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HYDERABAD, Pakistan: On a rain-soaked September night in 1947, ten-year-old Muhammad Saleem Pirzada was woken by his father and told to gather whatever valuables the family could carry. 

Outside, the streets of Narnaul — then part of the princely state of Patiala in present-day India — were dark, slick, and dangerous.

The order was clear: leave, or risk certain death at the hands of armed Hindu and Sikh mobs that had already begun attacking Muslim neighborhoods.

“Walk barefoot and put a cloth in the children’s mouths so they may not talk,” Pirzada recalls his father telling his mother as the family prepared to slip away in silence. 

That night, Sept. 8, Pirzada, his father, grandfather, four siblings and three other relatives walked more than two kilometers to the railway station. His mother would join them in Pakistan months later.

“It’s natural, when a person is ill, near death, and then Allah grants them health, that moment of near-death comes back to mind. It was just like that, only Allah saved us.”

Britain’s hurried partition of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan had triggered one of the largest migrations in human history. Around 15 million people were displaced along religious lines, and more than a million were killed in massacres and reprisals, according to independent estimates.

In Narnaul, the violence began on Sept. 6, when mobs attacked Muslim homes. The next day brought more killings and looting. By the third day, the Pirzada family decided to leave, joining a crowd of terrified Muslims at the railway station. Sikh state police initially tried to stop them, but relented after the intervention of the British Railways’ Watch and Ward force.

“We boarded from there and set off,” Pirzada says. 

Along the journey, the train stopped at stations where bodies lay scattered. 

“We saw bodies, wounded people, some without limbs,” he remembers. 

The family eventually reached Hyderabad, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, traveling via Munabao in the Indian state of Rajasthan. 

“May Allah never let anyone see such a time.”

Pirzada estimates that at least 80 members of his extended family were killed in those weeks.

It was not always this way.

Before 1947, he says, Narnaul was a place of deep communal trust. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims attended each other’s weddings, and summer nights saw neighbors gathered together on charpoys.

“The Hindus would come and sit there [in the Muslim neighborhoods] at night in the summer… That’s how relations were with the Hindus. They would attend our weddings,” he recalls. 

Sometimes Hindu fathers would even entrust Muslim traders to escort their daughters to their in-laws’ homes. 

“The Hindus would say, ‘Mian ji, you are going there, take my daughter along.’ I have seen those days of affection.”

He still remembers the names of his Hindu schoolteachers, even as he acknowledges that the violence in Eastern Punjab was part of a larger cycle of retaliations. 

“In Eastern Punjab, the atrocities were greater… the Muslims there were martyred,” he says, accusing the Maharaja of Patiala, Yadavindra Singh, of providing arms to Hindu and Sikh mobs. 
“The riots took place at the instigation of the Maharaja of Patiala.”

When asked whether his family would have migrated if peace had held, Pirzada is clear: “There would be no question of coming [to Pakistan]. We had land, the crops were good, and life went on. Had we stayed there, we would have used new technology and increased production.”

In Pakistan, Pirzada briefly worked as a clerk before his family received a land allotment in rural Hyderabad. Farming became his life’s work, and today, at 88, he lives surrounded by his two sons, one daughter, and ten grandchildren.

But more than seven decades later, Narnaul remains etched in his memory. 

“One’s homeland, the place of one’s birth, is always remembered. The desire is still there. May Allah grant the opportunity so I can visit it once,” the said. 

“We even saw some people who died in Pakistan insisting, ‘No, no, we will go back! We will go back’!”

ISLAMABAD: Encased in glass at the center of a softly lit hall in Islamabad’s Radio Pakistan museum stands a towering relic of the country’s birth — a Marconi transmitter that once carried the solemn words:

“This is Pakistan Broadcasting Service, Lahore. We now bring to you a special program on ‘The Dawn of Independence.’”

It was the night of August 13, 1947. As the world tuned in, the voices of broadcasters Zahur Azar and Mustafa Ali Hamdani broke the silence, one in English, the other in Urdu, to announce the creation of a new nation on Radio Pakistan, the national broadcaster which came into being simultaneously with Pakistan.  

Installed in Lahore in 1937 as part of British India’s early radio infrastructure, the transmitter was repurposed a decade later to deliver the defining broadcast of Pakistan’s emergence as an independent state.

Today, nearly eight decades on, it has found a second life in the capital, restored, preserved, and displayed as a monument to the country’s broadcast and political history at the Radio Pakistan museum. 

“This transmitter was stored away in our engineering store for years,” Saeed Ahmed Shaikh, director-general of Radio Pakistan, told Arab News.

“It was vacuum tube technology, obsolete. But because vibrant nations preserve and document their history, we brought it here, restored it, and put it on display.”

BROADCAST THAT ECHOED THROUGH TIME

Back in 1947, radio was the most immediate and far-reaching medium available. Newsprint was slow, television still rare. The airwaves were how people learned of revolution, war — and freedom. And this Marconi machine was how Pakistan was introduced to itself and the world.

“It wasn’t just a broadcast,” Shaikh said. “It was the dawn of a new era.”

Restored in 2020, the transmitter is now the centerpiece of a museum that charts nearly a century of Pakistani broadcasting. The collection includes microphones, vinyl records, antique radios, classical music recordings, and the original Urdu and English scripts of landmark news bulletins.

Among the artifacts is the very microphone Hamdani used during his independence night announcement.

“We’re not just witnesses to history,” Shaikh added. “We’re its custodians. And we want our young generation to connect with that legacy.”

CRADLE OF MUSIC AND MEMORY

Founded in 1947, Radio Pakistan, also known as Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, was not only the country’s first public broadcaster but also a formative platform for the country’s musical and cultural identity.

“If you ask the late Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, he would tell you his first public performance was aired by Radio Pakistan. Same with Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi. These were voices we introduced to the world,” Shaikh said, naming giants of Pakistani music. 

Over the decades, Radio Pakistan aired everything from Sufi qawwalis to political speeches, public service announcements, and dramatic radio plays that reached millions. For many households, it was the soundtrack of a nation coming into its own.

DIGITAL ERA

Since assuming office as director-general in 2023, Shaikh has introduced reforms to bring the legacy broadcaster into the digital era. A major focus has been archiving and digitizing its vast music and speech recordings, some of which date back more than 70 years.

In partnership with a Chinese technology firm, Radio Pakistan is digitizing its full music archive, a collection scheduled to be accessible globally via platforms like Apple Music by September 2025.

“We’re moving fast,” Shaikh said. “Soon you’ll be able to access our music from anywhere, right on your phone.”

Already, the broadcaster boasts over a million followers on X, 2.7 million on Facebook, and a mobile app that streams live content from 53 stations across the country. Its digital reach spans far beyond Pakistan -to Gulf countries, Europe, and North America — connecting expatriates not just to news, but to familiar sounds and languages from home.

“[For us] the question is no longer, ‘How many people in Pakistan are listening?’” Shaikh said, when asked about a decline in radio audiences worldwide.

“The question now is: How many people worldwide are listening to Radio Pakistan?”