 I have with me today Ayesha Kidwai who teaches linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Welcome to NewsClick, Ayesha. In addition to teaching linguistics, Ayesha Kidwai has been engaged with a very very interesting work over the last few years. She's translated a memoir by Anise Kidwai who happens to be her grandmother. And this memoir is an opportunity for all of us to go back to a critical moment in our collective history as Indians. Ayesha, let me begin with saying that when I came to the book in Freedom's Shade, which is the English title of your grandmother's memoir, I had all these labels at the back of my head, a partition memoir, a witness to history and that sort of thing. But a chapter or two into the book, I was completely engaged not as a witness, of course as a witness to history, but also as somebody, this extremely alive woman, full of hopes for this new nation, full of fears, full of disappointments and full of desires for her friends and community around her. So there is a sense of this memoir being yours as well. And that is what really interested me, that this was something relevant and alive. Could you begin with the kind of person Anise Kidwai was and the kind of memoir you think she's written? When I first came to this book, I came to the book in about, really came to it as an adult. I came to it in about 2002 after the Gujarat riots. And my interest in that book was one of course as one of us were impacted on by what happened in Gujarat and perhaps you were impacted on first what happened in 1984. So I came to this book to try and understand what partition was and how was this different because I saw the reaction of people like Kuldeep Nair who said that 60 years after India's independence the first time he wept and cried because as he had crossed the border to over to India he had resolved to himself that this will never happen again. And that when he went to Gujarat he cried. So I went to this book very much like you expecting to find tears, to find the visions of horror. But in this book I found a perspective which could be of a friend of mine. Somebody who is a witness but not complicit and who is painfully conscious of the fact that as long if you are a witness and you are mute you are complicit. So what I discovered in the process of beginning the translation was that it was not a book which was intended to be a memoir. It knew from the beginning because it was written in 1949. It only got published in Urdu in 1974. But when she wrote it in 1949 she is a political witness. She is competing to create memory and the means by which she creates memory is by peopling this universe of Delhi in 1947-48 not only by victims, with victims but the people who fought against them. So in some sense this book is a dual memoir. When we receive it now as memory there is a restorative aspect to this which puts into the picture all the people who fought back because we've had this sort of collective silence about partition and its afterlife. So it just happened and it was two years and maybe it went on for a long time in terms of migration but it is sort of secluded, it is like encrypted so that it has no history and that all secularism and everything organically either springs from our generation or the generation before independence. So the times before independence so we were returning to a past which was more secular than what happened. So for me I think this book is tremendously important because it restores partition in the life of a city because it's not about everywhere else into a historicity. And if I can take you up there it restores partition to human stories that are sadly still true in both positive and negative ways today and if we can actually go to a couple of concrete examples so there is always that balance. There's the anguish, the abducted women, the feeling that you are being pulled out from the root from what you've thought of as your home and being sent off somewhere else. So the stories of anguish and the stories of your man and woman and child on the streets doing something extraordinarily brave and helping out quite spontaneously. So perhaps you could very quickly, you know, kind of a nugget-sized example of both these aspects. Well I think the first example of this is Anise Kidwai herself because this book begins with her husband was murdered in Missouri in September 1947. So the book begins the first chapter which is an extraordinarily moving chapter where she describes what Missouri was and how slowly the place vacates. Muslims are sent into the camps and he's the only person who's preventing the land owned by the Muslims being taken over by grabbed and that story then ends in his ghastly murder and Anise Kidwai says that for a week she didn't know, she couldn't gather herself and then, you know, giving soup to the song that we all sing in demonstration and Anise Kidwai comes to Delhi, does not want to pursue who murdered her husband because why will she make his mother lose her son? Why will she make his wife a widow? That's what she said. And so when this book comes to Delhi, she goes to Gandhi who's again whom I think whose individual sort of connection with people we have lost from the way that, you know, his saintliness of impotence and he sends her to work. Now this is for the first time that a woman who has, is in the most terrible of circumstances she is working in the Purana killer camps. First of all to give relief to all the people who had been, you know, evicted from their homes. The Muslims who didn't want to go, but were forced out. This is a story of partition which has not been told. Yes. This is a crude idea that these people brought up. I think the real tragedy of partition is that the stories don't travel in their specificities. So the people who came across each border told the stories of the terrible things that happened to them on the other side. So there is, you know, there's an exemption that we have been able to do of ourselves. It happened elsewhere. So Anise Kitwai's story of the Purana Killa and the Humayun tombs camp are not stories about Muslims, but the internal displacement that violence produces. So what the first three chapters of the book are of trying to stop this scam from being. My favorite story in the first half of the book is actually when these two women, Anise Kitwai and Subhadra Joshi, decide that, you know, the only way to stop people from making this, you know, this enforced eviction is to stop them coming to the camp. Because once people come to the camp, the hordes of poor destitute displaced people come to their homes and take them over so there is no way that you can persuade somebody to go back. And when they, so they decide to go to Kasabpura and as they are driving by actually, Gandhi Ji is on his fast in January 1948 and Anise Kitwai and Subhadra Joshi, they go to the neighborhood in Kasabpura. They see that the Muslims are loading their belongings onto a lorry and they manage to persuade them not to go. And as they manage to persuade them not to go, on the opposite side of the road, there is a line of Hindu refugees