Basant Kaur lived through one of the most harrowing episodes of Partition - the well deaths in the Punjabi village of Thoha Khalsa in what is now Pakistan in March 1947. She recounts why and how women jumped into the well as a hostile Muslim crowd advanced on the village. I interviewed Basant Kaur in her home in the Jangpura Extension district of Delhi on 12 May 1997 - she told me she was 92. I met her through her son, Bir Bahadur Singh, whom I also interviewed at length about his memories of the tragedy of Thoha Khalsa. She spoke Punjabi, or more accurately a Rawalpindi dialect of Punjabi - her grandson Bhola Singh tried to translate and at times elaborated on her story. 

The deaths at Thoha Khalsa became particularly well known because they feature in Bhisham Sahni's Partition novel Tamas - Sahni visited Thoha Khalsa and saw some of the bodies being retrieved, and an interview with him is also available on this site. I was able to visit Thoha Khalsa very briefly in April 1997 and the photo on the YouTube label above is one that I took there at that time. I've posted below the programme in my series India: a people partitioned which focussed on Punjab.