Prof Kirpal Singh, the first chronicler of Partition, who started building an archive in 1954, passed away at 95 in Chandigarh on Tuesday.
He began his journey in Partition’s historiography in 1953 as a young lecturer at Khalsa College, Amritsar. “It has never happened before, it will never happen again. I want to work on Partition but I am too old. You write Partition’s history,” Bhai Veer Singh told Kirpal, himself a victim of the tragedy.
Over six months, Kirpal took interviews of the leading figures linked with Partition—Punjab Boundary Commission chairman Cyril John Radcliffe, Governor of West Punjab Sir Francis Mudie, PM Clement Attlee and Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff Hastings Ismay.
While compiling his seminal work, ‘Select Documents on Partition of Punjab’, he met almost every architect of Partition. After each interview, he would jot down the excerpts in longhand which are now part of the Punjabi University library in Patiala.
Amid the despair of Partition, he believed that the stories of hope were yet to be told. “People saved girls, collected dowry, and married them off. They sheltered them for years and later united them with families. Both sides saw such stories. The second part, ‘Silver Lines in Dark Clouds’, comprises those stories,” he said.
His last work was aimed at “fixing the responsibility” for the tragedy. He had once said that not even one of the key figures he had interviewed was ready to take responsibility for the monumental human tragedy that had unfolded seven decades ago.