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Voices of India’s Partition, Part V

by Amber Abbas

Professor Mohammad Amin is a distinguished professor of History who spent his entire career in St. Stephen’s College, one of the founding colleges of Delhi University.

During his years at Aligarh, he was trained by Professor Mohammad Habib (Father of Professor Emeritus Irfan Habib). He remarked that Aligarh was known for its liberal History Department, which “later turned completely red.” His own priorities were in writing narrative histories of the medieval period. He described his own position as a skeptic, “History is not neat and tidy. If you find that you have an answer, I am very skeptical about it. How can there be a rational explanation for the irrational acts of irrational people?”

In this interview, Professor Amin reflects on his experiences at Aligarh during late 1940s, when the Muslim League was dominant and “Aligarh really was bristling with the movement for Pakistan.” Students were being dispatched into the hinterlands to spread League propaganda in 1945 and 1946 as India prepared for elections. Aligarh was considered so important as a center of Muslim opinion-making that, he tells me, if a meeting was taking place in the Union (the seat of student government), stores would close in towns and villages nearby as the community awaited news of Aligarh’s pronouncements on the important issues of the day. This centricity to Muslim opinion was key in placing Aligarh at the heart of the Pakistan movement. Amin, like narrator Masood ul Hasan, describes an atmosphere of youthful enthusiasm in which students were caught up in the political excitement of the time.

During the partition, however, as Amin’s story reveals, Aligarh became a site of suspicion; Muslims were targeted as potential traitors to the state, and Aligarh was especially vulnerable because many students had been active in calling for independent Muslim statehood. Amin mentions that as he returned to Aligarh in late summer 1947, he had been advised to carry a book with the name of a Hindu inscribed inside, so as to distract attention from his own Muslim identity. Trains, as he reminds me, were sites of massacre during the communal unrest that accompanied partition and on both sides of the border trains pulled into stations full of dead bodies. His return to Aligarh in 1947 was tense, but uneventful.

In remembering this, Amin moves directly to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. He connects Gandhi’s assassination to the atmosphere at Aligarh by describing it as particularly “telling.” On the day of the assassination, Amin was headed into the city—the predominantly Hindu city of Aligarh separated from the precincts of the Aligarh University by a railway line and a bridge. By the time they reached the city, now a few kilometers distant from their university and its protective walls, people shouted at them to “Go back!” Though they simultaneously heard that Gandhi’s assassin had been a Hindu, the students felt the threat of violence in the city, and those around them sternly directed them to return to the right side of the tracks.

Amin remembers how important Gandhi had been in preserving a tenuous peace in Eastern India during the chaos of 1947. Having gone on a fast to the death, he refused to break it until leaders of the three major faiths of the region: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs came together to make a joint pledge to stop the fighting. In the moments after Gandhi’s death, Amin and his friends reaped the benefit of his magnanimity- they returned safely to their school- but they knew, as did those around them, that the situation remained tense enough to go either way.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Mohammad Amin

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Jama Masjid, “AMU-Aligarh,” Decemer 23, 2009

Author’s own via Flickr Creative Commons

Unknown author, Untitled Portrait of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawharlal Nehru, July 6, 1946

AP Photo/Max Desfor via Flickr Creative Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part IV: Interview with Professor Masood ul Hasan

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III: Interview with Professor Irfan Habib

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Voices of India’s Partition, Part III

by Amber Abbas

Professor Irfan Habib is probably the best-known professor in Aligarh. Born in 1931, he was a young student in the Intermediate classes during the 1940s. His father, Mohammad Habib, a staunch nationalist was the leader of the progressive factions at Aligarh. Irfan Habib is an Emeritus Professor of the Department of History but he still appears daily in the department where he sits in the office of Professor Shireen Moosvi and interacts with all of the students, other professors, Communist party activists and others who move in and out of the office throughout the day. Irfan Habib always provides hospitality to these guests: endless cups of tea and biscuits. On many occasions I had the opportunity to sit in the office and transcribe stories he would share in English or in Urdu with the people who came and went. It was some time before I could convince him to sit down with me for a formal interview about his experiences during the 1930s and 1940s in Aligarh. He was very skeptical of the methodology of my research, being as he is, a historian of medieval India and deeply invested in the investigation of documentary sources. Interviews, he reminded me, would only catch a person’s “bias,” and not “The Truth.”

