The Great Partition Read online

  Gandhi was not walking alone. Other peace workers also spread his message, often leaving their families in the face of incredulity, and travelling many hundreds of miles to follow in the footsteps of their leader. Amtus Salaam was one such woman, born into a landowning Muslim family in Patiala in the Punjab. A slight young figure, with thick dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses, in the winter of 1946 she arrived in Noakhali to play her part in the peace mission. Amtus Salaam, dismayed by the scenes in Noakhali, fasted for twenty-four days to try and convey the message of Hindu–Muslim unity. By the time that Gandhi came to visit her, she was verging on starvation and was too weak to speak. She sat up a little, cloaked in pale homespun blankets, and took some orange juice to end the fast. There were still faithful groups of Gandhian believers in India at the end of 1946, trying to counteract the spirit of the age and to carry out his teachings. The waves of terror brought by the massacres, however, meant that their work was more difficult than it had ever been.

  A web of fear

  In late October and November, the violence spread rapidly westward. On Bihar's seemingly endless, flat Gangetic plains, the poor in villages and towns suffered some of the worst poverty in India. Troubled by an inequitable landholding system and the domination of landlords, during the preceding years more people had become increasingly poor and landless. Little by little those with even a small plot of land had been forced in the post-war years to sell up, much against their will. Congress had long built its Bihari support on the bedrock of protests by farm labourers and left-wing activists. It was not really considered a danger zone for Hindu–Muslim conflict. In October, though, the same patterns of violence raged in Bihar; thousands of Muslims were killed and perhaps 400,000 Muslims were affected – by mass migrations, upheaval and brutality – in Patna, Chapra, Monghyr, Bhagalpur and Gaya in both the towns and the countryside. National jubilation and expectations of freedom had become muddled and entwined with the ‘othering’ of Muslims. Slogans, symbols and songs were utilised to rally the rioters. Nehru was shocked to see that ‘In the main bazaar as well as elsewhere every Hindu house and shop had Jai Hind or some other slogans [including ‘Hindus, beware of Muslims’] written in Hindi on the wall’ and was devastated by what he saw. ‘These two days here [in Bihar] have been so full of horror for me that I find it difficult to believe in the reality of things I must believe in.’ He upbraided the crowds who came to see their future Prime Minister: ‘Is this a picture of Swaraj for which you have been fighting?’ and ‘All of you are shouting Jai Hind and “Long Live Revolution” but what kind of country do you want to build up?’ The Congress message of freedom and liberty had been reworked and manipulated in new and frightening ways.18

  Among the ministers and party workers in Bihar, as in Bengal, a deep streak of party-political bias was apparent. In some villages in Monghyr, Congress workers did not turn up to investigate for three or four days after the ‘riots’ had taken place – signalling their lack of concern. Sultan Ahmed, a Congress Muslim of Bihar complained to the leaders in Delhi about the lack of arrests and the impunity of the attackers. ‘The house searches are also very few and stolen jewellery and grains are being transferred from place to place and being sold freely without fear of conviction.’19 Little news came out of Bihar about what was taking place, and the Congress-controlled provincial papers kept the lid on the story. League activists, for their part, rushed to the spot to protect and help ‘their’ people and Leaguers running camps for homeless Biharis manned the doors and would not allow other people or government officials to enter.

  In November, further west again in Meerut district, near the small market town of Garhmukhteshwar, closer to Delhi, violence started during a local religious fair. The next day the killings continued in Garhmukhteshwar town itself, three miles away, and the Muslim quarter was ruined. Perhaps some 350 people were murdered. Property and livelihoods were destroyed, and several young girls were abducted. The violence fanned out into other parts of the district.20 There was general agreement that this attack had been well planned and organised, and in the memory of one Congress minister who witnessed the scene, ‘The RSS had carefully laid the plot, marked all Muslim shops which after dusk were burnt according to a plan without doing the least injury to the neighbouring Hindu shops.’21 During arson attacks in nearby Hapur, the local Indian Superintendent of Police concluded that most of the gangs ‘are in the pay of banias of Hapur’ and that the responsibility of rich Hindus ‘cannot be ignored’.22

  Violence was being carried out in the name of freedom. In some places, such as the western coastline of Gujarat and Bombay, freedom appears to have chimed with hopes of a new moral purity, and Gandhian-inspired attempts to ban alcohol, foreign cloth, prostitution and salacious films were attempted as Independence dawned.23 In the provinces of the south, with small minority populations and very different political economies, the ‘Muslim problem’ seemed further away and the challenges of Independence were to direct and shape the place of regional languages and caste within a free India. In other places though, especially in the northern Hindi belt, popular expectations of freedom had a pronounced Hindu colouring and the overlap between the consolidation of nationalism and the ‘othering’ of the Muslim could not be escaped; Hindu extremists – and Congressmen on the right of the party – mixed their politics with support for religious mendicants, championed the abolition of cow slaughter, the restoration of temples, and the purging of Arabic and Persian words from the Hindi language. It was not irrational, then, that the Congress should be seen as threatening to Muslim traditions and customs and this boosted the League's polling power, giving the sheen of authenticity to the crass cries of ‘Hindu Raj’.

