It is barely dawn and the sky is as pink as Turkish delight. Yet already, at 5.45am, Lahore Central Station is buzzing like a kicked hive.
Bleary eyed, you look around in bewilderment. At home the milkmen are abroad at this time, but no one else. Here the shops are already open, the fruit and vegetables on display, and the shopkeepers on the prowl for attention.
"Hello my dear," says a man proffering a cauliflower.
"Sahib- what is your good name?"
"Subzi! Subzi! Subzi!"
"Your mother country?"
A Punjabi runs up behind the rickshaw, waving something horrible, a wig perhaps, or some monstrous vegetable:
"Sahib, come looking! Special OK shop! Buying no problem!"
Lahore station rears out of the surrounding anarchy like a liner out of the ocean. It is a strange, hybrid building: the Victorian red-brick is imitation St. Pancras, the loopholes, battlements and machicolations are stolen from some Renaissance palazzo: Milan perhaps, or Pavia, while the towers are vaguely German, and resemble a particularly extravagant Wagnerian stage set. Only the chaos is authentically Pakistani.
As a tape of the Carpenter's Greatest Hits plays incessantly on a tannoy, you fight your way through the surge of jammed rickshaws and tottering red-jacketed coolies, through the sleeping villagers splayed out on the concrete, past the tap with the men doing their ablutions, over the bridge, down the stairs and onto the platform. In the pre-dawn glimmer, Platform 7 seethes with life like a hundred Piccadilly Circuses at rush hour. Porters stagger towards the First Class under a mountain of smart packing cases and trunks. Lower down the platform, near Third Class, solitary peasant women sit stranded amid seas of more ungainly luggage: cages and boxes, ambiguous parcels done up with rope, sacks with lumpy projections: bits of porcelain, the arm of a chair, the leg of a chicken. Vendors trawl the platform selling trays of brightly coloured sweet meats, hot tea in red clay cups, or the latest film magazine. Soldiers wander past, handlebar mustaches wobbling in the slip stream.
The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent, that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. For from stations like Lahore ran the railway lines which bound the subcontinent together- but which were eventually to act as the agent of their bloody division, at Partition in August 1947.
Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than 23,000
By 1863 some three million tons of rails, sleepers and locomotives had been shipped to India from Britain in around three and a half thousand ships. Engineers had looped tracks over the steepest mountains in the world, sunk foundations hundreds of feet into the billowing deserts, bridged rivers as wide and as turbulent as the Ganges and the Indus. It was an epic undertaking even by the standards of an age inured to Imperial heroics
The railways also brought about a social revolution. For there could be no caste barriers in a railway carriage: you bought your ticket and you took your place. For the first time in Indian history a Maulvi who spent his days contemplating the glorious Koran might find himself sitting next to an Untouchable who skinned dead cows. Moreover, as journey times shrank, India became aware of itself for the first time as a single unified nation. For as the bullock cart gave way to the locomotive, a subcontinent disjointed by vast distances and primaeval communications, suddenly, for the first time, became aware of itself as a geographical unit. It was the railways that made India a nation.
Ironically, a century later, the same railways also made possible the irreparable division of the subcontinent. The partition of India and Pakistan, which took place fifty years ago, on the 15th of August 1947, led to what was probably the greatest migration in human history. When partition was announced, more than twelve million people began packing up and preparing to exchange both their homes and their countries. Muslims in India headed en masse for Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs made their way in the opposite direction. In the course of the mass migration, suppressed religious hatreds were viciously unleashed; over a million people lost their lives in the riots and massacres that ensued. Yet partition would have been impossible without the railways; and it was on the railways that much of the worst violence took place. Lahore station was the eye of the whirlwind.
The fate of Lahore remained uncertain until the final maps of the boundaries between the two nations were released on the 14th of August. In the event the city went to Pakistan, just fifteen miles from the Indian border, and the city and its people were torn apart. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fought their way to the station to flee to India. At the same time train after train began arriving from south of the border carrying hundreds of thousands of Muslims to their new homeland. The station became a battleground.
