Part III - Building Two States: Refugees & Resettlement

For many of the people in Punjab, reaching the other side of the border did not mean that the journey was over. It meant that one form of uncertainty had been replaced by another.

They had entered a country with the expectations of safety, but reality proved that they did not have homes, employment, land, or any certainty about the permanence of their displacement. Families carried keys to houses they could no longer reach, deeds to land now located in another country and the names of relatives they had left behind or lost along the way. Some still believed that the violence would subside and they would eventually return. Others had understood and accepted that the Punjab they had left behind was already becoming inaccessible.

India and Pakistan now faced a task for which neither had been prepared. Refugees needed immediate food, shelter and medical care, but survival was only the beginning. They also needed homes, livelihoods, schools, places of worship and some means of rebuilding the communities that had been scattered across the new border.

The governments responsible for this work were themselves only beginning to function. At the same moment that millions of people were being uprooted, the administration that had once governed Punjab was being divided between two provinces and two countries.

Arrival Without a Destination

Refugees entered East and West Punjab by train, road and foot. Some arrived as part of organised convoys, others reached the border in smaller groups after moving repeatedly between villages, temporary shelters and railway stations.

Their immediate needs were often overwhelming. Many had travelled for days or weeks with little food and extremely limited access to drinkable water. Some were injured or ill. Children had become separated from their parents, while elderly relatives had been lost along the journey. Families who had once owned farms, businesses or substantial homes could arrive carrying only the personal belongings that had survived the unrest, looting, and uncertainty of the journey.

Railway platforms and border towns became the first points of reception. Amritsar received trains and convoys from West Punjab, while Lahore became a central point for Muslims arriving from the east. Refugees were registered, given water and food where supplies were available, and then directed towards camps or onward transport.

But movement did not always proceed smoothly. Railway lines were damaged or overwhelmed, vehicles were scarce and roads remained dangerous. A refugee might reach one camp only to be moved again because it was overcrowded or because officials intended to resettle the family elsewhere.

Some people avoided camps altogether. They stayed with relatives, occupied vacant buildings or found space in gurdwaras, mosques, dharamshalas, schools and private homes. Religious organisations, local committees, volunteers and ordinary residents became an essential part of the relief effort, often providing food and shelter before formal government assistance reached an area.

Life Inside the Refugee Camps

Refugee camps appeared on either side of Punjab. Some were established in existing military grounds or public buildings. Others consisted of large tented settlements created on open land. Transit camps operated at places including Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Ambala, while Kurukshetra - a city in modern day Haryana, but previously within Punjab, developed into the largest refugee camp in India. At its height, it sheltered hundreds of thousands of people.
In Lahore, Walton - a cantonment area named after Military engineer Sir Cusach Walton, became one of the largest and most recognisable camps for Muslim refugees entering Pakistan.

The word camp could describe very different conditions. Some were carefully arranged into rows of tents with kitchens, medical stations and registration offices. Others were improvised settlements in which refugees constructed shelters from fabric, branches, salvaged timber and broken bricks.

The camps were intended to provide temporary relief, but many people remained in them for weeks or months. The arrival of winter made inadequate shelter increasingly dangerous. Overcrowding placed enormous pressure on water supplies and sanitation, while cholera and other diseases spread easily among populations already weakened by hunger, travel and extreme stress.

Daily life became organised around distribution. Families queued for grain, cooked in communal kitchens and waited for clothing, blankets and medical treatment. Officials recorded names and places of origin. Notices were displayed for missing relatives, and messages passed between camps through volunteers, government offices and word of mouth.

A camp was therefore more than a collection of tents. It became a temporary society filled with children, elderly people, widows, injured travellers, former landowners, labourers, traders and artisans. People exchanged information about abandoned villages, incoming trains and possible relatives. Religious observances continued, children found ways to play and families attempted to recreate ordinary routines within deeply abnormal circumstances.

For some, the camp offered the first sustained safety they had experienced in weeks. For others, it became another place of waiting.

A Government Being Divided

The inability of the authorities to respond quickly has often been understood as evidence that the administration failed to care for the people caught in Partition. Supplies did not always arrive, some officials acted with prejudice, property systems became vulnerable to corruption and thousands of people remained without adequate protection.

However, the scale of the administrative crisis is often underestimated.

The administration of east and west Punjab were expected to manage one of the largest and fastest movements of people in modern history while simultaneously dividing the government that would normally have coordinated the response.

