The descendents of partition

Last July, while attending the Punjabi Conference in Leicester, I listened to Nuzhat Abbas narrate Jalandhar Kitthe Hai. Something about that story plucked at the strings of my heart. It transported me back to my grandmother, who, in the final years of her life, would often speak of the lanes of Lahore and call out the names of childhood friends as though she had only seen them yesterday. Last weekend, when I watched Main Vaapas Aaunga, all those memories came rushing back.

My nana rarely spoke about Partition. But when he did, it was always in fragments. "Laashaan hi laashaan sigiaan" (There were bodies everywhere), he would say, before falling silent. Neither he nor my grandmother ever really unburdened themselves of what they had witnessed. They carried it until their last breath. Even after their deaths, the trauma remains.

If you want to understand the scars Partition left behind, let me narrate an incident I witnessed myself. A close friend of mine was admitted to a hospital. On the bed beside him lay an elderly bebe, well into her eighties. Whenever the pain became unbearable, she would call out for Gurpreet—perhaps her son or grandson—and then, in the same breath, chant both "Allah" and "Waheguru." We could only guess that she had lived through Partition, and in those moments of pain, her mind had wandered back to an undivided Punjab where such invocations belonged together.

For the mainland Indians, the pain ended in 1947, for us, the victims and their descendants, the trauma was inherited. It did not remain an archive of memory; it became a lived condition. Something that seeped into language, into silence, into the way stories were told only partially, or not told at all. What was passed down was not just remembrance, but a way of holding the world—carefully, anxiously, always expecting fracture.

This inheritance was not always spoken. In fact, it was often most powerful in what was left unsaid. My grandmother rarely narrated Partition as a complete story. It arrived instead in fragments, names of Lahore friends remembered suddenly in the middle of a conversation, an unfinished sentence about a house that was no longer there, a silence that followed whenever someone asked too directly. Even forgetting did not work cleanly. Even silence had texture.

The point is not that Partition survivors were constantly reliving 1947 in some dramatic, visible way. It is that 1947 reorganised how reality itself was perceived. Security became conditional. Home became temporary. Happiness became something that had to be mentally prepared to end.

This is where inheritance begins to shift from history into psychology, and then into everyday life.

It manifests itself in the most ordinary of gestures. In the obsessive need to save, store, and avoid throwing away anything that might be useful later. Money is not the only consideration; objects, habits, and even emotional restraint are also important. Scarcity does not always manifest as a lack; it can also exist as preparedness.

My grandfather’s best friend, my uncle, who has worked every moment of his life, from delivering newspapers as a child to later running his own graphic design agency, has done extremely well for himself. He's eighty now and has given up on life after my nana’s death.  One evening, many years ago, while I was sitting with him, he said, almost as if speaking to himself rather than to me, "Eh paisa kade v rull sakda”.

There was no immediate context for that fear. No crisis in front of him. And yet the logic was intact. It did not need a present trigger. It had already been installed decades ago, somewhere deeper than experience, almost like reflex.

A friend once told me about his father who took out even the door handles and footmats of a new hatchback before using it, just to “save them.” At first it sounds absurd, even humorous. But underneath it is a very specific relationship to loss. If everything can disappear once, then everything must always be treated as if it is already on the verge of disappearing again.

This is how Partition lives, not as an event remembered, but as a structure of anticipation.

It does not only shape what people fear. It shapes what they do when nothing is wrong.

It enters homes, quietly, in the form of discipline that is not really discipline but anxiety in disguise. My grandmother hit her children. Some of her children hit their children too. This is not a moral claim so much as a continuity. Violence here is not always expressive rage; sometimes it is inherited method. A way of restoring control in a world that once became uncontrollable.

And then it travels further.

It enters intimacy.

It enters love.

It enters the way people argue and then cannot tolerate the silence that follows, because silence itself begins to feel like abandonment, like disappearance, like something irreversible is already beginning.

Because this feeling does not always begin in the present. It often arrives already formed.

