Partition’s orphaned and abandoned

children in Pakistan

Ilyas Chattha
School of Humanities and Social Science, Lahore University of
Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan

Alongside women, children were among the foremost victims of the 1947 Partition violence, and
yet this group has been historically neglected by scholars. Countless children became orphaned
and were adopted or sent to orphanages. Concomitant with these developments was the growth
of an ambitious humanitarian movement to protect the orphaned children. While arguing that
these movements spawned the modern benevolent institutions in the early years of Pakistan,
this essay also poses the following questions: What was the role of the state and interventions
of social workers vis-à-vis the orphaned children? What happened to adolescents after their
discharge from charitable institutions? Did their trajectories lead them back into the mainstream
of society, or did other fates await them? Drawing on previously untapped and rich archival
materials, including the records of relief agencies, unpublished memoirs and government docu-
ments, this essay considers the varying circumstances in which children found themselves in
orphanages and explores the motives behind as well as the incidence and social implications
of adoptions. It also studies how these charitable orphanages emerged out of a host of needs,
expectations, resources and opportunities.

Keywords: Partition violence, children, charitable institutions, adoption, reunions

Introduction

Within the emergent ‘new history’ of the Partition studies, this essay investigates
a hitherto unexplored aspect of the Partition violence: the traumatic experience
of women and children.1 The historiography of the Partition was dominated by
accounts of the political division for a long time. However, with the 50th anniversary

1
  See for a historiographical overview: Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, pp. 7–24; Pandey,
Remembering Partition, pp. 1–22; Virdee, From the Ashes of 1947, pp. 2–18.

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Dr Ali Usman Qasmi and the two anonymous readers for
their suggestions.

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DOI: 10.1177/00194646221085365
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of Independence in 1997, literature dealing with the Partition became noticeably

more sensitive to its ‘human’ aftermath, particularly with regard to ordinary people.2
This essay reflects the reality that for ordinary people, the Partition is experienced
as suffering and violence, although this has largely remained unacknowledged in
the dominant historiography. As noted by Gyanendra Pandey, the ‘Partition changed
the course of many lives which would have otherwise run in their familial chan-
nels. It was in the bloodletting of Partition that the meaning of independence was
to be found by many ordinary people’.3 Despite the proliferation of scholarship
on the human component of the Partition and Independence, few scholarly works
focus on women’s experiences. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and
Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries are two noteworthy
exceptions. Both monographs were pathbreaking in their own right and brought the
gendered violence of the Partition to the fore and exposed the appalling realities
of abduction, rape and trauma. Still, there are no academic works which focus on
the children of the Partition.
This essay provides a new perspective by directly investigating the process—
both state practice and social experience—by which children were channelled
into orphanages and transformed into desirable adoptees in Pakistan. It also con-
siders the community attitudes, relief agencies’ responses and state provisions to
orphans following the Partition, and asks certain important questions: What were
the life trajectories of children from the refugee camps to orphanages? How did
an orphan become an adoptee? What circumstances compelled children to become
available for adoption? What were the motivations of people or foster parents to
adopt orphans? What were the responses of society towards them and were they
accepted into mainstream life? What role did the state and orphanages play in
fostering orphans and facilitating adoption? By attempting to answer these ques-
tions, this essay contributes to our understanding of the transitional nation-state in
Pakistan.
This documentation relies on archival material such as police reports about
abductions, official documents on the whereabouts of missing women and chil-
dren, assembly debates on the conditions of victims and diaries of relief workers in
refugee camps. These are supplemented by the Haldia Porter Papers, housed at the
Presbyterian Historical Society Archive, Philadelphia (PHSA) and the Katharine
Cox Papers, housed at the Church Mission Society Archive, University of
Birmingham (CMSA). Porter and Cox were actively involved in the nursing of
refugee children in India and Pakistan. These documents show that mixed motives
for adoption coalesced with the humanitarian actions to rescue unaccompanied
infants. They also reveal the significance of orphanages and their role in fostering
as having provided the conditions that played a part in shaping Pakistan’s charitable
2
  Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Bhasin and Menon, Borders and Boundaries; Major, ‘The Chief
Sufferers’; Low and Brasted, Freedom, Trauma, Continuities.
3
  Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 125.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 3

system, as well as forming the basis of a debate on the minors’ well-being and
rights with the introduction of the Punjab Children Act in 1952.
The limitation of sources has previously prevented historians from exploring
these important areas. Despite many women and children being affected by the
traumatic experiences of abduction, rape and sexual molestation, the national his-
torical narrative either erases these painful memories or subsumes them within the
rhetoric of sacrifice for the nation. Such a statist and nationalist approach towards
the violent events of the Partition has overshadowed and suppressed the voices of
those countless men, women and children who suffered and lived through the
traumatic events that unfolded in 1947. Information about what happened to
orphans after they were adopted is virtually absent from the existing scholarship.
By studying children, we gain valuable insights into the situations in which they
lived and the formation of social realities. The circumstances of children point to
a far messier scenario and challenge an important convention in the historiogra-
phy of the Partition. They foreground Zamindar’s notions about ‘Partition effects’
where histories continue to shape people’s contemporary predicaments beyond
1947.4 This exploration, therefore, argues that it is in the lives and experiences of
the ‘children of the Partition’ that we see the durable legacies of the Partition—
legacies that live on long after the actual moment. This is also an exceptional
example of society coming together through charitable organisations, rather than
the state helping the vulnerable. Thus, this is not all about the state response to the
circumstances of the Partition’s children; this article argues that it is rather about
how the fabric of societal faith remains intact somehow through this traumatic
period.
Children as victims of mass violence are difficult to study within the standard
frames of historical analysis, as it is not easy to recover their experiences ‘as
children’.5 Urvashi Butalia has argued that accounts of children could be accept-
able as autobiography, but not necessarily as history. ‘No history of Partition that
I have seen so far has had anything to say about children. This is not surprising: as
subjects of history children are difficult to deal with’.6 While official records
could impose constraints and limitations in a historical study of children, literary
work has by contrast profoundly expressed the traumatic experiences and psycho-
logical problems faced by women and children during the Partition.7 At another
level, research strategies developed within the wider historiography and theoreti-
cal context of the impact of mass violence, forced migration and resettlement of
juveniles are all helpful starting points for addressing issues of method in a

4
  Zamindar, The Long Partition, p. 238.
5
  See Das, ‘National Honour as Practical Kinship’, pp. 212–32; Benigno, ‘Mother and the Child’,
pp. 1–25; Mehra, ‘The Birth Pangs of a Divided Nation’, pp. 1247–52.
6
  Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 197.
7
  Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man; Bhisham, ‘Pali’; Pokhriyal, ‘Children as Victims of Partition’; Jalal,
The Pity of Partition.

