Book Excerpt: 'Those Who Stayed; The Sikhs Of Kashmir' By Bupinder Singh Bali

(Excerpted from Bupinder Singh Bali’s Those Who Stayed; The Sikhs of Kashmir. Published by Amaryllis, 2024) 

When Nehru made his famous speech, “At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,” most of Kashmir was still in a deep sleep. A sleep that was broken months later when thousands of armed tribal men from Pakistan and Afghanistan poured into Kashmir. They turned the beautiful valley red with apples and orange with autumn into one red with blood, and orange with arsons. 

According to an estimate over 33000 Sikhs were killed in those two weeks. 

During the course of writing this book, I met and interviewed several survivors of the 1947 Kabali Massacre. A few stories are shared here. 

Though the world knows that Kashmir was annexed to India after the then king signed an instrument of accession, it never came to the pages of history how gory this annexation was. Through my book, I have tried to bring the history of the underrepresented to the larger world. There were too many things deliberately hidden from the world, which I have tried to collect through oral histories and micro-histories. 

--Bupinder Singh Bali 

Survivor Stories 

I was ten or eleven years old when it happened. The winter had already kicked in as it was the end of October, and I remember most of the villagers were still busy with the apple produce. The harvest was almost over, but storing the apples in wooden caskets was tiring work. One had to first arrange a layer of apples, then spread a thin layer of hay over it before putting another layer of apples. A casket would hold three or four layers of apples, and you had to be careful that there was no bad apple in the casket. One bad apple could spoil the bunch. Most men from the village would go to their orchards by sunrise, taking their lunch along, and returned once the sun set.

I was eating the apples and apricots, stealthily, in the attic and looking out through the small window. It was evening, the sky was orange at the horizon, and the men had already started coming back from the apple orchards. During the harsh winter, people preferred to stay indoors. 

Our schools were already closed due to the partition. The past few months were very troublesome. India had gained its independence, and a new country called Pakistan was formed. Muslims from all over India were crossing over to that newly formed country, which they said was exclusively for Muslims. All the non-Muslims who lived in that country were coming to India. 

When I was eating those apricots, I heard a loud clamour. Hundreds of people poured into the village from all sides. They were big, over six feet, and carried axes, swords, spears, staffs and guns. A lot of them were shouting some profanities or others, their slogans were, ‘Sardar ka sar, Hindu ka zar, aur Musalman ka ghar’ which meant Sikh’s head, Hindu’s woman, and Muslim’s property. Their mission was to kill or convert as many non-Muslims as they could so as to shift the demography of Kashmir to a Muslim-only place and help the Kashmiris to accede to Pakistan. This happened on 27 October 1947.

At that time, we did not know that the ruler of Kashmir had already signed an annexation with India. The kabalis were trying to liberate Kashmir, and a lot of Kashmiri revolutionaries were supporting them and guiding them to our villages. Later I came to know that they were marching towards the Kashmir Airport in Srinagar. If the invaders captured it, the Indian army would not be able to come to Kashmir and defend it. On the way to the Airport, the invaders were annihilating every non-Muslim village. 

The kabali entry into the village was not by stealth. It was a brazen one. The tribal people were savages. They loved to slaughter. The smell and taste of blood fuelled them. They killed not because they were told but because they enjoyed it, they loved it. 

The kabalis ran into the village and unleashed all their rage on the villagers. Shouting slogans and roaring like wild animals, they put a sword in anyone that they saw. Kids were playing, and women were cooking while men were doing different work. Before they realised what was happening, they were already dead. The handful of people tried to run or hide. Those running were chased, killed, and then dragged back to the village. Those hiding were hunted which proved to be an exciting exercise for the kabalis. They played hide-and-seek, calling them out, telling them what was waiting for them and how they would chop off their hands and feet before killing them. 

There were a lot of slogans and noise, cries, and people shouting. “Naso, kabali aye” (Run! Kabalis have come). I was scared. I was frozen, seeing everything from the window without moving. 

They put spears through the people and left them hanging there. With their brutal force, they cut people in half, and there were headless bodies everywhere. When a big man with an enormous sword brought it down on the head of a person, he was cut from his head to his torso in one blow. When he withdrew his sword, all his insides splattered out. I vomited on myself. 