On the night of Independence the last British officials in Lahore arrived at the station. They had picked their way through gutted streets, many of which were still littered with the dead from the riots that attended the Partition of India and Pakistan. On the platforms they found the railway staff grimly hosing down pools of blood and carrying away piles of corpses on luggage trollies for mass burial. Minutes earlier a last group of desperate Hindus had been massacred by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting quietly for the Bombay Express. As the train pulled out of Lahore, the officials could see that the entire Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from every village. Their life's work was being destroyed in front of their eyes.
The massacres of Partition brought the Raj to a cataclysmic close. Now, only half a century later, that period can seem as distant as that of the Romans. But the buildings- like this extraordinary station- still survive. They are the keys which can unlock the history of a period- a history which, though it may seem impossibly foreign, is as much part of our heritage as that of the Indian subcontinent.
With its great round bastions and tall machicolated towers, Lahore station may look as if it is the product of some short lived collaboration between the Raj and the Diney Corporation, but it was in fact built in deadly earnest. The twin towers look as innocent as Swiss cuckoo clocks, but they were designed to be bomb- proof, while the loop holes across the facade are not the mock arrow slits they appear to be, but placements for Maxim guns, which were drawn down carefully designed lines of fire. Even the cavernous train sheds could, in an emergency, be sealed with huge sliding metal doors, turning the whole complex into a colossal fortified bunker.
According to its architect, William Brunton, the whole station had a "defensive character" so that "a small garrison could secure it against enemy attack". The twin towers look as innocent as Swiss cuckoo clocks, but they were designed to be bomb- proof, while the loop holes across the facade are not the mock arrow slits they appear to be, but placements for Maxim guns, which were drawn down carefully designed lines of fire. Even the cavernous train sheds could, in an emergency, be sealed with huge sliding metal doors, turning the whole complex into a colossal fortified bunker.
Straddling the Grand Trunk Road leading south to Delhi and Calcutta, Lahore is marching distance from the North West Frontier. At the time of the Great Game the Victorians saw it as an important defensive post against a Russian invasion through the Khyber Pass. Moreover the station was built in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. So the building was deliberately designed to function both as a station and as a fort. Brunton was particularly pleased with the masonry, which he called 'the best in the world' and which he felt confident could survive even full-scale howitzer fire.
.
In the event, Brunton's extraordinary architecture was never put to the test. Instead, in the course of the nineteenth century, the station became a symbol of the profitable partnership Britain developed with its greatest colony. For India took to the railways in a way that could not have been imagined by the British engineers who first drew lines across the plains of the subcontinent. Just as India has always seduced and transformed its conquerors, so in the same way India slowly took over the railways. The stations were inhabited by whole villages of people washing, sleeping and cooking in the ticket halls, arriving days early for a train and building encampments on the platforms. Within a few years something quintessentially English had been forever transformed into something quintessentially Indian.
Then there was the bureaucracy. Somehow the idea of multiple forms, triplicate permissions and strict codes of practice- ideas that originated in Crewe perhaps, or maybe Swindon- took on a new lease of Indian life in the plains of the Punjab in the hands of Hindu bureaucrats, brought up from birth with Gods who had multiple incarnations, three faces and the strictest of codes of practice regarding their representation and worship. The hierarchy of the railways seemed directly to echo the Hindu caste system, with a pyramid that rose, rank after rank, from the lowly armies of sweepers through the Parcel Clerks, Goods Clerks, Booking Clerks and Special Ticket Examiners to the twice-born apex of Station Master and General Manager. For the Muslims too, there may have been something appealing in submission to a railway timetable at once as merciful, omnipotent and loftily inflexible as the great Koran itself.
Moreover the railways were the ultimate symbol of all the Raj prided itself in being: pioneering and up to date, intrepid and impartial; on the cutting edge of the industrial revolution. Even today harrumphing Home Counties colonels will point first and foremost to the railways as a symbol of everything they like to think the British 'gave' to India. Yet the railways were not works of charity. They were sound commercial enterprises, and the private investors who put up the initial capital saw their money returned many times over. Nonetheless, the railways did inspire a feeling of esprit de corps among those that worked for them, a spirit which survived until very recently.