In this interview, he describes the atmosphere in AMU in the years following partition and his experiences around Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. He first emphasizes the fact that though partition caused terrible disruption at the university, with thousands of students and many faculty departing for Pakistan, the university worked to minimize its effect on students’ lives. He repeatedly told me that no class was ever cancelled, even if a professor left, another instructor stepped in to cover his responsibilities. Continuity is important as a way to show that there were Muslims at the university who worked to support independent India—contrary to the narrative that has plagued the university since the 1947 partition by suggesting that its students and professors were, without exception, traitors and fifth columnists. Habib wears his nationalism on his sleeve, even if, as a Leftist, he has not really represented its mainstream.

Habib’s family had a long history of nationalist allegiance and his mother’s family had been close to Gandhi since the early years of his leadership. Habib earlier told me that Gandhi “was an idol… in our home. My mother called him ‘Bapu’ because of the family relationship, but I never heard my father referring to Gandhi as anything except ‘Mahatmaji.’ He wouldn’t even say ‘Gandhiji.’” In describing the events of Gandhi’s death, Professor Habib, however, does not emphasize his family’s grief, but the efforts of students publicly to show their solidarity with the nation. Because of the immediate suspicions that a Muslim may have committed the murder, and the anxiety that threatened the Muslims more broadly in the wake of partition, AMU stood out as a particularly sensitive site. Professor Mohammad Habib led the students from the University to the city of Aligarh, which involved crossing the railway line, the traditional boundary between the University and the majority Hindu city adjoining it. Crossing this boundary is a symbolic act of solidarity, and the Muslim students demonstrated their Indian-ness by publicly engaging in the response to Gandhi’s death. Habib also points out that many “Pakistanis”—by which he means those students whose family homes were in territories that became Pakistan in 1947: Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sindh, Balochistan and Bengal—also participated in the march. Thus, even though Gandhi had been a controversial figure at the University, all students: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and even Pakistanis came together to mourn for the man who had risked his life in 1947 to stop the murder of Muslims in Bengal.

In conclusion he notes that the refugees—sharnyartis—who arrived at the university in 1947 and 1948 were welcomed with open arms, students gathered clothes for them, and “no incident” ever took place between Muslim students and refugees. This is important at Aligarh in particular because of its much-vaunted history of religious tolerance. Aligarh University had always considered itself aloof from “communal” concerns, but partition was a test of this culture. During the 1940s, even as the Muslim League mobilized students to support a Muslim homeland, no communal violence took place there. Political and national groups with differing perspectives put them aside to join in solidarity to support the university and the state in 1947 and 1948—and this is a very different kind of story from that we hear in Punjab, in Delhi, in places where violence and not peace characterized this time.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo Credits:

Amber Abbas, untitled portrait of Professor Irfan Habib

Author’s own via Not Even Past

Yann, Gandhi During the Salt March, March 1930

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

Syed Gibran, Aligarh Muslim University

Author’s own via Wikimedia Commons

You may also like:

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II: Interview with Mr. S.M. Mehdi

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Interview with Mrs. Zahra Haider

Re-Reading John Winthrop’s “City upon the Hill”

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

I recently came across John Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered in 1630 on a boat to those about to establish a “New England” across the ocean from the old. Winthrop urged his congregation to create a “city upon the hill,” a model for others to imitate. Ever since Winthrop, the meaning of that city has been hotly debated. It is clear, however, that Winthrop’s city has come to stand for the ongoing experiment that is America: unique, exceptional, inspiring. Modern rebels, like those who have gathered on a platform of social and cultural conservatism around the Tea Party, a name full of references to Puritan Massachusetts, owe Winthrop, their alleged ideological ancestor, a careful reading.

Winthrop was a man of his age. He understood societies to be naturally divided into two camps: the “great ones” and the “inferior sort.” He thought that, for all their divisions, societies had built-in limits to social polarization so “that the riche and mighty should not eat up neither the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke.” Natural instincts pushed the rich to be merciful and the poor not to be too rebellious. A society that has lowered the taxes of the wealthy so that it could then dismantle both collective bargaining and public education would have puzzled Winthrop. He would have been surprised by last summer’s developments in Wisconsin.

