By a twist of fate, the ancestral village where my family had lived and farmed for five centuries, Kanjrur-Duttan, was located seven miles west of the Ravi River, where the Boundary Commission had drawn an invisible border line. Suddenly my family members were minority Hindus living in an Islamic nation, caught in the middle of a holocaust. Scores of uncles and granduncles were butchered by Muslim mobs. My aunts were raped and abducted. Not even my elderly relatives were spared; my octogenarian granduncle Pooran Chand’s throat was slit by Muslim killers. Those who were lucky enough to survive had to flee.
The chaos and violence sent family members scattering in different directions. While growing up in a refugee colony in India, I felt the effect of the violence my elders had witnessed. I sensed the deep hatred my family felt toward Muslims. We considered them to be bloodthirsty animals who had preyed on us, killing our loved ones and driving us from our homes, turning us into destitute refugees.
In September 2001, 16 years after I had moved to the United States, I returned to India for a visit and was confronted with an ugly family secret, a shocking truth that opened my eyes to the dual lives we had been living. My father took me to meet my granduncle, a family elder he’d seen only once since the partition 54 years before. Old age had failed to diminish his spirit. He spoke in a fierce, deep voice, reciting couplets from poetry books he had written. He talked about seeing his uncles and two sisters killed while trying to flee a Muslim mob in Kanjrur-Duttan and told me how he had narrowly escaped by swimming across the flooded Ravi to the Indian side. When he got there, he had to walk over fields of dead refugees on the way to the town of Dera Baba Nanak.
Once he had made it to Dera Baba Nanak, he did something that was inexcusable and repulsive. He joined a group of young men who were attacking Muslim refugees in caravans going west to Pakistan. When I heard the story, I asked him in disbelief, “Do you even know how many people you killed?”
“I don’t know, son, there were many. You cannot even imagine what was going on at that time. Muslims were butchering entire trains of Hindu refugees; we were just retaliating.”
I was still in shock. “Our family members were killed by Muslims in Pakistan. They were desperately trying to escape, leaving behind their homes and land. Don’t you think that the people you killed were also innocent refugees who were trying to escape to Pakistan?”
My granduncle was quiet for a few moments before he spoke. “Yes, those were also poor, innocent people. But there must have been some sinners among them, too.”
I tried to argue, to show him how twisted his reasoning was, but he was unrepentant. Suddenly the moral certainty I felt about my family’s legacy as victims and survivors of a brutal massacre was gone. I had never imagined that they were killers too. My granduncle was probably not the only member of my family to wander Punjab with vigilantes. Like thousands of other killers who roamed the countryside–killers who lived respectably after the carnage as husbands, fathers, uncles–he never had to face the law for what he had done.
For a long time after our meeting, I thought about how easily victims of crime can lose their moral bearings and turn into criminals themselves. As a police officer, I know how often we focus on punishing the guilty while leaving the victims to suffer alone with no support. Perhaps that is one reason the cycle of violence continues.
I also know how much pain my family has endured. Even so, I feel strongly that revenge-based justice is no justice at all. Nothing came out of the killings my granduncle perpetrated in 1947. They did not bring satisfaction to my family, we were never able to return to our ancestral homes and our dead relatives did not reappear because he and other Hindus had killed Muslim refugees to even the score. It is time that we learned from our blood-soaked histories. Only forgiveness and compassion can put an end to violence.
