For an unbiased version of Partition

Bansi Singh was 22 when she had to flee her house in Lahore along with her husband and five-month-old son. Now 85,she still remembers how their car was surrounded by rioters on August 13,1947 who let them flee to Amritsar only because one of the rioters had received free medical treatment from her husband who was a practising doctor in Lahore then. Now settled in Versova,Singh does not know what happened to her palatial house in Lahore; she has never been to Pakistan since.

School history textbooks may be replete with descriptions of the jubilations on the midnight of August 15,1947. Some may ever remember the exact words of Nehru’s iconic post-Independence ‘tryst with destiny’ speech. But far fewer people know about the horrific tales of Partition. Now,a group of six teenagers from the city,having done over a year of research,is trying to bring out a clear,non-partisan and unbiased version of the actual turn of events that occurred during Partition.

Their ultimate goal is to see a museum devoted to memories and memoirs of the Partition days. The group also wants to travel to Pakistan to collect stories and artifacts from across the border.

The idea originated when17-year-old Ria Mirchandani,a student of Cathedral and John Connon School,on a trip to Jerusalem in Israel last year visited a museum that had captured the holocaust during Second World War. “This is around the same time when the controversy surrounding Jaswant Singh’s book Jinnah: India,Partition,Independence was brewing back home. As I was reading the book I realised how Partition was never a glorious event as our biased history books have made it out it be. It was almost like an Indian Holocaust in itself,” said Ria.