But on a crisp January afternoon this year, the couple were reunited along the border that had so devastatingly torn their family apart. “Finally, we’re together,” Sadiq told his brother, tears streaming down his face. 75 years ago on August 15, 1947, the subcontinent was divided along religious lines to become two independent countries, India and Pakistan. It would be a bloody and bitter parting. After 300 years of formal British presence, the key figures of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi and his protégé and future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, envisioned a single, secular country. Muslim political leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, however, argued for a separate state for Muslims, fearing the effects of a Hindu majority India. As sectarian tensions flared, deadly riots broke out, targeting Hindus, then Muslims, then Sikhs. The British, eager to extricate themselves from India quickly, oversaw the drawing of a crude border that split the Indian states of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east to form a discontinuous Pakistan that angered all communities. A visitor to the Apartment Museum in Amritsar, India, studies a photograph of a crowd during partition in 1947. Photo: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty It instigated a mutual genocide on both sides of the new border. Entire villages were burned, children were massacred and approximately 75,000 women were raped. In Punjab, the epicenter of the violence, pregnant women had babies cut from their bellies and trains full of refugees – Muslims fleeing Indian Punjab, Sikhs and Hindus fleeing West Pakistan – were ambushed and arrived at stations littered with silently bleeding corpses. . The actual death toll is still unknown, with estimates ranging from 200,000 to 2 million, and it led to the largest forced migration in history, as more than 14 million people fled their homes. From that point on, India and Pakistan were sworn enemies, separated by a border that would become increasingly jagged and impenetrable over the decades. Sikka Khan holds a picture of his brother Sadiq. Photo: Hannah Ellis-Petersen/The Guardian Families caught up in the chaos and brutality were forced to leave everything behind and many were separated as they crossed into India or Pakistan. Although many tried desperately to find each other later, through newspaper ads, letters and bulletin board messages, cross-border communication was limited. Visa restrictions and a deep-seated fear of the “other side” also prevented most from ever going back across the border. But recently, social media has opened up a realm of new possibilities. Facebook pages and YouTube channels, some with thousands of members from India and Pakistan, have begun reconnecting people with homes and family members lost during the partition and subsequent conflict that also tore apart Kashmir . Video accounts and snippets of information are posted on the pages: a photo or a name, a village or a description of a house. As the posts are shared widely by people on both sides of the border, and from the diaspora around the world, leads sometimes appear. While getting a visa to cross the border is still a challenge, video calls have been arranged so people can see the homes and villages they were forced to leave behind so long ago. Sadiq Khan (on screen) talks to his younger brother Sikka (right) via video call. Photo: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty “For those who lived through partition, that longing for their origins remains very strong,” said Aanchal Malhotra, a writer who has spent years documenting the oral history of partition. “One of the most common things I hear in my research is, ‘When I close my eyes, I see my home,’ or ‘Every night in my dreams, I cross the border.’ Most people have resigned themselves to the fact that they will never see their homes again. But the great power of social media is that it’s borderless and it was beautiful to see the way it’s being used in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, to connect people with a past they thought they’d lost.” Makhu Devi, 87, who lives in Indian-controlled Kashmir, said she had been given a new lease of life after a Facebook group had recently connected her with relatives still living in her old village, now in Pakistan, from which she was forced to leave. . Now they have regular phone calls, although the first few times they almost didn’t talk, as they were crying a lot. “My memory is being refreshed,” Davy said of the calls. “They have turned me around in those times. I feel as young and energetic as I was then.” Makhu Devi, 87, on a call with her family in Pakistan. Photography: Aakash Hassan The second and third generations have also embraced social media groups to connect with a lineage that is often not discussed within families amid a pervasive culture of silence around division. Lines of cross-border communication have opened up in innovative ways, including through dating apps. It has become commonplace on Instagram for people to search for hashtags of the towns or villages their grandparents came from to see what they look like now and find people who still live there. Muhammad Naveed, team member of Pakistani YouTuber Nasir Dhillon’s Punjabi Lehar channel. Photo: Farooq Naeem/AFP/Getty Punjabi Lehar, a YouTube channel created by Nasir Dhillon, 38, a real estate dealer from Faisalabad Punjab in Pakistan, has made about 800 videos that help people reconnect with a person or place that is lost in the apartment. According to his estimates, 300 have resulted in personal encounters between loved ones who were divided by the India-Pakistan border. Dhillon grew up hearing his family and village elders talk longingly about the ancestral villages they could no longer visit, and began using social media to share their stories and gather information. But after his posts and videos started going viral, “the response was so overwhelming that I realized this is the story of the entire Punjab.” “Everything I do is because of my roots,” Dhillon said. “We may live in two hostile countries, but our hearts are still in a time before the partition. I pray that there will never be a division like this anywhere in the world – it is a cruel thing.” Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am. BST His biggest regret is not being able to take his father, who died in 2018, to their ancestral family shrine in India, which he eventually managed to track down thanks to social media. “He longed to see his native village till the last days,” Dhillon said. He has not been able to visit it yet. last year India rejected his visa application. Thanks to Dhillon’s channel the Khan brothers found each other again. Sikka, who was born into a Muslim family in what is now India’s Punjab, was just six months old when anti-apartheid violence broke out. Away from home with his mother, they were forced to take refuge with a local Sikh family who protected their Muslim neighbors from the massacres. After weeks of slaughter, they emerged, but in terrible scenes. The nearby river was so full of bodies that it ran red with blood. And in Sikka’s Jagraon village, 40 miles away, there were no Muslims left. no sign of Sikka’s father, his 10-year-old brother or his eight-year-old sister. Sikka’s mother, overcome with grief, drowned. Sikka was left without family except for an uncle and was brought up by a Sikh family from his mother’s village. He spent his entire adult life trying to find news about his family, especially his beloved brother Sadiq. He made speculative calls and wrote hundreds of letters to obscure addresses in Pakistan, to no avail. He never married. Without family around him, he said, “something was always missing, so it never felt right.” Sikka Khan (centre) talks to his older brother Sadiq in Pakistan on a mobile phone video call. Photo: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty It was by chance in 2019 that a friend from the village was sent a YouTube video of Punjabi Lehar by a relative. In it, an old man in his 80s living in Pakistan talked about trying to find the younger brother he had lost after he fled Jagraon village during partition. After contacting Dhillon, it was confirmed: this man was Sadiq Khan. An emotional video call was arranged between the two brothers and soon they were talking to each other every day. Sikka finally learned his family history. that his father had been killed in a joint attack and his brother and sister had fled to a refugee camp on the border where his sister had died of disease. Sadiq arrived in Pakistan, settled in Faisalabad and had six children and many grandchildren, but not a day went by that he didn’t think about his lost brother. The brothers were prevented from meeting for nearly three years due to visa issues and the Covid pandemic, but in January, a reunion was finally arranged at the Kartarpur Corridor, a religious pilgrimage site recently opened to Indians and Pakistanis. “I felt complete,” Sikka said of the encounter. Both brothers agreed: they had stayed alive long enough to meet again. In April, Sikka was finally granted a visa to stay in Pakistan for three months and Sadiq returned with him to India for two months. They hope to see each other again soon. Sadiq keeps teasing Sikka that if she goes back to Pakistan, she will finally find him a wife. “Now I am not worried about anything,” Sikka said. “I just want to see my brother and be close to him.” But, added Sikka, he was also angry…