By the time they reached my house, the hue and cry in the village had already reached us. My Father was out somewhere while my mother was on the ground floor, cooking dinner. My younger brother, who was just a two-year-old toddler, was mostly in bed or crawling beside my mother. I saw a big man drag my mother out of our house. He was holding her by her hair. Another one tossed my brother onto the ground in our courtyard. I wanted to run downstairs. I wanted to cry. I wanted to close my eye so I couldn’t see what was going to happen. But I could do none of that. I was wet with my vomit and sweat, and my body did not move at all.

They kicked my brother repeatedly, and then someone just put him out of his misery by putting a spear through his heart. The one holding my mother’s hair with one hand had a big sword in the other. He pushed her towards another guy who tore the front of her shirt, impaled her on the ground, and rode her while the former ran into the opposite house. When he was done with her, he stabbed her with a sword multiple times till the ground was red with her blood. 

After a tireless bloodbath, and a ground full of bodies, the village looked like a graveyard. The large central ground between my house and the house into which that guy ran was filled with multiple bodies. I knew them all as it was a small village, and everyone knew everybody. More kabalis were arriving, each dragging bodies and throwing them like they were bringing sacks of rice to a warehouse. Another such person we met, was the sole survivor from his whole contingent that tried to escape the kabalis who were chasing them. They were a group of sixty to seventy people including more than two dozen women and around fifteen to twenty children. He was nine years old at that time.

A resident of some village in Muzaffarabad, which the kabalis had annihilated. These few survivors were running for their lives through the mountains and were being chased by the kabalis. Harsh winters and hunger were chasing them as well. After two days of running through the thick forest, they reached a meadow and could see a village in front of them. Their hopes were snuffed when they saw the houses in that village already burnt down in the fire. They knew the kabalis had already reached it, and the villagers had met the same fate as theirs. The people in the group unanimously decided to take the last step.

In the meadow, there were many huts, remnants of the Gujjar-Bakarwals, the nomadic community of shepherds who would stay in such meadows in summer and go to the valley in winter. Those nomadic hutments had three large compartments to accommodate the shepherds and their cattle. All the fleeing villagers assembled in front of one hut and instructed the women and children to go inside and rest while the men went to the surrounding forest to bring branches and twigs. They covered the hut with a lot of wood. All the men also went inside. Then, they set it on fire with all of them inside. 

In the meadow, there were many huts, remnants of the Gujjar-Bakarwals, the nomadic community of shepherds who would stay in such meadows in summer and go to the valley in winter. Those nomadic hutments had three large compartments to accommodate the shepherds and their cattle. All the fleeing villagers assembled in front of one hut and instructed the women and children to go inside and rest while the men went to the surrounding forest to bring branches and twigs. They covered the hut with a lot of wood. All the men also went inside. Then, they set it on fire with all of them inside. 

The person who told us about this escaped the burning hut through a small window and ran away from there. He remembered running and crying until it was evening and then falling unconscious. He woke up at a Muslim’s house in a nearby village. Later, he was given off to a Sikh family who adopted him as their son. 

In another such case, somewhere in Baramulla’s Uri, on the bridge over Jhelum, a thousand Sikhs were surrounded from both sides. When they knew that death was imminent, the men went to fight and buy some time for the women and children to jump into the mighty Jhelum. The women did not want to be captured. For them, capture meant a worse fate than death. Faced with the choice of being captured or dead, they happily and willingly chose death. There were no survivors from the group. The story was told by the Muslims of the nearby village to the journalists and newspapers and later became an oral tradition. 

In a place called Chura, located some fifty kilometres on the highway connecting Srinagar to Baramulla, an orchard full of fruitless trees were made into a spectacle with the heads of Sikh men tied to the branches. Their bodies were under the tree. The grass had turned red. 

The Kashmiri Muslims who saw it said, “It was like Kiyamat, like something out of jahanum. We could not eat or sleep for days after seeing the massacre. If you dig the orchard anywhere, you will still find human bones there.” More than two thousand people were killed in this small village. A small memorial stood there today.

Throughout the district of Baramulla, wells were full of dead bodies of women and children who had committed suicide to evade the capture by kabalis. Kabalis attacked not only Kashmir but also the bordering areas of the Jammu province, like Mirpur, Rajouri, and Poonch. 

Bupinder Singh Bali is a writer and educator based out of Kashmir. His works have been published in The Week, The Wire, The Delacorta Review and many others.