VIOLENCE AND MIGRATION: A STUDY OF KILLING IN THE TRAINS DURING THE

PARTITION OF PUNJAB IN 1947

Author(s): Navdip Kaur
Source: Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 72, PART-I (2011), pp. 947-954
Published by: Indian History Congress
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44146786
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 VIOLENCE AND MIGRATION: A STUDY
OF KILLING IN THE TRAINS DURING
THE PARTITION OF PUNJAB IN 1947
Navdip Kaur

The advent of independence on August 15, 1947 simultaneously saw

the division of the Indian sub-còntinent into two countries India and
Pakistan. The province most affected by Partition was Punjab which
was caught in unprecedented collective violence. In only three months,
between August and October 1947, the land of five rivers, was engulfed
in a civil war. Attacks by the Muslims in the West Punjab were followed
by counter-attacks by the Sikhs and the Hindus in the East Punjab. The
communal venom that had seeped into the minds of all the communities,
got expression in large-scale arson, murder of innocent men, women
and children, looting, forcible conversions and abduction of women.1
This was a time when the hurricane of communal passions swept the
whole Punjab community clan of all decency, morality and sense of
human values.2 The focus in this paper has been on killing in the trains
during the Partition of Punjab in 1947.
The most immediate impact of the Partition was the brutal and
gruesome violence which it brought. Nobody knows how many people
were killed in Punjab during the Partition riots. The estimates of persons
killed in Partition violence differed widely. It is, of course, undeniable
that virtually all sections of Punjabi society could count among their
kinsmen those who were uprooted, plundered, assaulted and murdered.
From early 1947 Punjab had gradually been succumbing to communal
violence which became more brutal and widespread after March 4. In
the last days of the British Raj, it was not only the case that violence
occurred as a consequence of partition, but 'violence was a principal
mechanism for creating the conditions for partition'.3 The violence
which preceded Partition was grave, widespread and lethal. After 15
August 1947, it took on a new ferocity, intensity and callousness. Now
militia trawled the countryside for poorly protected villages to raid
and raze to the ground, gangs deliberately derailed trains, massacring
their passengers one by one or setting the carriages ablaze with petrol.
Women and children were carried away like looted chattels.4
The Partition of Punjab in 1947 was followed by the forced
uprooting of more than twelve million people belonging to minorities
who sought shelter across the newly created boundaries in the two states
of India and Pakistan. The minorities were made to quit their hearths

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948 IHC: Proceedings , 72nd Session , 2011

and homes in the most adverse circumstances created by communal

riots and they had to reach the country of their destination very often
as paupers. Mohammad Waseem has described the migration in
connection with the Partition of Punjab as 'one of the most violent
processes of ethnic cleansing in recent history.'5 The growing
uncertainty about the future course of events, such as the drawing of
boundary lines and the possible extent of communal violence, proved
cataclysmic in terms of making people move away to perceived safer
areas where their community was in majority.6 While some people were
forced to move because of fear of death, others sought to escape shame
and humiliation brought about by the abduction of women, rape, and
forcible conversions.7

Once the Boundary Line became clear, the numbers of refugees

crossing Punjab and moving out of the state intensified frighteningly
quickly. Between August and November 1947 - a bare three months -
as many as 673 refugee trains moved approximately 2,800,000 refugees
within India and across the border.8 Partition refugees did move in other
ways on foot, columns or kafilas also by trucks and cars. But it is the
railway compartments with people clambering dangerously on train
tops that have provided the totemie image of Partition migration.
Partition narratives - official, semi-official and survivors'
testimonies suggest that there was a big difference in the way that people
left. The refugees marched across the border on foot, bullock carts,
trains, in any means of transport they could find. The rural refugees
with their farming essentials and meagre belongings, started their
journeys either on foot or in bullock carts. The trains were deployed to
ferry the urban refugees. While the foot journeys took weeks of travel
and were fraught with dangers of violent attacks, looting and abduction
of women and children. The train journeys were much in demand as a
quick means to get away from risk-zones even though these were also
fraught with danger. The ambushes and killings in trains and at various
railway stations in Punjab make the communal massacres difficult to
forget or ignore. The railway station and compartment of the train
became the 'indicators of the misery of refugee existence - a life in
flux.'9

Overcrowded trains provide the most enduring images of Partition.