Winthrop was a realist and acknowledged that there were limits to giving and forgiving. Individuals needed to put aside some of their wealth to guard against future hardship; they needed to take care of their family before they practiced charity. According to Winthrop, even the Bible found this prudence virtuous: the wise Egyptian Joseph put grain away and saved his treasonous brethren, the sons of Jacob, from famine when drought struck Israel. Winthrop, however, also thought that members of communities under siege demonstrated unusual degrees of solidarity. Natural law dictated that, under these circumstances, the wealthy would openly share their property. Winthrop would have not recognized his city upon the hill in America today: a society whose most needy voluntarily sign up to fight wars while the most powerful avoid such sacrifices and tirelessly lobby to get ever larger tax cuts.

But it is perhaps the failure of America to live up to the laws of a Christian community that would have disoriented Winthrop. Winthrop made a distinction between societies ruled solely by natural law and those ruled by the “law of Grace or of the Gospel.” Christian societies were bodies whose disparate parts were also glued by the ligaments of “love.” For all our desire to remember the Pilgrims as peaceful Christians who fled England to escape persecution, the fact is that Puritans were just as intolerant as their enemies, and Winthrop was no exception. Winthrop drew a clear line separating true Christians from the rest. He argued that the ligament of love worked best in communities that were ideologically homogenous. And yet, Winthrop did think that love caused communities to be more egalitarian. His model was the primitive Church whose members “had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own.”

Tea Party radicals, the alleged ideological heirs of men like Winthrop, might be surprised by Winthrop’s views on love and same-sex relationships. Winthrop’s descriptions of the love required to create his city on the hill are moving. His examples are all biblical. He explained that the love Eve felt for Adam was so carnal because her flesh literally came from Adam’s. But Winthrop also acknowledged the love Jonathan felt for David, the courageous shepherd who would soon dethrone Jonathan’s father, Saul. Winthrop was deeply aware of the force and depth of homoerotic love: “so that it is said [Jonathan] loved [David] as his own soul.” These two lovers would have their hearts broken when they were apart, “had not their affections found vent by abundance of tears.” Winthrop also considered the love of Ruth and Noemi exemplary.

The city upon the hill that Winthrop sought to create in New England is a different world from that of his alleged ideological heirs. For Winthrop, the stakes of getting the city right were high (and they continue to be). To build a lasting “city upon the hill” the Puritans needed to create a society held together by charity, mercy, and love. A danger loomed: this new experiment could be overtaken by lack of either foresight or solidarity. Puritans then would meet the fate of so many failed social experiments. So let’s take Winthrop’s parting words as a warning: “The eyes of all people are upon us. So if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”

The text of the sermon can be found here.

President John F Kennedy on the City Upon a Hill: video/audio

President Ronald Reagan on the City Upon a Hill, text

To read more of Canizares-Esguerra on Puritans in North American see our monthly feature on his work from May 2011.

Portrait of John Winthrop, author unknown.
Page from John Winthrop’s journal: Wikisource, The Founding of New England

Gunter Demnig’s “Stumbling Blocks”

by David Crew

“Stumbling blocks” (in German, Stolpersteine) are unobtrusive reminders of the Nazi past.

These small squares of concrete (about 4 x 4 inches), covered with a thin brass plate, are embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin and hundreds of other German cities, as well as locations in other European countries. Each of these stones bears a simple inscription giving the name of an individual victim of the Nazi dictatorship who lived in the house or building in front of which the stone has been set as well as details about this individual’s fate. Most of the victims are Jewish but these stones also draw attention to the fate of Sinti and Roma, gay men and women, mentally or physically handicapped people, Jehovah’s witnesses, political opponents of the Nazis, and German soldiers who deserted at the end of the war.

These “stumbling blocks” are the result of a project started by a Cologne artist, Gunter Demnig, in the 1990s. Demnig wanted to bring the Nazi past out of the museum into the neighborhood and into the everyday lives of Germans and other Europeans. He thought the stones would encourage ordinary citizens to realize that Nazi persecution and terror had begun on their very doorsteps. By “stumbling” over the Nazi past of their own hometowns (metaphorically, not literally; the stones are actually not raised above the level of the surrounding pavement), ordinary citizens would be challenged to think about what it meant to live where victims of the Nazis had once also gone about their everyday lives. Inscriptions are short and can be brutal; one in Berlin reads “Paula Davidsohn (maiden name Katz) lived here. Born in 1905. Deported to Theresienstadt 1943. Murdered in Auschwitz.”

