Kuldip Nayar’s Sialkot
Khalid Hasan
When Kuldip Nayar came to Pakistan in 1972 to interview Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he was one of the first Indian journalists to be invited. He told me that he wanted to go to Sialkot, the city of his birth, where he had gone to school and college and which he had never ceased to reminisce over. Circumventing the mindless travel regulations that were in force when it came to Indian citizens – and that, sadly, remain in force today – I saw to it that he went. That was where all his associations were. His best friend in life was the late Khawaja Shafqat Ali, with whose wife Zarina, Kuldip has kept in touch. The two were inseparable as boys. Kuldip told me that he remembers going to Imam Sahib with Shafqat and seeing Allama Iqbal from the back sitting on a cot. “He was then in a foul mood and loudly said something in Punjabi which I do not recall.”
I asked Kuldip to recollect for me his memories of Sialkot, which he has. He went to the Ganda Singh High School, where a women’s college now stands. After two years at Murray College, he went to Lahore to join FC College and from there to Law College where he earned an LLB on the eve of partition. He did not want to leave Sialkot when India was divided. He writes, “This was my home. I was born and brought up here. Why could not I, a Hindu, live in the Islamic state of Pakistan when there would be hundreds of thousands of Muslims residing in India?” He could not accept that he was suddenly unwelcome in a place where his forefathers and their forefathers had lived for decades.
His family had other reasons to stay back. Most patients of his father, a popular doctor, were Muslims. His best friend Shafqat lived in Sialkot, at whose wish he had had a crescent and star tattooed in his arm. “We had a large property and a retinue of servants. Where would we go if we were to uproot ourselves? Then our spiritual guardian was there. It was not a superstition but our faith that the grave in our back garden was that of a Pir who protected us and guided the family whenever it faced troubles. How could we leave the Pir? The grave was our refuge. We always found relief there. Our Ma, whenever harried or harassed or after her quarrel with our father, ran to the grave for solace. We, three brothers and one sister, bowed before the Pir every Thursday in reverence and lit an earthen lamp. It was our temple.” It is ironic that the Muslim residents of the Nayar home flattened the grave to gain more space. When Kuldip was jailed by Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency, the Pir came to him in a dream and told him that he would be freed that day. He was. Kuldip felt shattered when he came from Delhi to place a green chador on the grave only to find that it no longer existed. Spiritualism lost, property won.
Kuldip knew the people of Sialkot as mild, austere and tolerant, cast in a different mould, with religion not acting as a divider. Thirty percent or 100,000 residents of the city were non-Muslim. “As far as I could remember, we had never experienced tension, much less communal riots,” he recalls. There were Hindu and Muslim mohallas but also mixed neighbourhoods. “Women moved freely, a few in burqa, some in thick chadors, but most with just a dupatta.” Even at the height of the agitation over the demand for Pakistan, Sialkot did not experience any tension. “We felt we had to live together, although we had begun to think in terms of separate identities.” He records that the atmosphere “deteriorated” only when Muslims, ousted from India, began pouring into the city and when it dawned on the population that it had an independent country of its own. “Yet there was no tension, not even a twinge of enmity,” he recalls.
Kuldip writes, “We spoke the same Punjabi. The Punjabi we spoke in Sialkot had a peculiar accent. I discovered this when I met Nawaz Sharif, then Punjab chief minister, for the first time at Delhi. It took him no time to tell me that I was from Sialkot. He said that the way in which I spoke Punjabi had a distinctive twang, a kind of accent, which was confined to the Sialkotis. But why only I? The subcontinent’s two great Urdu poets, Mohammed Iqbal and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who were from Sialkot, spoke Punjabi in the same way.”
Kuldip records that the “city’s innate goodness asserted itself at the time of partition” and there was not a single incident of violence. However, the Jain mohalla in the heart of the city did not go to sleep for nights. Its fears were allayed when the Muslim localities surrounding the mohalla assured protection. What really spoilt the city’s atmosphere was the arrival of a blood-drenched train that had been attacked near Wazirabad, 40 kilometres from Sialkot. Scores of Hindus and Sikhs travelling to Jammu, only 18 kilometres away, had been done to death. A few who had escaped were grievously injured. This single incident led many Hindus and Sikhs in Sialkot to migrate to India.
Kuldip remembers, “Our family was yet to decide about our future. One day in August, before partition, all of us – my parents and three brothers (our sister was already in India) – sat around the dining table to discuss our course of action.” Then came the Quaid-i-Azam’s speech that said all citizens were equal and religion was not the business of the state. Reassured, the Nayar family decided to stay on. Once when the Quaid had come to Law College he had said in answer to Kuldip’s question that once Pakistan was created the two countries would be the best of friends. But things were now going downhill. A peace committee Kuldip and Shafqat had formed was wound up because people’s attitudes had changed. On 14 August, communal poison infected Sialkot. A Hindu sadhu was attacked outside the Nayar home in Trunk Bazar by some Muslim refugees.
No one had foreseen the cataclysmic change that had come over India. The forces of hate and savagery, unleashed with such fury, were now beyond control. Kuldip recalls how the end came. Arjan Das, the District Jail Officer, told the family, “You cannot stay here. This place is not safe any more. I am taking you to my house.” Some years later, it was the same Arjan Das who supervised the hanging of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. Kuldip recalls, “His voice was comforting. Nobody questioned him. Nor did anyone want to stay back in the house. We followed him quietly, leaving the food on the table untouched. My mother hurriedly packed a suitcase and we rushed down to the car Das was driving. It was a small vehicle and we had to sit on each other’s lap to fit in.”
I often think that had there been no transfer of populations on a massive scale, India and Pakistan would have lived in friendship. There would have been no wars. There would have been no Kashmir issue and people would have lived where they had always lived. Speaking of my own family, we would have continued to live in Kashmir, spending our summers in Srinagar and our winters in Jammu, as we always have.