No image of Partition, textual or in the mind's eye, photograph or film,
escapes from the overloaded trains with men, women and children
moving from one side of the border to the other.10 Due to their central
role as a preferred means of urban evacuation, they have become
symbolic of the last journey of the masses. In the opening scenes of
Khushwant Singh's novel, Trains to Pakistan , a train inhumanly

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 Modem India 949

crammed with refugees passes throu

Indo-Pak border. 'Like all the trains
dangled down the sides on to the doo
windows were jammed with heads a
buffers between the bogies.'11
The narratives of Partition are full
of dead passengers arriving on railwa
carrying dead passengers have becom
that ordinary people went through. In
passengers across the borders became
of the border so that each exhorted it
number of people to be sent across to th
to Pakistan : 'One morning, a train fr
railway station. At first glance, it had t
peace. No one sat on the roofs. No on
one was balanced on the footboards. But somehow it was different.
There was something uneasy about it. It had a ghostly quality ... The
arrival of the ghost train in broad daylight created a commotion in
Mano Majra.'12
There were very serious attacks on trains in Punjab between August
1 947 and the spring of the following year. Leonard Mosley gave a
graphic account of the violent incidents that took place during this
period. He writes: "It was a time when trains were arriving in Lahore
station packed with passengers, all of them dead, with messages scribed
on the sides of the of carriages reading: 'A present from India' so, of
course, the Muslims sent back trainloads of butchered Sikhs and Hindus
with the message: 'A present from Pakistan' .... All India stank -
with the stench of countless thousands of dead bodies, with the stench
of evil deed, with the stench of fires."13 Wolpert also writes: In and
around Amritsar, bands of armed Sikhs killed every Muslim they could
find, while in Lahore, Muslim gangs - of them 'police' - sharpened
their knives and emptied their guns at Hindus and Sikhs. Entire
trainloads of refugees were gutted and turned into rolling coffins, funeral
pyres on wheels, food for bloated vultures who darkened over the Punjab
and were stated with more flesh and blood in those final weeks of
August than their ancestors had enjoyed in a century."14
The refugee trains were known as 'India Specials' or 'Pakistan
Specials.' The special trains were frequently subjected to sabotage by
ingenious methods, in order to way lay them and then massacre the
refugees. The most deadly attacks were those against these Refugee
Special trains. These were highly organized affairs in which ex-military
personnel, with knowledge of explosives and sabotage techniques,

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950 IHC : Proceedings, 72nd Session, 2011

played a prominent role. Most trains carried on average three to four

thousand refugees, and were accompanied by small military escorts,
which were often incapable of preventing considerable loss of life. A
massacre in these trains left two to three thousand passengers killed
and the rest injured. These trains served purpose for the marauding
gangs as they could indulge in 'wholesale slaughter' because these
trains carried the members of a single community.15
Swarna Aiyar gives details of the massacres that occurred on trains
in the Punjab in 1947 and also discusses the planning involved and
methods employed in these killings. She writes: "Sikhs on railway
platforms would observe Muslims entraining, and enter the same
carriages. After the train's departure, they would single out the Muslims
and push them out of the windows, at pre-decided spots, like rail side
telegraph poles that were marked with a white flag. There gangs of
killers waited to complete the killings. Often the gangs conducting this
had their couriers on trains who pulled the communication cord between
stations, and the killer gangs then operated throughout the train.....
The attacks were organized with military precision, with one half of
the gang providing covering fire while the others entered the train to
kill."16

The trains were especially vulnerable to systematic, premediated

attacks because trains have fixed routes and may not change them and
that indeed their times of arrival and departure were known to the
attackers. Trains would usually be attacked when passing through the
countryside, which provided ideal cover for the mobs stopping the
trains, as they could lie in wait in the nearby fields of standing crops of
sugarcane or maize, and vanish with equal ease once the looting and
killing were completed. For the same reasons attacks were generally
carried out at night or in the early hours of the morning.17
The methodical and systematic manner in which these killings and
train attacks took place, point to a high degree of planning and
organization. Many accounts reveal that the attacks in both sides of
Punjab were carried out with military precision. The observations of
Francis Tuker, who was the Commander in this regard are worth
mentioning.18 The systematic organization and the high degree of
planning that was involved in the sabotage and stoppage of trains
suggests at least some degree of complicity by officials, among the
staff of the civil administration generally, an the railway staff in
particualr.19
The tragedies of Partition would not have been complete had they
not been accompanied, as every conflict since the dawn of history, by
an outpouring of sexual savagery.20 Tens of thousands of girls and