who is waiting. And they surround them and put these women through, I think, the force of their empathy and reason. They say, you don't have to, we will get your homes but don't make the others leave. And they manage it. They see stories which are bound in the book and with great delicacy. You don't, I mean it is not the orgy of death and it is not the orgy of blaming. Both things that we have come to expect in partition literature. The only thing that can, you know, what Anise Kitwai to be, you know, to escape from the prison of recommendation is a sense of who her friends are and they are not Hindu or Muslim. So it completely changes the perspective you can have in partition literature. And this is written about a time when India, as we know it today, was a baby. So the first two years, so those years which must have been so full of hope as well as disappointment that it was beginning with all this bloodshed and division and so forth. If you knew Anise Kitwai as a grandmother and then subsequently through the text as somebody writing this memoir, before we go to her as a woman because she is fascinating, if she were talking to young people today, what do you think she would say about those first two years? There are some very moving moments when she sees the birth of the nation and some of those comments, some of those thoughts, some of those worries of hers actually resonate with us today and if you could share some of this. Yeah, I think that what she would say is, you know, perhaps not only in the comments that she directs directly to people. It's in the way that she views the world. Because there is the specificity of being a Muslim woman, a fairly elite Muslim woman, part of the political elite and that person is out on the streets every day and taking her young daughters to places where people are being killed to work in the camps, to play with Hindu children in the school. So if Anise Kitwai would say, don't let people form your memories because those memories are partial. You must form your memories yourself and that why we must remember what happened in partition is perhaps not and she fails actually to make sense of why it happened. But to understand that in the fighting of communal division, separation, hatred that you will find an answer, an antidote to the badness that engulfed us. I think all of us who have been activists since the late 70s when citizens groups have written reports and tied to tell the truth to say that only truth can solve the basis of reconciliation. So look at that truth. Understand that this was the complexity of the problem and move forward knowing that if you're going to take the categories of just Muslim and Hindu, that you're not going to make much headway. But if you ask the question, a Muslim woman, a Hindu woman, that are there connections that can be established between the two and that connection in partition was first established by Victor Boat and then by fighting back and if you can do that, then each Victor can be a person who says now with me this cycle stops, it ends. And your extraordinary story of Anise Kidwai and Subhadra Joshi actually coming together and doing something, not just being victims as you put it. I also want to get a sense of what was she like as a woman because we have so many cliches in our head not only about historic events such as partition and the anguish and so forth but also of women of those times, what sort of education they had and of course if they were Muslim women even more so. I must say that by the time I finished reading the memoir I had adopted Anise Kidwai as a kind of grandmother that of course I too had. And there is this feeling of her speaking to directly, of her having made herself a bigger person than she was allowed to be. So if you could share some stories about that. Anise Kidwai had, she was born, her father was actually a writer of humorous punch pieces and she used to write in the Abadpan and he used to write in English. So she was that segue that you had in the early 20th century for all families of let's say Uttar Pradesh was that of a Zamidari turning into a professional elite. And so her father was trained as a lawyer but made his name in the pan-Islamic fervor and the nationalist fervor that swept our in the first 20 years let's say of the 20th century. Anise Kidwai, but he died when she was about 11 years old until then she was given a very rigorous education till the age of 11. And then after he died she had to move to the village which is Masali. And then lived a life of great, she was in the Prada which she struggled to get out for the next 16 years from 1936 but around her the world was politicized. Her brother-in-law and her husband Shafi and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai were congress activists and she was consumed with a passion but the public space was not her. So very, I mean ironically and I think touchingly when partition makes the public space available to women I mean if you just look at the photographs from the archives that we tend to see women like her as striding out into the space but I think the nature of the public space in a place like Delhi was actually completely altered by partition. Women who had never gone in kafilas in these caravan women, children, they were all over the place as victims it was. So that public space had been altered and I think many women at that point the fact that they could go out into the public space it was legitimate now because there were other women in the public space that Anish Kidwai I think her life was really transformed by those two years of partition. Well as a grandmother I am extremely fortunate that I have got to know my grandmother in the non kinship sense because this memoir sets up a person because to be able to you know I think every act of witness writing you have to know and like that woman and you cannot know her through kinship. So of course for me initially it was a shock to be able to see this person as a real woman but in the process of translating I understood many things about why I grew up in a world. I didn't have a grandmother who cooked. I didn't have a grandmother who was at home for even 10 days continuously. I had a grandmother who raced across the lawn and into the arms of some bearded gentleman. I had a grandmother who you know could tell me what I should be able to read but in English her language didn't speak because she read them in translation. A grandmother whose all her friends were single women. So a world in which you know I am a grandmother who said you have to be fearless. So it's only through the book that there are many things that I understand. My favorite memory of hers and I can you know even in the age of 44 I can't get over it is that I refused to learn to read the Quran when I was eight mostly because I found it very I said and I knew that I could impress her with a smart comment. So I said I can't learn it by rote. So can I will learn Arabic when I grow up and then I will learn to read it and she bought it completely. So I thought that she would be angry but she said no that makes sense.