From partition’s survivors to a generation wondering whether to stay, leave, or rebuild. I was standing in the Army Museum when I saw him. He was sitting there among the recreated scenes of the partition—one of those painstakingly crafted figures meant to make history visible. I knew, rationally, that he was not real. And yet, when I looked into his eyes, something in me shifted. For a moment, he wasn’t a figure in a museum. He was my grandfather… or perhaps my great-grandfather. He was an old man who had lived through the thing we now call partition because we have the ‘luxury’ of giving unimaginable things names. And I could almost hear him looking at me and saying: “This is what we went through to get you this land.” I stood there thinking about a line I had heard countless times:
- Laaye hain toofaan se kashti nikaal ke
- Is mulk ko rakhna mere bacho sambhal ke
(We brought this boat out through storms: My children, keep this country safe)
I had heard the words before. That day, I understood them differently. Because somewhere between 1947 and 2026, Pakistan stopped being a story told by people who had lived it and slowly became a story told about people who had lived it. And I wonder what happens when the people who remember become fewer than the people who have only read. For many millennials and older Gen Z Pakistanis, the partition was never entirely history. It lived in our grandparents’ kitchens. It existed in stories told after dinner, in photographs kept carefully in drawers, in relatives whose names were followed by “they never made it,” in houses that had once belonged to someone else, in the silences that arrived whenever certain questions were asked. We grew up knowing that 1947 had happened not merely because a textbook told us so, but because someone we loved had been there.
But our children may encounter the partition differently. For Gen Alpha, it risks becoming a date. A chapter. An examination question. A speech on 14 August. A few familiar names. And perhaps this is how history begins to lose its pulse. We know the heroes of the independence movement. We know Muhammad Ali Jinnah – the Quaid-e-Azam. We know Dr Allama Muhammad Iqbal – the national poet. We know Fatima Jinnah – the Madar-e-Millat. We know the political leaders, the speeches, the photographs, the famous quotations. But somewhere along the way, we lost the people behind the portraits. The ordinary men and women. The children. The mothers. The refugees. The students. The people who packed what they could carry and left everything else behind. The people who didn’t know whether they were walking towards a homeland or simply away from death.
We remember the founding fathers. We forget the millions of ordinary people who made the founding possible. Perhaps that is one of the great tragedies of the passage of time: the larger-than-life heroes remain, but the intimate stories—the ones that made history human—begin disappearing. That is why the work of organizations such as the Citizens Archive of Pakistan matters so deeply. By recording oral histories and preserving photographs and memories, efforts like theirs help rescue something that textbooks cannot fully contain: the voice of the person who was actually there. Because history does not only need dates. It needs witnesses. And sometimes, the most powerful witness is one sitting quietly in your own family. For me, that witness was Bi Jaan – the adopted sister of my grandmother. She was born into a Sikh family in Peshawar. She was nine years old when she saw her parents killed in front of her.
Nine. An age at which a child should be worrying about school, scraped knees and what might be waiting for her at home for dinner. Instead, she was hiding inside a heavy-duty metal storage trunk, terrified that someone would find her. She survived for two weeks on raw rice. She only came out at night. Eventually, my grandmother’s father found her. He was afraid too. But he took her in. He adopted her. She grew up in Pakistan. She married here. She lived her entire life here. And this is the part of her story that has stayed with me more than anything else. Every Independence Day, Bi Jaan would become angry if we did not light earthen oil lamp. Not mildly disappointed…Angry. And when there was a cricket match on television, she was often the most enthusiastic person in the room.
Pakistan scored? She celebrated. Pakistan won? She was ecstatic. And somewhere in the middle of it all, the woman who had once been a nine-year-old girl hiding from the violence of the partition would shout: “Pakistan Zindabad!” I have often wondered about that. What does patriotism mean when it comes from someone who lost almost everything? What does “Pakistan” mean to a child whose earliest memories of the country are intertwined with blood, fear and death? Perhaps Pakistan was not the people who killed her parents. Perhaps Pakistan was the place where, after everything was taken from her, someone found her. Someone opened a door. Someone said: You can stay. Someone gave a frightened little girl a family. Perhaps, eventually, Pakistan became the place where that little girl was allowed to grow old. And perhaps that is why I cannot dismiss the idea of loving a country simply because the country is imperfect.
Because Pakistan is, unquestionably, imperfect. How could we pretend otherwise? We live with inflation that has made ordinary life frighteningly expensive. We watch educated young people work for salaries that barely reflect the years they spent earning their degrees. We see corruption, nepotism, political instability, institutional failures and opportunities distributed according to connections rather than merit. We see young doctors, engineers, researchers, teachers and graduates wondering whether the country they trained themselves to serve can offer them a life of dignity in return. We understand why someone says something not so good, and shows sentiments beyond our thinking. And perhaps we should be careful about judging them for it. There is no virtue in romanticizing struggle. There is no patriotism in asking people to endure indignity simply because they were born here.
