Major Events Pre-1950

Satinder Mullick received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1965 in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering, with a minor in Economics. He was Director of Economic Planning and Research for Corning Inc., where he worked on different consulting assignments for improving growth and profitability for 30 years. Later, he helped turn around Artistic Greetings (40% owned by American Greetings) and doubled the stock price in four years. He received Lybrand Silver Medal in 1971 from Institute of Management Accountants.

Dr. Manohar Lal Kapur lives in Virginia, USA. He grew up in Bannu, which became part of Pakistan in August 1947. He was 11 years old in April 1948 when he flew from Bannu in a small plane, operated by the Indian government with help from the Pakistan government, to Ambala in India.  His parents followed him later. Manohar's father was a gold jeweler in Bannu. His business was getting affected as Hindus and-Sikhs started to leave due to uncertainty about what the rulers of Pakistan would do.  His family liked Bannu but realized that their business in Bannu will decline drastically as their customers will not be there for too long.  They had to leave behind their gold jewelry assets as the Government planes did not allow them much to carry much.

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Manohar has told me that he saw no violence or heard about violence in Bannu when he lived there. I trust his memory. He has given me a lot of details about Bannu. He even revisited Bannu all by himself in 1991 for three days. On that visit, Manohar did not see people he knew except one.

I C Srivastava was born in 1943. A student of English Literature, he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1966. During his 37 years tenure, he served as Collector/ District Magistrate of three districts, rising finally to the position of Chairman, Board of Revenue, Rajasthan. Shri Srivastava worked as Secretary/Principal Secretary of as many as 17 Rajasthan State Departments, including Revenue, Irrigation, Education, Culture, Tourism, Sports, Women &amp\; Child Development Department. He retired as the Chairman. Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Corporation.  Shri Srivastava has authored several books on Administration &amp\; Current affairs in Hindi and English. Nowadays, he is associated with various social and cultural voluntary organisations in Jaipur.

The Quit India Movement of 1942 had, somehow, an immediate impact and response from my older brothers, Vishnu Chandra and Jagdish Chandra. Vishnu was the oldest. At that time, they were quite young. They were studying in seventh and fifth standards at Ganeshrai Inter College in Jaunpur in UP.

As part of the Quit India struggle, they were asked to go, along with other boys, and hoist the tri-color flag on the roof of their school. Full of zeal, the boys hurried up to the roof with policemen downstairs. That did not stop the boys. They managed to hoist the flag atop a quickly fixed mast for that purpose.

The incident is captured vividly in this story in Hindi.

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Sunder Ramchandani was born in Sindh and migrated to Delhi in late 1947 with his family when he was 9 years old. Upon receiving his Bachelor's degree, he devoted a lifetime to a career in the Indian Airlines Corporation. He retired as Deputy General Manager of Flight Operations in 1999 and now lives in Hyderabad, Telangana with his wife, son, and daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters.

Dilip Ramchandani was born in Delhi, the oldest of three children, to the late Indersingh and Ranjana Ramchandani. He graduated from the Maulana Azad Medical College in Delhi and, after emigrating to the US, trained in psychiatry. He retired two years ago from the Drexel University College of Medicine and now divides his time between Philadelphia and Washington DC. He and his wife, Parvati, a uroradiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, spend time with their two daughters and their families that include a granddaughter and a grandson.

Editor's note: Dilip reached out to his uncle, Sunder, to write this story. It is based upon a loose compilation of the memories that emerged in their recent telephone conversations and some notes and photographs that Sunder was able to provide.

Our family's story

Ashok Khanna has a B.Sc. (Econ) from London University, an MBA and PhD from Stanford. He has worked with Deloitte Touche (London, New York), taught at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Business, and worked for more than 25 years for the World Bank. He got his first chance to travel out of India when he was seventeen and has not stopped traveling since. In 1998, he began to sporadically write travelogues for friends. These essays increased over time as he traveled more after retiring, and also cover other interests.  Bloomsbury will publish his book on Emperor Ashoka in India in 2019.

I was eight years old, on 15 August 1947, India's independence day. My family had an invitation to the flag-changing ceremony, where Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India and the uncle of Prince Philip, the current Duke of Edinburgh, lowered the Union Jack and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, raised the Indian flag in its place. We got this prized invitation because my father was an executive in a British company.

Our seats were near the steps that ascended to the platform with the flagpole, at the epicentre of a crowd of one or two million assembled at the edge of Old Delhi, with Jama Masjid visible in the distance. As I had never been in such a huge crowd before, I remember feeling uneasy, but my mother and sister were excited, and their energy infected me as well, though I did not grasp the full significance of the day.