I remember being in my early teenage years, cutting out op-eds and reports on communal violence and pasting them into black scrapbooks. I did not understand why I was doing it at the time. I only know now that I was building an archive of catastrophe before I had fully entered adulthood. Preparing for a world that might break at any moment.

What kind of imagination does that come from? What kind of inheritance leads a child to collect violence in the same way that others collect stamps or photographs?

This is where the concept of partition transcends its historical context. It becomes atmospheric. Something you live inside without necessarily naming it. Something that repeatedly reminds you that rupture is normal and continuity is fragile.

Even joy is not immune to it. Happiness frequently comes with a sense of caution, as if it must be emotionally insured against loss. Celebration is never truly surrendered to. It appears, almost from a distance, that the mind is already preparing an exit strategy.

And yet, the most complicated part of this inheritance is that it was not always passed down as fear.

Often it was passed down as protection.

Many elders chose silence not because they had nothing to say, but because they believed saying it would reproduce the violence in another form. They tried to break the chain by refusing narration itself. To them, speaking was not healing; speaking was risk.

So trauma and care became entangled.

Silence became a kind of love.

But silence also had consequences. Because what is not spoken does not disappear. It mutates.

And it returns in other ways—in suspicion, in anxiety, in inherited caution that has forgotten its origin.

This is why Partition cannot be treated as something that ended when migration stopped or when borders were drawn. It continues wherever its emotional logic continues to organise life: the assumption that stability is temporary, that strangers are always potential threats, that loss is not exceptional but expected.

In that sense, Partition did not only divide geography. It reorganised imagination.

And imagination, once reorganised, does not stay in the past.

It becomes how people see tomorrow.

Main Vaapas Aaunga understands this distinction. Set simultaneously in 1947 and 2026, it is less interested in asking who was responsible for Partition—a question that has dominated public discourse for decades—than in asking what Partition continues to do to us.

The film recognises that Partition did not merely divide territory. It altered the emotional architecture of generations. It seeped into the ordinary habits of family life, into the instincts with which people loved, feared, saved, disciplined, trusted and remembered. The border was drawn across maps, but its deepest lines were etched into minds.

The inheritance of Partition was trauma. The inheritance of partitioning was something even more enduring. Trauma passed through silence; partitioning passed through everyday life.

It lived in homes where cupboards were always stocked because scarcity might return tomorrow. It lived in families where money was never simply money but protection against an imagined catastrophe.

One of the film's most powerful scenes captures this dilemma. A young person asks an elder to recount what happened during Partition. The elder erupts in anger. Why should I tell you? You will take our pain and turn it into hatred.

It is a devastating line because it captures the paradox of memory itself. Silence may conceal trauma, but memory can be weaponised.

The young person responds with an equally difficult question: has silence prevented hatred, or has it allowed hatred to grow in the spaces where memory should have been? It is a question many of us have found ourselves asking in recent years, as political projects built on partitioning have regained confidence.

Perhaps forgetting was never the opposite of remembering. Perhaps, like Alzheimer's, it often remembers selectively.

For my grandmother, Partition began in 1947 but never truly ended. It travelled with her into old age, into dementia, into the names she whispered before she died. It passed into her children and, in quieter ways, into my generation.

What exactly is destroyed when you uproot a human being? How long does a house continue to burn after the fire has been extinguished? I often wonder whether those who participated in the violence understood that they were not merely killing people or destroying homes. They were reshaping generations yet unborn.

Watching Main Vaapas Aaunga, I was startled by how much of my own life it seemed to understand. Later, I saw people my age, on both sides of the border, sharing stories of grandparents who had carried the same grief until the end, grandparents who warned them not against Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, nor against Indians or Pakistanis, but against hatred itself.

"Anyone who hates is a Martian," the film says. "The rest of us are humans."

Its final, mid-credit song is not a call to revisit Partition. It is a plea to resist partitioning.

That is a responsibility we owe not only to our grandparents, but to ourselves.