Sangam Festival: Huddersfield author to launch children's book based on father's Partition of India story

Aimed at children aged six to eight years old, The Boy Who Lost His Home But Carried Light explores themes of “loss, displacement, hope and arrival” and will be launched on Saturday, August 12.

The event is tied in to year’s Sangam Festival, which celebrates South Asian Heritage Month (July 18 to August 17), and is also in partnership with the Huddersfield Literature Festival.

Mandeep, who is in her early 50s, says: “It's a universal story, isn't it? For those that have to leave from one place and end up somewhere, feeling displaced.

“My dad would have been about four or five years old when this happened. So it's from his perspective, what he remembers. And when you touch on these themes, it's relevant to people from anywhere else in the world where they've had to just flee, suddenly leave their home, and all their belongings, thinking that one day they'll come back and never to return.”

After the turmoil and expense of Second World War, and amid calls for independence, Britain’s leaders set about giving up the colonial rule of India.

At midnight between August 14 and 15, 1947, British India, as it was then known, was divided along religious lines.

The country was split into two independent states - Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. This momentous event - known as the Partition of India - triggered one of the largest mass migrations in human history as millions of Muslims moved to Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), while millions of Hindus and Sikhs made their way inside India’s new borders.

While the handover of power had initially been scheduled for no later than June 1948, it was brought forward 10 months earlier than expected by the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Additionally, the lawyer Cyril Radcliffe was only given five weeks to draw up the border lines ahead of the Partition.

With no time to absorb the change, overnight Muslim, Hindu and Sikh families found themselves on the wrong side of the division.

Some 14.5 million people were displaced as a result, according to the British Library, in a situation which triggered a huge refugee crisis and mass violence which killed, some estimates report, between one and two million.

In the case of Kulbir, he was born in 1945 and spent his childhood in Lyallpur, a small farming village in West Punjab in India.

After Partition, he remembers fleeing in his uncle’s truck. They settled in Phillaur, a town in East Punjab, where they had to rebuild their lives.

Years later, Kulbir received a letter from his friend in England who told of “a town called Huddersfield where jobs in textile mills were plentiful and the people that once fled from one another, now lived side by side,” writes Mandeep, who works part time for Chol Theatre in the town.

He travelled to England by plane, alone, with just three pounds in his pocket.

Mandeep’s book has its origins in The White Line, a heritage project she worked on to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition in 2017. She followed up for the 75th anniversary last year with another cultural event, Arrival, and the book is part of that project.

Initially, Mandeep was going to commission an author and illustrator to produce the book. “When I was developing the children's book, it wasn't apparent right in the beginning that the story was going to be about my dad. In fact, I didn't even know it was gonna be me writing it – I developed the project."

She slowly realised, though, that previous conversations with her father that were worthy of expansion and she worked with him closely on the book, and illustrated it by hand with acrylic paints.

“It feels like finally, I’m able to share that story,” says Mandeep.

"Because the Partition stories are so horrific, what happened in 1947 when the line was drawn and where communities were divided.

"My dad will have only been a small child, protected by his family, but they had to move from one side of India to the other side. It depended on, were you are on the right side when that line was drawn?

"But coming back to the children's book, I was able to share some of those stories in a way that's relevant to that time, but also, my dad's story about then arriving in Huddersfield.

"And really, the story touches upon when a child is connected to the place that they're born, and then suddenly they have to move.

"It's that transitional period that can be a really difficult and challenging time, but how a child can adapt to change no matter where you are and where you’ve come from and where you arrive at.

"So he would have had two really epic journeys - one as a child during Partition, and then the other as a young man when he arrived in Huddersfield.”