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historical study of children.8 Tara Zahra notes the difficulties inherent in attempt-
ing to mend the social dislocation caused by the Second World War. She has
highlighted the implications and consequences for children in the post-war period
in Europe, both in terms of how nations interacted with each other and how
psychologists understood the impact of war on children.9 What were the social
implications and consequences for the Partition’s children? This question has both
conceptual and methodological dimensions. Before addressing this, we need to
look at the circumstances of orphaning and abandonment, and then at some of the
ways that these children were adopted before they ended up in the newly estab-
lished ‘homes’.10

Children as Victims of the Partition Violence

How many children were orphaned or abandoned after their parents were killed in
1947? What were their genders, ages and localities? Documents from government
and missionary archives show that many orphans died in the refugee camps due to
malnutrition and disease, while some were quickly adopted by individual families.
Infants were left at new state-run ‘homes’ and were then transferred to desirable
adoptive parents. Others were rescued and looked after by Christian missionaries
and Muslim welfare trusts. Yet many, under the garb of adoption, ended up instead
as ‘domestic servants in the hands of wealthy people’.11 There were many others
who took to the streets to beg, or became prostitutes. Such situations were mainly
seen as a ‘disgrace to [the] new nation’.12 It is certainly a hidden part of the social
implications of the Partition. This exploration seeks to fill the huge temporal and
structural gaps that exist in our understanding of the new nation-state’s provisions
to orphaned children. They were called ‘unaccompanied children’, ‘orphaned chil-
dren’, ‘abandoned children’, and ‘missing children’, among other things. Official
figures from the National Documentation Centre, Islamabad, point to many aban-
doned, orphaned and missing children, although these figures are inexact and, in
all probability, downplay the scale of this tragedy. According to the Punjab Police
Chief at the time, over 100,000 abducted women and children were found to be
‘missing’ in the province, either orphaned or abandoned. A confidential memo of
the Pakistan Home Ministry titled ‘Recovery of Abducted Women, Children and

8
  See for example, Zahra, The Lost Children; Lifton and Fox, Children of Vietnam; Plum, ‘Orphans
in the Family’, pp. 186–208; Flath and Smith, Beyond Suffering; Dasberg, ‘Adult Child Survivor
Syndrome’, pp. 13–26; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Das, ‘Voices of Children’; Kleinman, Das and
Lock, Social Suffering.
9
  Zahra, The Lost Children, p. 22.
10
  On diverse themes and conceptions of ‘home’, see Blunt and Dowling, Home.
11
  See for example the proceedings on the Punjab Children Act 1952 in Punjab Legislative Assembly
Debates (PLAD), from 9 to 12 December 1952), pp. 152, 169, 185–86, Punjab Secretariat Archives
(henceforth PSA), Lahore.
12
  Ibid., p. 160.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 5

Converts’ stated that ‘as the movement of refugees continued over a period of
weeks and months, it became increasingly clear that large numbers of women and
children have been left behind on either side’.13
‘Large-scale abduction’, ‘Thousands of children in danger’ and ‘Molestation
playing havoc’ were typical headlines in some of the newspapers of those times.14
The Zamindar, an Urdu paper in Lahore, carried a chilling report on an attack on
a refugee train on 23 September 1947: ‘The sword-slashed bodies of 62 children,
29 women and 30 men were removed from a Moslem refugee train when it arrived
in Pakistan from Delhi.’15 Children’s circumstances also varied considerably.
Many were abandoned while migrating. In one instance, a terrified young woman
left her child on the roadside when told by the driver of a bus full of Muslims that
there was space for only one person.16 Katherine Cox—a British missionary
worker—provides a rich and previously untapped source containing information
about the conditions of children in 1947. Representing the UK Church Mission
Society, she served as a volunteer nurse in the Amritsar refugee camps and hospi-
tals. She visited Amritsar’s St Catherine’s Hospital on 22 September 1947 and
wrote in her diary log that day that ‘most of the children had been found beside
their murdered mothers and some were injured themselves with cuts … some
died, many who recurved (sic) did not know where to go ….’17
Evidently, child survivors had varying experiences. Some were able to reunite
with their families, but others ended up in the refugee camps and orphanages.
Haldia Porter provides perhaps the most detailed surviving account of the refugee
children’s experience in the city of Kasur, where many of them arrived from the
Sikh princely states of Patiala and Faridkot.18 Porter, who served as a relief worker
for the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, noted in her diary on 12
September 1947: ‘The children distressed me most … so many of them were
absolutely alone, [for] all their folks had been killed and the children themselves
were wounded.’19 In another diary log, a few days later, she wrote that ‘several
little girls were badly wounded and we had to carry them to the dressing room
each time. They had no one with them’. Most of them were between four and
eleven, but some were newborn babies. Malnutrition and mortality among chil-
dren rose as they did not receive mother’s milk. No amount of medicine or special

13
  ‘Recovery of Abducted Women, Children and Converts’, File no. 36, 128/CF/48, National
Documentation Centre (henceforth NDC), Islamabad, pp. 16–23.
14
  ‘Problems of Abducted Women and Children’, Zamindar (Lahore), 25 September 1947, p. 2.
15
  Zamindar (Lahore), 23 September 1947, p. 3.
16
  Khan, The Nation That Lost Its Soul, pp. 184–86.
17
  Katharine Cox Papers, ‘Journal of Partition’, CMS/ACC532 F2, Church Mission Society Archive
(henceforth CMS), University of Birmingham, p. 13.
18
  For the background of violence in the region, see Copland, ‘The Master and the Maharajas’, pp.
657–703.
19
  Haldia Porter Papers, ‘Hanfia High School, Kasur’, Record Group 415, Presbyterian Historical
Society Archive henceforth (PHSA), pp. 23–24.

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diets could restore their health. On the night of 17 September, Porter poignantly
recorded that another two infants died of starvation in the camp. Their mothers’
breast milk had dried up and there was not enough milk in the centre that night to
feed them. In the instance of a peasant woman lying with two kids in a cot, Porter
wrote as follows:

Her one child got cholera and other whole night cried for milk. Her own milk dried up
and she went all around the camp to find milk; but she could not. In the morning, a nurse
came to her and asked what can I do for you this morning? She said bitterly, ‘Bury my
child’. It hurt me that we had to wait a couple of hours for the truck to come and that
they had only one bed and nowhere else to lay the body.20

The orphaned infants were particularly vulnerable. The mothers who had miscarried
or had seen their babies die were requested by the Kasur refugee camp committee
to feed the motherless infants in order to save their lives. Some were so agonised
that they simply refused. One of the most poignant cases described by Porter is of
three women who refused to feed the motherless babies:

I found two little babies with no mothers. No one knew anything about them. I remembered
three women who were in pain because they were not able to feed their babies who had
died. I asked each woman in turn if she would feed a motherless child, but they all said,
‘it is not mine’. I was so cross I could hardly speak decently to them after that, though
one of them had her arm cut off at the shoulder.21

The Kasur camp was by no means an exceptional case. A number of minors were
living in different refugee camps on rations. Local newspapers highlighted their
woeful plight. For example, a Pakistan Times journalist, after visiting one of
the four camps in Lyallpur along with the deputy commissioner of the district,
reported: ‘I was informed that the local “Muslim Orphaned Authorities” had not
accepted one orphan to their institution although there were plenty of [them] all
over the camps without any one to look after them.’22 The reporter also spotlighted
refugees’ complaints against the local Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam. One of them
was that while the organisation had grabbed 28 abandoned cows of Sikh landlords
who had migrated to India, it had not provided even a single drop of milk to the
under-nourished refugee children at the camps.
Older children in the camps were hardly less vulnerable than the infants,
because of the continued threat of outbreaks of cholera. The situation improved,
according to Porter’s account, in late September when vaccines were sent from
France. But there was a growing concern about both the abduction and kidnap-
ping of unattended children in the camps.

20
  Ibid.
21
  Ibid.
22
  Pakistan Times (Lahore), 24 December 1947, p. 3.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 7

Abduction and Recovery

Porter’s account certainly corroborates the emerging picture of the gendered vio-
lence of the Partition, and of women and children being the ‘chief sufferers’ of
violence. It is clear from her diary that the majority of those in the Kasur camp
were older women and children. ‘There were almost no young girls in the group’,
Porter writes, ‘because they had all been abducted ….’23 Others, after recovery, set
out to locate missing family members. ‘Group after group poured out their stories
and the names of their daughters’, Porter noted in her diary on 18 September, ‘and
all I could say was, “go and report to the police station when you leave this place.
They will do what they can”’.24
Porter gives a description of heart-rending scenes of separation where women
would ask questions about their child’s future to which there were no answers.
The families had registered complaints about missing relatives—particularly
missing girls—to the local police. By the second week of September 1947, the
police record revealed that the Muslim refugees reaching Kasur from the Sikh
Princely State of Faridkot had reported the abduction of 600 girls aged between
13 and 20.25 As of 28 November 1947, according to one police report, 44 Muslim
girls and 22 children were recovered and handed over to the authorities in Kasur.26
The recovered people, sometimes termed ‘unattended persons’, were sent to and
raised in orphanages, oblivious of the whereabouts of their parents and siblings.
Refugee children sparked moral outrage, while they fitted awkwardly into the
programme of state‑making. They became the focus of a greater anxiety and
alarm for a private cause of family grief as well as on the part of public who
viewed them as a physical loss to the nation. Evidence for the latter is found in
letters to newspaper editors. One such missive was sent by a lawyer from Lyallpur
to the editor of the Pakistan Times on 5 November 1947:

On account of the disturbances in East Punjab and forced migration to the West, thou-
sands of children, aged between seven and twelve years old have lost their parents.
If the Pakistan government takes the view that these children are valuable assets of
the state, it should put them in military schools, where they may be educated to the
middle standard and given military training. Thus cared, for they can prove useful
citizens of the new State.27

23
  Haldia Porter Papers, Record Group 415, PHSA.
24
  Ibid.
25
  Punjab Police Special Branch Transcripts Week Ending 13 September 1947, Para 123, p. Roberts
Club Archive (henceforth RCA), Lahore, p. 377.
26
  ‘Abducted Persons’, File no. b50; 20/CF/49, NDC. In 1948, official statistics on the recovery of
‘abducted persons’ revealed that out of all 6,000 ‘rescued Muslim women’ recovered from India, 1,400
were from the princely states of Patiala and Faridkot.
27
  ‘Refugee Children’ (Letter to the editor), Pakistan Times (Lahore), 5 November 1947, p. 4.

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Figure 1. An Advertisement in Nawa-e-waqt for Warishon ki Talash (Search

for the Heirs)

Source: Nawa-i-Waqt (Lahore).28

The anguish caused by separation led the wealthy and literate refugees to
place advertisements in local papers in the hope of tracing missing relatives. In
addition to the well-known ‘Refugee Corner’ in the Pakistan Times, the Urdu
paper Nawa-i-Waqt ran a regular column entitled Talash-Ghumshada (Search
for the Missing) and Warishon ki Talash (Search for the Heirs) for several
months in 1947–48 (see Figure 1). These have an unmistakable gender bias,
especially in the Urdu press, with few advertisements being about daughters.
This reflects the fact that families did not want to publicise missing girls in the
public domain, in order to uphold their izzat (honour) within the community.
This is the backdrop—of preservation of purity of the population—to what
Veena Das has deftly theorised to be the emergence of ‘a masculine nation’ in
the construction of the notion of national honour.29 As we have seen, in the case
of male children, there was a repeated demand that the state take responsibility
for their well-being, mainly seeing them as ‘mujahid’ (freedom fighters) and
‘valuable assets’ for the nation-state. Many families, especially those that were
well-off, individually approached relief agencies such as the Red Cross as well

28
  Nawa-i-Waqt (Lahore), 5 February 1948.
29
  Das, Life and Words, pp. 18–30.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 9

as Christian missionaries for help in tracing their loved ones, both because they
operated freely in both India and Pakistan and because they would not publicise
sensitive family matters.
Children were at the symbolic heart of efforts for the nation-building process
in the aftermath of the Partition and Independence. There was extensive local
press coverage and regular public debates relating to the plight of children. The
Pakistani government set out to rescue them with widely varying understandings
of who belonged in the category of ‘destitute person’ and who was more obvi-
ously orphaned, discarded or otherwise separated from their parents. To show
their determination, the newly installed Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan,
Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, issued a joint statement on 3 September
1947, calling on all communities to end the atrocities and warning the perpetrators
that ‘bands caught in the act of committing crimes [such as] the abduction of
women and children will be shot on sight’. An Inter-Dominion Conference was
held at Lahore on 6 December and both governments agreed ‘to recover and
restore the abducted women and children within the shortest time period possi-
ble’. By the following year, over 17,000 ‘abducted persons’ had been recovered:
India returned 12,000 persons to Pakistan, while Pakistan returned 5,010
persons.30
Both governments knew this recovery was a fraction of the actual figure and as
such, they agreed to work together on the recovery project. The week commenc-
ing on 20 February 1948 was observed as ‘Restore Abducted Women and Children
Week’.31 In the following months, the two governments continued their efforts for
the ‘recovery and restoration of abducted persons’ by agreeing on certain broad
definitions of the term ‘abducted person’ as

a male child under the age of sixteen, or a female of whatever age, who is, or immedi-
ately before the first day of March 1947, was a Muslim and who, on or after that day,
has become separated from his or her family and is found to be living with or under the
control of a non-Muslim individual or family, and in the latter case includes a child born
to any such female after the said date.32

In 1957, when the governments officially stopped the recovery process, the Pakistan
Ministry of Home Affairs issued a booklet called ‘Recovery and Restoration of
Abducted Persons’ giving details of these recovery operations during the preced-
ing decade (Table 1).33

30
  ‘Official Statistics on the Recovery of “Abducted Persons”’, File no. b50; 20/CF/49, NDC, p. 5.
31
  ‘Restore Abducted Women and Children Week’, Pakistan Times (Lahore), 20 February 1948, p. 6.
32
  ‘Official Statistics on the Recovery of “Abducted Persons”’, File no. b50; 20/CF/49, NDC, p. 1.
33
  ‘Recovery and Restoration of Abducted Persons’, File no. b5; 20/CF/49, NDC, p. 3.