The old Punjab administration did not reproduce itself automatically on either side of the Radcliffe Line. Its civil servants, police officers, judges, railway employees and medical staff had to be allocated between East and West Punjab; and many government workers were themselves refugees. Muslim officials left posts in the east, while Hindu and Sikh officials left posts in the west. Their replacements sometimes arrived with little knowledge of the districts they were now expected to administer.

Government offices had to be reorganised. Files, finances, vehicles, communications equipment and public buildings had to be divided. Railway stock and military resources were being allocated between the east and west, even as trains and soldiers were urgently needed to evacuate civilians. Land records required for rehabilitation often remained on the opposite side of the border or had been lost during the disorder.

The institutions of the central government were being divided as well. The armed forces, bureaucracy, treasury, government property and financial liabilities of Colonial India all had to be separated. Pakistan, as the entirely new state, had to establish central departments and administrative offices while also receiving millions of refugees. Naturally, India inherited more of the existing central machinery, but it still had to reorganise its government, absorb displaced officials and coordinate relief across several affected regions.

Officials were therefore expected to protect refugee convoys, restore railway services, prevent further violence, operate camps, distribute food, trace missing people and allocate property while the institutions carrying out these duties were still being constructed.

From Relief to Rehabilitation

During the first months of Partition, government policy concentrated on immediate relief: receiving refugees, running camps, distributing rations and moving endangered populations away from the border.

As the possibility of return disappeared, the nature of the problem changed.

The refugees could no longer be treated as temporary occupants waiting for conditions to improve. They would have to become permanent residents of India or Pakistan. Relief had kept people alive; rehabilitation was intended to restore the foundations of ordinary life.

Both countries created departments and offices responsible for refugees and rehabilitation. Registration became increasingly important. A refugee’s name, place of origin, occupation, family composition and abandoned property could determine the assistance they received and where they would eventually be settled.

However, these records were not easy to produce. People had lost documents during attacks or left them behind while fleeing. Land deeds and revenue files could be held in another country. Witnesses who might confirm ownership were dispersed across different camps. Refugees sometimes gave claims from memory, while officials had to distinguish genuine claims from exaggerations or attempts to obtain multiple allotments.

The paperwork could appear detached from the human crisis, but each document carried enormous significance. A ration card meant access to food. Registration could determine whether a person was officially recognised as displaced. A property claim represented the house, shop or farm a family had lost. An allotment order could decide whether they remained dependent upon a camp or began establishing a new home.

The emerging states were not merely counting refugees. They were attempting to convert displaced people into residents, property holders and citizens.

The Property Left Behind

The most immediate resource available for rehabilitation was the property abandoned by those who had fled in the opposite direction.

On paper, this appeared to offer a direct solution: those who had lost property on one side could receive property left vacant on the other.

In reality, the exchange was never equal.

The land abandoned on either side of the border differed in quantity, value and agricultural quality from the land left by Muslims in East Punjab. Many refugees from the western canal colonies had cultivated highly productive, irrigated farms. There was not enough equivalent land available in the east to restore every holding in full.

The governments also had to determine what constituted ownership. Some refugees had owned their land, while others had been tenants, sharecroppers or agricultural labourers. A property might have belonged to an absent landlord but been cultivated for years by a local tenant. Several relatives could claim shares in the same estate. Houses might already be occupied by refugees before officials had formally allotted them. Local tenants, existing occupants and incoming refugees could all make competing claims. Some buildings had been damaged or stripped of usable material during the unrest that preceded partition. Others were seized before the authorities could record or protect them.

Resettling the Countryside

Because Punjab remained overwhelmingly agrarian, restoring rural life was central to rehabilitation.

Where possible, families from the same village, district or region were settled near one another. This helped preserve kinship networks and allowed people familiar with the same farming practices to cooperate. However, it was not always possible. Entire village communities had been seperated during travel, and temporarily placed in different camps, and the amount of available land determined where refugees could be placed.

Agricultural resettlement also disadvantaged those who had owned little or nothing before Partition. Landowners could submit claims based on their former holdings, but tenants, labourers and members of service communities had fewer assets for the state to replace. A person who lost employment, customary rights or the support of a village patron could suffer as greatly as someone who lost land, but such losses were much harder to record.

