Both my parents were born before 1947 in two different villages in Jullundur. My father was six when he became a refugee. He had faint memories of the time. They were not happy memories. My mother was too young to recall anything of the violent upheaval; it’s a mercy.
My parents were among the 4.9m Muslim refugees that arrived in Pakistani Punjab and that constituted 26% of Punjab’s population, per the 1951 census. Three quarters of the refugees were ‘agriculturalists’.
The Government initially set-up a temporary allotment (‘Guzara Scheme’) which distributed evacuee land for the first spring and autumn harvests. Fixed amounts were distributed: six to eight acres for land in irrigated areas and 12.5 acres for land in non-irrigated areas. Eventually, when the governments of India and Pakistan exchanged land records, land was allotted permanently based on comparable unit of value calculations, which allocated a share of the land in Pakistani Punjab based on the value of the land that landholders lost in Indian Punjab.
The 1951 census tells us where the majority of the refugees went in the Punjab: 980k went to the Lyallpur (Faisalabad) district; 745k to the Lahore district; 713k to the Montgomery (Sahiwal) district; and 646k to the district of Multan.
It was no surprise that Lyallpur was a particularly attractive location for refugees. Much of the areas around the western doabs in Punjab, that are now part of Pakistan, were sparsely populated until the major irrigation projects which established a network of perennial canals from the 1880s onwards. The result was a large-scale agricultural colonisation of previously uncultivated or semi-cultivated land. The Lyallpur district was the quintessential canal colony district. Prior to the opening of the Chenab Canal it was inhabited by only a few and consisted of impenetrable jungles and sandy waste land.
Writing in 1929, the British Governor of Punjab wrote that the irrigation works had made “the desert blossom." He continued: “Parts of the Lower Chenab Canal Colony are now absorbed in the districts of Jhang and Sheikhupura; but the Lyallpur District stands out as an entity by itself as the complete self-expression of a colony which made good…it is difficult to realise that within the memory of some of the present generation the whole of this area was one of the most waterless, inhospitable and trackless deserts in North-West India, where a handful of Nomads for some months in the years wrested with difficulty a scanty livelihood for their flocks and herds, but which was otherwise wholly devoid of life or production.”
Therefore, the reputation of the land of Lyallpur preceded itself. And it is where my grandparents settled as they went about reconstructing their torn lives.
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An extraordinary collection of photos survive of the ‘great migration’, with a Punjab focus. They were taken by Margaret Bourke-White for
LIFE. If you have not seen them, they are well worth looking at:
https://www.life.com/history/margaret-bourke-white-great-migration/
