How an Indian historian and a Pakistani YouTuber solved a partition mystery

An Indian man who was separated from his family in Pakistan more than 70 years ago finally reunited with his siblings — thanks to a cross-border collaboration between a historian and a Youtuber.

During field research in a village near the India-Pakistan border earlier this year, Dr Nonica Datta, who teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, came across 87-year-old Mahinder Singh Gill, who said his birth name was Muhammad Shafi and his blood relatives might be in Pakistan.

Gill was among millions of people who migrated during the violent Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the religious and ethnic mayhem.

When Gill’s family was making the run, he was separated. He was only ten years old. Alone, destitute and facing certain death, a Sikh family adopted him.

He grew up, married, and now has grandchildren in the Indian village of Bandala, just five kilometres from the border. He thought he’d never see his brothers.

“When the border was drawn it wasn’t clear for many people where the villages were,” Datta tells TRT World.

Pakistan’s largest province is also called Punjab, and it shares a long border with Indian Punjab. The landscape and geography are so similar that people still mistakenly cross from one side to the other with soldiers chasing after them.

The old man has a story

Datta met Gill, who likes to be called Mahinder Shafi, over several months this year, taking the long journey from Delhi to the Bandala village, which is about six to seven hours by train. The train, Datta adds, is never on time.

Datta never thought she’d meet someone like Gill. She came across him quite by chance. One day during her fieldwork, she met someone who said there was an old man more than 100 years old who could share interesting tales about the 1947 Partition.

As a researcher, Datta often visits border villages to collect stories and understand how the Partition changed the social landscape and lives of the people.

“One of the things that actually affected me deeply was the loss of his family, how he got separated, how his father held his hand, his three brothers, I remember their names on my fingertips now. He saw his young sister drown in the canal,” Datta says.

“And this visual kept coming back to me – how he was holding beloved protective father's hand, and suddenly somebody snatched him away.”

It seems odd that tracking someone’s family can be so difficult in this digital age.

However, despite the widespread availability of the internet and search engines like Google, Gill’s family has no access to the web and remains unfamiliar with Google, TikTok, or Facebook.

Gill had told Datta that before the Partition, he lived in the Indian village called Bulloke, which is located in the Zira tehsil of district Ferozepur. Datta decided to look it up on the internet.

The Youtube connection

Across the border in Pakistani Punjab, 39-year-old Abbas Khan Lashari, a Youtuber, was doing similar work to Datta’s — he would go to different villages and collect stories about Partition.

Lashari enjoys history and collecting stories about the turmoil that engulfed the border areas during the independence of India and Pakistan from British colonial rule. He had grown up listening to stories about the Partition from his father.

A few years ago, he came across YouTube videos in which people were sharing their family history and the Partition experience, which till this day remains engrained in the memory of many Indians and Pakistanis. But he felt there was nothing related to the place he was from – Sheikhupura, a city located an hour's drive away from the border with India.

Lashari now runs a YouTube channel called ‘Sanjhe Wele’, which means the age of unity. He started the channel in 2022 and has over 29,500 subscribers.

Since then, he has interviewed 120 people across 400 villages, documenting their lives. Some of the stories he recorded are horrific in terms of violence and greed, but some are full of love, bravery and strength, where people went above and beyond to help a Muslim or a Sikh brother.

About a year ago, Lashari documented the reunion of two friends who used to live in a village near the Pakistani city of Lahore and had last seen each other 75 years ago.

Muhammad Sharif, a Pakistani, and Arjun Singh, an Indian, were 12 years old when they last saw each other. With the help of Lashari’s YouTube content, they met again in Lahore.

One of Lashari’s videos ended up on the YouTube feed of a Sikh Sardar from the United States. He asked Lashari if he could take him to his ancestral village, Kot Shamsher Singh. And it was there that Lashari came across Mahinder Singh Gill’s story.

“It was then I met Niamat, who is Gill’s brother. He told me about a missing uncle,” says Lashari, who wears a long moustache curved like a dagger.

Lashari learned that Gill was holding his father’s hand when they were escaping.

“They were a rich family and owned a lot of land. When the violence erupted, they left Bulloke to find refuge in the nearest town, but the army didn’t help them. So they decided to travel to Pakistan. Their sister drowned while they were crossing a canal.”

He interviewed the family and uploaded it on his YouTube channel.

The reunion

The borders of India and Pakistan were drawn by a British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

The British Raj gave Radcliffe 36 days in 1947 to determine the border between the neighbouring countries. The two major provinces impacted by the line were Punjab and Bengal.

“The border – to the people living there – is a palpable reality. It is real. It's palpable and human with all its contradictions. Sitting in a big city, you don’t really think about it that way, but it is,” says Datta, the Indian historian.

“The line was not drawn in an arbitrary manner, but its impact was much more drastic and traumatic.”

While scrolling through the internet, trying to see if there was anything on India’s Bulloke village, Datta came across a YouTube video called Veer di Udeek, loosely translated into ‘waiting for the brother’.

“I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It was like looking at a miracle unfold before my eyes.”

It was the same video Lashari had filmed for his channel Sanjhe Wele, in which he interviewed Gill’s long-lost brothers.

Datta got in touch with Lashari, and they fact-checked the stories.

They arranged a Zoom meeting for the brothers to meet. Despite the separation of decades and a bad internet connection between them, Gill and his brothers spoke to each other like they had separated just yesterday.

With teary eyes, Gill said he would have gone to Pakistan to look for his family if he had the means and money to do it.

"If I did, I would have gone," he said before breaking into tears.

Gill told his brothers that the closest he came to crossing into Pakistan was when the buffalos he was herding crossed the border.

In the meeting, which Lashari uploaded to his channel, Gill’s brothers told him not to be upset. “Separation was our destiny".

Datta says there is much to learn from Gill’s story.

“As part of my work, I have met other families where they were separated. But this was one experience which had consequences. Gill resettles into his new family. So, this was a story about his past and his separated family. But the other aspect of the story is that we were able to reunite him with his brothers.”

Datta says Gill and his brothers hope to meet in Nankana Sahib or Kartarpur Corridor soon.

“We're not talking about a separated family, you know, we are not talking about a separated family in terms of what happened in 1947. So, Partition doesn't end there. The history of separated families is part of the living histories of South Asia. These are the histories that we need to talk about,” she says.

“It is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of how we look at Partition and borderlands and borders because it's the separated family that becomes the point of connection, reunion and love and healing and, and, and there are many stories, not just one Muhammad Shafi.”