It will be a long journey to find a way to use these parts of us in a way that can facilitate growth.
We have the capability of ending these cycles and addressing the pain. We must acknowledge trauma, acknowledge the power of mental health, and acknowledge our personal battles and the causality that comes with them. Going forward, we must collectively heal as a family. I have seen first-hand how the impact of my nannajaan’s unhealed trauma had the ability to weave its way through the fabric of my family for over three generations. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, trauma affects the way people think and act and overwhelms their ability to cope and engage. Intergenerational trauma was first documented among the descendants of Holocaust survivors, where the impact was clearly passed from one generation to the next, creating a snowball effect of cumulative damage. Living with a father with many aggressive tendencies has clearly affected my mother and her siblings and it is an unspoken fact that many children of immigrants continue to be the scapegoats of PTSD and trauma. Because of this, my nannajaan never thought to seek professional help over his traumatic experiences during the partition and instead it manifested in toxic ways that have consequently affected his children and grandchildren. Whilst there is now increasing research on the impacts of people living through the violence of partition and how it would have led to severe trauma, mental health is still very much stigmatised in the South Asian community. Seventy years ago, concepts such as post traumatic stress disorder were not part of the understanding of refugees and migrants in the same way as they are today.
As he was constantly faced with extreme racism and poverty, my mum and her two siblings grew up with an angry, irrational and turbulent father, whose mood would flip in seconds and leave the whole family constantly walking on eggshells. From stumbling across the aftermath of a massacre, to helping his own father protect the lives of vulnerable neighbours and friends, horrifying events were experienced by millions of people, including my own nannajaan.Īfter the exit of the British Empire, the Pakistani economy entered a period of uncertainty and my nannajaan had no choice but to make the move to the UK and work tirelessly in several factories to make money for his family back in Pakistan. Over the course of just a few months, approximately a million people died, ten million mass migrated across the border, thousands died from contagious disease and around 75,000 women were known to be raped and abducted. It was a time of widespread riots and bloodshed, which were marked on both sides of the border. My nannajaan was just 13 when the Indian subcontinent divided into two parts – a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan. A logical place to start was the India/Pakistan partition in 1947. Over the summer, the UK had its first ever South Asian Heritage month, which prompted me to reflect on my understanding of where exactly I have come from. From handing out ten pound notes and telling stories to his grandchildren, to a sudden hurricane of anger that had the power to create deep and lasting cracks in our tight knit family – it was often hard not to dismiss him as an angry Pakistani patriarch.Īfter a short stint of living with my grandparents, his wisecracks, humour and care would be quickly and suddenly overshadowed by his bad moods that would leave a heavy fog over the house and leave us all visibly shaken.Īs the granddaughter of first-generation immigrants, I have been far removed from his experiences before, during and after partition, and so I have struggled to understand the anger and stress he was so visibly handing down to the generations below him. As a family, it was a constant struggle to not let this trait define him. But he has always and will always have a temper.
He is intelligent, funny, generous, and hard-working.