Demnig’s project asks Germans to take an active role in the reconstruction of the Nazi past of their own cities and localities. Demnig sets stumbling stones in the pavement only on the invitation of local organizations or groups of citizens who have developed an interest in his project and who have researched the histories of the victims who are to be remembered with these stones. Placing these stumbling stones has sometimes provoked controversy. Some homeowners argue that a stone in front of their property may lower its value, a few city governments have refused to give the necessary permission, and some Jews have questioned whether stepping on the names of the victims is an appropriate way to remember them. Yet, Demnig’s project is constantly expanding. In a recent YouTube clip, Demnig claims to have now set more than 23,000 stones in over 500 German communities. “Stumbling Blocks” has also become a European project; examples of this “decentralized monument” can now be found not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Ukraine.

Compare the stumbling blocks to other Holocaust memorials:

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance

Photo Credits

Stumbling block commemorating Alfred Wilhelm Algner
James Steakley, via Wikimedia Commons
Students cleaning the stumbling blocks
Sigismund von Dobschütz, via Wikimedia Commons

A Dangerous Idea

by Miriam Bodian

In 1645, a young Jew who had been captured in Portuguese Brazil was brought to Lisbon and tried by the Inquisition for heresy. He had been reluctantly baptized by his parents in France, where the practice of Judaism was forbidden. His trial, in many ways so much like other inquisitorial trials, is different from any other trial I know of in one respect: The “heretic,” Isaac de Castro Tartas, defended his right to practice Judaism on the basis of a universal natural right to freedom of conscience. This was a bold defense but it ultimately failed; he was burned at the stake in 1647, at the age of nineteen. But his long exchanges with his inquisitors on religious authority and individual conscience are preserved in a lengthy dossier housed today in the Portuguese National Archives, and tell us much about the hopes and fears around this issue.

Anonymous engraver, 17th century. The text reads “Method for burning those condemned by the Inquisition” and depicts the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Today, people who live in democratic societies take religious freedom for granted. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Europeans found the idea of “freedom of conscience” deeply threatening. How could the fabric of society withstand competing religious ideas? What would convince people to live moral lives in the absence of a single, state-supported church? The anxiety Europeans felt about religious freedom impeded the struggle to achieve that freedom. Isaac de Castro’s trial vividly reflects the great divide between the few who supported this idea and the powerful authorities who rejected it. The inquisitors’ views about religious authority is often disparaged; but even in 2011 it is just as important to understand the mentality of the inquisitors as it is to understand the arguments of Isaac de Castro.

Castro defended himself by arguing that even if the inquisitors chose to regard him as a baptized heretic, he was not guilty of heresy, “because an act that is done in accordance with one’s conscience cannot be judged culpable, and the act I have and will continue to do – the act of professing Judaism – is done according to the dictates of my conscience.” Castro supported his argument by describing his experience as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam and Dutch Brazil. These were exceptional environments in which freedom of conscience had been written into law. The inquisitors would have been well aware that Dutch society was thriving and had not been torn apart by the religious diversity of its inhabitants.

The Kahal Zur Israel synagogue in Recife, Brazil was the first Jewish congregation in the New World. It was founded in 1636 during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.

But the inquisitors were imbued with a medieval perspective on conscience, according to which individual conscience was “in error” if it differed from the teachings of the Catholic Church. Castro was accused of ignoring the Church’s authority and presumptuously adhering to his own personal beliefs. Confronted with this accusation, he strategically abandoned his argument as an individual and adopted an authoritarian counter-view. He argued that as a Jew by ancestry, and having been circumcised, he was bound to observe the Law of Moses – an argument invoking (Jewish) religious authority that met the inquisitors on their own ground. This concession by Castro,however, proved fatal. The inquisitors argued that baptism, regardless of ancestry, obligated Castro to observe the teachings of the Catholic Church. Having invoked religious authority, Castro had opened himself to attack. If “conscience” meant obedience to doctrines that did not come from within, as he had been pressured to admit, was he not bound to the first obligation he had incurred in his life, that is, baptism?

A great deal of pain, suffering, and experimentation have accompanied the process by which we have come to regard religious beliefs as a matter of individual conscience. But to understand events in our own time, it is important to understand that such an idea is not at all obvious – that for many centuries this was an idea that few could even imagine. An examination of the intense struggle in early modern Europe between those who defended religious authority and those who resisted it brings into focus the great difficulty involved in establishing a principle of religious freedom. It may help us to understand the frequent failure of well-intentioned efforts to impose an idea cherished in the western world, but alien to people conditioned to accept religious authority and to condone the persecution of religious nonconformists.

