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- Title:
- Oral history with Satyajit Singh Majithia, 2013 May 28.
- Author:
- Majithia, Satyajit Singh, 1938-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Singh, Sukhpal
- Author (no Collectors):
- Majithia, Satyajit Singh, 1938-, Sandhu, Manleen, Sandhu, Manleen, Singh, Sukhpal, Singh, Sukhpal, and Singh, Sukhpal
- Corporate Author:
- Acton Family Fund
- Description:
- Born to parents, Surjeet Singh Majithia and Kushal Pal Kaur, Satyajit Singh Majithia, lovingly called Saty, was born in Amritsar, next to the Circuit House on 30th September 1938. The history of Mr. Majithia’s ancestors is really long, but the family had relations with Ranjit Singh, as his grandfather was married into the Majithia family. They had an estate in what now is Pakistan, called Dhani state, which was known for it’s horses. His family has a history in governance. His family also has a long history of war with the British, whether in alliance with Ranjit Singh or just by themselves too. Mado Jetha was the name that established Majitha, a place thirty odd miles from Amritsar. During the British, they were one of the only villages that had a municipality. The Majithias were known as the iron warriors of the Ranjit Singh empire, they were very active at the helm of affairs. Mr. Majithias grandfather was the Prime Minister of Nabha State, his name was General Shivdev Singh, who had a very strong personality, he suffered a lot as he was frequently put in prison by a Maharaja. One of the anecdotes that Mr. Majithia shares tells us about how his great grandfather was imprisoned in Banaras, while Maharani Jindal was there too. What has been told to him is that his great grandfather had his sister switch places with Maharani Jindal and helped her escape the jail and was taken to Nepal. When the mutiny broke out, his great grandfather protected the fort that he was imprisoned in, out of respect for women and children as he claimed that his fight was only with the men. He was later given an estate in Gorakhpur as a reward and he started his own farming there- whether indigo or sugarcane. His family is very well known and also from a very historically rich lineage. His Grandfather started a campaign to get people to join the air force and because the air craft industry hadn’t developed so much people were hesitant to join. His father and cousin joined the air force, his father then went onto became a fighter pilot and was selected to put on a show when the Prince of Wales came to India for a visit. His uncle Sir Kirpal Singh, took over the political work the family was doing. Upon his death, his father took on this political work. He was then also made the Ambassador to Nepal. Then his father became an MP after the third election, and also had a difference of opinion with Krishna Menon. His father had strong opinions against the Chinese and that’s where lay the difference of opinion, his father felt that China was major threat. Apparently Krishna Menon, was provoking Jawaharlal Nehru against Mr. Majithia’s father. After which he handed in his resignation as he didn’t want to be doubted and had strong beliefs. Mr. Majithia also holds strong opinions about China. His grandfather also worked towards upliftment of farmers, with the help of the leader of Haryana. He went to school at Sacred Heart School in Amritsar. He also went to the Doon School in Dehra Dun, which led to him being cocooned from the happenings of Partition. After his schooling in Dehra Dun, he went to Aitchison College in Lahore which was a very sports orientated school. He also did some of his schooling in United Kingdom. He didn’t finish his schooling in the UK all the way through but upon coming back to India he wanted to join the air force but his father suggested that he was not of the correct age to do so anymore. Given that, he ended up handling his father’s business in Gorakhpur. Then he got married to his wife, and had three kids, two sons and one daughter. His daughter is a MP in Delhi, his son is on the Cabinet and his oldest son is handling their family business and he resides with them in New Delhi now. His views on religion is that each religion teaches you to love the creation of the almighty and that those who don’t understand their religion end up fighting instead. That our souls are to be connected to your religion, and how could souls fight? He claims that they never differentiated between Hindu and Muslims and Sikhs and treat everyone equally when he went to college in Lahore.