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Table 1. ‘Abducted Persons’ Recovered and Returned Between India and

Pakistan in the 1950s
Recovered ‘abducted women’ from India and Pakistan 35,961
Recovered ‘children’ from India and Pakistan 3,343
Pakistan returned women to India 10,100
India returned women to Pakistan 25,860
Pakistan returned children to India 405
India returned children to Pakistan 415
Source: ‘Recovery and Restoration of Abducted Persons’.34

In addition, Pakistan’s correspondence to India listed 4,500 ‘recovered per-

sons’ that turned out to be ‘non-abduction cases’ and another 253 as dead. Apart
from the return of 25,860 ‘abducted persons’ from India, Pakistan claimed that
50,000 unrecovered Muslim women and children still remained in India.35 The
‘Recovery and Restoration of Abducted Persons’ booklet also drew attention to
the problem of ‘post-abduction children’, who were left behind by their mothers
when they were repatriated to India. As on 30 September 1957, these children
were accounted to be 1,848 in Pakistan and 550 in India. Many mothers left
their children behind to escape embarrassment, or for fear that their relatives
would not accept their ‘illegal children’. Others left their children with their
abductors in the hope that they would get an inheritance in property as well as a
chance to return. While the task of restoring the women to where they had ‘orig-
inally’ belonged before 1 March 1947 was fulfilled, the dilemma of how their
‘mixed-blood’ offspring—sometimes called ‘illegal’ children of two religions—
would be accepted. The question of how the cut-off period was defined arose in
this context.
Urvashi Butalia asserts that while women could be returned to the fold of
religion and the household or possibly ‘purified’, the ‘post-abduction chil-
dren’—fathered by men of different religions—were often thought of as sym-
bolising the humiliation and shame imposed on them by their society and were
thus undesirable and not as easily assimilated.36 The Indian government passed
an ordinance to the effect that the Hindu women whose babies were born in
Pakistan after the Partition would have to leave them behind, but Muslim
women whose children were born in India could keep them. Although many
efforts were made to rehabilitate the children, in both cases the children were of
‘mixed blood’, and hence it was difficult to determine who would eventually be
the guardians of these children.37 In Pakistan, many of these children, whose
ages ranged from infant to 13 years old, were placed in different state and

34
  Ibid.
35
  Ibid.
36
  Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, pp. 213–14.
37
  Bhasin and Menon, Borders and Boundaries, pp. 145–46.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 11

private ‘homes’ and were divided into infant and adolescent groups. Some lived
with their mothers—who were not acceptable to their relatives and society
because of these children being of ‘mixed blood’—in these homes. The mortal-
ity rate of these infants was high, and they were likely to die because of sickness
and malnutrition prior to being adopted or billeted in the orphanages. Many
efforts were made to rehabilitate the children, yet the scale of destitution and its
accompanying issues proved to be a great hurdle. Only a few infants made a
rapid transition into adoption.

Adoption and Its Social Implications

At a time when there was no law in Pakistan on the subject of adoption, it was
seen as a humanitarian gesture that would help build the new nation, and people
were encouraged to adopt the ‘unaccompanied children’. Sometimes, the govern-
ments put out advertisements in newspapers and on Pakistan Radio asking for
offers of adoption. Accounts of relief workers suggest that the fear of disease
played a great role in parents giving up their children for adoption. Porter’s
account shows the relinquishment of minors ‘on the fear’ that the newborns
would catch cholera from their mothers. She justified children’s and infants’
adoption as ‘the best way to save their lives’ and tells the poignant story of this
cholera-afflicted woman:

I took one poor soul along [to the hospital] one day because she wanted to find out what
had happened to her child. It had been born in the women’s hospital and had to be left
there when the mother developed cholera and was sent to the cholera camp. She made
one of the women promise not to give her child away but this woman had come from
Lahore and one day all the Lahore women helpers returned to the city. Then someone
else, thinking the mother had died, gave the child to people waiting to adopt a baby.
My friend, the assistant, spent much precious time trying to find the child again. I never
heard whether she succeeded in the end or not.38

This was not an isolated episode. ‘Every day we had women asking to adopt babies’,
Porter observed. In the camp, like in the hospital, the children were given away for
adoption to men and women who were regarded as ‘desirable’ guardians. Appalling
stories of the distribution of the infants added to the torment of refugee parents
whose children were either missing or being kept in the hospital for care. Its scale
at the Kasur camp appears quite extraordinary. It is certainly a hidden part of the
Partition story. If it was repeated across Punjab, it would indicate a social conse-
quence of the 1947 uprooting that possessed a wide significance. Little academic
work exists on the adoption of children at the time of the Partition. Similarly, little
has been written about the kidnapping of minors in the refugee camps. Porter’s

38
  Haldia Porter Papers, Record Group 415, PHSA.

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memoir, however, provides a number of cases. One of the most shocking instances
was an unfortunate mother

who lost her child along the way, found it at the hospital, put it down on the path to get
some water from the pump and returned to find it gone …. She was nearly frantic. When
we inquired, [one] woman, she said she had seen a woman come in the gate and pick up
the child and go off with it. As far as I know she never found it again.39

Adoption of children meant different things to different people. Curiously, a child’s

gender mattered, sometimes greatly, as most foster parents preferred to adopt boys.
A rare but shameful aspect regarding adoption was that people, instead of having
compassion for the children, were in search of domestic help or had other mate-
rial motives. Many were handed over to strangers and were pushed to the brink
of physical and emotional collapse. In other cases, the children were adopted by
distant blood relatives who might never have met them, in some cases not for care
and love, but for the temptation of their property and assets. Evidence of this crops
up frequently in the evacuee property archives. A memo circulated by the West
Punjab Ministry of Rehabilitation for Refugees contains evidence of the latter:

It came to [my] notice that the relatives or guardians of the widows and orphans, whose
husbands or parents were the victims of disturbances at the time of Partition, were trying
to register their claims on their own names solely…. [Earlier] the Rehabilitation Com-
missioner in a memo…directed to the land rehabilitation officers that the widows and
orphans…should be allowed to register their own claims…on their own names. They
should be allowed to register their claims in the congested districts (the canal colonies)
provided their relatives or guardians had already secured allotments there under the
Rehabilitation Scheme.40

Children’s responses to orphanages and adoption are as little known as the guard-
ian’s motives. Porter recalls that a small girl in the Kasur camp insisted that she
would prefer to live with someone from her home village than move to an orphan-
age in Lahore. ‘Noora was taken, by a camp helper, from bed to bed through the
whole place to see if she could find someone from her village at least, and finally
a woman had promised to look after her.’ 41 Pressure upon the government, too,
came from the refugee families who had carried the orphaned children when their
parents were killed at the uprooting, and now they did not want them to become
a permanent liability. They approached both the authorities and charitable bodies,
sometimes going against the children’s wishes. ‘Every day, refugee families
come to me and ask what they should do with these children’, Khadija Begum—a

39
  Ibid.
40
  ‘Punjab Rural Settlement Scheme Collections’, File no. E.33, Part 5, 19 September 1951, pp.
34–35, PSA.
41
  Haldia Porter Papers, Record Group 415, PHSA.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 13

member of the Punjab legislative assembly and the president of the Children’s Aid
Society—explained to the House debating the Punjab Children Act:

I know families who fetched between 5 and 6 children of their neighbours’, who had
been killed during the disturbances in 1947 …. Many do not want them to foster … some
simply could not afford to keep in their households … some gave them away to strangers
… others abandoned them in the roads ….42

She did adopt three orphans, but she also started her own adoption agency, by the
name of Children Aid Society, so that other couples could adopt.
Sometimes, children had to be sent to the orphanages against their will. Little
has been written about what happened to the child after he or she got adopted. The
breakdown of the family was more than a social problem. Many children experi-
enced a total collapse of the values and hierarchies that had traditionally struc-
tured family life. Adopted boys were often raised as the family’s children; girls
were used for ‘other services’ such as domestic help.43 Religion, too, was a factor
in adoption. Some scholars have claimed that Muslims abducted and adopted
more Hindu and Sikh boys, believing that they were more intelligent, albeit physi-
cally weaker, than Muslim boys.44 Often assumptions are made that many children
ended up in brothels and in the street, begging.45 Children’s age, gender and class
mattered as well. In West Punjab, some fortunate children were adopted; many
grew up in orphanages or homes for the destitute, while some ended up on the
streets, or in the hands of ‘bad characters’. This plight of refugee children was first
raised in the West Punjab Assembly. Malik Qadir Bakhsh, a member of the Punjab
legislative assembly, was concerned that ‘some bad people are exploiting the refu-
gee children in the disguise of adoption … children are being sexually abused ….
This is a stigma on the face of our nation …. I would plea to the government these
children need to be protected immediately.’46
There were, of course, frantic demands that the government take the responsi-
bility of women and children upon itself to build the new nation. Begum Salma
Tasadduq Hussain, in her capacity as a member of the West Punjab Assembly and
a prominent activist of the Pakistani freedom movement, raised concerns of ‘refu-
gee children’ in the West Punjab Assembly on 25 March 1948.

Mr Speaker …. If you go out in the streets of cities, you can see small innocent refugee
children who are fighting for their lives because of starvation. There is not any arrangement

42
  PLAD, 9 December 1952, Part 2 (III), p. 163, PSA.
43
  Ibid., pp. 250, 259, 261.
44
  Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 250; also see Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.
45
  For example, see Khan, The Great Partition, p. 163; Banerjee, ‘Displacement within Displacement’,
pp. 199–220; Chakrabarty, The Marginal Men. For the literary presentation, see Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-
Man; Bhisham, ‘Pali’.
46
  See for example, PLAD, 9 December 1952, Part 1 (III), p. 160, PSA.

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14 / Ilyas Chattha

by the government to feed them …. [The boys] would join street gangs and survive on
theft and extortion. Girls would almost certainly become prostitutes …. I fear that these
orphans, to whom we hope to become mujahid to serve this country, would be ended up
as street beggars because of the government’s insufficiency and negligence.47

Four years later, the number of both beggars as well as prostitutes in the streets
of Lahore had indeed increased, and in particular the women who had become
prostitutes were seen not only as victims of economic compulsions but also as
dishonouring the entire community. Khadija Begum expressed her concern about
this social paranoia during a session of the Punjab Assembly on 11 March 1952:

As members of this House are aware of the tragic consequences of the 1947 bloodshed,
a large number of our sisters and daughters became widows, and many children became
orphans …. While the government set up homes for them, they were neither enough
nor satisfactory. As a result, we can see how many orphans are on the streets of cities
and places [for begging and prostitution] …. Mr Speaker, the plight of these destitute
orphans is deplorable and I fear this would corrosively affect the nation’s social values
and morality if the government does not take serious action in this regard immediately.48

Such was the case in India as well, where many refugee children were picked up
and sold into prostitution and begging. From time to time, the Indian government
expressed its concern about the health and education of refugee children who
were rendered homeless following the Partition. In 1954, Rameswari Nehru, the
President of the All-India Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, demanded
the abolition of brothels all over India by law. She asserted that the number of
brothels had increased in the wake of the Partition:

Fifty per cent of the new recruits in the ranks of the prostitutes were from helpless refu-
gees. Prostitution was a festering sore; it could be checked only if there was co-operation
between the Government and the public. That immoral traffic was a source of income to
the police, hence if it was to be eradicated the higher authorities must be more vigilant.49

It would be wrong, however, to assume that all the unaccompanied children ended
up in prostitution. We do not know the exact number of children who ended up
this way, or what gender or age they were. It is equally challenging to discern how
many children who ended up living in care homes subsequently returned to live
with a surviving parent after the Partition. Archival materials do reveal to some
extent how these children were cared for, from their early transit to the refugee
camps to their eventual return to orphanages. They also hint at the growth of an
ambitious humanitarian project in the early years of Pakistan’s history, setting up

47
  PLAD, 25 March 1948, Part 3 (I), pp. 338–39, PSA.
48
  PLAD, 11 March 1952, Part 1 (III), pp. 616–17, PSA.
49
  ‘Immoral Traffic in Women’, Times of India (Bombay), 17 April 1954, p. 12.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 15

orphanages and shelter homes to feed, clothe and protect women and children
recovered from their abductors and disowned by their families as part of a state-
making process where women embodied national honour and children exemplified
the future of the nation.

