A Tale of Two Cities

Modern Asian Studies 41, 1 (2007) pp. 151185. C 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.
1017/S0026749X05002337 Printed in the United Kingdom
A Tale of Two Cities: The Aftermath of Partition for Lahore and Amritsar 19471957
IAN TALBOT University of Southampton
Introduction Such modern cities as Breslau and Smyrna have suffered widespread destruction and demographic transformation in the wake of armed invasion. The neighbouring Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar shared this experience, at the time of the 1947 division of the Indian subcontinent1 . Almost 40 per cent of Amritsars houses were destroyed or damaged2 and its Muslim population fell from 49 per cent of the population on the eve of partition to just 00.52 per cent in 1951. Six thousand houses were damaged in Lahore3 and its Hindu and Sikh population who formed over a third of the population departed for India. The Luftwaffe had destroyed some 4185 houses in Coventry in an air raid for ever associated with the concept of concentrated bombing.4 The greater damage in peacetime Lahore and Amritsar was a result of disturbances surrounding the end of British rule. The cities lay at the heart of the region which bore the brunt of
1 Breslau following its transformation from a German to a Polish city in the wake of the Second World War became known as Wroclow. Smyrna which in September 1922 was invaded by Turkish forces became Turkish Izmir, purged of its Greek and Armenian population and inuences. A Greek force had earlier occupied the city in May 1919 and large numbers of innocent Turks had been slaughtered. For the events of 1922, See M.H. Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (Kent, 1988). 2 J.S. Shattock, Appreciation of the East Punjab 16 March 1948 DO 142/39 Refugees East Punjab Public Records Ofce. 3 M. Baqir, Lahore Past and Present (Lahore, 1952), p. 309. 4 For details of the intense bombing raid of the night of 14/15 November which gave birth to the word coventrate see, Tony Mason, Looking Back on the Blitz in Bill Lancaster and Tony Mason (eds), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry (Coventry n.d.), pp. 32142.
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the 1947 upheaval.5 Ten million Punjabis were uprooted.6 In all around 13 million people were displaced by partition. This was the largest migration in a century whose wars and ethnic conicts rendered millions of people homeless.7 The cities proximity to the border (see map.) meant that they received large numbers of refugees. There were a million in Lahore alone in April 1948, two fths of whom were housed in camps.8 This article examines the impact of partition on the cities and their inhabitants during the post-partition decade. It explains how the damage was repaired, large numbers of refugees were housed and why there was less tension between them and locals than in such refugee cities as Karachi and Calcutta.9 Finally it reveals why Lahore was able to overcome the dislocation and border location handicap unlike Amritsar. As early as March 1948 a British observer gloomily predicted of Amritsar there seems little hope for this erstwhile prosperous city.10 Little has been written about the two cities life after partition. Their geographical situation, however, invites a cross-border comparative analysis which is lacking in the wider literature. Most studies until recently were about, why partition happened, rather than its aftermath.11 Recent work12 has begun to put a human face on the
5 Bengal also experienced upheaval, but the violence was less intense. Migration occurred in waves stretching over many years creating rehabilitation problems for the refugees. For an overview of the differences of the two regions experiences, see, I.Talbot and G. Singh (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi, 1999). 6 Memorandum by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations 20 January 1948 DO 142/439 Refugees East Punjab, Public Records Ofce. 7 The two World Wars resulted in massive population movements in Europe. There was further displacement in the Balkan region following the collapse of communism. The end of European Empire and the problems of ethnic conict in the new states of Africa and Asia created further migration. 8 Report of Deputy UK High Commisioner Lahore 25 April 1948 DO 142/440 Refugees in West Punjab, Public Records Ofce. 9 For details see, S. Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sind 19471962 (Karachi, 2005); P. Chakrabarty, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal (Kalyani, 1990). 10 J.S.H. Shattock, Appreciation of the East Punjab 16 March 1948 DO 142/39 Refugees East Punjab, Public Records Ofce. 11 This so called high politics approach evolved from classical great man of history and divide and rule analyses (See, Asoka Mehta and Achyat Patwardhan, The Communal Triangle in India (Allahabad, 1942) to the revisionism of Ayesha Jalal (The Sole Spokesman, Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge, 1985). 12 U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi, 1998); R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indias Partition
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Figure 1 The Partition Boundary and Lahore and Amritsar (Scale 1:5500000) .
bald statistics of abductions, deaths and property losses. This new emphasis reects the reality articulated by Gyanendra Pandey that partition for many in North India was equivalent in its trauma and impact to the First World War in Britain, or the Second World War for Japan.13 Nevertheless, current studies of the human dimension of partition lack a locality focus. The few earlier accounts of refugee rehabilitation, such as M.S. Randhawas classic text Out of the Ashes14 centred around its rural dimensions. While the rural migrants greatly
(New Delhi, 1998); J. Bagchi and S. Dasgupta, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in East Bengal (Kolkata, 2003); S.Settar, Indira B. Gupta (eds), Pangs of Partition. The Human Dimension (New Delhi, 2002). 13 Gyanendra Pandey, In Defence of a Fragment. Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today. Economic and Political Weekly Volume XXVI (1991), p. 560. 14 M.S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees From West Pakistan In Rural Areas Of East Punjab (Chandigarh, 1954).
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outnumbered their urban counterparts,15 the latters settlement was signicantly different.16 Lahore and Amritsar because they were the colonial Punjabs leading cities17 provide an excellent vantage point from which to study Indian and Pakistani responses to the problems of urban resettlement.
The Riot Damaged Cities of Lahore and Amritsar Lahore and Amritsar were wracked by violence during the closing months of British rule. The Punjab Governor Sir Evan Jenkins dubbed it a communal war for succession. It differed from earlier communal outbreaks in its intentions and hence its intensity. Violence was motivated by the desire to ruin the economic life of rival communities. Hundreds of houses, businesses and warehouses were burnt down in the walled areas of both cities. Fires raged for hours because of the lack of pumps and the inaccessibility of narrow alleyways overhung by buildings full of combustible material. A horried Nehru had likened the devastation in Amritsar following the initial violence of 5 March 1947 to that of an earthquake.18 The Congress Report maintained that even wartime bombing could not have caused greater damage.19
15 This was as much as 3:1 in the Pakistan Punjab, see Appendix B in I. Talbot, Freedoms Cry. The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North West India (Karachi, 1996), pp. 21216. There were 1.3 million urban refugees in East Punjab out of a total of 3.8 million. 16 Rural refugees were directed to districts that were assigned for them. Here they were settled en bloc. In The Indian Punjab where there was insufcient evacuee land, a system of graded cuts was introduced in the allocation of farmland. An owner of a thousand acres in West Punjab would only receive 170 acres. In the Pakistan Punjab, it was not a lack of evacuee land, but its occupation by Muslim tenant cultivators that hindered resettlement. Some of the tensions between local tenants and refugees were eventually to be played out in protests on the streets of Lahore following the ejection of tenants by refugee landowners. Tension also arose in both the Punjabs when there was a nal permanent allotment of land. As some non-agriculturalists as well as those who had exaggerated their claims lost out from the non-veriable gains they had earlier made in the temporary allotment of 1947. As late as June 1948, the Pakistan authorities only had voters lists from East Punjab with which to check the eligibility of allottees. See, A.G. Raza, Note of 16 June 1948 DO 142/440 Refugees in West Punjab, Public Records Ofce. 17 Lahore was the provincial capital and a leading educational and banking centre for the whole of North India. Amritsar was the Punjabs major trade and industrial centre. 18 The Tribune (Lahore), 6 March 1947. 19 All-India Congress Committee File No. G-10/1947 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
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Order was only restored after the calling out of British troops and the imposition of a curfew.20 Large areas of the Hall Bazaar, Katra Jaimal Singh and Pashminwala Bazaar were destroyed. Rubble was piled ten feet high in places.21 Lahore suffered similar destruction. Fires on the night of Sunday 18 May in the non-Muslim areas of Chuna Mandi, Kucha Kagzian and Pipal Vehra, taxed the available army and civil resources, the Punjab Chief Secretary reported, to their utmost limit.22 The reduction of large parts of the walled city to ashes, prompted Nehru to call for the army to be given a free hand in Lahore.23 Just over a month later, on 21 June, a raging inferno destroyed the Shah Almi area24 of Lahore. This was the leading Hindu commercial and residential centre within the walled city. In the words of one Muslim writer, it presented the look of a city that had just been subjected to a blitzkrieg.25 Despite doubts about whether Lahore would be awarded to India or Pakistan, many wealthy Hindus began to move out of the city in the wake of this conagration. The days leading up to independence witnessed a nal round of bloodletting and destruction. The last Muslim pockets of population were overrun in Amritsar, resulting in, alarmingly high casualties in Mountbattens words.26 A pall of smoke hung over Lahore. Its formerly Hindu dominated commercial area of Anarkali, felt like a corpse and lay there like a lifeless body.27 Amritsar had suffered more physical damage than any other Punjabi city. Around a half of the walled city had been left in ruins. According to the District Taxation and Excise Ofcer, nearly 10000 buildings had been burnt down and as a result there had been a 25 per cent loss in property tax and
The Tribune (Lahore), 6 March 1947. The commercial loss was estimated at 8 crores (crore is ten million) of rupees. In this one episode, 5000 houses were destroyed. 22 Punjab FR 2nd Half of May 1947 L/P&J/5/250 India Ofce Records. 23 Jawaharlal Nehru to Sir J. Colville, 23 May 1947 R/3/1/90 India Ofce Records. 24 The locality was named after the nearby gate which was one of the walled citys famous thirteen entrances. It took its name from the Mughal Emperor Shah Allam Bahadur Shah who died in Lahore in 1712. Outside the gate, there was a water tank, serai and Shivala (known as Rattan Chands Temple). These had been constructed by Diwan Rattan Chand, a court favourite of the Sikh ruler of the Punjab Maharajah Ranjit Singh. 25 Mohammad Saeed, Lahore: A Memoir (Lahore, 1989), pp. 2345. 26 Viceroys Personal Report 16 August 1947 cited in Government of Pakistan, Disturbances in the Punjab 1947 (Islamabad, 1995), p. 355. 27 Fikr Taunsvi, The Sixth River-A Diary of 1947 in A. Salim (ed), Lahore 1947 (Lahore, 2003), p. 38.