You may also like:

Historian Richard Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: an Historical Revision (1999) offers a nuanced reassessment of the Spanish Inquisition’s role in history.

Yale Professor of Brazilian history Stuart Schwartz examines religious toleration in All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2009).

Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (1999).

Images via Wikimedia Commons

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I

by Amber Abbas

During the summer of 2005 I embarked on my first research trip. I had recently taken a class on oral history methodology and was eager to put my newly acquired skills to use. My research focuses on a tumultuous time in the history of the Indian subcontinent: the 1947 events that gave India its independence and created the new state of Pakistan. My own family hails from Aligarh, a city about 90 miles southeast of New Delhi and, as Muslims, opted to move to Pakistan. I was aware of this as a child, but because I grew up outside Pakistan, it was not until I began my research and had enough comfort speaking Urdu that I persuaded some of my elderly relatives to tell me their stories of the time of independence and partition.

Lahore's old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque — Lahore’s old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque. Photo by Aaron Jakes.

Mrs. Zahra Haider was married to my grandmother’s cousin, Khurshid Haider. I have known her my whole life, but it is only in the last few years that I have become close with her and her family. She was born in Dehra Dun. Her father’s name was Yaqoob Shah and her mother’s Zohra Shah. She was raised in Lahore by her Aunt because her mother was unwell. Her father was the Auditor General of Pakistan. He was posted for two years in Washington as Pakistan’s representative to the World Bank, and took his family along with him. She married Khurshid Haider, who died a few years before this interview. Currently she lives in Rawalpindi Pakistan with her son Mohsin and his family.

I interviewed Mrs. Haider at her sister’s home in Lahore, Pakistan. As it was June, and very hot, we sat in a room with the air-conditioning running. The hum is audible on the recording. Throughout the interview, Mrs. Haider’s sister, kept coming in to offer us food or fruit.

She speaks here about her experiences during the 1947 partition, an event that played out violently on the streets of Lahore. Mrs. Haider remembershaving her daily routine disrupted by partition’s displacements. Although she briefly mentions the bureaucratic imperatives of partition, she is mostly focused on personal experiences. It was unbearably hot as they prepared for their exams that summer; in August, many of her friends moved away; the school tuition bills had to be paid; she was scolded by a doctor in a refugee hospital for seeking a few moments of normalcy with her friends; she took clothing from her mother’s laundry to give to the refugees. This focus on the everyday helps us, as historians, to understand the experience of women and youth during partition.

Mrs. Haider’s memories come in snippets that take on comprehensive significance and are influenced by the national history of Pakistan. She speaks of conflicts with Hindus yet, it is the loss of her Hindu friends that she feels most sharply. And the innocence of her surprise at their departure is still evident in her voice. As her story concludes, she refers to a woman who died from her wounds after doctors’ heroic attempts to save her. When she died, her baby daughter became an orphan. Though the story is not included here, one of Mrs. Haider’s friends took that baby home and today, she is practically an older sister of Mrs. Haider’s daughter-in-law, Neely, the daughter of that friend who long ago carried a baby home from the refugee hospital.

Zahra Haider’s story gives a glimpse of Lahore, a primary site of partition’s violent upheavals. She shows us that partition’s disruptions were both massive and mundane. Stories like Mrs. Haider’s bring partition down to ground-level where we can see, hear and feel what partition was like for one young girl trying to make sense of the world around her.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Mrs. Zahra Haider

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Lahore, Pakistan (June 28, 2005)

Transcript:

Zahra Haider: Actually, I was born in Dehra Dun, the year was 1928. And Dehra Dun is in India. And I was born there. We came back to Lahore and I lived with my grandparents! My own mother got very ill, she had some problem with her legs, she couldn’t walk. She recovered from that, but at that time she was like that. So my Aunt, my father’s sister, she took me over and then I lived with her all my life and she became my adopted mother.

AA: You have lived most of your life in Lahore?

ZH: Most of my life. I remember when we were in our old house, it was a big house, which is a big house with a big courtyard inside and a big garden outside. It was a big area. And we used to all sleep inside in the courtyard with all the beds laid out and mosquito nets and everything and one table fan for all of us because we used to be in a row, all the beds laid out. Then, you know the first sound one woke up to in the morning, was we could hear the noise of the lion roaring in the zoo! Really! That! And then we could hear the cocks, our own cocks and things crow and everything. And then there used to be the Salvation Army band which used to march around outside on the road of our house. These are the few things. There was a beggar woman who used to come early in the morning and she used to sing for her pennies. Those are the few noises I remember very clearly… We can’t hear any lion any more.

