Gazing at Neighbours: Travels Along the Line That Partitioned India

by Bishwanath Ghosh

No other seemingly benign exercise has such far-reaching consequences as drawing a line on a map. On the face of it, you merely put pencil to paper, but the line actually runs through towns, villages, valleys, farmlands, forests, rivers, ponds—and people. Sometimes those assigned to run the pencil do so, without realising the impact their line is going to have on humankind. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was one of them. Sir Cyril had built a formidable reputation in Britain as a barrister before he went down in history as probably the world’s most infamous cartographer. In July 1947, he was summoned to New Delhi and given five weeks to partition India. Accordingly, he drew two lines on its map. One of the lines, 553 kilometres long, created the province of West Punjab; the other, 4,096 kilometres long, carved out a province called East Bengal. They both joined the newborn nation of Pakistan—an event that saw fifteen million people displaced and over one million dead.

Most refugees who went through the horrors of Partition as adults have passed on. The succeeding generations have long grown roots in India. They are now old-timers in cities where their forefathers had arrived homeless and penniless, and someday their grandchildren will grow up reading about Partition with the same detachment of someone never affected by it. The surgical scars, however, remain—and will remain as long as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh exist as separate countries. The scars, considered together, are called the Radcliffe Line. In the places it runs through, the line is referred to variously as zero line, boundary line, international border, or simply, border. Here, barbed wires have split families; concrete pillars have turned neighbours into foreigners; people follow restrictions which their countrymen elsewhere don’t, and wish sometimes silently, and sometimes aloud, that the line did not exist.

The ceremony, quite unfortunately, has overshadowed every other role of the BSF. Spectators merely watch the choreographed showdown, applaud, and go home. Not many are aware that lowly sentries, earning slightly better than a pittance, stand guard at the fence round the clock, with no shelter to protect them from the summer and winter of Punjab—both known to be very cruel.

I had bathed in the tank at this hour voluntarily, only because I wanted the experience and not because I saw it as a ritual that had to be followed. Sikhs don’t believe in rituals or superstitions anyway, they bathe in the tank out of sheer devotion for their gurus—and the water was perfumed with devotion. The Ganga, on the other hand, reeks of superstition: people treat the river as a drain carrying all their sins. The Ganga stands for blind belief, the pool of nectar stands for blind devotion. There is a big difference between belief and devotion: belief can change, devotion doesn’t.