Orphanages and Charitable Institutions

In the post-Partition nation-building project, the government of Pakistan began

to gather up the refugee children from the camps, hospitals and streets, placing
them in state-run homes. In this context, the new nation-state began to build
orphanages. Hundreds of abandoned ‘destitute persons’—as the state collec-
tively described them at the time—were provided shelter in the four newly set
up homes in Lahore:
1. Unaccompanied minors were housed in the Milli Darul Atfal (Children’s
House) in the Mazong’s Bahawalpur House.
2. Widows and ‘unattached women’ were housed in the Darul Aman Zanaana
(Shelter Home).
3. The ‘rescued’ Muslim women were housed in the Darul Mahajirat (Refugee
Women’s House) in a wing of the Mental Hospital at Jail Road.
4. Hindu and Sikh ‘recovered’ women and children were assembled in the
famous Ganga Ram House.
The ‘destitute persons’ such as widows, ‘deserted women’ and ‘unmarried women’
who had lost all their family were regarded as the state’s responsibility.50 Nonethe-
less, the authorities did not want them to become permanently dependent and strove
instead to enable ‘productive’ economic activity for them. In the case of single
women, the state would even go so far as to arrange their marriages and set up
adoptions in the case of minors. In one case, 15 March 1948 was advertised in the
national press for such arrangements of the marriages and adoptions.51 Charitable
institutions tried to present women as ‘marriageable’ for elderly men or make them
self-reliant by teaching them sewing and cooking. Charitable institutions were
funded entirely by the government, and thus very often they decided the future
of their residents. In each case of dowry, an amount of �500 was allocated by the
government.
When there was no adoption, most of the infants were taken by welfare organi-
sations and charities, who looked after their needs and provided cradles, clothes,
milk and baby food. This meant that there was a contest among the various agen-
cies over the adoption of children. Children from the camps were shifted to the
newly formed ‘Children’s Centre’ in different cities of Punjab. Initially, the

50
  ‘Establishment of Orphanage and Women’s Home in Punjab’, File E.33, Part 1, 19 September
1951, PSA.
51
  PLAD, 24 March 1948, p. 315.

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16 / Ilyas Chattha

Pakistan Relief and Rehabilitation Ministry set up a wing for children in the FC
College, Lahore. The Children’s Centres were then extended to the vacated Hindu
and Sikh educational institutions and religious sites, converting them into ‘homes’
and ‘refugee schools’ where children were not only provided recreational activi-
ties to divert their minds from brooding over the separation from their mothers but
were also trained in cooking, sewing and doing laundry.52
Apart from the ‘homes’ opened by the state, children were looked after by
welfare organisations and charities. For example, in the city of Lyallpur, the local
Anjuman-e-Himayat-e-Islam was at the forefront of taking care of refugee orphans
in its Yateem Khana (orphanage). In Lahore, charitable institutions such as the
Poor Children’s Home, Strangers’ Home, Dar-ul-Niswan, Beyond House and Mrs
Inglis’ Home spared many refugee children from the unsavoury prospect of wan-
dering the streets begging for food or, even worse, committing crimes.53 These
agencies were in direct competition with each other, relying heavily on govern-
ment funds to finance children and other activities. While these charities raised
donations themselves, a collaboration with the state was also maintained at this
stage. This was an important predecessor to the emergence of modern and robust
charitable institutions in Pakistan, in general, and the Lahore Charitable
Association, in particular.
In other places, where the Christian missionary activities had dominated, some
refugee orphaned children were taken in by the ‘Mission Centres’. A prime exam-
ple was Narowal’s Mission Girl School that took in six orphaned minors from one
of the refugee camps in town.54 The Lahore Catholic Church’s charitable wing in
the locality of Garhi Shahu, called Gosha-e-Aman, sheltered some orphaned chil-
dren and ‘unattended persons’. Counsellors in these orphanages did not attempt
any kind of psychological rehabilitation. They had more immediate concerns such
as the lack of beds and food. Their priority was to make the orphanage habitable.
While child welfare activists may have been confident about the well-being of the
orphans, how did the children respond to the orphanages such as the Poor
Children’s Home, Strangers’ Home, Dar-ul-Niswan, Yateem Khana, Beyond
House and Mrs Inglis’ Home?
The relief workers who worked closely with children questioned how these
children could be rendered normal and what would the future possibly hold for
them? Porter provides a glimpse into the circumstances of the children who were
accommodated in the FC College. According to Porter, most of the children in the
centre who were from the Sikh princely states shifted from the Kasur refugee
camps, and they were ‘now healthy and good looking’:

52
  They included Arya Putri Pathshala, Sarswati College, and D. A. V. High School.
53
  ‘Establishment of Orphanage and Women’s Home in Punjab’, File E.33, Part 1, 19 September
1951, PSA.
54
  ‘1947–48, Punjab’, CMS/ACC625Z, Typescripts Annual Reports, CMS Archive.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 17

When I got back to Lahore and went to the hospital that had been set up in a wing of our
brother college, the first ones I recognised were a number of orphans for whom we had
cared in Kasur. They saw me and came running, threw themselves on me and cried, ‘Our
Mother has come’. I wished I could adopt them all. They were such bright youngsters
and amazingly resilient. I wondered what the future would hold for them and the nation.55

Charitable institutions emerged out of the aftermath of the Partition. In 1957, when
the state efforts of the recovery project were being wrapped up, there were 28 reg-
istered orphanages in Lahore alone, receiving from the government one-tenth of
the expenditures reserved for orphans’ rehabilitation.56 Charity drove the earliest
founders. Some orphanages for children from lower social ranks slowly transformed
into large-scale charitable institutions. By the late 1950s, orphanages for children
could be found across the country, and the cost of care would be borne in some part
by governments, both central and provincial. A meeting of the Pakistani central
cabinet held in Karachi on 9 May 1950 considered the financial difficulties facing
the refugee homes in Punjab. It agreed to bear 33% of the annual expenditures
of the Ganga Ram Home and 10% of the Darul Mahajirat’s.57 Several charitable
institutions that joined the relief effort took up the task of setting up charitable
funds. In Lyallpur, the celebration of Independence Day in 1950 was used by the
British deputy commissioner R. A. F. Howroyd and the assistant deputy commis-
sioner Syed Masood Ahmed to launch a collection of a sum of �100,000 to build
a ‘Destitute House’. Its future establishment was hailed as ‘a significant chapter
in the lives of orphans’, where they ‘would be trained to earn their livelihood and
become useful citizens of Pakistan’. By October, the district authorities had col-
lected a sum of �60,000.
Another significant project for children was launched in Lyallpur by a
humanitarian organisation called the Killa Gift Fund Trust, which raised funds
for the orphaned refugee children with the main objective to provide security to
the vagrant children by teaching them some crafts.58 Similar institutions were
established elsewhere in the country. In the city of Sargodha, the vacated man-
sion of a Hindu businessman, Shesha Ram Bagh, was converted into ‘Orphans’
House’ for widows and orphans, and citizens were petitioned for donations and
the adoption of infants. Among the founding homes for children established in
Lahore, one of the first and most famous was the Milli Darul Atfal, which
housed ‘unattended refugee children’. Other important charitable organisations,
including Punjab Children Aid Society, Hospital Welfare Society and Voluntary
Poor Fund, worked in collaboration with the government’s wing of the

55
  Haldia Porter Papers, Record Group 415, PHSA.
56
  ‘Recovery and Restoration of Abducted Persons’, File no. b57; 20/CF/49, NDC, p. 3.
57
  ‘Establishment of Orphanage and Women’s Home in the Punjab’, File E.33, Part 1, 19 September
1951, PSA.
58
  Ibid.

