| Train Station in Lahore, 1947 |
Invisible Journey
Abstract
This essay considers a set of photographs taken in early 1947 in Lahore and in Punjab when the region was still united in India. The images traveled from India to Australia in 1948, and a single image journeyed to the world's first Partition Museum in Amritsar in 2017. They represent a moment of tangled relations between object, history, migration, and technology. The photographer was young and, like his subjects, was unaware of the horror that would erupt outside the frame a few months after the photographs were taken. The British government placed great burdens on the shoulders of young men, as hinted at in the images. Seventy-five years later, viewers are privy to that knowledge, which lends a layer of pathos to the images. This essay draws on oral history and family photographs to explore a time, experience, and place just before one of the great tragic migrations of twentieth-century history.
This essay considers the travels of a set of photographs as they crossed between continents and generations. As part of my early research into technologies in pre-Partition India, I used vernacular photographs, specifically my family-owned photos, to stimulate the memories of people who lived in railway colonies along the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Line (GIPR) as close to Independence in 1947 as possible. These are not the usual family photos, but they were taken by my father and circulated in our family when we were of an age to understand their history. However, several small photographs taken in Lahore in 1947 and carried to Western Australia in 1948 came to my notice, as a researcher, in 2007, and one photograph (fig. 1) came to be included in the world's first Partition Museum in Amritsar in 2017. The images encode an invisible history of migration and movement and a particular experience at a moment of great change. Other photographs taken by my father during the 1947 migration reveal a bird's-eye view from the top of trains to the mountains and empty landscapes. They do not include photos of massacres, kalfilas (lines of people traveling mostly on foot), or camps. However, they evidence layers of life and history, both seen and unseen. The Partition of India in 1947 involved an agonizing six-month migration of Hindus to India and Muslims to East and West Pakistan. As the Partition took place, so did the withdrawal of the British military from India, leaving very few soldiers behind to oversee the process. The Gurkhas were part of the British Indian army and stayed on to act as aides to the civil power. Thus my father as a young soldier in the British Indian army remained in India until early 1948. Despite a trope of abandonment, these soldiers were among the last soldiers to leave India.