Khamosh Paani

Probably no other event has caused such widespread human hardship in India as the partition… Millions of people were forcibly uprooted from villages, towns and cities that they had called home for centuries and forced to become refugees in a foreign land that they were now supposed to identify as their own only because of their religion… While millions undertook this journey in search of relative security for themselves and their families, many died and probably many more were left behind in a country that refused to call them their own…

Khamosh Paani (2003) is a story of one such Sikh woman who is left behind in West Punjab after she refuses to obey her father's command and mother's example by jumping in the village well… Soon, she is caught by the Muslims, one of whom, out of the goodness of his heart marries her… She becomes a devout Muslim and raises a family, forgetting her past till one day it returns to haunt her… Her brother, a part of a jatha of Sikhs allowed by Zia-ul-Haq to visit holy shrines discovers her and begs her to return to India to see her dying father… At this point, she asks him " Father wanted me to die… I ran away… Tomorrow when I die, to which heaven will I go?- The Sikh heaven or the Muslim heaven"… At the end, she jumps into the same well, which she had refused to jump into some 30 years ago when she had chosen life over suicide...dying as a broken soul… Rejected by the Sikhs for having forsaken their religion by becoming a Muslim… And discredited by the Muslims, thanks to the rising Islamic Extremism in Zia-ul Haq's Pakistan, for not having rejected Sikhism enough…She was an apostate to both religions in spite of her trying hard to stay true to both her faiths…

This must be the tale of so many women and girls who would have been left behind in "enemy territory"… Used and exploited by the men as the loot of war, they would have been subject to the worst of tortures and when finally they would have begun to accept their fate, they would have been rejected as impure and cast aside… Unlike the comfort women of Japanese occupation of Korea, China and South East Asia during WWII, this topic has never received any attention, due also in part due to the social stigma attached to dishonor of women in the subcontinent … 

As the generation which experienced the horrors of partition fades into oblivion, the stories of these women would probably die with them, with probably no chance of them getting justice and at the very least, a heartfelt apology from their adopted countries for having inflicted unspeakable horrors upon them...