- Topic:
- Filmed interviews and History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 5 video files
- Publication Info:
- Ludhiana (India)
- Imprint:
- Ludhiana (India), May 28, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0582
- Title:
- Oral history with Shanno Khurana, 2013 August 4.
- Author:
- Khurana, Shanno, 1927-, Sandhu, Manleen, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Author (no Collectors):
- Khurana, Shanno, 1927-, Sandhu, Manleen, Sandhu, Manleen, Sandhu, Manleen, and Kapila, Shuchi
- Description:
- Shanno Khurana was born as ‘Raj Kumar’ on 23rd December 1927 to father Chaman Lal Kumar and mother Jamuna Bai in the princely state of Jodhpur in present-day Rajasthan. She was later named Shanno after a woman from Jalandhar who visited Jodhpur to raise funds for a good cause. Shanno’s father was a railway engineer posted with the princely state of Jodhpur. Her mother died in a railway accident when Shanno was about 4 years old. Since then, she was mostly brought up by her paternal grandmother who lived with them. Her father was originally from Shahpur in Sargodha and her maternal side of the family was also from a place near Sargodha. Shanno is one of eight siblings, five sisters and three brothers. She also has one brother and two sisters from her father’s second marriage. Early in her life, Shanno and her family discovered that she had a lovely voice. However, her father never wanted her to pursue singing professionally since at the time, female singers were widely associated with courtesans in the king’s palace and this was frowned upon by larger society. Thus, Shanno and her sisters were also never allowed to visit the king’s palace. She would listen to songs on the radio and try to sing them. When she was eight years old, Pandit Raghunath Rao Musalgaonkar began coming to their house to teach music to her older brother. A few years later, Shanno’s father yielded to her request to allow her to learn from him as well. At the time, Shanno was attending St. Partick’s Convent School in Jodhpur. She remembers the nuns at school being very affectionate. Eminent Indian physicist, M.G.K Menon’s sisters studied with Shanno at St. Patrick’s Convent. Her first radio broadcast was from All India Radio in Lahore in 1945. Shanno fondly remembers singing Raag Multani. In the same year as her first radio broadcast, Shanno married Dr. Parmeshwar Lal Khurana. He was a medical doctor and dentist in the Air Force. In early 1947, she and her husband relocated from Lahore to Delhi for he wanted to practice dentistry in Delhi. When Partition struck, Shanno and her husband were living in a house on Parliament Street in Delhi. There was news of rioting in Connaught Place which was near their house. Since her husband’s family was from Banno in NWFP, they had close to 40 of his relatives who had come from Banno and were now living with them in Delhi while in search of their new homes. Shanno’s father-in-law was a prominent lawyer in Banno. With 40 people living in the house, Shanno remembers that time as being one of great hardship. Organizing their stay along with food and other amenities was a big challenge. At the height of rioting, some of them who had to sleep in the lawns due to lack of space inside the house, kept guns under their pillow. Some stayed in their house in Delhi for a whole year before they could move out into their own houses. After Partition, Shanno worked very hard to promote female musicians in newly independent India. She also noticed how the classical music scene in Delhi hardly enjoyed an audience or general presence in the city’s culture. Thus, Shanno, with a team of fellow artists who were her supporters, conceived and executed the concept of performing opera on Punjabi and medieval Indian folk tales and historical legends. She was able to use western mediums of performance arts to bring Indian classical music and arts into the consciousness of residents of Delhi who thus far were more into tea-time and cocktail bands as remnants of Delhi’s colonial legacy. In this interview, Shanno also talks about the role radio played in propagating classical music after Partition. She speaks about how after Partition, when the princely states were dissolved and musicians lost royal or aristocratic patronage, court musicians left the darbars and the common man finally experienced unprecedented access to these musicians for the first time. In 1959, she began studying from Mushtaq Hussain Khan, a highly distinguished classical music exponent who taught her until he passed away in 1964. Shanno eventually got her PhD in Music/Musicology and conducted extensive studies on the folk music of Rajasthan. Her contributions to classical music are very well known in India for which the Indian government also awarded her the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan awards in 1991 and 2006 respectively. She has two children, a son and a daughter. One of her grandsons, Naman Ahuja, is an art historian and currently teaches at Jawahar Lal Nehru University. Today, Shanno lives in the home she and her husband built together in Defense Colony. Her husband passed away a few years ago. At the age of 85, Shanno continues to practice singing for a couple hours every day.