Women faced particular difficulties when property had been registered in the name of a missing or deceased husband, father or brother. Widows and separated families could be required to establish inheritance or ownership while lacking documents and reliable information about whether male relatives were still alive.

Rehabilitation restored landholding more easily than it restored the full social and economic structure of a village.

Rebuilding the Towns and Cities

Urban rehabilitation presented a different set of problems.

Refugees who had worked as shopkeepers, artisans, transporters, teachers, doctors or industrial workers needed more than a house. They required commercial premises, tools, credit, licences and customers. A farmer could not necessarily become a trader because a shop was available, nor could a displaced urban family automatically support itself if offered rural land.

Lahore and Amritsar were transformed especially deeply. Lahore lost much of its Hindu and Sikh population, including families prominent in commerce, education and the professions, while receiving large numbers of Muslim refugees. Amritsar lost its Muslim neighbourhoods and commercial communities while absorbing Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab.

Vacant homes, shops and workshops were gradually allotted, although demand frequently exceeded supply. Several families might share a large house, while schools, barracks and religious buildings continued to provide temporary accommodation. Refugees established stalls in markets, reopened abandoned workshops and created businesses with whatever capital they had retained.

Governments introduced loans, grants, housing schemes and industrial assistance, but access remained uneven. Educated refugees or those with surviving family networks were often better able to navigate the claims system. Poorer families could remain dependent upon camps, casual work or charitable relief for much longer.

The refugees themselves became central to the recovery of urban life. Traders restored commercial networks. Artisans introduced their skills to new towns. Teachers founded schools, while families created neighbourhood organisations, markets and religious institutions. Over time, refugee settlements expanded beyond emergency accommodation into permanent colonies and suburbs.

Punjab’s cities were not simply repopulated. Their economies, neighbourhoods and public cultures were reconstructed.

Rebuilding Communities

Rehabilitation could provide a tent, ration, house or field. It could not reproduce the social world that had been lost.

Before Partition, a village community had been formed through generations of family relationships, shared labour, local knowledge and everyday familiarity. Shopkeepers knew their customers. Farmers understood the soil and water of particular fields. Families knew which neighbour could lend money, help arrange a marriage or care for a child during an emergency.

Displacement severed many of these relationships at once.

Refugees therefore attempted to rebuild collectively. Relatives searched for one another and combined households. People from the same village or district tried to settle nearby. Community associations helped newcomers find work, arrange marriages, establish places of worship and support families whose main providers had died or disappeared.

Food, dialect, clothing and local customs carried memories of particular regions across the border. Refugees recreated familiar dishes with the ingredients available to them and preserved stories of villages their children would never see. New neighbourhoods and markets sometimes adopted names that recalled the places their residents had left.

Yet these rebuilt communities were never exact copies of the old ones. Refugees encountered local populations who had not migrated and whose own lives were disrupted by the sudden arrival of thousands of newcomers. Housing became scarce, wages and prices changed, and competition developed over land, employment and government assistance.

The relationship between refugees and local residents could include generosity, cooperation and shared identity, but also resentment and political tension. Refugees were citizens of the same new country, yet they were often identified by their place of origin, speech or refugee status for years afterwards.

Belonging had to be negotiated rather than assumed.

An Uneven Recovery

The success of rehabilitation varied considerably.

Some families moved from camps into permanent homes within months. Others spent years contesting property claims or living in temporary accommodation. Those who had possessed land, businesses or education could sometimes rebuild by transferring their skills and remaining capital into a new setting. Those whose livelihoods depended upon informal work, tenancy or village relationships were more difficult for official systems to compensate.

Not every refugee received property. Not every claim was recognised. Corruption, political connections and illegal or unrecognised occupation influenced the distribution of valuable homes and businesses. Women, children, lower-caste communities, landless labourers and families without documentation could be left at the margins of programmes designed around recognised ownership and male-headed households.

Despite these barriers, millions of people were fed, registered, transported and eventually absorbed into new towns and villages. Agricultural production resumed, markets reopened and large camps gradually emptied. Much of this work was undertaken by newly established departments operating under immense pressure, supported by local officials, soldiers, volunteers, religious organisations and refugees themselves.

Rehabilitation was neither an uncomplicated success nor a story of total neglect. It was a vast, improvised and deeply unequal undertaking.

The border had divided Punjab in a matter of weeks.

Rebuilding life after it would take generations.