Walking around the station one day this summer, I met Abdul Majid. He was an old man with hennaed hair and heavy plastic spectacles. He wore a sparkling clean salvar kemeez, and sat on a magnificent throne raised on a mahogany dais above platform 1. Above him was a plaque with the message 'Our objective- Speed Cum Safety.'
Abdul Majeed told me that he had retired from the Pakistani railways ten years earlier, but chose to come to the station and sit in the information booth by choice: "I spent forty years in the railway department," repeated Mr. Majeed, lowering his face shyly. "I come back to this station because I am loving these railways of Pakistan- to them I have dedicated my life- and because my colleagues are my best friends."
I remarked to Mr. Majeed how many of the older men in the Pakistani railways seemed to regard the running of the railways almost as a sacred duty.
"I think we should," replied Mr. Majeed. "I always took my duty as a sacred duty, just like my religious function. I never came to the station without washing myself, just as I prepare for my prayers in the mosque."
I asked him how the railways had changed in the forty years he had been part of them.
"Sahib," said Mr. Majeed. "It’s not only the railways. The change is in the general sphere of life."
"In what way?"
"In the shape of corruption, in the shape of requirements, in the shape of evils, in the shape of thinkings, in the shape of harassment, in the shape of sabotages. Now the young men are not so dutiful, I think. There has been big change."
"You think corruption has eaten into the railway system?"
"Sahib, you can imagine. When I was working as a station master, people used to adjust their watches by the passage of trains. Now we adjust our watches from the public. Today there is no punctuality. Yesterday's train arrives today and today's train arrives tomorrow. No one thinks to mention it when a train comes in ten or twelve hours late. Things are very bad."
Abdul Majeed, it emerged, was born in the half of the Punjab which is now part of India. Expelled from his ancestral village in early September 1947 at Partition, he and his family were made to walk to a refugee camp in the Monsoon rains. There were no facilities for drinking water or for even the most basic sanitation. Soon cholera broke out.
"In the camp my mother died at about 14 hours due to cholera," said Abdul Majeed, eyes still lowered. "The same day my father died at 2 a.m."
"So you lost both your parents on the same day?"
"Yes. We buried our mother that evening, then buried our father on the morning of the 9th of October."
"You had to bury them yourselves?"
"Yes we buried them ourselves near a mosque, offering our religious prayers. I was just fifteen years old. The following day we were made to walk to the new place from where we had to catch a train. In the crowd, my younger brother was separated from the rest of us. I never saw him again.
"In the morning, when the train passed the Beas River I looked down and saw hundreds of corpses scattered in the river bed from point to point, being eaten by crows, dogs and kites, giving bad smell. After many hours we eventually crossed the Pakistan border from Atari at about fifteen hours. We were stunned when people said Pakistan Zindabad [Long Live Pakistan!]. They welcomed us and gave us food and water. We had not eaten for four or five days. Then we thought, we are still alive."
The longer I stayed at Lahore, the more I realised quite how cataclysmic Partition must have been. Pakistan's birth pangs had also been India's Holocaust. Everyone you met had their story: fifty-year-old tales of exile, death, massacre and bereavement flowed from their lips as readily as if it were new gossip. The most horrific were told to me by Mr. Majeed's elderly friend, Khawaja Bilal who had had the unenviable job of being the station master of Lahore in 1947.
"I have been coming to Lahore Station since I was a student," Khawajah Bilal told me as we sat on a bench outside what had once been his station master's office. "Before Partition took place the station was a landmark of beauty. The platforms were clean and the carriages were spotless. The people were calm and quiet. The staff were well dressed. The uniforms they wore were immaculate. The buttons were polished, the braid was golden and shone under the lights. All that ended with Partition."
"What happened?" I asked.