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‘Rehabilitation of Abandoned Children’ to mitigate the problems of children to

finance the orphans. While some orphanages evolved into charitable institu-
tions, others became schools or convents. In February 1954, the city of Lahore
still had no fewer than eight schools that housed hundreds of refugee women
and orphans.59 By and large, the state pushed the children quickly towards adult-
hood. It frequently forced them out of the care houses and into work and mar-
riage. Most women married men older than themselves. In all cases, the criteria
for potential husbands were their jobs and employment, rather than age, class
and locality, although in a majority of the cases, the men were from an urban
background. Some administrators in orphanages complained about the financial
implications of dowry. Others recorded that several women were not eager to
get remarried, partly because of concerns that their new husbands would not
accept their ‘illegal child’. Some women longed to go back to their ‘abductor
husbands’ in India. Often, the state attempted to arrange remarriages of these
women. In December 1954, Begum Shah Nawaz, the Muslim League leader in
West Punjab, while addressing her audience during a visit to a care home in
Lahore, recalled that refugee abducted women had been ‘educated up to 6th
standard and … particularly trained in cooking, sewing and laundry’ and were
now ready to get married to ‘unmarried or widowers with no issues [who]
should be no more than 30 years of age’. 60
It is difficult to ascertain whether these state-sponsored schemes were able to
deal with the psychological and emotional trauma of the children and make them
into responsible citizens. Psychologists say that traumas inflicted on minors leave
deep scars, and children developing psychological problems were not able to live
in families.61 One can only guess at the burdens carried by some of the orphans for
the remainder of their lives.62 While documents can provide some insights into
state provisions and responses, they cannot shed light on the feelings of the
orphans themselves. The children found themselves in traumatic situations that
would affect the rest of their lives. However, missionary archives provide good
news of the successful reuniting of some families.

Family Reunions

Documents show some families reunited; however, many others were permanently
torn asunder by the Partition. Porter’s account provides examples of happy family
reunions. ‘See this is my son? Now our whole family is complete’, a happy Muslim

59
  PLAD, 22 February 1954, Part 4 (II) p. 55, PSA.
60
  Pakistan Times (Lahore), 10 December 1954.
61
  Williams, ‘The Psychosocial Consequences for Children of Mass Violence’, pp. 263–77; Georgiou,
‘War Trauma and Psychopathology in Bosnian Refugee Children’, pp. 84–90; Lifton and Fox, Children
of Vietnam; Engel, ‘Children and War’, pp. 71–90; Kakar, ‘The Inner World’.
62
  Kleinman, Das and Lock, Social Suffering.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 19

mother expressed her feelings to the person in charge of the camp. ‘Isn’t God good
to us? We don’t know how this boy found us. Isn’t it wonderful?’ Among other
cases, Porter describes a family reunion of a policeman with his lost child:

One afternoon a group of people came in with a little boy with them and a helper reported
to me that one of the women in [Hanfia school camp] knew the name of the child’s father
and he lived in the city [Kasur]. I went to talk to her and she told me that he was the
child of a policeman who had left his family across the border when his wife had gone
to visit her folks. All had been killed but this one child …. Within ten minutes the father
was there with his little son clinging to his neck.63

While these were happy homecomings, the majority of families could not trace
their missing loved ones and had to live with the trauma throughout their lives.
Hamid Mir, a celebrated journalist of Pakistan, recounted in one of his columns on
the 70th anniversary of Independence how his mother and khala (mother’s sister)
survived the Partition massacres by hiding themselves under dead bodies in 1947
and were later rescued. However, his grandmother and infant mamu (maternal
uncle) remained missing.

My mother and her sisters had been rescued by the Baloch Regiment in November 1947
from a road near Kathua full of dead bodies. They were sent to a refugee camp, where
my grandfather found them after a few weeks. He searched for his wife for many years.
At some point my grandfather even organised the exchange of a few kidnapped Hindu
women with kidnapped Muslim women, but Ghulam Fatima never returned…. I used
to accompany [my mother] to the many Sufi shrines where she devotedly prayed for the
return of her missing mother and brother. I inherited the pain for missing persons from
her…. When Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in 1988 my mother
asked me, ‘Can she do something that will help find my mother and brother?’ She never
lost hope…. Every year on Independence Day, my mother distributed food and money
to the poor. Independence was supposed to mean peace and harmony, but for my mother
the pain was never far away.64

Some families divided at the time of the Partition reunited after 70 years. Harbans
Kaur, at the age of 75, was reunited with her two sons Qaramat Ullah and Kudrat
Ullah, born of her first marriage to a Muslim man in 1947. The sons ‘cling to the
mother’, the Daily Times reported from Lahore, showing a photograph of the
woman flanked by her two sons. What has made Kaur’s story more tragic is that
she, born a Sikh in Sialkot, had converted to Islam after the Partition, married her
Muslim abductor and bore him two sons, but was declared an ‘abducted woman’
and repatriated to India in 1954. ‘When I returned to Pakistan two years ago as
a pilgrim at Punjab Sahib, I saw Jasi Singh of Lyallpur who helped to find my

63
  Haldia Porter Papers, Record Group 415, PHSA.
64
  Hamid Mir, ‘Missing Since 1947’, The News (Lahore), 15 August 2017, p. 5.