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 Modem India 95 1

women were seized from refugee colum

isolated villages, in the most wide-scale
While men belonging to the other com
women were not let off in show of
abducted. Partition accounts refer to sexual molestation and abduction
of women in refugee trains.22
In Lahore retaliation from the Muslims was swift. The Lahore
Railway Station became a veritable death-trap between August 1 2 and
August 18. The riots in the city compelled the non-Muslims to leave,
and their only avenue of escape was the railway station, because journey
by road far more perilous ... There was a general state of tension and
anxiety and when news came that the Sind Express, on its way to
Lahore, had been attacked by Muslims, the panic spread among the
passengers.... The next day, it became impossible for non-Muslims
even to reach the railway station. They were caught and massacred on
the way .... On August 1 4 and 1 5 the railway station became a scene of
wholesale carnage.23
The incidents of retaliation were especially prominent in cases of
train attacks. Whenever a 'ghost train' laden with dead bodies arrived
on one side, another would immediately be sent in the opposite
direction.24 Prakash Tandon, a Hindu Punjabi from Gujarat, in his
personal account writes: ' . . . train crammed with two thousand refugees
came from the more predominantly Muslim areas of Jhelum and beyond.
At Gujarat station the train was stopped, and Muslims from the
neighbourhood, excited by the news of violence in East Punjab, begad
to attack and loot. There was indescribable carnage. Several hours later
the train moved on, filled with a bloody mess of corpses, without a
soul alive. At Amritsar, when train with its load of dead arrived, they
took revenge on a train load of Muslim refugees.'25
Fictional and non-fictional accounts of Partition point out that the
train administration on both sides was not only sabotaged by fanatics
but the railway staff itself was divided along communal lines so that
the trains would not be allowed to leave the station until the passengers
of the other faith were slaughtered, women abducted, belongings looted.
An inquiry report about a train accident, for instance, points to the
complicity of the railway staff: '.. a Muslim refugee special (train)
which left Ambala met with a serios (serious) accident at Shambu
railway station (Patiala state). Engine and three bogies derailed,
resulting in 129 deaths and injuries to about 200 persons of whom nine
died in the hospital.... Accident (occurred) due to the train having
directed to a deadline instead of the mainline, which is attributed either
to gross negligence of railway staff or a deep-seated conspiracy. The
station ASM, pointsman and the driver have been arrested.'26

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952 IHC: Proceedings, 72nd Session, 2011
D.A. Low points out that 'the human agonies which they (victims)
suffered are, in the standard accounts, often buried away. Often they
are neglected altogether.' ... The fictionalized narrative apparently
furnishes a more bearable medium for explicit descriptions of unnerving
horrors than raw accounts by victims and survivors can provide now.27
Some important fictional works that have captured the horror,
trepidation and fear of passenger travelling in trains to cross over the
other side of the border are - Khushwant Singh's novel Train to
Pakistan ; Krishan short story "Peshawar Express"; Bhisham Sahni's
story, "The Train Has Reached Amritsar" and Aziz Ahmad's "Kali
Raat."28 The train in fictional narratives on Partition has been used at
multiple levels: as a narrator, as means of escape, as the site for killings,
as a symbol of dislocation and deranged humanity. Train to Pakistan
provides a picture of Mano Majra, a village in Punjab, close to the
newly formed border, in which trains play a vital part in the everyday
life of the villagers, and subsequently, trains become the cause of
turbulence in an otherwise calm and peaceful village.
As the number of refugees on the railway stations increased the
condition of stations became awful and worse. The condition of
Amritsar railway station in the middle of September was beyond
description. A British army officer writes about condition of evacuees
on station: 'On their arrival in Amritsar their condition was beyond
description. There were deac^nd dying in every rail truck, and their
beddings were covered by bile and excreta. The smell was almost
unbearable. It is said that approximately 100 women were abducted at
the first derailment and several killed. Police reports state that the train
arrived in Jullundur 12th September evening with 145 dead, of which
1 00 had been killed and 45 had died for want of food and water. During
the search by the police in Amritsar some 50 to 60 women and children
died of thirst, hunger and sunstroke, as no efforts had been made to
give these people water, although there was a plentiful supply in the
station. No civil medical aid was available.29 This could be taken as
representative of the conditions on railway stations in Punjab.
The people travelling in the trains shared the same hatred, mass
hysteria and insecurity that characterized those travelling on foot
columns. In Bhisham Sahni's story, "The Train Has Reached Amritsar"
the passengers are tense and nervous whenever the train stopped, 'the
passengers watched each other suspiciously. If the train slowed down
they started at each other apprehensively. If it stopped, the silence inside
became unbearable.'30

