Twelve villages for a cremation ground

ਹੁਸੈਨੀਵਾਲਾ

Shaheed Bhagat Singh Ji, Shaheed Sukhdev Singh Ji and Shaheed Rajguru Ji were cremated at Hussainiwala on the Sutlej on 23 March 1931. Batukeshwar Dutt and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Ji's mother Vidyawati were later cremated there too.

At Partition the site fell inside Pakistan. On 17 January 1961 it was returned to India in exchange for twelve villages near the Sulemanki headworks in Fazilka.

The Hussainiwala-Ganda Singh Wala rail crossing on the old Delhi-Lahore line is dead. The Kaiser-e-Hind rail-and-road bridge was destroyed in the 1971 war and never rebuilt.

A retreat ceremony has run daily at six in the evening since 1970. It is quieter and friendlier than Wagah.

The bodies were taken out through a hole broken in the wall of Lahore Central Jail on the night of 23 March 1931, driven to the Sutlej and burned in haste. Families arriving the next morning found the remains partly consumed and the ashes were collected from the bank.

Batukeshwar Dutt, who threw the Assembly bombs with Bhagat Singh and was transported rather than hanged, died in 1965 and was cremated here at his own request. Bhagat Singh's mother Vidyavati was cremated here in 1975.

The site was damaged in the 1971 fighting and rebuilt. It stands a few hundred metres from the border, and the retreat ceremony there is a smaller version of the one at Attari with almost no audience.

What we don't know

  • Who lived in the twelve villages that were traded away, and what happened to them. Nobody appears to have asked.
  • The exact spot of the 1931 cremation, which the river has moved over.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Wikipedia entry on Hussainiwala and its cited sources.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 49 accounts in Ghadar, the chapter of this site covering the movements against colonial rule, 1907 to 1947.