Many Punjabi families living in Delhi today share a common memory of the Partition. Although the Partition occurred in 1947, its echoes continue to survive through stories, silence, and cultural identity.
Although 1947 divided a nation politically, its emotional wounds and inherited memories continue to shape identities even generations later.
This essay explores the impact of Partition on families, particularly women, and how the trauma they experienced was often hidden beneath a veil of silence and ‘honour’, and eventually forgotten. Although 1947 divided a nation politically, its emotional wounds and inherited memories continue to shape identities even generations later, with descendants carrying memories of places such as Gujranwala and Lahore despite never having seen them.
Growing up, I remember my great-grandmother and, now, my grandparents sharing their experiences of Partition at the dinner table, often with a strange mixture of grief and nostalgia. They often spoke about hiding their valuables in piles of hay, believing they would soon return to their homes. One such story that has been passed down in my family captures this same sense of desperation: my maternal grandmother’s Chachaji (paternal uncle) carried a tin box while crossing the River Ravi, believing it contained nothing more than panjiri, a traditional North Indian sweet.
As crossing the river grew more difficult, he let the box go. Once they reached the other side, someone from the family asked him where the box was, and only then did he reveal the truth to the other family members. One of the women in the family then told him that the box had actually contained jewellery hidden beneath the panjiri. The loss was realised only after it had become irretrievable.
My family also spoke of losing close family members and sometimes questioned their family’s decision to leave, wondering what might have happened if they had stayed.
My family also spoke of losing close family members and sometimes questioned their family’s decision to leave, wondering what might have happened if they had stayed.
The invisible labour of women and patriarchal respectability
These memories were not just carried by the individuals who experienced Partition; rather, they were shared across families and generations. As thousands of refugees walked towards a new land, they carried their lost homes with them in the form of memories. Even today, when I speak to my grandparents, I can sense both the ache of losing their homes and the nostalgia for the life they once had there.
However, building a new life in a new land was not an easy task; it had taken the invisible labour of women, who did much of the work of quietly rebuilding what they had lost. I think of my great-grandmother when I say this.
When their village and home came under attack, my great-grandfather stayed behind, fighting with his army gun, while the rest of the family managed to escape safely. In the midst of the chaos, he was captured. In the uncertainty that followed, not knowing whether he was alive, it was his wife who held everything together, managing their new surroundings, caring for her children, and ensuring their daily survival largely on her own until he was eventually found and reunited with the family.
As refugees reached Delhi to start from scratch, the city itself became a record of displacement. Scholar Ravinder Kaur has written about Delhi’s Partition-era resettlement, including the establishment of a colony for young widows in Lajpat Nagar, where women were placed under close supervision and barred from leaving without permission from the female social workers assigned to the colony. In this way, the state assumed the role of a patriarch, seeking to regulate women’s lives in the name of preserving the nation’s ‘honour’.
Memory is fragile because trauma can distort recollection, and painful memories are often buried rather than spoken. People might forget dates, but they still remember the scent of a homeland they never knew themselves, and eventually memory becomes emotional rather than factual. What the younger generation inherits are not necessarily facts, but fragments, traces, and nostalgia that continue to shape who we are.
This fragility of memory, however, was not evenly shared. Men’s stories of property, migration, and difficult decisions were more openly shared, while women’s stories were more likely to be buried, softened, or left unspoken. Even small domestic details carry these traces. In my own family, it was the women who held the knowledge of what was hidden and what was lost, even though they were not visible decision-makers during Partition.
Different experiences of gendered violence
Having grown up with these fragments, I want to turn now to two relatives whose stories carry the gendered violence of Partition more directly. One of my relatives’ houses was attacked during a village raid. The men were killed, while the women were taken, assaulted, or killed. In that moment, saving ‘honour’ seemed to matter more than saving their lives. In desperation, the women of the family and the village ran towards the well. Among them was my grandmother’s mami (maternal aunt), who ran with her sister, holding her son tightly in her arms. When she reached the well, she jumped in without knowing that it held no water, only bodies. She survived, but her son died, still in her arms. She was later captured by the attackers and held for months.
When her father-in-law finally learned where she was, he crossed the border from India into Pakistan to bring her back. She initially refused to return because she no longer believed herself ‘worthy’ of returning as anyone’s wife. It took time, and his insistence, before she agreed to come home. She was received with great honour and went on to build a new life on this side of the border, away from the trauma of those months. She lived quietly into her late seventies in Samana, Punjab, and left behind a close-knit family.
Another story in my family is that of a newlywed bride. As tensions rose in their village, communal conflict increased. The family decided to leave for India, but before they did, her husband told her to dress in her newest suit and wear all her jewellery, telling her they were going to visit her paternal family. She asked why they were leaving under such circumstances, but he refused to answer. As she stepped out of her room, dressed and ready, he beheaded her.
In that moment, he decided her ‘honour’ was more important than her life. She was left there without anyone performing her last rites. Her husband believed that, like countless women during Partition, she might have been abducted and assaulted on the journey to India, and so he chose to kill her first and called it ‘protection’. Once the family reached India, he lived the rest of his life in great mental anguish, unable to escape the weight of what he had done.
What we choose to remember
These two stories reflect a pattern larger than my own family. Women’s trauma during Partition was routinely hidden because society demanded silence; ‘honour’ mattered more than truth, and women were rarely given the space to narrate their own pain publicly.
My grandmother’s mami was returned to her family and received with ‘honour’, much like the thousands of women who were formally ‘recovered’ under India’s post-Partition policies. Although her family’s love for her was real, her own sense of not belonging was something the family chose to overlook.
The newlywed bride was not even given this chance; her husband unilaterally decided that her death preserved the family’s ‘honour’, which her survival likely wouldn’t have. In both incidents, what was called ‘protection’ or ‘honour’ was decided by men, for women, without asking what the women themselves wanted or believed.
Some memories faded with time; others remained painfully sharp. Partition lives not only in what is remembered, but also in what could never be spoken aloud, the memories that remain buried deep within individuals to this day.
Even after more than seven decades since the Partition of 1947, the memories of those dark months continue to exist quietly within Punjabi households across India, especially in Delhi. For many Punjabi families like my own, these experiences are still preserved through the retelling of family stories at gatherings.
Even today, memories of cities such as Gujranwala, Rawalpindi, and Lahore continue to live on within the descendants of those who came from these regions and their surrounding areas. Perhaps, then, the power of memory lies not in its ability to erase the borders between nations and continents, but in the fact that no border can erase the memories of the countless unnamed women who, in many cases, carried the weight of the displacement within them, often alone.
