Yoked with a legal battle, the birth of Pakistan was fought before the British judiciary and snatched from the clenching jaws of Hindu nationalists. The scaffolding for the right for a separate land was laid by geniuses such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Alama Muhammad Iqbal and a consortium of legal aides. However, after the battle was won, the war to claim territories began. A war that was fought with blood and tears and in the midst of it; a woebegone mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife or simply a woman.  

As a mother labours for the birth of a child, so did the Muslim women of the subcontinent nurture the birth of Pakistan. While the men battled to secure a safe passage for the migration of their families, the horrors abroad and at home manifested themselves upon the women and the children; the easier and weaker targets. For women, the journey to independence brought with it displacement, a harrowing walk, a threatening train ride, looting or abduction. Journeying to the other side of subjugation, women often had to forego their homes, their relatives, their honour, their identity and finally their life. 

Subjected to the will of sectarian mobs, the betrayal against women came from home. The Hindu and Sikh communities that had been tolerant towards their Muslim neighbours became belligerently unaccepting of the independence. Thus, the women presented as the most effortless of preys that were used as spawns to belittle the victory of Muslims. Imagine a woman witnessing the male members of her family tortured and killed, her children snatched and dashed to the ground, her sisters robbed of their innocence, only because she valued the birth of Pakistan her paramount desire.

Afraid, unarmed and often stripped of their possessions, the migration often turned matriarchal. Widowed and orphaned, women would lead processions of their kind, uncertain if they would see the freedom they had once dreamt of. The 1947 Partition Archive documents the resilience of such women that became the pillars of philanthropy. Mrs. Rahseeda Hussain and her family were settled in Hyderabad during the partition wherein she recalls her grandmother mobilizing people in her neighbourhood to help refugees. Footprints in Time: Reminiscences of a Sindhi Matriarch, a collection of the memoirs of her grandmother  states ‘It was edifying to see her lead them at railway stations carrying stretchers of the sick and ailing.’ Yet, her own fear overcame her at the time of partition when she was living at the hostel in Kinnaird College in Lahore. “We were told to put the lights out early at night due to the riots outside. The girl next to me was sleeping with a knife tied in a belt around her waist. Suddenly I was scared and I was crying in fear thinking, ‘What if she pierces me with that knife in my sleep?’ Remembering this later on, I was so shocked at my natural distrust in that girl,” she says. “Religion had never played a part in our lives but when partition happened, it suddenly began to.”
The pathos of a woman’s woes during the partition was that her history was often undocumented. Her anguish was witness by none but the land towards which they voyaged. The tales of her misery were often orally passed down by eye-witnesses.

Maryam Baber recalls her mother’s harrowing determination to end the misery swiftly when thousands of rioters gathered around the Goshamahal Baradari assembly building and started chanting slogans. Mrs. Babar and her entire family were inside. “I heard my parents talking with each other about a pistol my mother was carrying. I remember my father asking her how she was going to defend herself with one pistol against thousands of angry people outside. She told him that the pistol was not for them but for killing the children in case the mob breached the mansion,” Mrs. Babar recounts. 

The mettle of these migrating amazons was tested and tried yet never subdued. As they arrived into the refugee camps, the violence-stricken migrants faced the true horrors of displacement. Asif Saleem Qureshi was merely a young girl around the time of the partition, she remembers the ‘violence, looting and rioting’ while she travelled to school. Her carriage driver would try alternative routes every day to keep her safe. Yet, the love for Pakistan did not stop her family from extending their hospitality to the suffering migrants. Mrs. Qureshi says that nearly 300 people took refuge in their house in Lahore. “They slept there for days and there were two doctors looking after them.” 
Under the strong leadership of Fatimah Jinnah, great women like Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Lady Abdullah Haroon and Jahanara Shahnawaz were at the forefront of the legal battle to win Pakistan for the Muslims of the subcontinent. However, there was a large majority of women that gathered around in dimly lit quarters to reinforce the idea of unity, faith and discipline. They sewed flags, painted placards, chanted slogans and bore witness to the greatness that was to come for their daughters in the form a new land where they would thrive; in peace, prosperity and success. 

The woes of a mother are no stranger to the land of Pakistan, as it witnessed mothers giving birth in refugee camps without much medical help. Arghwani Begum was over eight months pregnant when she migrated from Delhi to Lahore, to witness not only the birth of her child but of a nation. “There were no clothes for the baby,” she says simply. “We draped him in one of my daughter’s frocks.” Consequently, the local Muslim women volunteered in providing medical aids to those in tent and tin camps.

Dr Hameeda Hossain; a human rights activist, remembers that her grandmother established a hospital and shelter for refugees in Hyderabad, Sindh.
As the partition of the subcontinent ensued, many women were abducted and forced to convert from their religions and later married to their abductors. Their way of life was stolen from them, leaving behind a wake of nostalgia and grief for their lost relations. The case of Allah Rakhi, was one that was woven from abduction to adaptation and later recovery. Already married before her abduction, her son was taken from her. After The Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949 was signed, the army came looking for the abducted women and found her. She had birthed two sons from her captor by then and only managed to take one of them with her to Lahore. Reportedly 20,738 Muslim women were recovered from India by 1955.

In the post-partition mayhem, the women that left behind their friends and families despaired to revisit their native towns. They yearned to reminisce the lives they had spent coexisting with their Muslim neighbours. For forty of such women, Munawar Humayun Khan proved to be mana from heaven. While her husband served as the Ambassador to the High Commission of Pakistan in India in the 1980s, she met with the alumni of Kinnard College, her own alma meter. Seeing the yearning of these women, Mrs. Khan along with her husband arranged 40 visas so the yearning could revisit Lahore and peek into the lives they had left behind. 

The Post-Partition Muse of Academia. Hoor Bano, today called Hoor Bano Panipati, was born in 1925 at Karnal District in Panipat, Haryana. She matriculated in 1940 and got a teaching job at a school in Amritsar. During partition, she was with her family in Karnal for summer holidays when they decided to migrate. Ms. Bano recounts that her ailing grandmother passed away on the second day of their journey. She and the rest of her family were picked up by military trucks that took them to the refugee camp at Walton Cantonment in Lahore.
Ms. Bano resumed teaching in 1948 and joined the Nusrat Girls High School at Rabwah where she taught Urdu and Islamiat for six years. She also wrote columns for Mashriq Daily, a Peshawar-based Urdu newspaper, and several other notable Urdu publications. Being hailed as the rehabilitator of education, she also took charge of her husband’s institution, Victory College. She taught at Victory College/Kinnaird High School for Girls for several decades and retired in 1992.
Thus, the idea of Pakistan had already been born ages ago, the compassion of the Muslim brethren, their empathy for the displaced and migrating bespeaks the ideology of unity that formed the foundation of Pakistan. After 77^th years of independence the women of Pakistan are reaping the fruits of the sacrifices made by their foremothers. Today, a society of strong, resilient women is fighting for the prosperity of Pakistan. They don their armours and raise the flag of Pakistan high.