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even more in sales tax.28 The citys physical infrastructure had also suffered. The weeks after partition were marked by frequent failures of electricity and water supply. The city was plunged into darkness for a week in September.29 A year later, there were still problems with the water supply leading to acute shortages in September 1948.30 Like many other north Indian cities, Amritsar faced a cholera epidemic in the weeks immediately after independence. This was only brought under control following mass inoculations.31 The dearth of sweepers exacerbated Amritsars sanitation problems. Many sweepers had obtained more lucrative employment by lling the roles formerly played by Muslims as cart drivers and coolies.32 A Municipal clean up campaign eventually started in mid-November 1947. Trucks were used to remove the garbage and re engines were employed to wash the drains.33
Rebuilding the Cities Little has been written on the rebuilding of Lahore and Amritsar. Such a study has a fourfold importance. Firstly it offers an opportunity to move beyond the partisan positions which have dominated writings on partition with their focus on political disputes and blame displacement for violence. Secondly, it offers important insights into early institutional development in partitioned Punjab. Thirdly, it offers a local grounding to the social history of partition which has been dominated by generalised rst-hand accounts of refugees. Finally it can contribute to a cross-border comparison of the aftermath of partition. In fact, numerous similarities emerge when considering the rebuilding of the riot-torn areas of Lahore and Amritsar. In both cities, the process was handicapped by the shortage of building materials. The main problems, however, surrounded the legal acquisition of land
28 Tribune (Simla), 10 November 1947. Moreover, Muslims had departed owing arrears in rent and houses that had been destroyed or were vacant represented another revenue short fall. It was not until the establishment of a District Rent Ofce in October 1948 that arrears of rent on evacuee property began to be realised. During the rst month of the Rent Ofces operation, nearly Rs 80000 was collected. See Tribune (Ambala), 9 November 1948. 29 Tribune (Simla), 4 October 1947. 30 Tribune (Ambala), 6 September 1948. 31 Tribune (Simla), 4 October 1947. 32 Tribune (Simla), 4 November 1947. 33 Tribune (Simla), 11 November 1947.
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and property, much of which was owned by evacuees. There was also an acute shortage of town planners. Building designs were hurriedly drawn up in many cases by engineers from Public Works Departments rather than by architects. The housing shortfall was exacerbated by the demolition of properties to widen roads and create new market areas. The slow rebuilding process meant that many refugees lived in dangerously dilapidated dwellings. Each monsoon, the press was full of reports of building collapses. Finally in both cities, the rebuilding process was overseen by the Improvement Trusts that had been established in the wake of the 1922 Punjab Town Improvement Act.35 It is to this hidden area in the cities post-partition institutional life that we will now turn. (i) The Amritsar Improvement Trust The Amritsar Trust was only established in 1946. Its work had thus hardly begun when the city descended into violence. Its activities were suspended in the aftermath of partition. The Trust was only revived in April 1949. Dr Dina Nath Ahluwalia, a former Chief Minister of Suket, was appointed as its permanent chairman. Mr D.D. Kailal was its Town Planner. He had worked for a number of years in the Engineers Department at the English new town development of Hemel Hempstead. Other members included Sir Buta Singh, Seth Satya Pal Virmani, Padam Chand Bhandari (the Cambridge-educated Executive Ofcer of the Amritsar Municipal Committee) and the Amritsar Deputy Commissioner Sardar Bahadur Narinder Singh. The three Municipal Committee representatives on the trust were its President Sardar Dharam Singh, Seth Radha Kishen and Sardar Mohinder Singh.36 The rst meeting was held in the Town Hall on 19 April. It resolved that the Public Works Department should survey both the damaged areas and the Muslim evacuee property within the city.37
34 It was only in September 1950 that the East Punjab Government dealt with the delay arising from the acquisition of evacuee property that had been holding up Amritsars development scheme. An ordinance was promulgated that facilitated its acquisition. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 7 September 1950. 35 The Trusts were empowered to prepare development schemes for any locality within the municipal limits. These could be undertaken in designated redevelopment areas or on vacant tracts of land. The Trusts were responsible for water supply, drainage and sewerage as well as land development and slum improvement. 36 Tribune (Ambala), 9 April 1949. 37 Tribune (Ambala), 20 April 1949.
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The Amritsar Improvement Trusts operations were closely bound by the provisions of the Punjab Development of Damaged Areas Act. This laid down a notication period during which objections could be raised. Government sanction was obtained following this 60 day period. It was only then that land was acquired. This was usually purchased out of the Trusts funds accruing from the annual Government grant and the 2 per cent slice it received of the Municipal Committees gross income.38 It was also given by the Government, valuable plots of evacuee property in Anjuman Park39 and the Anjuman Islamia Fruit Market in Hall Bazaar. These were to be developed as new wholesale and retail fruit and vegetable markets which would provide business opportunities for refugees. About 170 retail stalls were proposed for construction on the former site to a design approved by the Improvement Trust. The refugees were granted loans of up to Rs 2000 to help pay for the construction40 and to start their business. The Improvement Trust built shops, houses and widened roads. It sold commercial and residential plots through public auctions. Reservations were made for refugees. Some allotments involved the drawing of lots. It was only when the construction work was completed that a development scheme was handed over to the Municipal Committee which then became responsible for its maintenance. In November 1949, the Improvement Trust drew up a scheme for the widening of the Pashamwala Bazar and the opening up of the area from Katra Jaimal Singh right up to the Town Hall near Khoti Ahata. The aim was to facilitate one-way trafc through the congested Hall Bazaar area. Stallholders needed to be moved. The Trust acquired 5 acres of land in order to undertake the project. It sought to meet the costs by either building its own shops and houses or by auctioning the plots.41 On 20 February 1950, the East Punjab Governor Sir Chandu
38 Tribune (Ambala), 20 February 1950. In order to strengthen the Trusts nancial position, it was suggested that the annual grant be made recurring and that the amount realised from the East Punjab Urban Immoveable Property Tax and the Entertainment Tax should be awarded to it. 39 This faced the GT Road on one side and the Hall Gate (renamed Gandhi Gate) on the other. 40 The construction cost was estimated at around Rs 1000. This included the development charges of the installation of roads, drains and electricity. Tribune (Ambala), 9 February 1950. 41 Tribune (Ambala), 6 January 1950.
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Lal Trivedi visited the damaged areas of the city. He saw for himself the area encompassed by the road development scheme.42 Two residential schemes were also put forward at this time. The rst was for the construction of a harijan colony outside Bhagtanwala Gate. The second proposed the construction of 100 double-storied houses for clerks outside the Hathi and Lohgarh Gates adjoining the Durgania Temple and on the open space formerly used for the municipal stables.43 In many instances fteen to twenty years elapsed between the planning and sanctioning of a scheme and its nal hand over. The earliest schemes in the damaged areas of Katra Sher Singh and Katra Jamail Singh had been sanctioned under Section 5 of the Punjab Development of Damaged Areas Act in July and November 1951 respectively. They were only handed over to the Municipal Committee at the end of 1970.44 It had been hoped as early as November 1949 that a thousand houses could be constructed in Katra Sher Singh for refugees. The scheme was delayed because of the difculties in acquiring evacuee property.45 The Trust also utilised the ten acres area of land beyond the wall known as Gwal Mandi which had been formerly inhabited by Muslim Gujjars. This area was rst developed for low-income housing in the 1970s, although it had been sanctioned by the Government as early as 1961.46 Further ats were constructed in the mid-1990s, although problems with the water supply have led to dissatisfaction with the accommodation.47 Another low-cost housing scheme involved the proposal to build a double-storied block of 100 houses for harijan refugees on a piece of nazul (peripheral) land vested in the Municipal Committee outside Gilwali Gate. Each house was designed to have two rooms (12 feet by 10 feet), a cooking verandah (8 feet by 10) and a common courtyard. Common baths and latrines were provided along with a dispensary and a reading room. The funding was to come either from a Government grant or a 30 year interest free loan from the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial fund.48
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Tribune (Ambala), 20 February 1950. Tribune (Ambala), 21 November 1949. 44 A.K. Malik, Appraisal of Development of Urban Areas of Punjab: Case Study Amritsar , Unpublished Thesis, Guru Nanak Dev University n.d, Appendix IV, p. 210. 45 Tribune (Ambala), 21 November 1949. 46 Malik, Appraisal of Development op.cit., Appendix III p. 207 47 Navtej K. Purewal, Living on the Margins: Social Access to Shelter in Urban South Asia (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 1812. 48 Tribune (Ambala), 29 April 1950.
