When Telloo Khan became Tarlok Singh
Partition had triggered unprecedented violent civil unrest on both sides of the divide. Nearer home, the conglomerate of Phulkian princely states (Patiala, Nabha, Malerkotla, Kapurthala, Faridkot and Jind) were similarly buffeted by the inexorable and cyclical waves of rapine and cold-blooded murders.
Yet there was one exemplary patch of sanity, sans killings and counter-killings, and that was the predominantly Muslim Malerkotla state. Some 240 years earlier, its Nawab had publicly condemned the gruesome killings of Guru Gobind Singh’s two sons by a satrap of Aurangzeb and in recognition of the Nawab’s humanity, the Sikh Guru had issued an edict to his community to protect Malerkotla and its populace in perpetuity! So, the brotherhood of the remaining five, Jat-Sikh-Hindu-populated, Phulkian states honoured in letter and spirit the recompense granted by their Guru, to Malerkotla.
My father, an administrator in the Maharaja of Nabha’s civil service, happened to be posted as the District Magistrate in early 1947. I was a year shy of entering my teens. Even though he was mostly in the Secretariat from sunrise to midnight, our home was a scene of constant arrival and departure of Muslim men and women, almost all with drooping heads, seemingly weighed by sorrow and despair.
The District Magistrate obviously had antennae deployed and concluded that first and foremost, not a single Muslim of Nabha would face unnatural death under his watch, and in the prevailing circumstances, the best recourse was to arrange for the safe passage for some 12,000 Muslim inhabitants from Nabha to Attari and beyond. Once this plan became public, our home became akin to a wailing chamber of sighs: “Save us in Nabha, don’t send us there.”
The Nabha Akal Infantry Battalion (present-day 14 Punjab), veterans of WW-II, was the lynchpin of his plan. The departure route was the Nabha-Amloh-Mandi Gobindgarh road and thence along the GT Road to Attari. The soldiers were tasked to set up four camps up to Gobindgarh, but GT road onwards, being the Central administration jurisdiction, the caravan would, in literal sense, be at God’s mercy.
A conscious effort was made to instill a sense of hope. A grand ceremonial parade was organised and reviewed by the Maharaja and thereafter, it marched first to Kali Mandir and next to the Akal-Garh Gurdwara Sahib, to seek divine blessings for the mission. On the day of the departure, there were scenes of unending heartbreak but in the ultimate, barring about 50 deaths mostly age-related but aggravated by trauma and fatigue, all the Muslim inhabitants of Nabha crossed the Attari check-point safely.
The District Magistrate had a more daunting task of personal nature on his hands. The family owned a modest agricultural holding in Ramgarh Chhanna village, off the Nabha-Patiala road. The land had been tilled from the time of his father by Muslim tenants. They were akin to an extended family, who made it clear that they intended to commit Hara-kiri en masse outside his home but would not migrate to Pakistan.
My father was a staunch atheist, yet in the hour of need, he reached out to the Sikh clergy. Two buses were hired to accommodate the 60-odd adult tenants while my father and a posse of police, all armed with rifles, sat atop the bus roofs and drove to Golden Temple, Amritsar. And in a brief, solemn ceremony, each bus passenger was consecrated an Amritdhari Sikh. Telloo Khan became Tarlok Singh, Nooran Noor Kaur! After partaking of langar, they all returned home and happily lived their natural life spans, as do their progeny to this day.
Shortly, the Phulkian princely states were reorganised into a single state (PEPSU) headed by the Maharaja of Patiala as “Raj Pramukh”, while the Magistrate was shifted to head the new department, Custodian of Evacuee Properties, rehabilitating several thousands uprooted from the other side of the divide.