"On the 14th of August I was on duty. We heard an announcement that Partition had taken place. Soon after that the killing started, the slaughter began. Everywhere we looked we saw carnage and destruction of human life. There was no law and order, even when the soldiers came and made a barricade with barbed wire outside the station. Despite their presence, many were being killed on the platforms, on the bridges, in the ticket halls. There were stabbings, rapes, attempts at
"One morning, I think it was 30th of August, the Bombay Express came in from Delhi via Bhatinda. There were around two thousand people on this train. We found dead bodies in the lavatories, on the seats, under the seats. We checked the whole train, but nobody was alive except one person. There had been a massacre when the train stopped at Bhatinda. The sole survivor told us he had approached the train driver, an Englishman, who gave him refuge.He hid the man in the watertank by the engine. When the Sikhs arrived they could not see him so they went away and he survived. Only one man out of two thousand. After that every train that came from India was attacked. We used to receive one hundred trains a day. There were corpses in every one. "
Listening to these horror stories it was clear that for the people of India and Pakistan the horrors of Partition were not just the stuff of history, consigned to the memories of a few old men: for most people they were still livid scars, unhealed wounds which were still poisoning relations between Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan, more than half a century later.
When Lord John Lawrence broke the earth on the future site of Lahore railway station in February 1859, the silver shovel he used bore the Latin motto 'tam bello quam pace'- better peace than war. The motto was appropriate because the railways did play a vital part in creating a peaceful, united India. The irony was that less than a century later, they were also the instrument that made its irreparable division feasible. The biggest migration in human history was only possible because thousands of people could be moved from one end of the country to another by rail. It was a two way traffic, and the slaughter which resulted was on a scale so unimaginable, and the wounds created were so deep, that to this day India and Pakistan are still the most bitter enemies.
Today the old main line from Lahore to Delhi, once the busiest line in India, is now the hardly used. These days only one train a week passes from Lahore Station down the line to Pakistan- and that is largely empty.
[Based on the script of Blood on the Tracks, the first episode of the Channel 4 series Stones of the Raj 1997]
Bleary eyed, you look around in bewilderment. At home the milkmen are abroad at this time, but no one else. Here the shops are already open, the fruit and vegetables on display, and the shopkeepers on the prowl for attention.
"Hello my dear," says a man proffering a cauliflower.
"Sahib- what is your good name?"
"Subzi! Subzi! Subzi!"
"Your mother country?"
A Punjabi runs up behind the rickshaw, waving something horrible, a wig perhaps, or some monstrous vegetable:
"Sahib, come looking! Special OK shop! Buying no problem!"
Lahore station rears out of the surrounding anarchy like a liner out of the ocean. It is a strange, hybrid building: the Victorian red-brick is imitation St. Pancras, the loopholes, battlements and machicolations are stolen from some Renaissance palazzo: Milan perhaps, or Pavia, while the towers are vaguely German, and resemble a particularly extravagant Wagnerian stage set. Only the chaos is authentically Pakistani.
As a tape of the Carpenter's Greatest Hits plays incessantly on a tannoy, you fight your way through the surge of jammed rickshaws and tottering red-jacketed coolies, through the sleeping villagers splayed out on the concrete, past the tap with the men doing their ablutions, over the bridge, down the stairs and onto the platform. In the pre-dawn glimmer, Platform 7 seethes with life like a hundred Piccadilly Circuses at rush hour. Porters stagger towards the First Class under a mountain of smart packing cases and trunks. Lower down the platform, near Third Class, solitary peasant women sit stranded amid seas of more ungainly luggage: cages and boxes, ambiguous parcels done up with rope, sacks with lumpy projections: bits of porcelain, the arm of a chair, the leg of a chicken. Vendors trawl the platform selling trays of brightly coloured sweet meats, hot tea in red clay cups, or the latest film magazine. Soldiers wander past, handlebar mustaches wobbling in the slip stream.
The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent, that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. For from stations like Lahore ran the railway lines which bound the subcontinent together- but which were eventually to act as the agent of their bloody division, at Partition in August 1947.
Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than 23,000
miles of railway in all. It was the biggest- and the costliest- construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.The railways are now such a part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they bought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj
By 1863 some three million tons of rails, sleepers and locomotives had been shipped to India from Britain in around three and a half thousand ships. Engineers had looped tracks over the steepest mountains in the world, sunk foundations hundreds of feet into the billowing deserts, bridged rivers as wide and as turbulent as the Ganges and the Indus. It was an epic undertaking even by the standards of an age inured to Imperial heroics
The railways also brought about a social revolution. For there could be no caste barriers in a railway carriage: you bought your ticket and you took your place. For the first time in Indian history a Maulvi who spent his days contemplating the glorious Koran might find himself sitting next to an Untouchable who skinned dead cows. Moreover, as journey times shrank, India became aware of itself for the first time as a single unified nation. For as the bullock cart gave way to the locomotive, a subcontinent disjointed by vast distances and primaeval communications, suddenly, for the first time, became aware of itself as a geographical unit. It was the railways that made India a nation.
Ironically, a century later, the same railways also made possible the irreparable division of the subcontinent. The partition of India and Pakistan, which took place fifty years ago, on the 15th of August 1947, led to what was probably the greatest migration in human history. When partition was announced, more than twelve million people began packing up and preparing to exchange both their homes and their countries. Muslims in India headed en masse for Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs made their way in the opposite direction. In the course of the mass migration, suppressed religious hatreds were viciously unleashed; over a million people lost their lives in the riots and massacres that ensued. Yet partition would have been impossible without the railways; and it was on the railways that much of the worst violence took place. Lahore station was the eye of the whirlwind.
The fate of Lahore remained uncertain until the final maps of the boundaries between the two nations were released on the 14th of August. In the event the city went to Pakistan, just fifteen miles from the Indian border, and the city and its people were torn apart. Thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fought their way to the station to flee to India. At the same time train after train began arriving from south of the border carrying hundreds of thousands of Muslims to their new homeland. The station became a battleground.
On the night of Independence the last British officials in Lahore arrived at the station. They had picked their way through gutted streets, many of which were still littered with the dead from the riots that attended the Partition of India and Pakistan. On the platforms they found the railway staff grimly hosing down pools of blood and carrying away piles of corpses on luggage trollies for mass burial. Minutes earlier a last group of desperate Hindus had been massacred by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting quietly for the Bombay Express. As the train pulled out of Lahore, the officials could see that the entire Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from every village. Their life's work was being destroyed in front of their eyes.
The massacres of Partition brought the Raj to a cataclysmic close. Now, only half a century later, that period can seem as distant as that of the Romans. But the buildings- like this extraordinary station- still survive. They are the keys which can unlock the history of a period- a history which, though it may seem impossibly foreign, is as much part of our heritage as that of the Indian subcontinent.
With its great round bastions and tall machicolated towers, Lahore station may look as if it is the product of some short lived collaboration between the Raj and the Diney Corporation, but it was in fact built in deadly earnest. The twin towers look as innocent as Swiss cuckoo clocks, but they were designed to be bomb- proof, while the loop holes across the facade are not the mock arrow slits they appear to be, but placements for Maxim guns, which were drawn down carefully designed lines of fire. Even the cavernous train sheds could, in an emergency, be sealed with huge sliding metal doors, turning the whole complex into a colossal fortified bunker.
According to its architect, William Brunton, the whole station had a "defensive character" so that "a small garrison could secure it against enemy attack". The twin towers look as innocent as Swiss cuckoo clocks, but they were designed to be bomb- proof, while the loop holes across the facade are not the mock arrow slits they appear to be, but placements for Maxim guns, which were drawn down carefully designed lines of fire. Even the cavernous train sheds could, in an emergency, be sealed with huge sliding metal doors, turning the whole complex into a colossal fortified bunker.
Straddling the Grand Trunk Road leading south to Delhi and Calcutta, Lahore is marching distance from the North West Frontier. At the time of the Great Game the Victorians saw it as an important defensive post against a Russian invasion through the Khyber Pass. Moreover the station was built in the immediate aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. So the building was deliberately designed to function both as a station and as a fort. Brunton was particularly pleased with the masonry, which he called 'the best in the world' and which he felt confident could survive even full-scale howitzer fire.
