Like most Indian children, I grew up enjoying stories that my grandmother told me. It was particularly gratifying that the lady in question, Savitaben Kamdar, was a well known social worker in the Gujarati community and had been a freedom fighter who had been jailed twice by the British for organising women during the freedom struggle. My grandparents’ home at Broadway in Chennai, where I was born, was a huge traditional home with 20 foot high ceilings and a central courtyard. One went up to the first floor, where we lived, by a spiral staircase which friends of the family still talk about some thirty years after the building was demolished. It was an era when there was no television, when the mornings in most Indian homes were scenes of frantic activity, women cooking while the men and children bathed and dressed in school uniforms to the sound of music on radio. All India Radio and Radio Ceylon competed for popularity among Indians particularly in the South, and at night one could look up at the sky and see the stars clearly. The Central Station in Madras had horse and Rekalla bull drawn "jhatkas" outside and the city had vastly more taxis than the now ubiquitous autorickshaws. It was an era of black and white films, of hand drawn rickshaws and bullock carts, an era when we would be taught in school that India alone had more bullock carts than the restiof the world had cars.

I remember the War of 1971 when I was a young boy. My grandmother’s group, the Jain Mahila Sangh which she founded and became President of until her death, would meet in the huge hall at home to pack kits to send to soldiers fighting for the country until it became dark and air raid sirens would go off telling everyone to turn all lights off, and then, again, tleling us that it was safe to turn them back on again. We heard loud jets fly overhead and my sister, cousin and I would draw the curtains on our windows aside to look up at the sky and try to see the jets - we never did even when we heard them. It was a time when Coca Cola was sold, I remember, a dozen bottles for Rs 10, and the milk arrived every morning in bottles in a little cradle of six bottles a shot. I do not remember whether it was at this time or earlier that my grandmother started telling us stories of heroes of our freedom struggle. As children, we enjoyed stories of the victories of 1965 and 1971. Again, as children, and my grandmother was firm in telling us about the bad as well as the good in India’s history, we often felt saddened by the stories of 1962, and more than that, of the war of 1857.

To my grandmother, 1857 was a defining moment in Indian history. She would tell us, "The Muslims came to India to live here and be a part of this country. The British came to plunder and steal what we had, for their country. It was these thieves who divided us in 1857 and again in 1947 and we were foolish to allow this to happen." Born, as my mother was in Pakistan, a country that her parents left aftter Partition more because there were far fewer opportunities for women to be educated in that country than because they were a small religious minority there, I remember my maternal grandfather, a Jain with the very unusual name of Fakirchand Shah, tell us stories of his youth in what was now a country that we were at war with. His stories of riding a bicycle around the various locations there, of how his boss, a millionaire Parsi gentleman called Shavakshaw took very good care of him and how his friend, a Pathan protected him during the riots of Partition by putting a burkha on him and walking with his arm around him were in stark contrast to the demonic descriptions that some of my classmates gave to the enemy that we were now at war with. There were some who would call us "Mohammedans" at St Columbans and St Marys, the Catholic schools that we went to as children, though, of course, we were nothing of the sort. And there were students who would call us traitors when we talked about 1857, a war in which three powerful Hindu patriots fought to make a Muslim the emperor of undivided India, though it was at 24 Broadway that packets were put together for our soldiers every day. We were called cowards though I had uncles who were soldiers who had medals from the Chinese and Pakistani wars. I remember getting into trouble for beating up some of the boys who said this to me but then, later, I learned to ignore them because it made them angrier. That was always more fun.

As I grew older, it became clearer how well the British policy of divide and rule had worked - after 1857 itself, the occupiers were able to divide people who had fought together on the basis of religion. They were able to dangle the very emotional bait of revenge for the brutal execution of the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur before the powerful Sikh armies who helped them defeat the Bengal armies who were fighting to throw them out of India. They would subsequently manipulate affairs in the Punjab so that the Sikh kingdom which was based at Lahore, was wiped out without a trace. And, in the 90 years after 1857, they would ensure that even a staunch patriot like Mahatma Gandhi who was able to unite the two main people of the Indian Subcontinent, failed to keep Indians as a single, united nation. The myth that this was purely a religious issue was shown up for what it was - a myth - in 1971. East Pakistan, a largely Muslim country which still had a substantial Hindu population unlike the western half of the country, broke away on the issue of language. The divisions that a foreign occupier and thief had set into the soil of a region where Hindus and Muslims had lived together, mainly peacefully and with some tensions down history, was now one of the most dangerous places in the world. It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t. But, will sanity prevail in the future unlike in the past? I seriously doubt it.

My maternal grandfather died in Baroda, India, grieving for the life that he had enjoyed in Karachi as a young man. His last years saw him suffer from cancer, something that was probably caused by smoking during the years he lived a carefree life in Karachi. But, his yearning for the city where he lived some of the best years of his life was no different from Zafar’s tragic cry that he expressed in a poem thst still brings tears to the eyes of friends in the USA and Canada who are from the Indian subcontinent and live here:

Lagta nahiin hai jii mera ujray dayar mein
Kis kii banii hai aalam-e-na-payedar mein


Kah do in hasarataun se kahiin awr jaa basen
Itanii jagah kahan hai dil-i daaghdaar mein


Umr-i daraaz maang ke laaye the chaar din
Do aarazu mein kat gaye do intizaar mein


Hai kitana badanasiib Zafar dafn ke liye
Do gaz zamiin bhii na milii ku-i yaar mein


There must be many more who died in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh with similar, sad thoughts after 1947. Though nothing could be done to ease their pain during their lives, I wonder if the 150th Anniversary of 1857 would lead to a re-examination of the hostitlities between the nations of the Indian subcontinent. There is no reason why that part of the world could not be a powerful bloc like the EU. There is no reason why people should continue to suffer because thieves and manipulators succeeded in dividing them so decisively 150 years ago.