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

AA: What happened in Lahore in your memory during the partition days?

ZH: See, we had gone up to Murree. It happened the summer. First, it started with this that we used to sleep upstairs in our house. On the roof! And we used to see—our neighbors were Hindus—surrounded. We had a lot of neighbors who were Hindus and we were quite friendly with them! But we saw them bringing up guns and things. Then we also got our guns. Inside the city, arson started, in the summer. And people were burning—inside the city, there were houses being burned—Hindus would burn Muslims, Muslims would burn Hindus. I don’t say that it was only “the bad Hindus” who were doing it. Muslims did in retaliation also! I don’t know if they started it but that’s how it [indistinguishable]. And it was such a hot summer, you can’t imagine!

We had to have our exams and all. We used to sit inside there, in the rooms—there were no air conditioners then—with the fans going. We had given our exams and all, then after that the real trouble started. Then, of course, our Hindu friends—we had friends, we used to go to the same college and everything—they took all their things away. We said, “Why are you taking them? You’ll come back when the holidays are over!” They said, “No, we are not going to come back if this is Pakistan.” And they took everything they could, you know, and moved.

AA: From the hostel?

ZH: From the hostel, and even from their homes. This is the sad thing, when one people get uprooted from their homes.

[Audio and Text Edited from Original]

When we came back from the hills, we had to go to college for our studies. And when we went to the college, it was closed. The only thing that was up were the bills, on the boards. And then, of course, we paid our bills! And then when our teachers came in they said that there aren’t enough people here, because most of the students were Hindus and Sikhs. Now we were few Muslim girls left. So they said, “No, we will now start.” Because there were a lot of refugees coming into the hostel. Because ours was Kinnaid College and the brother college was FC [Forman Christian] College. And they made FC College into a hospital. We all went. All the wounded people were taken there, the refugees. We went to work over there. They said they’ll give us marks for that. We went there and you can’t imagine what we saw!

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

There were a whole group of us who had to go to work there. We used to be there form the morning to the evening. Then one afternoon we just said, “Let’s take some cold coffee and have sandwiches and have something to drink.” So we were standing upstairs on the roof and having this when the doctor with whom we were working went past and said “Here you are having so much fun and go and see what’s happening downstairs! We went down and a new lot of refugees had come in. Uff! They were in all those wounded states and everything. Then we started off by cleaning their wounds, giving them bath. We needed clothes for them. Half of them were naked. We came home whichever way we could and took out our mother’s old clothes lying to be washed and took them there and gave it to those people. We washed them, scrubbed them. We couldn’t wash them properly. Their hair was absolutely matted and full of lice! We had to cut it open and it was worn down over here, lice coming down that—they were even going all over our hands. But we had to do that! And we gave them baths and bandaged them then brought food for them, and fed them.

Little children without arms, with their hands cut off, they were just saying, “I have no mother, give me something! Give me something!” So one would give them food and things, and feed them. Then there was one occasion, there was this lady who had maggots in her wounds. And she was a beautiful red-headed girl and she had a little baby with her. The doctor spent the whole morning getting out the—first they said, “She’s about to die, we won’t do anything.” There are so many others who we can help. Then they came around the next morning and she was still living. So he picked out all the maggots. And when he had picked them all out, she died. That was so sad.

Review of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (2000) by Urvashi Butalia

Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book on India’s partition emerged out of the terrible violence that gripped Delhi, not in 1947, when the partition took place, but in 1984. In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguard, the citizens of Delhi unleashed a murderous campaign of violence on the Sikh community as a whole. Delhi-ites were horrified to discover both the inaction of the local authorities to provide safety and security for citizens, and the failure of the media to report the atrocities taking place.

In response, South Asian scholars began to see for the first time, the holes in the official narratives of India’s 1947 partition into independent Pakistan and India. In this book, Urvashi Butalia turns to oral histories to tell the real story of the violence in Delhi and across North India in 1947. In Butalia’s oral histories both perpetrators and victims of the violence in Punjab reveal amazing stories of complicity and action. She contextualizes the stories by also narrating an official history of partition that covers the major events, including the story of her own divided family. Linking varied narratives illuminates facets of the partition story that are often obscured by concentration on political histories.

