The Great Migration
Excerpted from Margaret Bourke-White's book, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In 1946 and 1947 she was in India. She witnessed the largest exodus of populations in history that occurred in the Indian subcontinent on the eve of freedom. The following is her eye-witness account from Punjab.
With the coming of independence to India, the world had the chance to watch a most rare event in the history of nations: the birth of twins. It was a birth accompanied by strife and suffering, but I consider myself fortunate to have witnessed and been able to document the historic early days of these two nations: India and Pakistan.
When I went to the Punjab area, in the North of India, in the fall of 1947 to begin photographing the newborn sovereign states, massive exchange of populations was under way. The roads connecting the Union of India with Pakistan looked as our Pulaski Skyway or Sunset Boulevard looks during the rush hour. But instead of the two-way stream of motorcars there were endless convoys of bullock carts, women on donkey back, men on foot carrying on their shoulders the very young or the very old.
Babies were born along the way. People died along the way. Some died of cholera, some from the attacks of hostile religious communities. But many of them simply dropped out of line from sheer weariness and sat by the roadside to wait patiently for death. Sometimes I saw children pulling at the arms and hands of a parent or grandparents, unable to comprehend that those arms would never be able to carry them again. The name "Pakistan" means Land of the Pure: many of the pure never got there. The way to their Promised Land was lined with graves.
The hoofs of countless cattle raised such continuous columns of dust that a pillar of a cloud trailed the convoys by day. And in the evenings when the wayfarers camped by tens of thousands along the roadsides, and built their little fires and made their chapatties -- good deal, I suppose, like the unleavened bread of the Bible -- the light of their campfires rose into the dust-filled air until it seemed as if a pillar of fire hung over them at night.
Indeed, there was such a Biblical atmosphere about this mammoth two-way exodus that I turned to the Old Testament to compare its size with the migration of the Israelites. I found that the Children of Israel numbered eight hundred thousand, but since the Book of Exodus counted men only, this number would have to be tripled or quadrupled. Even so, the exodus of the Children of Israel was dwarfed by the great migration of Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus which took place upon the partition of India. At the time that I was photographing it for Life magazine there were five million people on the move, with several more million due to follow as soon as room could be found for them. This, for these wretched millions, was the first bitter fruit of independence. ......
They flowed in a two-way stream across the border. Into the Indian Union came the Hindus and Sikhs . ; the Muslims poured into their new Pakistan, which they looked on as their Promised Land. All were led by fear, by highly questionable leadership, by ever dwindling hope. What had been merely arbitrarily drawn areas on a map began emptying and refilling with human beings -- neatly separated into so-called "opposite" religious communities -- as children's crayons fill in an outline map in geography class. But this was no child's play. This was a massive exercise in human misery.
As though the travail of a people divided by pen strokes was not great enough, North India, in this year of all years, suffered the worst floods since 1900. In the Punjab, which means Land of Five Rivers, all five began overflowing their banks, tearing away the earth barriers in the network of canals, spilling into the fields, and trapping entire encampments of refugees. I was almost caught myself in the rising of the River Ravi. .......
Thousands of peasants less lucky than I were trapped -- they had no jeep, no one to warn them. The River Beas claimed the most victims. When the water began receding sufficiently for me to get to it, I photographed one meadow between the river and a railroad ramp where four thousand Muslims had gone in to camp for the night. Only one thousand had come out alive. That meadow was like a battlefield: carts overturned wildly, household goods and farm tools pressed into a mash of mud and wreckage. .......
More fearful than flood and starvation was the ever present threat of attack by hostile religious hordes along the way. Hatreds had been so whipped up by the political pressures which had divided the nations that a new morality had developed. All members of a different religious group were fair prey for loot and murder. Travel by train was still more dangerous than by road because of the ease with which a crowded refugee train could be switched off the main tracks and, while being shunted back and forth, attacked and looted. The railroad station in Amritsar was a place of dread for Muslims. Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs and therefore the center of an especially militant form of fanaticism, was the last big junction which Muslim refugee trains had to pass through before crossing into Pakistan. I remember visiting the frightfully littered railroad station after an attack which had cost the lives of a thousand Muslim refugees, and seeing a row of dignified-looking Sikhs, venerable in their long beards and wearing the bright blue turbans of the militant Akali sect, sitting cross-legged all along the platform. Each patriarchal figure held a long curved saber across his knees -- waiting quietly for the next train. The Muslims were not always the victims. Trainloads of Sikhs and Hindus emigrating to India had hours of equal dread when passing through Lahore, the last great rail junction before they escaped from Pakistan. Hindu-Sikh convoys on the Pakistan highroads were a constant temptation to Muslim raiders. .....
For the first time, Lee [a LIFE reporter] and I saw cholera; we had visited an improvised hospital in Kasur where I photographed eight hundred victims lying on the floor. Some, we were told, would pull through, although their appearance made us doubtful. Their lives depended partly on how much nourishment they had been able to get on the roads before the disease struck them down. The sight of these helpless sufferers had made me very angry. These were innocent peasants; some had been driven from their ancestral homes; the others had listened to the drumming of religious slogans and left home to pursue a dream.
Driving back to Lahore in the dusk, we suddenly saw the fields come alive, as though dragons' teeth had sprouted, with hordes of men carrying long poles mounted with knives. They were running forward, and as we rounded a bend in the road we came on a truckload of refugees, apparently Hindus ambushed in hostile Muslim territory. Already swarming figures had reached the top of the truck, throwing down bedrolls and other loot, while one of the attackers thrashed away with a hatchet. The screams were terifying. ....
Lee and I went on with the convoys week after week until our all our hair became stiff and gray with dust, our clothes felt like emery boards, my cameras became clogged with grit, and the endless procession of misery we were portraying seemed, as Lee described it, to be "wrapped in a horrible nightmarish gray lighting, where the heartbreaking sight of human suffering was mercifully blurred by our own physical weariness." But long after the last of my negatives and Lee's captions had been dispatched by air to Life, and Lee herself had flown to another part of the world on a new assignment, those millions of peasants were still trudging blindly forward on their tragic journey. The total of Sikhs and Hindu leaving Pakistan had reached four million, but with six millions Muslims coming in, this infant Land of the Pure seemed in danger of being swept away by the very numbers of the pure pouring into it. ....
Since the time of my first arrival in India a year and a half before Independence Day, I had watched the constant jockeying for position which had finally resulted in the creation not of a single, free, united nation but of these handicapped twins. I remember the many times when bloodshed had broken out during the preliminary sparring and the Pakistan promoters had said, "We must have our separate nation, or we will not have peace." But now that this separate nation had become a reality the people had not achieved peace. It was a little too soon to find out just what they had achieved.