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Low-cost housing schemes as for example the Haripura Harijan colony were bedevilled with shoddy workmanship. Contractors used inferior workmen and materials in order to make a prot. Fifty houses collapsed at Haripura in the heavy monsoon rains of September 1950. Their refugee occupants demonstrated outside the District Rent Controllers Ofce. They were promised speedy repairs. Padam Chand Bhandari toured the worst hit areas to survey the damage.49 Seven years later, the monsoon rains were still bringing house collapses and fatalities in their wake.50 In all, during the rst decade of independence, the Amritsar Improvement Trust had notied 20 schemes under the terms of the Punjab Development of Damaged areas Act. Seventeen of these had received government sanction. The schemes were evenly divided between commercial and residential developments. They covered a total area of 70.92 acres.51 The Improvement Trust members drew on experiences not only elsewhere in the subcontinent (for example, Bombay, Delhi52 and Kanpur) but even overseas. Its secretary, Mr Bhandari, for example, in 1950 visited cities in England, and Germany that had been badly damaged by wartime bombing.53
(ii) The Lahore Improvement Trust The Lahore Improvement Trust was created in 1936. Like its Amritsar counterpart, it became responsible for the citys postpartition reconstruction. The Trust initially turned its attention to the redevelopment of the devastated Shah Almi locality. By September 1948 demolition work was in full swing in the area from Shah Almi to Rang Mahal. The work proceeded with bulldozers and manual labour. The debris was removed on donkeys. The water that had accumulated because of the blocked drains was diverted into 4 disused wells.54
Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 20 September 1950. Four persons were killed in Amritsar when a house collapsed after 5 inches of rain fell on 12 August 1957. There were other house collapses in Katra Sher Singh, but no fatalities resulted. Hindustan Times (Delhi), 3 August 1957. 51 Calculated from Malik, Appraisal of Development, Appendix IV, p. 210. 52 Mr Kaila, the Chief Engineer of the Amritsar Improvement Trust, for example, went to Delhi to see the Subzi Mandi project so that it could be adopted in the construction of the new fruit market in the Anjuman Park. Tribune (Ambala), 14 March 1950. 53 Tribune (Ambala), 9 April 1949. 54 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 25 September 1948.
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The 1947 violence provided an opportunity to transform what had once been a narrow maze of streets into a major thoroughfare. A large market with around 200 shops sprang up in the space formerly occupied by Hindu shops and houses. The sites were offered at xed rents. They were made available at auction.55 The Improvement Trust also built and rented the Lahore Wholesale Shoe Market in the Shah Almi area. On 23 January 1953, Syed Ali Hussain Gardezi, the Punjab Minister for Development, opened the 36 fully equipped and commodious rooms and shops.56 As in Amritsar, iron and rubble from riot-damaged areas was used in construction elsewhere in the city because of the shortage of bricks and cement. In both cities, refugees formed part of the labour force. The Lahore Improvement Trusts redevelopment schemes formed a signicant element in the citys suburban development. They did not, however, solve the acute housing shortage. Even before the destruction and upheaval of partition, housing had been in short supply. The Chairman of the Lahore Improvement Trust had estimated in 1944 that between thirty to forty thousand new houses were required.57 The Trusts post-independence failure to provide affordable housing, or to engage in large scale repair works,58 at the same time as clearing areas of the walled city contributed to the shortfall. During the period 194750 Lahores population had risen from 812 lakhs. Four thousand houses had been gutted in the partition riots. The Lahore Improvement Trust demolished a further 2000. It had only managed until 1950 to build a fth of the total number of houses it had knocked down.59 One consequence of this was that while some of the walled areas were cleared for development, many houses that were dangerous remained standing as there was no alternative accommodation. During the heavy rains of August 1948, there were a number of building collapses in the Wachowali and Shah Almi areas of Lahore.
55 The Rang Mahal market development followed the same lines. The purchasers were expected to pay a quarter of the value of the bid at the time of the auction. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 17 September 1950. 56 Dawn (Karachi), 28 January 1953. 57 Report of the Subcommittee on Houses and Shops to The 18th Meeting of the Pakistan-Punjab Refugees Council Lahore 10 March 1948. 58 The Lahore Improvement Trusts repair programme was modest. In April 1948 it undertook to repair around 300 houses in various parts of the walled city. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 16 April 1948. Members of the Subcommittee on Houses and shops had reported that some of the 1130 houses identied by the Deputy Commissioner as easily repairable were in areas where such work would clash with town improvement schemes. 59 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 5 July 1950.
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On the night of 15 August, 18 members of a refugee family from Delhi died when the haveli they were living in collapsed. The following day, two thousand refugees stormed the Lahore Municipal Corporation ofce and vandalised it in a furious protest. An engineer of the Lahore Improvement Trust maintained that 100 houses in the Wachowali area were in imminent danger of collapse.60 In the week that followed, two people were killed and others were seriously injured in house collapses in Shah Almi. In one instance the family had been evacuated, from their death-trap, but in their desperation for somewhere to stay had returned evading a police picket.61 Bulldozers were called in to level some of the more dangerous dwellings. Windows were charred and gaping. Walls were cracked from the violence of the summer of 1947. Refugees were accommodated in hastily requisitioned bungalows and outhouses. Four hundred families were housed in DAV College, displacing non-Muslim refugees who were moved to Faridkot House.62 Six years later, little seemed to have changed as refugees had to be evacuated to the Lahore Fort following the collapse of 140 houses in the monsoon rains.63 The approaching ninth anniversary of independence was marked by further house collapses. The Lahore Corporation razed 121 houses. It notied the occupants of a further 298 to get their buildings repaired, or they would be demolished.64 A seven-member committee under the chairmanship of Zafarul Ahsan Lari had oversight of the major Gulberg, Samnabad and Shadbagh housing schemes. The former at a projected cost of Rs 3 crores in 1952 created a new area of 2900 acres around the existing Gulberg Colony in the southeast of the city near to the cantonment. Hundreds of bungalow compounds and small houses were planned. The third phase of the Gulberg scheme covering 1600 acres was completed at the end of 1956.65 The demand for plots was so great that the Allotment Committee of the Lahore Improvement Trust required every applicant to provide an afdavit attesting that they had never been allotted a plot for a residential house, under any of its schemes,
Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 17 August 1948. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 25 August 1948. 62 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 28 August 1948. 63 Dawn (Karachi), 25 September 1954. According to a Lahore Municipal Corporation survey, 2746 pucca houses had been damaged in the rains with an estimated repair cost of Rs 38 lakhs. Dawn (Karachi), 5 October 1954. 64 Dawn (Karachi), 28 July 1956. 65 Dawn (Karachi), 6 July 1956.
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or had a house or a plot on which a house could be built in the civil station of Lahore.66 Gulberg was an upper-class residential area. It reected Lahores post-independence administrative and commercial importance. Its accommodation was well out of the reach of poorer refugees. The Samnabad scheme was started in 1950. It initially covered just over 200 acres.67 The scheme was founded on the south western side of the city in the area lying between Miani Sahib and Pakki Thatti. It covered an area that despite its name (the land of jasmine) comprised abandoned brick kilns, wells and ponds. These had become the abode of waste tips and stray dogs.68 The rst phase of houses was allocated to ofcials who were still temporarily accommodated. The area was only slowly developed throughout the 1950s. Zafar Iqbal recalls that only a third of the locality was built up when he settled there in 1959. Tonga or cart drivers disliked entering Samnabad and never bothered to cross the roundabout on Poonch Road. Khizra mosque was not a pucca construction.69 Interviews with other residents reveal that when the land was originally allotted it was often viewed as an investment to be sold on, because of the reluctance to live in what was seen as a jungli area. Indeed it was only in the 1970s that the locality really became built up. The majority of the allottees were local residents. Some, such as the family of Mian Mohammad Jaffer, were original brick kiln owners of the locality.70 There were a few Kashmiri Abbasi families and some refugees from East Punjab. One visible sign of their presence was the existence for many years in the locality of the Amritsar Sweet Mart. The price for the most basic N type house comprising three rooms with a kitchen and bathroom installed with water and electricity was according to one resident Rs 5000. More commodious quarters increased in cost. Even before the considerable rise in land prices in the 1970s, it is clear that accommodation in Samnabad was well out of the reach of even lower middle class refugees and locals. The Shad Bagh71 (Prospering Garden) scheme was a continuation of the Lahore Improvement Trusts Misri Shah Development Scheme
Dawn (Karachi), 2 January 1957. Dawn (Karachi), 18 June 1952. 68 M. Saeed, Lahore: A Memoir (Lahore, 1989), pp. 2501. 69 Interview with Zafar Iqbal, Samnabad, 9 April 2003. I am grateful to Ahmad Salim for conducting this and other interviews in Samnabad. 70 Interview with Mian Mohammad Jaffer, Samnabad 4 March 2003. 71 I am extremely grateful to Tahir Mahmood for providing all the information for this section.
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that had originally been conceived in August 1944. The scheme had comprised 585 plots ranging from 20 to 10 marlas (1/400th of an acre) in size.72 The largest number of plots (198) were set aside at the latter size (2250 sq. ft.). At the time of partition, only Blocks A and D of the seven projected blocks73 had any houses commonly known as quarters. Blocks B and C were under construction. These were small single storey houses of a 5 marla design. Work continued on the other blocks with material being used from evacuee properties destroyed during the pre-partition violence in the Shah Almi locality. Open space plots beyond the quarters of 1012 marlas with a handful at 18 and 20 marlas were sold on both cash and instalment terms. The Lahore Improvement Trust initially required that only single-storey houses should be built on the open plots. It relented after a series of disputes with the owners. It eventually constructed some 20 doublestorey houses itself in the G block. The price of a 10 marlas plot was Rs. 400 or Rs 50 in advance and Rs 30 as monthly instalments.74 As land values eventually rose, the allotment procedures became less transparent. Lower middle class purchasers were replaced by those with political and landed connections.75 The houses were sold for Rs 5000 cash. They could also be purchased through a Provisional Transfer Order with a deposit of Rs 800 and then paid for in monthly instalments of Rs 40 for a twelve year period. Local Kashmiris and Arains purchased most of the quarters. They worked in Lahores post-independence burgeoning administrative sector. It was only in blocks A, D that refugees were housed. Block A had 30 houses known as quarters, while blocks B and C and D had 38 each. Each quarter had one drawing room, two bedrooms, a store room, a kitchen and a courtyard. There was a grassy yard fronting on every quarter. Refugees were not granted ownership rights. Whenever the quarters were sold, they were evicted and asked to settle their claims against the evacuees property. Only a few of them could afford to purchase the quarters. On the settlement of their property claims, they too left the area for good.76
72 For details see, Map prepared by Lahore Improvement Trust dated 14 August 1944 printed at Mud-i-Am Press Lahore. 73 The blocks were A, B, C, D, G, X and Z. Interview with Abdul Aziz Butt, Shah Bagh, Lahore, 16 August 2004. 74 Interview with Amjad Butt, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 16 August 2004. 75 Interviews with Haji Mushtaque and Haji Sharif, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 22 July 2004. 76 Interview with Abdul Aziz Butt, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 16 August 2004.