Sometimes leaving is necessary. Sometimes it is wise. Sometimes it is the only door that appears to be open. And this is not merely a feeling whispered over dinner tables anymore. The numbers are difficult to ignore. Since the 1970s, more than 13.5 million people have registered for overseas employment, while estimates place the number of Pakistanis currently living abroad at somewhere around 10 million. The desire to leave is visible even more sharply among the young. Research by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics found that 62 percent of males aged 15–24 surveyed expressed a desire to leave the country. Behind every percentage is a person. A medical graduate wondering whether years of education will ever translate into a dignified salary. An engineer sending applications across continents. A young woman wondering whether her ambitions have a future here. A student calculating whether the only way to build the life they imagined is to build it somewhere else.
A family deciding whether the future they want for their children exists here or somewhere across the sea. So no, I do not think we should shame the Pakistani who leaves. Go, if you must. Study. Build. Earn. Become brilliant somewhere else. Build a career. Build a life. See the world. Send money home. Bring knowledge back. Invest. Return when you can. Leaving Pakistan does not automatically mean abandoning Pakistan. But there is a difference between leaving Pakistan and giving up on Pakistan. And that distinction matters. Because the danger is not simply that Pakistanis are leaving. The danger is when an entire generation begins to believe that there is nothing here worth returning to, investing in, repairing or believing in. History gives us examples of countries that were once in circumstances that seemed almost impossible to overcome.
The United States experienced the great depression—a period of extraordinary economic devastation, mass unemployment and widespread poverty. The America that eventually emerged as a ‘global economic and geopolitical power’ was not a country that had never known catastrophe. It was a country that, despite catastrophe, continued to build. The lesson is not that Americans were magically patriotic enough to stay. The lesson is that a crisis is not always a verdict. Sometimes it is a chapter. South Korea offers another extraordinary example. After the Korean War, it was a desperately poor, war-ravaged country. Its cities and infrastructure had been devastated. Yet over the decades that followed, through education, industrialization, investment and institution-building, it transformed itself into one of the world’s major economies and technological powers. The South Korea of today was not hiding underneath the rubble waiting to be discovered. People built it.
Perhaps that is what we sometimes forget about nations. They are not finished products. They are projects. They are built by generations that inherit both the achievements and the failures of those who came before them. And perhaps Pakistan is no different. Our grandparents did not hand us a perfect country. They handed us a beginning. They did not hand us a finished house with every wall painted and every pipe working. They handed us a house and said: Now look after it. And perhaps we have misunderstood patriotism. Perhaps patriotism isn’t pretending the roof isn’t leaking. It isn’t defending every politician. It isn’t insisting that corruption doesn’t exist. It isn’t telling an exhausted doctor, teacher, engineer, or graduate to simply “love your country” while offering them no dignity in return. We must remember that patriotism cannot mean silence. If anything, love should make us more honest.
Perhaps patriotism is looking at the broken window and saying: This needs fixing. And then picking up the tools. Because Pakistan is not only its governments; Pakistan is the doctor who stays beside a frightened patient after his shift has ended. It is the teacher who continues to teach in a classroom with inadequate resources after the APS tragedy. It is the engineer who designs something better. The farmer who wakes before dawn. The researcher who keeps working despite limited resources. The entrepreneur who employs five people. The journalist who continues to write. The mother who insists that her daughter will study. The young person who refuses to cheat even when everyone else seems to be doing it. Pakistan is millions of ordinary people quietly deciding, every day, what kind of country this will be. Perhaps patriotism isn’t loving Pakistan exactly as it is. Perhaps patriotism is loving it enough to refuse to leave it as it is.
And perhaps that is the responsibility that has been handed to our generation. Not to inherit a perfect Pakistan. Not even to pretend that the Pakistan we have inherited is the Pakistan we want. But to decide whether our disappointment will become an excuse for abandonment or a reason to rebuild. Because when I think back to that old man in the museum, I no longer see a figure made by craftsmen. I see my grandfather. My great-grandfather. I see Bi Jaan as a little girl, hiding in the dark, eating raw rice to stay alive. And then I see her decades later, furious because somebody forgot to light the lamp. I see her shouting at the television during a cricket match – Pakistan Zindabad. And suddenly, the question isn’t whether Pakistan has failed us. It has. The question isn’t whether we have the right to be angry. We do. The question isn’t even whether we should leave if we need to. Sometimes we should.
The question is something much more uncomfortable. Something I think that old man’s eyes were asking me from behind the glass. What are you going to do with what we went through to give you this? Because perhaps our grandparents did not ask us to inherit their sacrifices. Perhaps they asked us to inherit their responsibility. They brought the boat through the storm. They handed us the oars. And now we stand in the boat, looking at the cracks in its wood, furious at the people who damaged it, exhausted by the waves, tempted by the sight of other shores. But somewhere behind us are the people who never made it across. Somewhere behind us is a nine-year-old girl who did. And somewhere behind us is an old man looking at his grandchildren through the glass. Perhaps he isn’t asking us to pretend the boat is beautiful. Perhaps he is only asking us not to stop rowing.
- Laaye hain toofaan se kashti nikaal ke
- Is mulk ko rakhna mere bacho, sambhal ke
