Major Events Pre-1950

Satinder Mullick received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Economics. He was Director of Economic Planning and Research for Corning Inc., where he worked on different consulting assignments for improving growth and profitability for 30 years. Later, he helped turn around Artistic Greetings (40% owned by American Greetings) and doubled the stock price in four years. He received Lybrand Silver Medal in 1971 from Institute of Management Accountants.

Dr. Manohar Lal Kapur lives in Virginia, USA. He grew up in Bannu, which became part of Pakistan in August 1947. He was 11 years old in April 1948 when he flew from Bannu in a small plane, operated by the Indian government with help from the Pakistan government, to Ambala in India.  His parents followed him later. Manohar's father was a gold jeweler in Bannu. His business was getting affected as Hindus and-Sikhs started to leave due to uncertainty about what the rulers of Pakistan would do.  His family liked Bannu but realized that their business in Bannu will decline drastically as their customers will not be there for too long.  They had to leave behind their gold jewelry assets as the Government planes did not allow them much to carry much.

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Manohar has told me that he saw no violence or heard about violence in Bannu when he lived there. I trust his memory. He has given me a lot of details about Bannu. He even revisited Bannu all by himself in 1991 for three days. On that visit, Manohar did not see people he knew except one.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he served as Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, rising finally to the position of Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan. Shri Srivastava worked as Secretary/Principal Secretary of as many as 17 Rajasthan State Departments, including Revenue, Irrigation, Education, Culture, Tourism, Sports, Women &amp\; Child Development Department. He retired as the Chairman. Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation.  Shri Srivastava has authored several books on Administration &amp\; Current affairs in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural voluntary organisations in Jaipur.

The Quit India Movement of 1942 had, somehow, an immediate impact and response from my older brothers, Vishnu Chandra and Jagdish Chandra. Vishnu was the oldest. At that time, they were quite young. They were studying in seventh and fifth standards at Ganeshrai Inter College in Jaunpur in UP.

As part of the Quit India struggle, they were asked to go, along with other boys, and hoist the tri-color flag on the roof of their school. Full of zeal, the boys hurried up to the roof with policemen downstairs. That did not stop the boys. They managed to hoist the flag atop a quickly fixed mast for that purpose.

The incident is captured vividly in this story in Hindi.

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Sunder Ramchandani was born in Sindh and migrated to Delhi in late 1947 with his family when he was 9 years old. Upon receiving his Bachelor's degree, he devoted a lifetime to a career in the Indian Airlines Corporation. He retired as Deputy General Manager of Flight Operations in 1999 and now lives in Hyderabad, Telangana with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters.

Dilip Ramchandani was born in Delhi, the oldest of three children, to the late Indersingh and Ranjana Ramchandani. He graduated from the Maulana Azad Medical College in Delhi and, after emigrating to the US, trained in psychiatry. He retired two years ago from the Drexel University College of Medicine and now divides his time between Philadelphia and Washington DC. He and his wife, Parvati, a uroradiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, spend time with their two daughters and their families that include a granddaughter and a grandson.

Editor's note: Dilip reached out to his uncle, Sunder, to write this story. It is based upon a loose compilation of the memories that emerged in their recent telephone conversations and some notes and photographs that Sunder was able to provide.

Our family's story

Ashok Khanna has a B.Sc. (Econ) from London University, an MBA and PhD from Stanford. He has worked with Deloitte Touche (London, New York), taught at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Business, and worked for more than 25 years for the World Bank. He got his first chance to travel out of India when he was seventeen and has not stopped traveling since. In 1998, he began to sporadically write travelogues for friends. These essays increased over time as he traveled more after retiring, and also cover other interests.  Bloomsbury will publish his book on Emperor Ashoka in India in 2019.

I was eight years old, on 15 August 1947, India's independence day. My family had an invitation to the flag-changing ceremony, where Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India and the uncle of Prince Philip, the current Duke of Edinburgh, lowered the Union Jack and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, raised the Indian flag in its place. We got this prized invitation because my father was an executive in a British company.

Our seats were near the steps that ascended to the platform with the flagpole, at the epicentre of a crowd of one or two million assembled at the edge of Old Delhi, with Jama Masjid visible in the distance. As I had never been in such a huge crowd before, I remember feeling uneasy, but my mother and sister were excited, and their energy infected me as well, though I did not grasp the full significance of the day.

Satish Chopra was born 1942 in Lahore, and his family moved to Delhi in 1947. After his M.A. from Delhi University, he became a banker, and retired from the Central Bank of India in 2001. He has a passion for learning, history, literature, and nostalgic film and light classical music. His book Forgotten Masters of Hindi Cinema was well-received in India and Pakistan.  In 2016, he got a National Film Award from the President of India. He is now working on his autobiography. His email is satishchopra@rediffmail.com.

The rooftop of our house situated at the right side entrance of Rasala Bazaar, Purani Anarkali, Lahore, was from where I saw fire all around the city in August 1947. The fire, which started from Shah Almi Gate, is one of my earliest memories. The Anarkali police station was situated at about two hundred metres from our house, and from our rooftop we could see its entire courtyard. At times, wailings of the detainees could be heard clearly in our home.