Butalia’s revelation that violence against women during the partition was not always connected to the narrative of religious identity gone awry is an important step in creating a gendered history of partition that shows how women became pawns in a national game about honor and community. The bodies of women came to represent the strength of different communities and their vulnerability exposed the weakness of male protectors.

Throughout these explorations, Butalia’s own concerns about the relationship between nation-building and violence come to the fore. Her oral histories consistently point to violence as an “outsider” act, perpetrated on communities by people from outside those communities. Butalia explains, “as long as violence can be located somewhere outside, a distance away from the boundaries of family and the community, it can be contained. It is for this reason, I feel, that during Partition, and in so much of the recall of Partition, violence is seen as relating only to the ‘other.’”

Many of Butalia’s partition narratives are surprising and touching. They reveal the difficulties of remembering violence and speaking about it aloud. Some of Butalia’s brave narrators remember their own complicity in actions that sharply defined religious difference and marginalized religious minorities, which became one of many reasons the subcontinent was divided.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

A Medieval Vision

by Martha G. Newman

In the last years of the twelfth-century, a monk named Engelhard, from the German monastery of Langheim, composed stories about miraculous events and visions he believed his fellow monks had experienced. This was not a decision made lightly: parchment was expensive, the process of writing laborious, and monastic authors needed permission from their superiors to write at all. But Engelhard (and his abbot) considered this project worthwhile. His stories preserved memories of holy monks, celebrated the special sanctity of his monastic order, and encouraged proper behavior. Other monks must have found this collection of stories worthwhile. Over the next century, it was copied – still by hand, still on parchment – at least four times.

A Cistercian manuscript of Gregory the Great's Moral Commentary on Job, created around 1111. A monk is seen wielding an ax, and the tree has some marks near the base. The monks and the tree form the letter "I." — A Cistercian manuscript of Gregory the Great’s *Moral Commentary on Job*, created around 1111. Today it is in the municipal library in Dijon, France (ms 173). The monks and the tree form the letter “I.”

The historical text I present here is one of Engelhard’s monastic stories. I have transcribed it from an early thirteenth-century manuscript and translated it from Latin into English. It contains a striking and unusual image: an apparition of the Virgin holding a vase filled with the sweat she had collected from monks laboring in fields. The image reinforces the purpose of Engelhard’s collection, for Mary praised the monks’ work and the holiness of their monastery; after hearing the story of the vision, Engelhard claimed that the monks worked still harder. However, this story does more than exhort and praise these Cistercian monks. It also illustrates changing attitudes toward labor as Europe moved from a subsistence to a commercial economy.

Engelhard was a monk in the Cistercian order. The first Cistercian monastery was founded in 1098, the same year that the crusaders conquered the city of Jerusalem. Just as the First Crusade demonstrated the combination of technological and economic advances and new religious impulses that allowed Europe to go on the offensive, so the growth of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century also combined a new understanding of religious ideas with technological and economic innovations. These monks sought to follow, as closely as possible, the strictures of the monastic rule written by St. Benedict 600 years earlier. One result of their adherence to the Benedictine Rule was that they rejected the economic practices of their monastic contemporaries, most of whom lived off the labor of a subject peasantry. The Cistercians instead wanted to live off their own labor; they refused gifts of manors and peasant revenues and, as a result, accumulated pasture, waste, and other territory not already settled by peasants. As the monks cleared these lands, raised sheep and pigs, and created workshops for metallurgy and other crafts, they quickly became participants in a new commercial and money-based economy.

The Cistercians’ attitudes toward work did not change as quickly as their economic practices. Medieval society inherited two sets of ideas about work, both of which held work in low esteem. The classical tradition of ancient Greek and Rome valued a cultured leisure and disdained the labor of those who made this cultured leisure possible. The early Christian interpretation of Genesis emphasized that God condemned Adam and Eve to toil and pain and presented labor as a result of human sinfulness. Throughout much of the middle ages, peasants were often seen as cursed by God because they had to labor in order to survive. When the Cistercians monks included agricultural work in their monastic customs, many of their contemporaries were puzzled to see aristocratic men working as peasants: “How, truly, is it religion to dig the ground, to cut down trees, to haul manure?” critics asked.

Even the early Cistercians still viewed labor as a penance for sin. They saw their willingness to take on the work of peasants as teaching them humility and control over their bodies: work was a means of imitating the humility and suffering of Christ, not a way to produce goods for consumption and sale. Soon after the foundation of their order, the Cistercians recognized that it was difficult to combine their prescribed hours of prayer with the demands of an agricultural economy; they may also have realized that aristocratic monks were not skilled at tending sheep and harvesting grain. As a result, they formed a second group of monks within their communities. These “laybrothers” spent less time at prayer and more at work, and they were probably responsible for the economic success of many Cistercian communities.

