From witnessing Partition to resurgent India

As HT marks 100 years, a look at centenarians whose lives have stood witness to India’s transformation

- Ravi Krishnan Khajuria

Sain Dass has lived in Khour village on India's northwestern fringe all his life. All 101 years of it.

The village in Jammu & Kashmir is a 20-minute drive from the frontier with Pakistan. And since 1923, he has watched from that vantage point as the country struggled for freedom, as it was yoked apart, as it fended off enemies, and as it cooled and calmed itself into stability.

But the centenarian hasn't been a passive onlooker. An army veteran, he first served Maharaja Hari Singh's cavalry, and then joined India's military ranks in August 1957, a decade after Independence.

As Dass says, he wrenched a lot of his rights with his own bare hands.

"It's been a life of struggle and adventure - and success," said Dass, sitting upright, cross-legged on a wooden cot. He holds a bamboo cane for support, but it's really not required.

Dass walks with the strides of a man several decades younger, the years of military training bearing fruit in the sunset of his life.

Khour village, of roughly 6,400 people, is packed with Hindu and Sikh refugees who fled West Pakistan and settled there in the brutal aftermath of Partition.

Dass was 23 when undivided India was split in two.

"I witnessed the mayhem Partition caused and the migration it triggered. Several Hindu families reached Khour overnight and spent nights in the open," he recalls. "They had nothing to eat".

His father, Dharam Singh, moved to the small village in Jammu several years earlier.

"He moved from Sheikhupura in Pakistan's Punjab province. That village was earlier known as Kot Dayal Dass. He got married here," Dass said.

Veteran many wars