R C Mody is a postgraduate in Economics and a Certificated Associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers. He studied at Raj Rishi College (Alwar), Agra College (Agra), and Forman Christian College (Lahore). For over 35 years, he worked for the Reserve Bank of India, where he headed several all-India departments, and was also Principal of the Staff College. Now 81 years old, he is busy in social work, reading, writing, and travelling. He lives in New Delhi with his wife.

Lahore

I was a student at Lahore in early 1947. While large parts of India were suffering from communal violence, starting with the great Calcutta killings of 16 August 1946, Lahore was singularly free from it.

Until, all of a sudden, riots broke out on the morning of 4th March 1947, and soon took a virulent turn. My hostel warden advised us to go home until the situation became normal. 

My hometown Alwar, a Princely State at that time, was some 400 miles away, and a long rail journey to get there was considered unsafe.

Surjit was brought up in many different places in India, went from Delhi University into the Indian Foreign Service, and subsequently joined her husband in academics, shuttling between India and the United States. Now a semi-retired professor with two grown-up sons, she lives with her Himalayan cat, music, books, and walks in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

My Dadi lived with us for the last years of her life when my parents and I returned from two years in England and were reunited with my three elder siblings. She was, in fact, my father’s bhua (father’s sister) who had adopted him when his own mother died shortly after his birth in 1904, and was known by us as Beji. She had been widowed some time in the 1930s in a bizarre incident of robbers mounting one night to the terrace where she and her husband were sleeping to tear the jewellery off her arms and ears and throw her husband down to the hard street below. This was in the small village of Kallar, about 40 miles from Rawalpindi (in present day Pakistan). I never heard my father speak of that village with any affection, but did listen to him declaim with loathing on its regressive social customs to my historian husband and myself.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

Arvind Kolhatkar spent his childhood in Satara, and later studied at Fergusson College, Pune and the University of Pune. After getting his MA in Mathematics, he joined the Indian Revenue Service, served in the Income Tax Department for about 30 years, rose to the rank of Commissioner, and retired voluntarily. He was an Executive Director of the Bombay Stock Exchange for 3 years. He and his wife Aruna currently live in Toronto. His email address is kolhatkar@hotmail.com.

Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi on January 30, 1948. Godse was a Maharashtrian Brahmin, like my family.

Soon, a mass anti-Brahmin madness engulfed many parts of Maharashtra, particularly the districts south of and including Pune. Perhaps this anger was the culmination of decades of tension between the Brahmins and other castes. In any case, angry mobs pillaged, burnt and looted the homes of hundreds of innocent Brahmin families, and many people were killed. All on the baseless assumption that all Brahmins were complicit in the assassination of the Father of the Nation.

I want to illustrate this well-recorded history by describing how my family suffered.

Born in Lahore on 5th January, 1930, to Savitri Devi and Shanti Sarup and brought up in an open environment, without any mental conditioning by a denominational commitment. He imbibed a deep commitment to democracy and freedom because his family participated actively in the freedom struggle. In 1947, together with his family, he went through the trauma of losing all, and then participating in rebuilding a new status and identity. He Joined the IAS in 1954 and retired in 1988 as Education Secretary, Government of India. Later, he became Chairman, National Book Trust. Also co-authored, with Sulabha Brahme, Planning for the Millions.

Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part story. Part 2 describes the the family’s move to India, while Part 3 is the story of their rehabilitation in Ludhiana.

I do not know the date. One evening in early 1947, when our family went up to the roof, we found the sky lighted with a huge fire in the direction of the walled city of Lahore.

Next morning, the news that one of the oldest settlement of Hindus (inside the Shah Aalami Gate) had been set on fire was circulating in the city.

R C Mody is a postgraduate in Economics and a Certificated Associate of the Indian Institute of Bankers. He studied at Raj Rishi College (Alwar), Agra College (Agra), and Forman Christian College (Lahore). For over 35 years, he worked for the Reserve Bank of India, where he headed several all-India departments, and was also Principal of the Staff College. Now 82 years old, he is busy in social work, reading, writing, and travelling. He lives in New Delhi with his wife. His email address is rmody@airtelmail.in.

India would be independent one day. This was the fond hope, in fact a dream, with which most Indians of my generation grew up. But this dream kept on eluding us.

Every time freedom appeared to be close in the 1930s and early 1940s, there would be a setback, with the British throwing back the leaders of the Independence movement back into jail. And then for long, nothing would be heard about it. The cynics would say, “The British will never leave India.”

When World War II ended in 1945, it seemed that the British had finally decided to leave. There was only one lone protestor in Britain, Winston Churchill, who was ignored by the new British Government formed at the end of the war.