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The Improvement Trust rented out some quarters at Rs 22 a month, as the scheme was unattractive to residents in its early stages.77 Its proximity to the Ravi meant that it was frequently ooded in the monsoon season. There were no electricity, water and sewerage services connections. A local resident, Abdul Aziz Butt78 launched a welfare organisation known as the Anjuman Rifah-e-Am79 to pressurise the Lahore Improvement Trust to end its neglect. R.A.F. Howroyd,80 the British Chairman of the Trust81 visited Golbagh, a central place of the scheme, where the Anjuman had erected a map before his arrival. After touring the scheme, he visited its ofces which were situated in a small room of a quarter, Abdul Aziz had purchased on instalments. The Trust Chairman was so impressed that he allotted a plot for the Anjuman. Howroyd also suggested that shops should be built on its front in order to generate funds for welfare work. Soon after this visit in 1949, roads and services were improved with the installation of hand pumps. Electricity was provided in the early 1950s. At the same time an embankment was built to reduce the risk of ooding.82
Ibid. Abdul Aziz Butt came from Ghartal village in the Daska tehsil of the Sialkot district. His father, Dolat Din Butt was a social worker after earlier serving as a translator for the Afghanistan Govwernment. Abdul Aziz came to Lahore in 1942, after completing his matric and started a clerical job on the railways. He resigned in 1949 in order to establish the Anjuman Rifah-e-Am. 79 The Anjuman over the years since its establishment has secured the provision of a number of facilities in the Shad Bagh residential locality. In 1949, a public call ofce was provided, followed in 1959 by a post ofce and much later in 1983 by a telegraph facility. In 1955 the Anjuman established a library. At its request the Lahore Corporation in 1961 established a free Primary Girls School. The same year, the Anjuman founded a Community Welfare Centre and an Islamia Girls Secondary School whose funds and assets were transferred to the government four years later. The Anjuman also in 1965 established an Industrial School for Women. Two other schools with which the Anjuman was involved were the Government Girls College (1982) and the National Junior Model School (1986). From 1981 onwards it provided grants for poor students. In the health eld, the Anjuman established a maternity home (1971) a free hospital (1980) and the Rifah-e-Am Hospital which has all modern facilities. Interview with Abdul Aziz Butt, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 16 August 2004. 80 Howroyd stayed on in a series of administrative posts in Pakistan for a number of years after independence. He served as the Deputy Commissioner of Lyallpur after he moved on from Lahore. He was Municipal Commissioner of Karachi from the beginning of November 1950 until May 1953. He returned from furlough in October of that year and resumed the post until 29 January 1954. See Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 26 August 1950 and 28 May 1953 and http://www.karachicity.gov.pk/mckmc.htm 81 Its secretary at this time was Zafr-ul Hasan. 82 The oods of 1955 were so high that the waters breached the embankment and entered the quarters which had 9 feet high boundary walls. Their residents had to
78 77
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The Ravis shifting course also played a part in ending the annual inundations. The policy remained, in exceptional circumstances, of breaking the banks of the Ravi on the north side in order to save the city from inundation to the south. The Shad Bagh scheme gradually increased in popularity, but this resulted in haphazard development which continued during the Ayub and Bhutto eras. Private investors and local landowners built properties adjoining the scheme which was nally completed in 1965. Wasan Pura, Tajpura and Makhan Pura (New Shad Bagh) Hamad Colony and Sidiqyah Colony all came into existence. Housing developments now stretched all the way from Shad Bagh to Badami Bagh.83 Residential localities were surrounded by mushrooming markets including Akbar Mandi, Maeva Mandi and Ghala Mandi. An originally lower middle class area took on a distinctly working class feel.84 The area became congested with a population density that was considerably higher than in Gulberg and Samnabad. Eventually, land use included industrial and commercial as well as residential developments. Two or three hundred small houses for refugees were also constructed in the northern industrial locality of Misri Shah during 19523.85 Another scheme, adjacent to Shad Bagh in the north of the city brought forward in 1952, was the construction of the Lahore Grain market near Badami Bagh. This was designed to relieve congestion in the Akbar Mandi area. At the same time land was acquired around the Wazir Khan Mosque in the walled city where the Azam Cloth market was to be later founded. This area was leased by the Improvement trust to the Cloth Market Association of Lahore.86 Many of the Lahore schemes catered for the needs of its emerging professional and ofcial classes. Those in Amritsar provided housing for lower class refugees who were an important feature of its postpartition settlement. Despite their efforts, the cities would have suffered the accommodation problems of such cities as Karachi and Calcutta, if large amounts of evacuee property had not been available.
take refuge on the roofs. The embankment was thereafter increased a further 3 feet in height. Interview with Abdul Aziz Butt, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 16 August 2004. 83 Interview with Muhammad Aslam Kashmiri, former chief news editor (now defunct) the Daily Imroze and an old resident of Shad Bagh, Lahore, 23 July 2004. 84 Interview with Mt Nazir, Shad Bagh, Lahore, 17 July 2004. 85 Dawn (Karachi), 23 September 1953. 86 Dawn (Karachi), 18 June 1952.
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The relatively less acute housing problem formed one of a number of factors that eased the integration of refugees in the two Punjab cities.
Refugees and Locals Partition transformed such cities as Karachi,87 Delhi88 and Calcutta.89 The Urdu-speaking mohajirs transplanted a North Indian culture in the sands of Sind. The inux of Punjabi refugees swept away90 the last remnants of Delhis classical Urdu culture.91 East Bengali refugees in Calcutta crowded into illegal squatter colonies and were a factor in its lawlessness and instability. In all three situations, the impact of the migrants was so great that they could be deemed to have created cities whose respective political cultures of ethnicity,92 communalism93 and communism94 were a direct consequence of partition. Recent studies have started to examine the tensions between partition-refugees and locals. Sarah Ansari has provided, for example a systematic study of the situation in Karachi during the period 19471962.95 No such detailed
87 See, K.R. Sipe, Karachis Refugee Crisis: The Political, Economic and Social Consequences of Partition-Related Migration. Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Duke University 1976 88 V.N. Datta, Punjabi Refugees and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi in R.E. Frykenberg (ed), Delhi Through the Ages. Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (Delhi, 1986), pp. 44263. 89 For a brief overview see, Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London 2000), pp. 1725. 90 Delhi had become a symbol of decline, shahr-e-ashub(city of misfortune) following its sacking by Nadir Shah in 1739. There had nevertheless, been a late revival of Urdu culture during the rule of Bahadur Shah Zafar (18371857). He had patronised such poets as Ghalib who became one of the greatest exponents of the ghazal (love lyric). 91 Every aspect of our lives became Punjabi, an old resident complained, the food became increasingly Punjabi, or Punjabi Mughlai, our cultural tastes became Punjabi, even our demeanour and values became Punjabi. Cited in Dipankar Gupta, The Indian Diaspora of 1947: The Political and Ethnic Consequences of the Partition with Special Reference to Delhi, in K.N. Panikkar (ed), Communalism in India: History, Politics and Culture (New Delhi, 1991), p. 81. 92 See, Tahir Amin, Ethno-National Movements of Pakistan (Islamabad, 1988). 93 See, C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in Delhi: From Locals to Refugees- and Towards Peripheral Groups? in V. Dupont, E. Tarlo and D. Vidal (eds), Delhi. Urban Space and Human Destinies (New Delhi, 2000), pp. 181203. 94 For the rise in support for the communists because of the politicisation of refugees in the squatter colonies of Calcutta see, Prafulla Chakrabarty, The Marginal Men, The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal (Kalyani, 1990). 95 Ansari, Life After Partition.