.
In the event, Brunton's extraordinary architecture was never put to the test. Instead, in the course of the nineteenth century, the station became a symbol of the profitable partnership Britain developed with its greatest colony. For India took to the railways in a way that could not have been imagined by the British engineers who first drew lines across the plains of the subcontinent. Just as India has always seduced and transformed its conquerors, so in the same way India slowly took over the railways. The stations were inhabited by whole villages of people washing, sleeping and cooking in the ticket halls, arriving days early for a train and building encampments on the platforms. Within a few years something quintessentially English had been forever transformed into something quintessentially Indian.
Then there was the bureaucracy. Somehow the idea of multiple forms, triplicate permissions and strict codes of practice- ideas that originated in Crewe perhaps, or maybe Swindon- took on a new lease of Indian life in the plains of the Punjab in the hands of Hindu bureaucrats, brought up from birth with Gods who had multiple incarnations, three faces and the strictest of codes of practice regarding their representation and worship. The hierarchy of the railways seemed directly to echo the Hindu caste system, with a pyramid that rose, rank after rank, from the lowly armies of sweepers through the Parcel Clerks, Goods Clerks, Booking Clerks and Special Ticket Examiners to the twice-born apex of Station Master and General Manager. For the Muslims too, there may have been something appealing in submission to a railway timetable at once as merciful, omnipotent and loftily inflexible as the great Koran itself.
Moreover the railways were the ultimate symbol of all the Raj prided itself in being: pioneering and up to date, intrepid and impartial; on the cutting edge of the industrial revolution. Even today harrumphing Home Counties colonels will point first and foremost to the railways as a symbol of everything they like to think the British 'gave' to India. Yet the railways were not works of charity. They were sound commercial enterprises, and the private investors who put up the initial capital saw their money returned many times over. Nonetheless, the railways did inspire a feeling of esprit de corps among those that worked for them, a spirit which survived until very recently.
Walking around the station one day this summer, I met Abdul Majid. He was an old man with hennaed hair and heavy plastic spectacles. He wore a sparkling clean salvar kemeez, and sat on a magnificent throne raised on a mahogany dais above platform 1. Above him was a plaque with the message 'Our objective- Speed Cum Safety.'
Abdul Majeed told me that he had retired from the Pakistani railways ten years earlier, but chose to come to the station and sit in the information booth by choice: "I spent forty years in the railway department," repeated Mr. Majeed, lowering his face shyly. "I come back to this station because I am loving these railways of Pakistan- to them I have dedicated my life- and because my colleagues are my best friends."
I remarked to Mr. Majeed how many of the older men in the Pakistani railways seemed to regard the running of the railways almost as a sacred duty.
"I think we should," replied Mr. Majeed. "I always took my duty as a sacred duty, just like my religious function. I never came to the station without washing myself, just as I prepare for my prayers in the mosque."
I asked him how the railways had changed in the forty years he had been part of them.
"Sahib," said Mr. Majeed. "It’s not only the railways. The change is in the general sphere of life."
"In what way?"
"In the shape of corruption, in the shape of requirements, in the shape of evils, in the shape of thinkings, in the shape of harassment, in the shape of sabotages. Now the young men are not so dutiful, I think. There has been big change."
"You think corruption has eaten into the railway system?"
"Sahib, you can imagine. When I was working as a station master, people used to adjust their watches by the passage of trains. Now we adjust our watches from the public. Today there is no punctuality. Yesterday's train arrives today and today's train arrives tomorrow. No one thinks to mention it when a train comes in ten or twelve hours late. Things are very bad."
Abdul Majeed, it emerged, was born in the half of the Punjab which is now part of India. Expelled from his ancestral village in early September 1947 at Partition, he and his family were made to walk to a refugee camp in the Monsoon rains. There were no facilities for drinking water or for even the most basic sanitation. Soon cholera broke out.
"In the camp my mother died at about 14 hours due to cholera," said Abdul Majeed, eyes still lowered. "The same day my father died at 2 a.m."