Engelhard was not the only Cistercian to tell a story about an apparition of the Virgin Mary who encouraged Cistercian labor. There are versions in other Cistercian story collections, but these depict Mary visiting the monks while they are at work, and they emphasize the wonder of seeing such noble men toiling as peasants in the fields. They emphasize labor as a form of penance which has a spiritual value only if it has been chosen voluntarily. Engelhard’s story is different, and suggests a changing attitude toward work. The monk in his story was the cellerar – the official in charge of the laybrothers, of paying hired workers, and generally maintaining the economic well-being of the monastery. And, in Engelhard’s version, this cellerar asks the apparition whether work done out of necessity has the same spiritual value as that done voluntarily. Mary’s response is remarkable: she says that she values both forms of labor and both will receive a reward.

Engelhard’s story suggests a growing recognition of the economic value of work. His ideas are akin to those of other late twelfth-century authors who rejected the idea that those who toiled out of economic necessity were cursed by God, who began to value the involuntary labor of peasants, and who started to quantify both time and production. We are not yet observing a society in which goods are valued primarily by their market worth: Engelhard’s story depicts monks producing sweat for Mary to collect rather than commodities to sell. But Engelard’s story of a monastic vision demonstrates that European attitudes toward work had started to change in tandem with the rise of a new commercial economy in the high middle ages.

The grange of the monastery of Langheim. Plants at the forefront of the image are decorated with gold and purple ribbons. — The grange (barn and workshops) of the monastery of Langheim. Today, the remaining buildings from Langheim are part of the town of Lichtenfels, in Upper Franconia, Germany.

A Monk’s Vision of the Virgin Mary (translated by Martha G. Newman)

This event happened in a monastery of our order, in a monastery that is renowned throughout France. Everyone believes it, because the man who saw it has many witnesses to his testimony.

It was harvest time, and as the monks worked in the fields, they sweat heavily with the hard work and under the heat of the day. When evening came, they went to bed and closed the door to their dormitory. The cellarer was a holy man, wise and mature, and of such good character that he alone was allowed to remain outside to take care of the hired workers. When he was finished, he went in to go to sleep, but the door to the dormitory was closed. What should he do? Beat on the door? He was not willing to knock, because the monks were resting. Should he then leave? But then he himself would have no rest. Preferring to inconvenience himself rather than his brothers, he entered the chapter room and sat on the steps.

But he did not sleep, and behold! the young woman entered, her light preceding two other women, and she approached the monk and asked if he slept.

He responded that he was awake, but asked why, against all monastic custom and in the middle of the night, the women entered the monastery without a care.

The woman said, “I am Mary, who cares for all who are in this abbey and in this order.” She carried a glass vase, which she held to her nose as if capturing the smell from it. And she said, “ I have visited today my monks in the field, and I collected their sweat for myself in this vase. For me it is the most pleasant smell, and it is certainly worthy for my Son, and it will return the highest reward.

The monk then asked, “O holy Lady, how important is our labor for you which is not so much done from voluntary devotion as from the necessity of our poverty?”

And she answered, “What do you say? Have you not heard that what is voluntary receives a penalty and duty earns the reward? If duty receives the reward, what is voluntary now receives a part. But whether out of necessity or voluntary, what you do is mine. I claim all of your work for myself, and what I receive, I remunerate.”

Having said this, she disappeared, and the monk slept sweetly, thus refreshed in hope, comforted in faith, and willing to work.

When morning came, he joyfully and devotedly reported what he had seen to the abbot at the chapter meeting. All were joyful, all believed him, and no one doubted it because of the seriousness of his character. All were stirred up, each was aroused to work. They labored and they sweated in such a manner that Mary, as she came near, could fill up her vase.

And thus Mary was accustomed to sport sweetly with her sons; thus she showed herself in a vision to them, offering them the gift of peace and grace. Those who were meek heard and rejoiced, those who were discouraged heard and were comforted; the lazy were inspired; all ran easily and without exhaustion to give glory to Christ and Mary, and from them receiving grace.

From Engelhard of Langheim’s Miracle Book. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, clm 13097, ff. 145v-146r.

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