- Topic:
- Filmed interviews, History, and History
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 15 video files
- Publication Info:
- New Delhi (India)
- Imprint:
- New Delhi (India), August 4, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0712
- Title:
- Oral history with Vilayat Khan, 2013 April 28.
- Author:
- Khan, Vilayat, 1919- and Sandhu, Manleen
- Author (no Collectors):
- Khan, Vilayat, 1919-, Sandhu, Manleen, Sandhu, Manleen, and Sandhu, Manleen
- Corporate Author:
- American India Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation
- Description:
- Vilayat Khan was born in 1919 into a family of balladeers/folk musicians with musical prowess dating back at least two generations from his birth. His father’s name was Raj Mang and his grandfather, who was also a balladeer, was named Khairu; they were both dhaddis, practitioners of folk music rendered on a percussion instrument in Punjab. Vilayat is one of five siblings, all brothers. He did not attend a formal school and is not literate. He received training in folk singing, music and ballads from a very young age. He was married to Dhanni before Partition. When Partition struck, Vilayat was living with his family in Goslan. Vilayat’s family initially came to Malerkotla where his maternal grandmother lived. Being a Muslim family in east Punjab, his family was forcefully sent to a refugee camp about a month after they came to Malerkotla. From that camp, they were boarded onto buses that took them to Kasur. From Kasur, they took a train to Lahore. They did not see any violence along the way. His family brought a lot of gold with them. Vilayat came to Pakistan with his wife Dhanni, four brothers, mother and father. All of Vilayat’s children, 4 sons and 3 daughters, were born in Pakistan. Vilayat’s family eventually came to Sargodha, where it could only sustain itself with dignity till the time the money, gold and silver they brought with them was all spent. Vilayat says he forgot how to sing, including the poetry and lyrics of the songs he used to sing before Partition. There was no audience to appreciate his art. For survival, he did odd jobs like secretly cutting wood and selling it and other forms of day labor. He says such was his sadness in the 10 years that he lived in Pakistan, from 1947 to 1957, that he never once laughed. Sometime in 1957, Vilayat and his father decided that they would return to Goslan, for that is where they believed they would be prosperous, both monetarily and spiritually, once again. Vilayat remembers selling his mother’s silver bangles and other ancestral jewelry to accumulate Rs. 9000, the amount of money he needed to make his journey from Sargodha to Goslan, a distance of over 400 kilometers with all sorts of bureaucracy and border controls that added to the challenge of returning to India. In the interview, Vilayat narrates in detail the obstacles he faced in his journey back to India, including how thieves posing as policemen robbed his family somewhere near Lahore. He crossed the border near Lahore as well. It took him three days to cover the distance between Sargodha and Goslan. Vilayat says that his music “came back” to him after his return to India. Since then, Vilayat has continued singing and is one of the most senior and formidable exponents of dhaddi music across Punjab today. His contributions to his art form have been recognized by India’s national academy for music, dance and theatre, Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA), in the form of the highly prestigious SNA Award in 2009. Today, at the age of 93, Vilayat lives with his children (some of whom have inherited his art form from him) and grandchildren in Goslan.
- Topic:
- Filmed interviews, History, and History
- Language:
- Panjabi
- Physical Description:
- 9 video files
- Publication Info:
- Amritsar (India)
- Imprint:
- Amritsar (India), April 28, 2013
- Genre:
- Filmed interviews
- Identifier:
- partitionArchive_0597
