More people than the entire current populations of NYC and Chicago combined had been displaced in India after 1947 due to Partition.
Multi-generational families in India and Pakistan were were permanently uprooted overnight.
In a war-like atmosphere, reports of atrocities, rapes, and massacres added up daily.
Many of these 11 million displaced people ended up in camps as they awaited safe passage into Pakistan or India.
Once a week audiences of traumatized Hindus and Sikhs in Delhi would watch my grandfather pull up in a jeep loaned to him by Lady Mountbatten.
He would step out with a bundle of canisters under his arm,
hang a bedsheet between poles,
and plug the projector’s audio into the camp’s PA system so everybody could hear the soundtrack to whatever films he thought suitable to keep them all calm.
I asked him later in his life about these films he carefully selected.
What did he show?
Did he show Casablanca?
The Best Years of Our Lives?
Maybe he showed Arnold Bake’s footage from the 1930s?
But the only film he could distinctly remember showing…
…was one about ants.
He told me the refugees were surprised to see insects that big.
Classic missionary humor.
The largest audiences for my Grandfather’s film screenings were at Kingsway Camp which held around 35,000 refugees.
Kingsway Camp, so-named because this was the site of the King's encampment -
where His Majesty found shelter from the sun during the Durbar just four decades earlier.
100 years ago, this was a drained swamp graced by an emperor with 6,170 diamonds on his head.
Now days, you can do anything you want here.
The obelisk over there marks the spot where King George the V was glorified as Emperor of India.
And the mound we are sitting on is what remains of the amphitheater where tens of thousands of people stood in shock when they first heard that this backwater would become the new capital of the British Raj and the new power center of the country.