finale of the centuries-old sojourn of Hindus and Sikhs in Bhera will not be around to tell about it. The ranks of our generation are dwindling steadily. So let us remember Bhera and celebrate our sad and happy memories of this town while we can! No one could have said it any better than Ghalib:

Naghama-hai gham ko bhi eh dil ghanimat janeai
Be-sadaa ho jaaey ga yeh saaz-e-hasti ek din!

O’ heart, consider even your sad songs to be a blessing,
One of these days, this instrument of our being will go silent!

(This article appears along with other articles on related topics at: www.bhera.com)

NOTES

Note 1: Besides expressions like “aasaan-jasaan,” some words were pronounced so distinctively in Bhera that a Bherochi was instantly identified. Here is an anecdote we used to hear. Someone was once asked the name of the town he was from, and he repeated the question to get it right, “Maira shehar?” The person who had asked the question immediately responded, “Stop, stop. You do not have to tell me what town you are from. I know it, you must be from Bhera!” Around 1950, my younger brother and I were going from Karol Bagh to Pahar Ganj by a tonga in Delhi, and were chatting. All of a sudden, an older passenger on the front seat, asked us, “O mundeo, tussi pichhon Bherai de ho?” (Boys, are you originally from Bhera?) Astonished, we asked him how he figured out where we were from. He told us that it was our maira, maira (instead of mera) that gave away our origin! As the lady in the Sahniyan da Mohalla house in Bhera told Kalpana Sahni, “We have only to open our mouths to give ourselves away!”

Note 2: Sheikh Fazal Haq Piracha Sahib served as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi from 1934 to 1946. He was also the Chairman of Bhera’s Municipal Committee from 1924 to 1958.

Note 3: The original couplet as Faiz wrote it is as follows:

Tujh pe bhi barsaa hai uss baam se mehtab ka noor
Jis mein beeti hui raaton ki kassak baqi hai.

From the same balcony, Diana shed her luminous rays on you as well.
The sweet pain of those nights past, still lingers in our hearts!