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examination exists for the Punjab. Mohammad Waseem96 has used the concept of cultural distance to explain the relative lack of tension between Punjabi migrants and locals in contrast with that between Urdu-speaking refugees and the Sindhi inhabitants of Karachi.97 His argument is province rather than locality based. For this reason, an examination of the interaction between refugees and locals in Lahore and Amritsar will close an important gap in historical understanding. Cultural explanations for the lack of tension ignore differences of dialect, diet and most importantly issues surrounding marriage and the West Punjab middle class refugees sense of superiority. The latter has echoes of mohajir sentiments in Sindh. They have come to an area, a British observer noted in 1950, which they regard as in every way inferior to the country which they have left.They tend to look down on East Punjabis and the latter resent this. They bitterly regret having lost the fair capital city of Lahore to Pakistan and it is no doubt partly in consideration of this feeling that the Government have been making much of the project to build a new capital of the East Punjab at Chandigarh.98 The limits of assimilation between migrants and locals were seen clearly in that most intimate of social arrangements marriage. Aside from securing employment and accommodation, the contracting of marriages in a strange locality was one of the greatest problems facing refugee families.99 The unsettled conditions increased the need to control female sexuality and safeguard family honour by marrying off daughters. The need to re-establish known community networks of potential marriage partners is not usually recognised as playing a role in the resettlement pattern of the clustering of kinship groups. Brij Mohan Toofan, a refugee from Sialkot living in Delhi, has revealed, however, how Sialkotis will always try to contract their marriages with fellow migrants.100 Ravinder Kaurs survey of 500 refugee families
96 M. Waseem, Partition, Migration and Assimilation: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Punjab in I. Talbot and G. Singh (eds), Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi, 1999), pp. 20328. 97 The cultural distance was so great between local Sindhis and refugees that the Pakistan Government felt obliged to publish a free fortnightly journal Nai Zindagi (New Life) to help both communities understand and adapt to each other. See Ansari, Life After Partition, p. 89. 98 F.R.K. Harrison Report on a Tour to Punjab 1825 February 1950 DO 35/3181 East Punjab Affairs, Public Records Ofce. 99 I am grateful to Ravinder Kaur for attracting my attention to this. 100 Liaqat Ali to Ishtiaq Ahmed e-mail correspondence 5 January 2003 posted at asiapeace@yahoogroups.com.
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in Delhi revealed that an overwhelming majority had married their children and grandchildren within partition migrant families.101 Ishtiaq Ahmed has similarly pointed out that Delhi migrants in Lahore marry within their own group and are reluctant to give their daughters to Punjabi dhaggas (oafs).102 A similar pattern is discernible with respect to refugees from Amritsar settled in Lahore. When they could not practice the preferred rst-cousin marriage pattern, they would marry into families that had been their former neighbours because they knew them.103 For families without access to known marriage networks, the last recourse could be to matrimonial advertisements in newspapers. Refugee partners were preferred because their pre-partition background was more readily researched. The following advertisement from the Hindustan Times is typical of many which appeared even nearly a decade after partition.
Bride (Matric) for a Sikh B.SC. LLB. Getting Rs 200. Family respectable. People from Shahpur and Bannu district preferred.104
It was in such localities as Gowal Mandi and Sharifpura that Lahore and Amritsar appeared most clearly to be refugee cities. Signboards and properties named after their occupants ancestral homes were unmistakable. To provide just one example, the Amritsari businessman Charan Dass has named his shops Bhagbanpurian di Hatti after his former residential locality in Lahore.105 Conversely for a number of years, the Amritsar Rovers Hockey Club competed successfully in Lahore.106 More important from a cultural perspective in assisting integration than the possession of a common Punjabi language and values was the existence especially in Lahore of community and kin networks
101 Ravinder Kaur, Narratives of Resettlement: Past, Present and Politics Among 1947 Punjabi Migrants in Delhi Unpublished 2004 Ph.D Thesis, Roskilde University Centre, p.74. 102 Ishtiaq Ahmed e-mail correspondence 4 January 2003 posted at asiapeace@yahoogroups.com. 103 A.M. Weiss, Walls Within Walls. Life Histories of Working Women in the Old City of Lahore (Karachi, 2002), p. 66. 104 Hindustan Times (Delhi), 10 March 1957. 105 G. Maini, Partition and Locality: The Impact on Amritsars Industry, Unpublished Paper presented at 17th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Heidelberg, 11 September 2002, p. 18. 106 For details of the ofce holders elected at its September 1950 AGM see Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 2 October 1950.
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that predated partition. The largest refugee communities in the city, Kashmiris and Arains, already had large numbers of kinsmen settled there. Khawaja Zubair whose father was a carpet manufacturer and wholesale dealer in Amritsar recalls, for example, We had old contacts in Lahore. The maternal uncle of my mother was living at Bhati in Lahore. Inside Mochi Gate all Kashmiris had business and biraderi ties.107 Mohammad Akhtar who came from an East Punjab family of Arain contractors/transporters similarly replied that they settled immediately in Lahore because we have had business relations here.108 The predominant resettlement of Amritsari Kashmiris in the former afuent Hindu residential locality of Gowal Mandi in Lahore was rooted not only in ofcial policy, but the fact that relatives earmarked abandoned properties for their refugee cousins. Urduspeaking migrants from Delhi had to be content with the more modest surroundings of the Sant Nagar and Krishan Nagar localities.
Refugees: Economic Assets or Competitors? Lahore far more than Amritsar approximates to the demographic experience of North Indias refugee-dominated cities. The refugee proportion of its population was 43 per cent.109 This was only marginally less than the gure for Karachi (49 per cent)110 and considerably more that that of Delhi (28.4 per cent).111 Delhis population had, however, increased 30 times more than Lahores in the 194151 period.112 In contrast, Amritsar experienced a 16 per cent drop in population between the 1941 and 1951 Censuses.113 Tensions between refugees and locals often occurred either in situations of fear of a refugee takeover, as in Karachi, or of acute competition for resources. The classic case is the tussle for land,
107 Interview with Khawaja Zubair, Lahore, 22 November 2004. I am grateful to Tahir Mahmood for conducting this interview. 108 Partition Transcript No 11, Mohammad Akhtar, 17 April 1999, Pakistan Gallup organisation. 109 The Census of Pakistan 1951 (Karachi, n.d.) p. 75. 110 Cited in I.H. Malik, State and Civil Society in Pakistan, Politics of Authority, Ideology and Ethnicity (Basingstoke, 1997) p. 200. 111 Datta, Punjabi Refugees, p. 443. 112 Lahores population increased by 2.6 percent, Delhis by a staggering 90 per cent. 113 B.P. Singh, Amritsar and Its Population in Fauja Singh (ed), The City of Amritsar. A Study of Historical, Cutural, Social and Economic Aspects (New Delhi, 1978), p. 323.
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in the Calcutta squatter colonies. Locals in Lahore competed with refugees for abandoned Hindu and Sikh property. Rehmat Ali (known as Kaka Randwa) from Chuna Mandi admitted that, we occupied houses of Hindus.114 The District Magistrate of Lahore warned on 28 September 1947 that legal action would be taken against squatters. The following day evictions began to take place in the Gowal Mandi area.115 Nearly two months later, local refugees were still being evicted from properties. Mohammad Sharif Muttaqi, Managing Director of the Muslim India Insurance Company was among a group of respectable persons named and shamed in a press report for unauthorised occupation.116 The West Punjab Government countered criticism of house allotment by appointing an Allotment Revising Committee in late November.117 Further disputes arose, however, regarding the allotment of shops.118 In an attempt to avoid clashes of interests between locals and residents, the former were incorporated into the allotment process.119 Ten per cent of the shops were allotted to refugees from Jullundur as a result of the efforts of Shams-ul-Haq who was a member from Jullundur on the Shops Allotment Committee.120 Controversy still continued, however, about the allocation of premises to locals.121 The Working Committee of the Lahore City Muslim League on 13 November 1947 passed a
Interview with Rehmat Ali (alias kaka Randwa), Lahore, 10 September 2000. The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 28 September 1947. 116 He had occupied 4 bungalows on Mozang Road. The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 29 November 1947. 117 Its ofce was located in that of the committees chairman, N.R. Kyani, the Legal Remembrancer of West Punjab. Malik Abdul Aziz, Advocate, formerly of Gurdaspur and Chaudhri Muhammad sharif, Bar-at-law of Gujranwala were the other members. The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 28 November 1947. 118 Allotment notices were published in the press and included details of the shop locality, its last owner or tenant and the goods in which it dealt. Applicants, for example, for such properties inside Lohari gate were required to do so between 113 on 1315 November at Ganga Ram Hospital, Wacchowali. The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 13 November 1947. 119 In the Gowal Mandi, locality for example, two allotment committees were established, the standing committee comprised of three locals, while the subcommittee contained two refugee representatives from Amritsar, one from Ludhiana, one fom Ferozepore and one from Jullundur. 120 The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 October 1947. 121 The orders of the Pakistan-Punjab Refugees Council were that locals were only eligible for such allotment if they had suffered losses in the Partition violence and if they could certify that they had no other means of subsistence in the West Punjab. See Proceedings of the 7th Meeting of the Allotment Tribunal Lahore, 13 February 1948.
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resolution urging the West Punjab Government to set up an inquiry into the illegal and unlawful allotment of shops to undeserving local inuential residents of Lahore. In another resolution it called for the District Magistrate to include one of its representatives on the Shops Allotment Committee.122 Importantly by co-opting refugees onto the Committee, the League prevented politicisation along residentrefugee lines. There appear to have been few complaints about the allotment of residential properties in Amritsar. This was certainly not the case in other Indian Punjab cities. Credit appears due to the Allotment Committee of the Municipal Corporation. This was well served by Sardar Charan Singh, a leading refugee businessman and President of the Hide Market. Police assistance was provided to help those who were unable to obtain possession of properties granted to them by allottment orders.123 Greater controversy surrounded the tendering of the leases of abandoned factories. Indeed when the East Punjab Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation, Sardar Ishar Singh Majhail addressed a press conference in Amritsar on 12 December 1947 he was forced to admit that members of the Legislative Assembly were attempting to lay their hands on all the factories and workshops.124 The Government had issued an order just a couple of days earlier that no Government Servants or their relatives should be allowed to bid in the auction of looted goods in Amritsar that was estimated to be Rs 28 lakhs in value.125 Aside from the issue of allotment, can the relatively good relations between locals and refugees in Lahore and Amritsar be partially explained in terms of the complimentary or at least non-competitive roles played by the latter? There appears to be greater evidence for this factor in Lahore than Amritsar, where refugees either lled niches in the labour market left by departing Hindus, or started new industries. Muslim migrants from Agra and Kanpur replaced skilled workers in the footware industry. UP refugees from Firozabad were important in establishing a bangle making industry. More than 500 people came to be employed by its furnaces. The migration of refugees also gave
122 123 124 125
The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 15 November 1947. Tribune (Ambala), 17 October 1948. Tribune (Simla), 13 December 1947. Tribune (Simla), 10 December 1947.