My family home in Lahore. at the right side entrance of Rasala Bazar, Purani Anarkali, Lahore. Picture was obtained in 1989 through a common acquaintance. Its authenticity was confirmed by my father, who expired in 1996.

Lakshaya Grover: I am a history enthusiast, on my way to become a lawyer. The enamouring world of the past seems intractably intriguing to me, and I spend my days exploring it. I read a lot. I think a lot.

Editor's note: Lakshaya has written this account of his family at my request. This account is based on what he has heard from his older family members.

My great-grandparents. Lyallpur, Punjab, Undivided British India

Lajwanti had been in the throes of emotion for the past few days. She was certainly not one to lose it all and cry, and yet, her life had already made its first tryst with utter despair. The family she had so assiduously built was lying in shambles. Everything had been so phenomenal, so miraculous. She had given her husband Tarachand, Tara, as she called him, a reason to rejoice. She was able to fight fate and occult powers, she had broken the curse laid upon her ‘Tara', she had defied the prophesies of pundits and maulvis alike.

Lajwanti, the hero of this story, the protagonist who could not survive the suffering inflicted upon her by chance, as if God was playing dice with her life, and the lives of millions of people like her, who were about to become refugees, or were going to be slaughtered en masse. A flurry of memories floods my brain as I write this, trying to make a cohesive story by stitching together dispersed anecdotes passed on to me by my late grandfather, who survived India's Partition in 1947, and lived to divulge the ghastly intricacies hackneyed catastrophe.

Dr. Anand - an unholy person born in 1932 in the holy town of Nankana Sahib, central Punjab. A lawyer father, a doctor mother. Peripatetic childhood - almost gypsy style. Many schools. Many friends, ranging from a cobbler's son (poorly shod as the proverb goes) to a judge's son. MB from Glancy (now Government) Medical College Amritsar, 1958. Comet 4 to Heathrow, 1960.
Widower. Two children and their families keep an eye on him. He lives alone in a small house with a small garden. Very fat pigeons, occasional sparrows, finches green and gold drop in to the garden, pick a seed or two and fly away.

I was then fifteen years old. We lived in what was to become Pakistan. Several months before that happened, discretion being the better part of valour, my father, his sister, and his brother rented a bungalow in Solan, Simla Hills. The younger generation reached there separately in the summer - as soon as our, i.e., children's, schools and colleges closed.

Solan was the capital of a small "native state" to use the terminology of the British Raj.

The ruler was called Raja Sahib, and I heard him described as HH. Presumably the British Government had conferred the "His Highness" style of address or title on him.

Kanwarjit Singh Malik was born in Rawalpindi in 1930. His family moved to India at the time of Partition in 1947. He joined the Flying Club in Jalandhar, and was later selected by the Indian Air Force. After the retirement from the Air Force, he served as a senior captain in Air India and Air Lanka. He got married in 1961, and now lives in Mumbai with his wife.

Pre-Partition life

My family had lived in Rawalpindi since the time of my great-grandfather, Malik Khazan Singh, who passed away in 1899 after amassing a large amount of property.

My father, Malik Mukhbain Singh, was a barrister, who had studied Law in the UK. He suffered from polio when he was 2 or 3 years old. He was treated in the UK while he was studying Law, but his condition did not improve. He was fitted with a brace, which he used to wear while going outside, and always walked with a stick.

My father and his younger brother Sardar Jaswant Singh Malik were the sons of my grandfather's first wife. My grandfather had two sons who were 17 and 12 years old when my grandmother passed away. Then, my grandfather remarried, and had three sons from my step grandmother, who passed away after Partition.

Dr. Anand - an unholy person born in 1932 in the holy town of Nankana Sahib, central Punjab. A lawyer father, a doctor mother. Peripatetic childhood - almost gypsy style. Many schools. Many friends, ranging from a cobbler's son (poorly shod as the proverb goes) to a judge's son. MB From Glancy (now Government) Medical College Amritsar, 1958. Comet 4 to Heathrow, 1960.

Long retired. Widower. A son and a daughter, their spouses, five grandchildren, two hens (impartially, one black, one white) keeping an eye on me as I stand still and the world goes by.

In 1947, I was a student at DAV College, Lahore. It stood fairly close to the Zamzama Gun, an artillery piece cast before Maharaja Ranjit Singh created the Khalsa Empire. An empire, which, despite the word Khalsa, was as non-communal as any. In fact, Ranjit Singh's youngest or junior most Maharani was a Muslim.

Before Ranjit Singh consolidated his hold on the Trans-Sutlej Punjab, the gun was in the ownership of the Bhangi Missal (sect). They were Jat Sikhs, reputedly fond of Cannabis indica. The Punjabi name of the gun was Bhangian di tope (The cannon of the Bhangis.)

It was commonly believed that whosoever held possession of the Zamzama would hold the Punjab. It had the longest range of any then in service in the sub-continent. When the East India Company defeated the Khalsa, they displayed the gun in Lahore.