(Excerpted from Bupinder Singh Bali’s Those Who Stayed; The Sikhs of Kashmir. Published by Amaryllis, 2024) When Nehru made his famous speech, “At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,” most of Kashmir was still in a deep sleep. A sleep that was broken months later when thousands of armed tribal men from Pakistan and Afghanistan poured into Kashmir.
They turned the beautiful valley red with apples and orange with autumn into one red with blood, and orange with arsons. According to an estimate over 33000 Sikhs were killed in those two weeks. During the course of writing this book, I met and interviewed several survivors of the 1947 Kabali Massacre.
A few stories are shared here. Though the world knows that Kashmir was annexed to India after the then king signed an instrument of accession, it never came to the pages of history how gory this annexation was. Through my book, I have tried to bring the history of the underrepresented to the larger world.
There were too many things deliberately hidden from the world, which I have tried to collect through oral histories and micro-histories. --Bhupinder Singh Bali *** Survivor Stories I was ten or eleven years old when it happened. The winter had already kicked in as it was the end of October, and I remember most of the villagers were still busy with the apple produce.
The harvest was almost over, but storing the apples in wooden caskets was tiring work. One had to first arr.
