“Is that our new home?” is Sita’s constant refrain, after being uprooted from their land as a consequence of India’s Partition in Ritwik Ghatak’s cult Partition film Subarnarekha. The search for a new home symbolised the journey of many who lost everything and moved to the other side of the border, not only in search of a new home, but also in search of dreams. Generations have grown up listening to the harrowing tales of the land that they lost. Journalist, film critic, and author Bhawana Somaaya had grown up listening to such stories as well. It made her skeptical of reading any Partition-related document or watching a film that deals with the tragedy. “That is because the home in which I was brought up had too many such stories to tell,” she says. “I felt depressed while hearing those from my parents. I realised even after so many years, their scars are not healed, and their traumas are real.”
As an author, therefore, she faced a major dilemma while narrating her parents’ experience in her latest book, Farewell Karachi: A Partition Memoir (Bloomsbury). On the one hand, she wanted to pay tribute to her parents’ struggles, and on the other hand, she had to encounter generational trauma on her own. “I have been writing for the cinema world for more than 45 years. I have documented many lives and the works of many film stars. So, I felt that it would be a good idea to document the rich legacy and the struggles that our family has gone through. I wrote it as a tribute and without any intention to contribute to the existing Partition literature,” she notes.
The lost address
Growing up, Karachi did not feel like a distant land for Somaaya as the city was present in every discussion, not only at her household but at those of the extended family. “I heard about Karachi when I used to visit my grandmother’s house. While buying a sari, my mother used to say that ‘this was from Karachi’. If we were troubled by air pollution, they would begin to recall how clean Karachi’s air was…” Somaaya tells TMS.
The book also narrates the story of two Karachis for the readers. The first one, where a proud Mulji Dayalji (Somaaya’s grandfather) worked
and built his construction business. He was the owner of two upmarket buildings called Bhatia Bhawan A and B in Karachi’s Empress Market in Saddar. Later, Somaaya’s father, Madhavji Mulji, joined him. A good cricketer, he went on to join the Burmah Shell, a leading British oil company in Karachi, until the gory days of the 1940s when riots broke out all over the city.
And that is the second Karachi she spoke of, as the book notes, “Horrific riots transformed the city into a graveyard. My maternal cousin Indira Ben, who was eleven years old at that time, recalls that trouble erupted on June 6, 1948. Her father, a doctor, was at his clinic, and her grandfather, an MLA, was at his office when fear gripped the city. Both called home to warn the family of the impending disaster. ‘Lock all doors, windows, and the main entrance,’ warned my uncle. Soon, telephone lines all over the city were disconnected. According to Indira Ben, a truck full of men barged inside their bungalow and started dismantling all the furniture.”
And, finally, the day came when the family bid adieu to Karachi and sailed to India. Somaaya narrates, “The date was 22 September 1948. My mother rushed to the glass window to have a last glimpse of the land she had called home.” Like Sita and her husband Abhiram, the family embarked on a journey to find a new home. They travelled to Bhuj first and finally settled in Bombay, where they re-built their dreams.
The Bombay dreams
What was the common between both the cities in post-Partition India? The refugee colonies, she says. In Kalyan, a well-known Bombay suburb, Madhavji, who got a job as a purchase officer in the Indian oil industry, arranged a house for his uprooted family. The rest of the family members, at that time, were staying in Bhuj when he mailed a detailed travel plan to Somaaya’s mother, Valiben Madhavji Somaaya, and also to his father seeking assistance.
After all the travel arrangements were done, Somaaya’s mother and six of her siblings started the journey. The first stop was Ahmedabad, then Bombay. They came to Bombay Central station, from where they took a train to Kalyan. Describing her siblings’ experience, Somaaya tells TMS, “Bombay amused us at the very first sight. It was for the first time that my siblings saw hawkers on the street. It kind of shocked them. However, the city felt magical to them as they had never liked Bhuj, where the lanes were narrow. Compared to that, Bombay was heaven.” A Gujarati family joins its history to that of the country, and both go on to breathe, heal, and start afresh though the scars remain.