A British officer touring in Punjab gave description of the ordeal

of train travel for refugees as he wrote: 'Some of the events such as

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 Modem India 953

murder, brutality, looting, ill treatm

in evacuee trains, the results of vicio
have outdone even Belsen and other b
Nazi mind... in every carriage withou
were mixed up with the wounded - it was
Some accounts also point out that violence was not all
encompassing. There were some acts of mercy and charity. Many
persons saved the lives of neighbours, friends and strangers even by
risking their own lives. In Train to Pakistan , the attackers tied a thick
steel wire on top of two poles across the railway track. But the plan to
derail the train failed as the hero cuts the steel wire he falls on the
tracks only to be crushed by the passing train which carries his beloved
and their unborn child safely across the border. There are some stories
which provide compelling evidence of a counter-flow to the polarization
of society in 1947. Even a future President of India, Zakir Hussain,
owed his life to the intervention of a Sikh captain and Hindu railway
employee who saved him from a gang at Ambala railway station.32
However, these examples were by far out-numbered by instances where
communal leaders actively engaged in aiding and abetting the violence.
The number of people killed in trains was far less than those
killed on ground, but savage brutality with which train killings were
executed are shocking examples of genocide and are the most powerful
images of the communal holocaust of 1947.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Satya M. Rai, Parution of the Punjab , Delhi, 1965, p. 47.

2. Ibid., p.257.
3. Paul R. Brass, Forms of Collective Violence , Gurgaon, 2006, p. 19.
4. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition , New Delhi, 2007, p. 128.
5. Mohammed Wasim, "Partition, Migration and Assimilation: A Comparative Study
of Pakistani Punjab", in UPS, 1997, Vol.4, No.l, p.21.
6. Ravinder Kaur, "The Last Journey: Exploring Social Class in 1947 Partition
Migration", in EPW , Vol.XLI, No.22, June 3, 2006, p.2222.
7. Ibid.

8. Government of India, Millions on the Move: The Aftermath of Partitio

Delhi, 1948, p.5.
9. Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint (eds.), Translating Partition , New Delhi: Kath
p.xv.

10. The photographs are available in NMML, New Delhi and are reproduced
books on Partition. See the cover of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan
Delhi: Lotus Roli, 2006, (rpt. Of 1956); Yasmin Khan, op. cit.

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 954 IHC: Proceedings, 72nd Session, 201 J
11. Ibid., p. 64.
12. Ibid., pp. 120-121.
13. Leonard Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj , New Delhi, 1961, p. 243.
14. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, New York, 2010 (rpt of 1984), p. 342.
15. Swarna Aiyar, "'August Anarchy': The Partition Massacres in Punjab 1947", in
D.A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds.), Freedom Trauma, Continuities, New Delhi,
1998, pp.20-23.
16. Ibid., 22.
17. Ibid.

18. Sir Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves, London, 1950, pp. 485-91.
19. Swarna Aiyar, op. cit., p. 23.
20. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom, at Midnight , New York, 197
p. 392.
21. Ibid., p. 393.
22. G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning, New Delhi, 1989 (rpt. of 1949), pp. 164-65; Sir
Francis Tuker, op. cit., p. 480.
23. Ibid., p. 122.
24. Sir Francis Tuker, op. cit., p. 48 1 .
25. Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Saga 1857-2000 , New Delhi, 2000, p. 131.
26. Kirpal Singh (ed.), Select Documents on the Partition of Punjab 1947 , New Delhi,
1991, p. 565.

27. D.A. Low, "Introduction" in D.A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds.), op. cit., p. 7.
28. For Partition stories see Alok Bhalla (ed.), Stories about the Partition of India , 3
Vols., Delhi, 1994; Saros Cowasjee & K.S. Duggal (eds.), Orphans of the Storm;
Stories on the Partition of India , New Delhi, 1995.
29. Sir Francis Tuker, op. cit., p. 48 1 .
30. Bhisham Sahni, "The Train has Reached Amritsar" in Richard Allen and Harish
Trivedi (eds.), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1880-1990 , London, 2000,
p. 341.

31. Sir Francis Tuker, op. cit., pp.48 1 , 484.

32. Yasmin Khan, op. cit., p. 139.

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