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an impetus to the making of bidis. A 50 per cent protective duty on all types of bidis also supported the industry.126 Anita Weiss has revealed the refugees role in the development of Lahores pharmaceutical industry. It hardly existed before partition. Interestingly the Hindu bania owner of one of the handful of such factories which operated in Moghulpura from 1932 stayed on in Pakistan until 1970.127 Refugee Sheikh and Arain traders, who moved into manufacture from owning chemist shops, set up the rst factories. Mumtaz Ahmad Sheikh, a migrant from Dalhousie, founded the Lahore Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works by the canal bank in 1953. It was so successful that it moved to a more spacious location on the Ferozepore Road. Two years earlier, Mohammad Sadiq had established the Unison Chemical Works on the Multan Road. He came from an Arain farming family in Sialkot but had run the Agra Punjab Bus Transport Company before partition. He had moved into manufacturing after spending some time as a clearing agent for medical stores in Anarkali.128 The Muslim takeover of Anarkali Bazar was a striking post-partition transformation of Lahore. Banias and Khatris129 had previously owned virtually all its businesses with the exception of the shoe trade. Khojas and Gaubas from the East Punjab Muslim trading communities replaced them. By lling such niches, refugees contributed to the citys growth without arousing local animosity. Some Hindu owners had tried unsuccessfully to continue to run their businesses through Muslim or even British agents.130 The muted local-refugee tensions in Amritsar may have been rooted more in the relatively small migrant population than in its economic contribution. The predominantly lower class migrants could not replace skilled Muslim artisans. Labour shortages in the textile industry, where over 50 per cent of the skilled labour force had been
126 Abdul Aziz Anwar, Effects of Partition on Industries in the Border Districts of Lahore and Sialkot. Pub no. 15 Board of Economic Enquiry Punjab Pakistan (Lahore, 1953) p. 100. 127 A. Weiss Culture, Class and Development in Pakistan: The Emergence of an Industrial Bourgeoisie in Punab (Boulder, 1991), p. 59. 128 Ibid., pp. 625. 129 Pran Nevile maintains that Brahmins owned only one shop in the whole of Anarkali, this was Lall Bros. Cloth Merchants. P. Nevile, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1993), p. 14. 130 Deputy High Commissioner Lahore Report 22 November 1947 DO 142/440 Refugees in West Punjab, Public Records Ofce.
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Muslim, compounded the damage to machinery during the months of March-August 1947. There were government schemes to address the skills gap. In August 1949, the East Punjab Government proposed that technical training would be provided for up to 50000 refugees. A number of local Amritsar industrialists, however, preferred to relocate to Bombay and Ahmedabad.132 Their Lahore counterparts attitudes to the new border situation differed sharply. Only 8/72 owners in Lahore expressed any desire to shift their production in 1947.133 There was no shortage of applications for evacuee factories from both refugees and locals to the Allotment Tribunal134 which was established following the Economic Rehabilitation Ordinance 1947. This differential response to the proximity of the border will form the focus of the closing section of this article. It has exerted a profound impact on the two cities post-partition development.
The Border and the Development of Lahore and Amritsar With the exception of the work of Tan and Kudaisya, there has been little written about the locational disadvantages Lahore faced as a result of partition. They subtitle their brief examination, Lahore: from Punjabs Pride to border town.135 They point to the severe economic consequences of partition arising from capital ight, loss of industrial labour, nancial expertise in the commercial and business sector and the relocation of businesses because of the citys proximity to the border.136 This geographical handicap took away much of its political importance. They conclude their brief analysis with the comment, Having been the heart of undivided Punjab and historically the most important city in the whole of Pakistan, it could not overcome its handicap of proximity to the Indian border.137
131 K.L. Luthera, Impact of Partition on Industries in the Border District of East Punjab, Board of Economic Inquiry No. 1 (Ludhiana, 1949), p. 32. 132 A complete industrial ight was only prevented by the passage of the 1948 East Punjab Factories (Control of Dismantling) Act. 133 Ibid., pp. 378. 134 It possessed ve advisory committees which covered, Engineering Industries, Textile Industries, Chemicals, Soap, Leather, Tanning and Rubber Industries, Printing Presses and Miscellaneous Industries. 135 Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition, p. 175. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., p.178.
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Lahore undoubtedly faced serious difculties in 1947. Its industrial labour force had declined by 73 per cent and its industrial working capital by 60 per cent.138 Further evidence of the dislocation emerges starkly from the following gures: only 13 of Lahores 39 printing presses were running in 1947; just 16 of Lahores former 28 scheduled banks were serving customers in August 1948; all of Lahores textile factories were only partially functioning. Lahore had accounted for 75/101 Engineering Factories in the undivided Punjab, only 23 of which were operating in 1947. The value of output of the registered factories in the Lahore district which had stood at Rs 1084 lakhs in 1946 had decreased to Rs 288 lakhs in 1947. Factories had been abandoned or damaged in the partition-related violence. These included such former large enterprises as the Mela Ram Cotton Mills and the Mukand Iron and Steel Rolling Mill. Skilled workers had migrated in the textile and book binding industries. Efforts were made to encourage Hindus and Sikhs to stay on in the banking eld which was crippled by the loss of expertise arising from migration. By 1950, there were, however, signs of an economic recovery. While the value of output of the registered factories in the Lahore district was still below that of 1946, it had more than doubled since 1947.139 The recovery rested on three key aspects. Firstly, the city beneted from an inux of skilled labour and entrepreneurial talent drawn from the Arain, Sheikh and Kashmiri biraderis of East Punjab. Secondly, the border location exerted a less negative impact on both private and government industrial investment. Finally, the citys continuing administrative importance compensated for its locational handicaps. Reference was made earlier to the inux of East Punjab artisans and entrepreneurs. It is important to note that Lahore was able to compete with such cities as Lyallpur for this refugee labour, not only because of its amenities, but as a result of existing biraderi ties. Moreover, while non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan could venture deep into Indian territory to Delhi, Faridabad or even Bombay, East Punjab Muslim migrants had less scope. The whole of the Pakistan Punjab was a border area given Pakistans lack of strategic depth. Urdu-speaking Karachi was geographically distant, but culturally unattractive to Punjabi industrialist refugees and skilled workers. The post-partition period in Lahore, in contrast with Amritsar, was thus marked by a
Ibid., p.177. The gure stood at Rs 719 lakhs. Abd al-Aziz Anwar, Effects of Partition.on Industries in the Border Districts of Lahore and Sialkot (Lahore, 1953), p. 55.
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labour glut rather than shortages. Migrants played an important role, for example, in the hosiery industrys considerable expansion. There had been just 4 factories in the city before partition, all of which dated to the interwar period. They had been unable to compete with the older established Ludhiana producers. The stoppage of goods from Ludhiana together with the arrival of skilled Muslim workers not only from there, but Amritsar and Jullundur, provided the basis for expansion.140 Lahores industrial and commercial expansion also beneted from Government assistance along with private investment. The West Punjab Governments immediate concerns were the strengthening of the nancial sector and the allotment of evacuee industrial enterprises. The former was achieved with the creation of the State Bank of Pakistan and the National Bank of Pakistan. The Pakistan Industrial Finance Corporation and the Refugees Rehabilitation Finance Corporation were also established in 1949. Refugees received further nancial support from the Cottage Industries Development Corporation and the burgeoning number of Co-operative Banks and Societies. The latter were formed around refugee occupation groups such as weavers and shoe makers as well as localities. There was, for example, a Mohalla Amritsarian Co-operative Society registered in Moghulpura Lahore.141 The Soap Industry provides a good example of the impact of government support. Before partition, Lahore was the second most important centre for this industry in the Punjab although it lagged behind Amritsar. The industry forged ahead after independence, not only because of the removal of its main competitor, but because of government assistance in terms of the removal of the Sales Tax, the reduction of duty on imported raw materials, and the encouragement of the local production of caustic soda.142 The industry was also investigated by the Pakistan Tariff Commission. By 1952, it had recommended that eight industries be granted protection.143 Shahdara, which in 1947 had housed a large refugee camp, was one of Lahores developing industrial centres. Other important localities
Anwar, Effects of Partition, p. 87. Anwar, Effects of Partition., Appendix F p. 175. 142 Anwar, Effects of Partition, p. 94. 143 These were the following industries: Grinding Wheels; Lathes; Paints, Colour and Varnish; Bidi; Industrial type Power Switch Boards; Electric Fans; Hurricane Lanterns; Motor Car and Cycle Pumps. Ibid., p. 122.
