I cannot ever forget the monsoon night of July 6, 1987. The night shift at my newspaper in Chandigarh was almost over. The chief sub-editor was closing the edition. But suddenly, a call came saying there had been a major mishap at Lalru on the Chandigarh-Delhi highway. The press was stopped and reporter Onkar Nath Garg and photographer Swadesh Talwar contacted to urgently cover the mishap before 3 am, so that the paper could be printed in time to reach the readers.
Recalling the dreadful night, Talwar says, “Terrorists had stopped the bus and segregated the Sikhs and the Hindus—and 38 of the latter were killed. It was the only time in my life that I walked on human blood to click pictures.” The report and the picture reached the office on time, and the night shift ended. We returned home in silence.
It was a time terror deaths had spiked in and around Chandigarh, the city of Nehru’s dreams built by Le Corbusier to compensate for the loss of Lahore. The killings had crawled into the precincts of the well-guarded state capital, too. And appalling news arrived without any warning. One day, All India Radio was consistently playing its regular mourning tune—on enquiry, it was revealed the Station Director had been killed. Earlier, in 1984, Professor Vishwanath Tewari of Panjab University, who was promoting Hindu-Sikh unity and whose son Manish is now a Congress MP representing Chandigarh, was killed by Khalistani militants while he was on a morning walk in the city’s Sector 24.
Assignments on this new chapter in Punjab started coming my way by chance, even though I was a cultural writer writing on the literary legacy of Punjab and other arts. The reason was my facility with the Punjabi language, or my presence in office while others were on their beats.
The emotional core of my writing also brought me an assignment in Tarn Taran, a town beyond Amritsar that had become a stronghold of terrorists from where reports were emerging of Hindu Punjabis fleeing.
My first memory of the visit, during which a local reporter was guiding me, was being stopped on the road by a haughty old Sikh and asked to cover my head with my dupatta (veil) that was hanging on my shoulders. Pointing a finger at me, the old man thundered, “Cover your head kurhiye (girlie), this is Punjab.” Taken aback, I resisted: “Where I live, girls don’t cover their heads.” He demanded to know where I lived. “Chandigarh,” I replied. This made the old man shout, “Chandigarh too is ours. It belongs to our Punjab.”
My guide was embarrassed, but to get on with the work, I did cover my head. Those were times when all women and even schoolgirls were ordered by the terrorists to move about in the regressive dress code of black and saffron.
Finally, I reached the home of a village head who happened to be Hindu. Speaking in choicest abusive Punjabi while puffing at his cigarette, he cursed the Hindu brethren who were deserting Punjab in fear and blamed unknown sources for creating panic. When I asked him if I could smoke too, as I was ruffled by the atmosphere, he was taken aback, and said, “Yes, you may, but not in the corridor. You may come inside my living room and smoke there!”
Looking back at the troubled times, I understand that the visits to Punjab’s villages were required because rural areas in the heart of conflict zones had suffered more. Belonging to a family of migrants from Pakistan who had crossed over in 1947, we had become city folks with no claim to any village.
But an artist friend, Malkit Singh, belonged to the twin villages of Rode-Lande near Moga. Thanks to him, I knew that Rode was the village of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the Sikh militant leader housed in Amritsar’s Golden Temple who became the spokesman of a Sikh country imaginatively titled ‘Khalistan’ or ‘Land of the pure’.
Ever since he became a radical religious head and abandoned his family, his wife and children had no choice but to move to her parental village. His paternal family was still in Rode, living a hard life while their son had moved out for the besotted leadership of the hardcore.
One of my most poignant encounters was with Pritam Kaur, widow of Bhindranwale. Hers had been a lonely and hard existence. She told me that sometimes she would manage to save some money and visit Amritsar, just to see the ‘saint’ who was once her husband.
“I would walk to the Golden Temple and sit right in front, hoping he would say something to me. But he never even acknowledged my presence.” Even a decade after the death of Bhindranwale, the abandoned family was trying to rebuild a life.
When I met her, I found her a gentle woman draped in a white veil sitting below a big picture of the husband who escaped from being a householder to a saint. A woman-to-woman bond emerged, as the then 40-year-old widow shared how she had brought up her children amid poverty. At last, Pritam had seen some peace with her elder son Ishar getting married and starting a livelihood of rearing cows and selling milk, while the younger brother Jevan Jyot was still studying.
Ishar told me: “I was four years old and my brother was even younger when he left home. We never knew father’s love.” He had recently got married and had a one-year-old girl named Jeevan Jyot and his wife Amandeep Kaur had decorated with embroidered roses in a frame, which seemed to be a symbol of better days. Later, the family moved to Canada and one hopes they lived a better life.
The episode I have kept for the end was perhaps one of the most painful yet inspiring. It happened at Preet Nagar, an experimental township equidistant from Amritsar and Lahore that was founded in the 1930s by an engineer named Gurbaksh Singh to promote the arts and serve as a commune for artists with a left liberal ideology. Well-known artists like Balraj Sahni, Sahir Ludhianvi and Amrita Pritam were associated with it.
The founder’s magazine called Preetlari, meaning the chain of love, led a fresh literary movement in Punjab. The whole concept suffered with Partition, but the magazine remained alive. Its editor during the unhappy times was Sumit Singh, the founder’s grandson who was married to his childhood friend Poonam Didi, who was younger to me in college. This young editor was shot dead for his bold stand while riding pillion on the bike of his younger brother. He was killed in broad daylight only because he was clean-shaven and wearing no turban.
Didi took over as editor of the magazine and it is still being published. The chain of love is indeed hard to break.
(Views are personal)
Nirupama Dutt
Senior journalist and cultural writer based in Punjab
