My great-grandfather, Ruchi Ram Sahni, wrote an autobiography which was recently re-published as A Memoir of pre-Partition Punjab: Ruchi Ram Sahni 1863-1948 (OUP, 2017). Born in Dera Ismail Khan, Sahni moved to Lahore as a student in 1879 and remained there until Partition, living an eclectic life as a scientist, educator, businessman, social reformer, politician and public intellectual.
In his autobiography, Sahni mentioned a mammoth 16-volume enterprise which he called HOMOTs or the “History of My Own Times,” which he began as a student. At age 83, in the shadow of Partition, he was busily correcting his manuscripts in red ink at his compound, helped by his grandchildren, including my mother. It was his dream to have them published in his lifetime, but this was not to be.
In 1947 his sons took him to Bombay, without taking the HOMOTs along. In January 1948, he wrote to his eldest son that he would like to pay for his own medical bills using the money he had put aside to publish his writings, since they were now lost. He died later in the year, a very depressed man.
Courtesy: National Archives of India
Looking for the HOMOTs: Part I
As I worked on the autobiography, I wondered what had happened to the HOMOTs. A chance suggestion from my son Arudra took me to the Chandigarh archives. Nobody there had ever heard of Ruchi Ram Sahni, but at my request, they took me to a small room on the first floor which clearly had not been opened for many years. It was dark and damp, full of dust and cobwebs. Armed with a duster, I told the staff that I would go through the whole room to see if they were there.
Within an hour, I heard Parminder Kaur, Assistant Archivist behind me.
Eh HOMOT ki hega? (“What is this HOMOT”?)
She had found them!
Together we discovered eleven volumes, neatly bound, damp but otherwise in good shape and very readable. My hands trembled as I picked up each volume. Parminder Kaur said in Punjabi, “Inha dee rooh twanu lub re si.” (“His spirit has been looking for you all these years. You were destined to find them!”)
Reading the HOMOTs and seeing the scribbled corrections in the margin in red ink gave me goosebumps. In one volume, Sahni worries that these volumes would never see the light of day, and hopes that his sons and daughters would see that they are published. Or was he speaking to me, his great granddaughter?
Letter from M. R. Sahni to Prem Kirpal on the repatriation of Prof. Ruchi Ram Sahni’s papers from Lahore to Lucknow in 1950 - Courtesy: National Archives of India
Looking for the HOMOTs: Part II
But how had the HOMOTs reached Chandigarh from Lahore? The mystery was solved last month when Arudra came rushing to show me a file that he had chanced upon in the National Archives of India. The Government of India had plans to prepare a History of the Freedom Movement edited by Dr. Tara Chand. M.R. Sahni, Ruchi Ram’s third son, urged the Ministry to help repatriate his father’s manuscripts, including the HOMOTs, which he thought could be used for this major task. And so six gunny bags full of Ruchi Ram Sahni’s papers and manuscripts were repatriated from Lahore via Amritsar to Lucknow in 1950 by train!
There is a twist to the story. The Ministry of Education released a press-note taking credit for this achievement, which led M. R. Sahni to write a pointed reply:
“I believe you know that this is not so. If it was possible to save these papers it was due entirely to my friend and colleague, Mr. Tayyab Ali, now with the Pakistan Geological Survey, who at great personal inconvenience, risk and expense went to my house and brought out about 6 gunny bags containing these manuscripts and father’s personal papers, and deposited them in the High Commissioner’s office. Earlier the High Commissioner’s own agent was refused permission to remove these papers and my correspondence with him since 1947 was of no avail. The credit thus goes almost entirely to Mr. Tayyab Ali, and the only reason why it has not so far been acknowledged is that this might not create an awkward position for him in Pakistan, for which I would be very sorry. But if ever an opportunity arises, I shall fully acknowledge this.”
In today’s difficult times, it is heartwarming to recall the efforts of a Muslim friend to rescue important manuscripts for a Hindu friend’s father whom he perhaps did not even know, quite likely at some risk to himself, during the height of Hindu-Muslim tensions in Lahore.
What next?
The HOMOTs have now been digitized. Most have secondary source material but there are also interesting anecdotes involving Ruchi Ram Sahni himself: walking with the jathas during the Guru-ka-Bagh agitation in 1922; his active involvement with the Gurdwara reform and the Sikh awakening; his personal experience of the growth of the national movement and the energy that it unleashed among the youth. In his own words,
“In the preparation of this ambitious work, the author has endeavoured to catch a glimpse – it may be but a faint glimpse – of the stirring times through which he was privileged to live, and fix it in words for his readers...he has tried to present in these pages, something of the reality and vividness of the pageant as a whole, as he saw it...”
I hope that material from the HOMOTs will be used by scholars in the future. If so, it will all be through the selfless actions of a Pakistani geologist almost 70 years ago.
Thank you, Tayyab Ali.
Neera Burra is a great granddaughter of Ruchi Ram Sahni and has a blog https://ruchiramsahni.wordpress.com/