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were along the GT Road and in Moghalpura. Shahdara situated on the north bank of the Ravi on the GT Road to Peshawar possessed 15 factories by the mid-1950s. They employed over ve thousand workers. Most of the factories were owned by refugees. The Western Indian Match Factory which resumed production in October 1953145 was the largest in Pakistan and was valued at Rs 1000000. In addition there was the Punjab Flour Mill, Punjab Woollen Mills, which was the only one of its type in the country, the Punjab Soap and Soda Silicate Factory, the Punjab Enamel Factory and the Punjab National Electric Company. The latter fullled most of the Governments demand for fans.146 It also manufactured power looms and electric motors. Ninetenths of its work force came from a refugee background.147 Little has been written about the West Punjab Governments support for the restoration of normal commercial activity in the province. It is clear both from contemporary press reports and such records as those of the Pakistan-Punjab Refugees Council148 that considerable effort was made in this respect. Industrial development was seen as central to the national interest as well as integral to the plan to absorb Muslim refugees.149 Pakistans rst budget exempted new industrial undertakings from direct taxation on prots not exceeding 5 per cent.150 On 1 November 1947, the West Punjab Industrial Planning Committee met for the rst time to discuss plans for expansion and the resettlement of industrial labourers.151 A week earlier, the West Punjab Finance Minister, Mian Mumtaz Daultana, had announced a short-term loan of Rs 6 crores for industrialists who had been inconvenienced because of inadequate banking facilities.152 Further support for industry was provided by the award of 500 grants of Rs 20 each for refugees desiring to receive training in such
144 Shahdara, or the royal pass was historically important because of the tomb constructed there in 1628 by Nur Jehan for her late husband the Emperror Jehangir. 145 The industry was earlier granted protection on the recommendation of the Tariff Commission FR 11 August 1953 DO 35/5296 Public Records Ofce. 146 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 17 October 1950. 147 Dawn (Karachi), 22 January 1957. 148 This has been established in October 1947 to deal with the evacuation of nonMuslims and the reception of Muslim refugees from India. It was assisted in these Herculean efforts by the Joint Council of Ministers of both the Pakistan and West Punjab Governments. 149 The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 18 November 1947. 150 L.S. Jehu (ed), The Indian and Pakistan Year Book 1948 (Bombay, 1948), p. 160. 151 The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 1 November 1947. 152 The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 21 October 1947.
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skills as electrical work, tool-making, machining and turning, wool weaving and spinning and carpet weaving.153 At the 18th meeting of the Pakistan-Punjab Refugees Council, a sub-committee proposal was agreed to place sums of between Rs 50000- Rs 100000 at the disposal of Deputy Commissioners for subsidies and loans for small businessmen.154 In August 1950, the Industrial Planning Committee set up 5 sub-committees to deal with nance, labour, the building industry, handicrafts for women and the lm industry.155 These were not just paper entities, as can be illustrated by the fact that shortly afterwards a Pakistan Art Emporium was set up in the refugee locality of Krishan Nagar. This employed about 200 artisans who had migrated from Moradabad. The workers manufactured cutlery for which this UP city had become famous.156 More research is required on the issue of state assistance for industrial development in Pakistan Punjab. Some of the large sums earmarked for this task existed only on paper. Little is known about the remainder. Pakistans nancial position was weak at the time of its birth. The recourse to private donations, as for example in the Quaide-Azam Fund,157 to assist with refugee rehabilitation is evidence of this. There has been no quantication of the amounts brought in by the refugee tax158 and its disbursement. It is possible that use was made of the sterling balances,159 as decit nancing on this scale would have resulted in rampant ination. The extent to which this was a political project of the East Punjab political and bureaucratic elites as epitomized by such gures as Ghulam Muhammad and the Nawab of Mamdot also requires further investigation. The ndings uncovered here, however, reveal the remarkable scope and cost of this process.
The Pakistan Times (Lahore), 11 November 1947. Proceedings of the 18th Meeting of the Pakistan-Punjab Refugees Council, Lahore, 10 March 1948. 155 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 16 August 1950. 156 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 21 August 1950. 157 This provided funding not only directly to refugees, but paid 18 relief workers from the Christian Committee for the Relief of West Punjab. H.S. Stephenson to I.D. Scott 13 March 1948 DO 142/440 Refugees in West Punjab, Public Records Ofce. 158 See, Ansari, Life After Partition, p. 79. 159 Ghulam Muhammad the Pakistan Finance Minister led a delegation to London in May 1949 for talks concerning Pakistans share of the sterling balances. An agreement was due to run out in June 1949 under whose terms 3 million had been released for current transactions with provision for the transfer of another 3 million.
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Lahores ability to overcome these post-partition difculties had also rested in part on its continuing administrative importance. The city not only remained the capital of the Punjab, but for a time, following the introduction of the One Unit in 1955, was the capital of West Pakistan. Amritsar could have only been saved from decline if it had been given a similar status. By October 1953, Lahores estimated population was 1200000, it had been 700000 in 1947.160 Amritsars importance as a wholesale centre for trade in the colonial Punjab made it vulnerable to the disruption brought by the new international border. Moreover, its industries were cut off from both their former markets and their sources of raw materials. The body blow dealt by the migration of skilled workers added to the citys physical destruction in the wake of partition. Despite its religious importance for the Sikh community, the city rapidly took on the look of a peripheral locality. Periodic war scares in the early post-partition era compounded its leading citizens sense of isolation. The city, which had once matched colonial Lahore in terms of population, stagnated.161 Despite the increasing militarization of the border, Amritsars population remained prone to rumours and panics. When Indian troops marched into Hyderabad, a British observer reported, thousands of Hindus poured out of the city by train and road and this exodus is becoming a fairly regular event whenever relations with Pakistan deteriorate.162 He went on to report how the tense atmosphere led to suspicion even falling on Europeans. Mr Stevens, the manager of the Oriental Carpet Factory at Chheharta had his letters opened and was interrogated by the CID because he spoke in French when at home and on the telephone. The British Manager of the Chartered Bank in Amritsar had also apparently come under suspicion of holding pro-Pakistan views.163 The border tensions momentarily eased when Liaquat and Nehru signed the Minorities Agreement164 in New Delhi early in April 1950.
FR 6 October 1953 DO 35/5296 Public Records Ofce. Amritsars population grew more slowly than the rest of Indias in the decades after partition, Lahores expanded at twice the rate of Pakistans during the decades 195171. N.K. Purewal, Living on the Margins: Social Access to Shelter in Urban South Asia (Aldershot, 2000), p. 55. 162 Report by E.G. Willan 17 December 1948 DO 35/3181 East Punjab Affairs, Public Records Ofce. 163 Ibid. 164 The so-called Liaquat-Nehru Pact safeguarded minority citizenship rights and provided for the recovery of looted property. There was also agreement that the press should be prevented from publishing false stories designed to iname opinion.
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The Indian Prime Minister and his daughter Indira visited Karachi for the rst time on 26 April. This was followed by a number of goodwill gestures including a visit of Pakistani journalists to Amritsar and the reopening for the rst time since the rupee devaluation crisis of the Amritsar-Lahore rail link for goods trafc.165 The following year, however, tensions generated over Kashmir resulted in a war scare. The Lahore based newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette relayed to its readers, reports culled from the British Press of the nervous tension in neighbouring Amritsar at the prospect of war. On 1 September 1951, it quoted a report in the Observor that over 20000 people had ed in the past 23 weeks. It also noted the heavy transfers of bank deposits to branches deeper into India, and the unseasonably high sales of wheat (some 3000 sacks) in the citys grain market. The East Punjab Governor Sir Chandulal Trivedis tour of the border areas was interpreted as an attempt to allay the panic that has suddenly arisen.166 The closing of the Wagah border emphasised the gulf that now separated the former twin cities. Amritsars new border location adversely affected both its position as a market and as a manufacturing centre. It was cut off from former customers, sources of raw materials and trade routes. Security worries discouraged both state and private industrial investment. The city not only failed to attract new industries and entrepreneurs, but saw some established businesses relocate. The British manager of Lloyds Bank lamented in May 1949 that he had lost ten lakhs of business to Bombay.167 Poor transport links with the rest of India not only undermined Amritsars wholesale trade and made it cheaper to export to Pakistan via Bombay and Karachi, but also encouraged a sense of marginality. This gloomy situation was summed up by a British ofcial after his visit to the city in February 1950. Few if any expect, he noted, Amritsar ever to hope to return to its former position.168 Amritsars colonial development as an entrepot depended on linkages with Europe via Karachi and central Asia via the Frontier. Its industries relied on raw materials and markets that after partition were located in Pakistan. The citys textile mills, for example, obtained their chemicals and dyes from Karachi and cotton from the West
Tribune (Ambala), 15 May 1950. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 1 September 1951. 167 Colonel C.J. Tryne Report on Tour to East Punjab 23 May 1949 DO 35/3181 East Punjab Affairs Public Records Ofce 168 F.A. K. Harrison Report on Tour to Punjab 1825 February 1950 DO 35/3181 East Punjab Affairs, Public Records Ofce.
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Punjab canal colonies. In 1950, Amritsars handloom and power-loom textile production was badly hit by a shortage of cotton yarn.169 The industry was, however, even more handicapped by the loss of markets than raw materials. About three quarters of its products had been consumed in areas which had now become Pakistan.170 Similarly, two thirds of the output of the citys cotton ginning factories had gone to the West Punjab.171 Leading pre-partition industries such as leather and soap manufacture were badly hit by the loss of labour in the former case and the Afghanistan market in the latter.172 The regional pashmina market was also severely curtailed. The traditionally important hosiery industry only made a slow recovery. Its annual production as late as 19623 was worth only Rs1685000.173 By then, Ludhiana had overtaken it. Ludhianas emergence as the major industrial and economic centre of the Punjab is one of the regions major post-independence developments174 . Its phenomenal demand for labour saw it replace Amritsar as the Punjabs leading city by the beginning of the 1980s. Amritsar traders constantly complained to national and local politicians. Their appeals indicated both the severity of their problems and the extent to which decisions made elsewhere determined the prospects for recovery. In a submission to Nehru before his departure for talks with Liaquat in April 1950, traders reiterated that the Amritsar cloth market.. hub of all business activities and main distributing centre for the whole of Northern India (had) suffered a serious setback (because of Partition). They pointed out that prior to Partition, Western Pakistan was the principal customer of the Amritsar cloth market, but under the new set-up these facilities had been given to the Bombay market, thereby depriving Amritsar of its due share.175 The protests about the troubled textile industry continued during the following year. The new Director-General of Food and Industry in East Punjab was upbraided in a meeting on 19 May regarding
Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 28 August 1950. Luthera, Impact of Partition on Industries in the Border Districts of East Punjab, p. 62. 171 Ibid. 172 V.N. Datta, Amritsar Past and Present (Amritsar 1967), pp.1467. 173 Ibid., p.143. 174 See, A.S. Oberai and H.K. Singh, Causes and Consequences of Internal Migration. A Study in the Indian Punjab (Delhi, 1983). 175 Tribune (Ambala), 25 April 1950.