"So you lost both your parents on the same day?"
"Yes. We buried our mother that evening, then buried our father on the morning of the 9th of October."
"You had to bury them yourselves?"
"Yes we buried them ourselves near a mosque, offering our religious prayers. I was just fifteen years old. The following day we were made to walk to the new place from where we had to catch a train. In the crowd, my younger brother was separated from the rest of us. I never saw him again.
"In the morning, when the train passed the Beas River I looked down and saw hundreds of corpses scattered in the river bed from point to point, being eaten by crows, dogs and kites, giving bad smell. After many hours we eventually crossed the Pakistan border from Atari at about fifteen hours. We were stunned when people said Pakistan Zindabad [Long Live Pakistan!]. They welcomed us and gave us food and water. We had not eaten for four or five days. Then we thought, we are still alive."
The longer I stayed at Lahore, the more I realised quite how cataclysmic Partition must have been. Pakistan's birth pangs had also been India's Holocaust. Everyone you met had their story: fifty-year-old tales of exile, death, massacre and bereavement flowed from their lips as readily as if it were new gossip. The most horrific were told to me by Mr. Majeed's elderly friend, Khawaja Bilal who had had the unenviable job of being the station master of Lahore in 1947.
"I have been coming to Lahore Station since I was a student," Khawajah Bilal told me as we sat on a bench outside what had once been his station master's office. "Before Partition took place the station was a landmark of beauty. The platforms were clean and the carriages were spotless. The people were calm and quiet. The staff were well dressed. The uniforms they wore were immaculate. The buttons were polished, the braid was golden and shone under the lights. All that ended with Partition."
"What happened?" I asked.
"On the 14th of August I was on duty. We heard an announcement that Partition had taken place. Soon after that the killing started, the slaughter began. Everywhere we looked we saw carnage and destruction of human life. There was no law and order, even when the soldiers came and made a barricade with barbed wire outside the station. Despite their presence, many were being killed on the platforms, on the bridges, in the ticket halls. There were stabbings, rapes, attempts at
arson. I had my charpoy in the station master's office: I didn't dare go back to my house. But at night I could not sleep because of the screams and moans of the dying coming from the platform. In the morning, when the light came, bodies would be lying everywhere.Would you like to comment on this article, or contribute an article or review of your own? Get in touch below
"One morning, I think it was 30th of August, the Bombay Express came in from Delhi via Bhatinda. There were around two thousand people on this train. We found dead bodies in the lavatories, on the seats, under the seats. We checked the whole train, but nobody was alive except one person. There had been a massacre when the train stopped at Bhatinda. The sole survivor told us he had approached the train driver, an Englishman, who gave him refuge.He hid the man in the watertank by the engine. When the Sikhs arrived they could not see him so they went away and he survived. Only one man out of two thousand. After that every train that came from India was attacked. We used to receive one hundred trains a day. There were corpses in every one. "
Listening to these horror stories it was clear that for the people of India and Pakistan the horrors of Partition were not just the stuff of history, consigned to the memories of a few old men: for most people they were still livid scars, unhealed wounds which were still poisoning relations between Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan, more than half a century later.
When Lord John Lawrence broke the earth on the future site of Lahore railway station in February 1859, the silver shovel he used bore the Latin motto 'tam bello quam pace'- better peace than war. The motto was appropriate because the railways did play a vital part in creating a peaceful, united India. The irony was that less than a century later, they were also the instrument that made its irreparable division feasible. The biggest migration in human history was only possible because thousands of people could be moved from one end of the country to another by rail. It was a two way traffic, and the slaughter which resulted was on a scale so unimaginable, and the wounds created were so deep, that to this day India and Pakistan are still the most bitter enemies.
Today the old main line from Lahore to Delhi, once the busiest line in India, is now the hardly used. These days only one train a week passes from Lahore Station down the line to Pakistan- and that is largely empty.
[Based on the script of Blood on the Tracks, the first episode of the Channel 4 series Stones of the Raj 1997]