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sons’.65
In another similar scenario, one such emotional reunion took place in
Nankana Sahib recently. ‘Two Pakistani sisters were reunited with Sikh brother
71 years after losing him to partition’. The emotional reunion took place in
Gurdwara Janam Asthan in Nankana Sahib in Pakistan’s Punjab province on
Sunday. Sardar Bayanth Singh was separated from his family during the bloody
partition of India.66 Many splintered families did not know whether their mem-
bers or close relatives were alive or dead. Many families had no resources or
connections to search for them. However, it was not until the 50th anniversary
of Independence that any serious initiative was taken for the reunion of families
separated by the Partition. In 1997, the media group India Today started a pro-
ject to collect the ‘true life tales’ of families separated during the Partition,
building their separate lives across the India–Pakistan border and then finding
each other through laborious word-of-mouth missions and Pakistanis visiting
shrines and family in India.67 On 18 August of that year, the group searched for,
found and facilitated many reunions of families across the borders. One exam-
ple is the reunion of Mohinder Kaur, who was left behind in Sheikhupura at the
age of four. Her family had been divided at the time of the Partition and was
finally reunited in 1997.
The Pakistani media periodically covered the emotional reunion of the sepa-
rated families as well. For example, The Dawn in 2015 reported on the family
reunion of Ghulam Hussain, who at the age of only seven months had been
abandoned in India, when his parents along with their four sons and two daugh-
ters migrated to Pakistan in 1947. The family settled in Gujranwala (village
Maju Chak) along with their four sons and two daughters. A man who knew the
family of the separated boy told Salmat Hussain Gujjar of Maju Chak that their
lost brother Ghulam Hussain was living in India. The two brothers contacted
each other, and Ghulam Hussain made a journey to Gujranwala to meet his fam-
ily after 65 years. Speaking to the Pakistani media, Ghulam Hussain said that he
was born on 1 July 1947 and got separated from his family when he was only

65
  ‘Sikh Woman Meets Sons in Pak After 52 years’, Times of India (Bombay), 13 November 2006,
p. 18.
66
  According to a report in Express Tribune (Lahore) on 27 November 2018, the family used to reside
in undivided India’s Paracha village, which lies in the Gurdaspur district in the Indian Punjab. His
family, including his two sisters, Ulfat and Mairaj Bibi, migrated to Pakistan in 1947. He and another
sister, who had been lost, were left behind. The woman got in touch with her neighbours back in India
who eventually helped her track down. After 71 years, Bayant was finally able to meet with his family
in the city of Nankana Sahib.
67
  See India Today of 18 August 1997. The principal correspondent Ramesh Vinayak and the
photographer Saibal Das tracked down a few such families in India, and Associate Editor Harinder
Baweja and Chief Photographer Dilip Banerjee followed up in Pakistan. More recently, a girl kidnapped
in 1947 was connected to her family via YouTube. See also Khayyam Chohan’s YouTube channel,
‘Desi Infotainment’.

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 Partition’s Orphaned and Abandoned Children in Pakistan 21

seven months old. He was adopted by a family in Rajouri in Indian-held

Kashmir.68
The attempts to reunite children with their families are remarkable, although
only marginally successful. While the newspaper accounts provide some insights
into the emotional and tearful celebrations of the family reunions, they cannot
shed light on what these individuals lived through, how this experience affected
their sense of self, of their homeland and ethnicity and how they incorporated the
memory of abduction, abandonment and forced displacement into the fabric of
their adult lives. Many had no memory at all of their families of origin. Some had
acquired new names, religions, languages and national loyalties after the post-
1947 period. Some had no memory of their biological parents and had established
close bonds with their host parents or families, who had sometimes cared for them
well into their adult years. Much still remains to be learnt about the social implica-
tions of the Partition.

Conclusion

This exploration not only adds to the empirical knowledge about the Partition
and its legacies but also contributes to our understanding of intergenerational
traumas suffered by countless children and their continued impact on the collective
memory of the Pakistani and Indian nation-states. The academic literature on the
Partition has traditionally adopted a statist narrative of high politics to describe
the violence that took place in 1947. While recent academic interventions have
served well to humanise the historical narratives, there has been little attempt to
write micro-histories of those who suffered violence, trauma, and displacement
and continue to suffer from their afterlives. This essay hopes to make a significant
contribution to the Partition studies as it plugs the gap in the literature about the
lives and experiences of abducted women and children. Borrowing from and
extending the scope of Salman Rushdie’s neologism of Midnight’s Children, the
essay does not write the biography of the state but that of women and children
by using the state as a referential point, drawing upon fresh archival evidence
to chronicle the lives of thousands of women and children subjected to violence
during 1947. By foregrounding the categories of abducted women and children,
this study helps understand the postcolonial moment and the subsequent unfold-
ing of the nation-state as it organised relief efforts, rehabilitation programmes
and coordinated recovery operations.
The figure of the missing children as the nation’s future and that of the abducted
women as dishonouring the national body—and the recovery of both—was thus
central to the state-making project and the self-fashioning of the new states.
Resultantly, as this article shows through an extensive excavation of hitherto

68
  Dawn (Karachi), 9 December 2015.

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22 / Ilyas Chattha

unexplored archives, the Indian and Pakistani states, in their bureaucratic prac-
tices and social policies, expressed extreme discomfort and anxiety at the prospect
of missing women and orphaned children in enemy territories and their future as
productive citizens. Despite the scale of violence and displacement and the efforts
undertaken by the two states, the memory of these women and children—espe-
cially those who were recovered and put through several rehabilitation schemes—
has faded into oblivion. Such historical amnesia reflects what Butalia referred to
as the silence of the past as a form of strategy to cope with trauma, and what some
Partition historians have described as the long 1947 that continues to haunt the
nation-states and reverberate in the lived experiences of affected individuals, fam-
ilies and communities.
In many cases, the orphaned children of the Partition continue to search in
vain for any information about their families. In such cases, they are eager to
reach out to a global audience to share their stories. By advancing a better
understanding of the broader social implications of the 1947 events, this essay
has shown that the breakdown of the family system at the time of the Partition
was more than a social problem. Children experienced the total collapse of the
values and hierarchies that had traditionally structured family life in Punjab.
They became objects and instruments of extensive projects of social engineer-
ing, which often also entailed their forced adoption. The state concern with the
numbers of orphaned and abandoned children and its attendant social implica-
tions generated new charitable institutions, child-rearing methods, and social
welfare programmes in the immediate post-Partition period, as is evinced in the
1950 Pakistan legislation on ‘Establishment of Orphanage and Women’s Home
in Punjab’ and the Punjab Children Act 1952. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, some fundamental ideas about child trauma and the effect of vio-
lence on children were articulated in the impact of conflict.69 The psychological
impact of violence on the Partition’s children has received little attention. In
many ways, the state’s manner of dealing with the problem of abandoned and
orphaned children shaped Pakistan’s charitable aspect and how homes, orphan-
ages, and other institutions were formed or expanded in the aftermath of the
Partition. The institutions, which stem from collective concerns arising out of
the issues, were not only tools of social change but active and articulate social
agents, capable of making sense of children’s well-being, devising strategies of
coping and conducting their lives. In sum, children’s experiences have for too
long remained a hidden history of the Partition. While it might be historiograph-
ically reductive to study children within the standard frames of historical analy-
sis, it is in their lives that we see the durable legacies of the Partition—legacies
that live on long after the actual moment.

69
  Zahra, The Lost Children, p. ix; see also Clifford, Survivors.

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