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the Governments failure to procure cotton yarn.176 Five weeks later it was the turn of the Development and Planning Ofcer of the Industry Department to receive complaints from the Punjab Textile Manufacturers Association. Its representatives pointed out that after partition all the Muslim weavers had migrated, but they had saved the industry by training a large number of refugees in the art of weaving. The weavers remained out of work owing to the short supply of yarn. The textile manufacturers also referred to the difculties in obtaining import licences for articial silk yarn and other raw materials and building materials.177 There was a growing realization that the citys locational disadvantages could only be counterbalanced if it was accorded administrative importance. The President of the Amritsar Municipality, Sardar Dharam Singh, moved a unanimous resolution on 7 October 1947 that the city should be the East Punjab capital. Master Tara Singh and other Akali Dal leaders along with the Amritsar branch of the Hindu Mahasabha supported the call.178 A year later appeals were still being made in this respect. Lala Chhabil Das, for example, the Chairman of the Millowners Association in the industrial suburb of Verka, submitted a resolution to the East Punjab Government.179 Despite these pleas, Amritsar was never considered a suitable government location, with the East Punjab Government temporarily quartering itself at Simla and Jullundur. This was in all probability not solely the result of the border vulnerability, but a feature of the clash between the Akali leaders and the Congress over the Punjabi versus Hindi language issue. This emerged soon after independence, although the Akalis Punjabi Subha movement was at its height in the later 1950s.180 Nehru decided to build a new capital city at Chandigarh four hours drive from the border to symbolize both his modernist vision of India and the Punjabs phoenix like recovery from the horrors of partition.181 Amritsar has never fully recovered from this setback.
Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 20 May 1951. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 1 July 1951. 178 Tribune (Simla), 7 October 1947 and 17 October 1947. 179 Tribune (Ambala), 28 December 1948. 180 Tensions emerged soon after independence between Hindu communal organizations and the Akalis. The whole issue of the Akalis demand for a Punjabi speaking state is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a historical overview see, Ajit Singh Sahadi, Punjabi Subha: The Story of the Struggle (Delhi, 1970). 181 See, V. Prakash, Chandigarhs Le Corbusier. The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle, 2002,) pp. 7 and 9.
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Conclusion Historians have said little about the extent of the riot damage in Lahore and Amritsar. Like British cities destroyed by the Luftwaffe, rebuilding took many years. In the process the inner cities public spaces were transformed. Two- way trafc enters the reconstructed Shah Almi area unhindered from Circular Road. Unlike in other parts of Lahores walled city where even rickshaw access is difcult, cars can drive right up to the Rang Mahal wholesale bazaar. This thriving shopping locality covers part of a former Hindu residential area. On a still larger scale, the Azam Cloth market extends over the former Hindu and Sikh localities which stretched from Kashmiri Bazaar to Chunda Mandi. Sacred space also underwent dramatic change. Large numbers of mosques, temples and gurdwaras disappeared forever. Nothing could more graphically illustrate the change in community composition and hierarchy for the scattered remnants of once powerful minorities. Religious buildings unless they were of outstanding historical signicance were either destroyed, became derelict or changed their use. The three gurdwaras in the Sharifpura locality of Amritsar are all former mosques. Indeed the Sharifpura gurdwara is still approached by means of Masjid di Galli. Some refugees182 sheltered in religious buildings, but many lived in the mud huts and tents which also became features of the new urban landscapes. Accommodation problems were nonetheless less acute than in Karachi or Calcutta because of the abundance of evacuee property. While the inner city areas inhabited by minorities suffered riot damage, nearby localities such as Sharifpura in Amritsar and Gowal Mandi, Nisbet Road, Krishan Nagar and Sant Nagar in Lahore escaped largely unscathed. They remain refugeedominated areas.183 Despite their relative ineffectiveness, the Lahore and Amritsar Improvement Trusts are of historical interest because of the insights they provide into the institutional life of local government amidst the chaos of partition. Both newly independent dominions drew
182 It was only in May 1951 that Amritsars Deputy Commissioner, Sardar Bahadur Narinder Singh directed the police to remove refugee occupants from the citys damaged mosques. Tribune (Ambala), 8 May 1951. 183 Most of the inhabitants of Sharifpura are from the Sialkot and Rawalpindi districts of Pakistan. Nisbet Road and Gowal Mandi in Lahore are dominated by Kashmiri refugees from Amritsar, while in Krishan Nagar and Sant Nagar there are many UP Muslims.
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on British models of urban regeneration in the response to the unprecedented problems they inherited. How useful these models were in the circumstances remains a moot question. The relative lack of economic competition between refugees and locals was as important in the formers integration as the absence of cultural distance. Refugees in Lahore were adept at nding niches for themselves. They undoubtedly contributed to the citys growing prosperity which also reduced tensions between migrants and locals. Entrepreneurial drive alone was, however, insufcient to revitalise ruined cities. Government policy and state nancial support were crucially important. The Pakistan state closely linked refugee rehabilitation with the wider task of nation building. This reected the considerable proportion of refugees in the total population. It was also a sign of the political importance of mohajir elites both from UP and East Punjab and the Islamic status accorded to mohajirs. Finally, the beginnings of a state built on order can be seen in the administrative responses to the human crisis of Partition. Lahore because of such support, together with its administrative importance, surmounted the handicap of proximity to a volatile international border. Refugees wielded less political inuence in New Delhi. Crores of rupees were nonetheless spent on a range of urban and rural rehabilitation schemes. New Delhi provided the East Punjab government with Rs 2.5 crores alone for a scheme to develop 12 satellite townships.184 The satellite town development for refugees in such places as Rajpura, Karnal, Panipat, Rohtak, Sonepat, Ludhiana and Gurgaon was on an impressive scale. It symbolised, however, the concentration of resources away from the border districts. Cities like Ludhiana with its good communications, and pre-existing economic base beneted from the south-eastwards shift of economic activity. It progressively eclipsed Amritsar as the hub of urban activity in a still predominantly agrarian Punjab state. Amritsar increasingly appeared like a distant outpost, unlike Lahore which remained a continuing locus of power. Transport problems compounded its peripheral location in the regional and national economy. When Indias Finance Minister Chintaman Deshmukh visited Amritsar late in August 1950, a traders deputation plaintively submitted a memorandum to him.
184 P.N. Tharpar, Rehabilitation Department to the Assistant Secretary to the Government of India, New Delhi Ministry of Rehabilitation 21 February 1950. RHB/1(i)/1950 Housing Schemes in East Punjab, NAI. I would like to thank Pippa Virdee for this reference.
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This recalled how the city before partition was the entrepot of the whole of Northern India and for trade with Afghanistan, Iran and Kashmir and how it was hard hit by partition. It was also the rst to bear the brunt of the inux of refugees.185 Deshmukh expressed his sympathy, but nothing was to change. Refugee labour and capital went elsewhere.186 With the further handicap of loss of access to traditional markets and raw materials, the city stagnated. Amritsars decline supports the standard view that partition marked a huge discontinuity in the regions history. This study has also revealed, however, that there were important continuities. The migration patterns and subsequent assimilation of refugees from Amritsar in Lahore was the product of a Kashmiri presence in the latter city. This even predated the colonial era. Lahores ability to compete with such cities as Lyallpur for skilled refugee labour and entrepreneurial talent was rooted in the biraderi ties between its inhabitants and Arains and Sheikhs from the East Punjab. The decision to make Lahore the Pakistan Punjabs administrative capital in itself revealed continuity with the past that the new border did not disrupt. Both David Gilmartin187 and Ayesha Jalal188 have called for a joined up historiography of partition that links the new study of the human dimension with the larger national political narrative. Sarah Ansari has recently revealed how, issues concerning refugee rehabilitation (in Sindh) melded with the centre-province strains that characterized (Pakistan in) the 1950s.189 Migrants re-creation of cultural spaces or private universes in Lahore and Amritsar did not profoundly inuence identity politics as in Karachi. Nevertheless, the cities provide important sites for understanding the connection between community, locality and the state during the decade which followed partition. In particular, ofcial responses to their refugee problems illuminate the broader processes of state construction.
Tribune (Ambala), 26 August 1950. There were of course exceptions not only amongst industrialists, but leading former gures of Lahores professions. Rai Sahib L. Ganga Ram Wadhwa, for example a Sessions Judge who was a popular resident of Model Town before partition, settled in Kuch Dakoutan Killa Bhanglan in Amritsar until his death on 18 May 1951. Tribune (Ambala), 27 May 1951. 187 D. Gilmartin, Partition, Pakistan and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative, Journal of Asian Studies 57, 4 (1998), p. 1092. 188 A. Jalal, Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of Communalism: Partition Historiography Revisited Modern Asian Studies 30, 3 (1996), p. 688. 189 Ansari, Life After Partition, p. 12.
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Modern Asian Studies 41, 1 (2007) pp. 151185. C 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.

1017/S0026749X05002337 Printed in the United Kingdom

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