  Fear of or involvement in violence hastened this process and consolidated new sorts of relationships; for instance, between rich and poor co-religionists. People who may never have had much in common in the past were thrown together by virtue of their faith: Begum Ikramullah remembered how poor Muslims from nearby slums shared their paltry rations of eggs and vegetables with her household during the difficult days of the riots when the markets were closed and food became scarce under curfew conditions.24 Businessmen took sides by paying out to protection rackets, lending their vehicles to political parties or making hefty donations. Unbidden, Punjabi League volunteers escorted their distressed co-religionists in Bihar from their disturbed homeland to their new ‘home’ in Punjab, hundreds of miles away. This evacuation, if infused with humanitarian impulses, could not be anything except politically provocative (as well as bewildering for the refugees themselves) in the context of the time, as the refugees became living symbols of a generalised ‘Hindu’ brutality and useful propaganda objects.

  Fatima Begum, an Urdu journalist who had begun her career as a municipal inspector of Urdu girls’ schools in Lahore, and became a faithful League activist, travelled to Bihar in a medical relief party organised by members of the Provincial Women's Subcommittee in 1946 and ushered at least two hundred women back to Lahore.25 Similarly, a Pakistani politician, Abdul Qaiyum Khan, later remembered that ‘Pathan volunteers who were sent as relief workers into Bihar came back entirely disillusioned after witnessing the harrowing details of the treatment meted out to the Muslims.’26 In the process new ideas about who was inside and outside the community were established and activists could invest in idealised, if short-lived, forms of pan-Islamic religious community.

  Many humanitarian activists said that relief work opened their eyes to the ways in which their fellow Hindus or Muslims in faraway parts of South Asia or in neighbouring, but previously unvisited, mohallas lived. Offended by the dire poverty that they saw, relief workers became imbued with the philanthropic but condescending urge to reform the poor, to improve them through education and instil better hygiene. Participation in relief work often coloured the assertion of ethno-religious identity with this improving mission: cosseted middle-class women had never realised before how poor, or uneducated, some of ‘their people’ were. Involvem
ent in relief work also energised groups by giving them a sense of energy, direction and usefulness; in some ways it gave meaning to existence altogether. Groups such as the Mahasabha, RSS, the League and Jam ‘at-i Islami stepped into the shoes of the government and filled the critical need for nursing, food handouts, shelter and rudimentary counselling that the state was too overburdened to provide.

  On the other side of the country, in Lahore, exaggerated accounts of events in West Bengal were being circulated in the press and political leaders called for ‘blood for blood’. A Noakhali day was marked in October and processions of students and lecturers from local colleges drew attention to the brutal violence that had occurred against poor Hindu peasants in rural Bengal.27 In Bombay city, similarly, a sudden rise in tension, the closure of the stock market and the hasty pulling down of shutters in the bazaar were attributed directly to news of events in Noakhali combined with a trenchant rumour that Nehru had been shot and injured on his visit to the frontier.28 (Nehru had in fact been pelted with a rock but was not badly injured.) In the past it had been much more difficult for political provocateurs to persuade people that their religious identity needed to be defended and that they had shared kinship with Hindus or Muslims living elsewhere. Now, though, as people worried about distant relatives and heard anxious rumours, the task of linking religion and politics became easier.

  For many of the Bengali elite, or bhadralok, the partition of Bengal began to appear a solution and a way out – both to resolve the crisis and to protect their own business interests – and a pro-partition movement gained momentum as petitions and telegrams from landowners and merchants, tea planters and white-collar workers flooded into Congress and government offices demanding partition of the province.29 For the extremists of both communities, the memory of the Calcutta killings also became an important weapon in the propaganda war fought across the country and retellings of the 16 August stories, in lurid poems, newspapers and stories, were systematically disseminated (even being used in a schoolchildren's poetry recital competition) and fully exploited to provoke further violence in Noakhali and Bihar in the following weeks.30 In this atmosphere, circles of allegiance rippled outwards, particularly in the cities and towns.

  Paranoia and intense fearfulness had become part of the fabric of everyday life by 1946 in Punjab and larger parts of North India. Polarisation depended upon a linear and totalising experience of complete isolation and faith only in a one-dimensional form of political identity – ‘If you are not with us you are against us’ – and a sense that retaliation and preparedness for aggressive assault was all that any rational person could engage in.31 What is more, the doomsayers and political voices controlling the press and the public discourse at the time of Partition wilfully manipulated senses of space and time, moving backwards and forwards across historical stories and future portents of Armageddon-like destruction to fill their listeners and readers with a sense of immediate terror. Hindus would be subject to collective extermination, ushering in an era akin to the centuries of supposed Mughal domination, while Muslims were reminded of times of former glory and both the real and imaginary humiliations that had followed.

  Explicit pamphlets on historical heroes, mythic figures and episodes from history, including the rebellion of 1857 (and its brutal British backlash), were printed, circulated and gossiped about so that history itself became a crucial part of the tool kit of the most fascistic elements in the country.32 Fears of domination and subjugation in the minds of Hindus and Sikhs, if Pakistan was brought into existence, or in the minds of Muslims if Pakistan failed to materialise, far outstripped the bounds of conventional politics as they had become so closely tied to the ability of individuals to govern their own existence, to have autonomy over their own bodies and families, to express their own religious faith. In the British conceptualisation of politics, reliant on straightforward statistics and the routine calculations of democratic politics, these fears and paranoia were entirely irrational and hence were grievously underestimated.

  Disciplinary measures intended to punish and bring order to the situation unfortunately exacerbated it. Collective fines were used to punish rioters in many places. After a bout of serious rioting, the authorities would impose fines on all the members of ‘the guilty’ religious group who lived within a certain radius of events. In Varanasi, local officials, in the manner of town criers, announced by beating a drum that locals would have to pay a fine whenever anybody was stabbed.33 Extorting money from all adult males in an area en masse, irrespective of whether or not they had been guilty of violence, created resentment and forged a new coherence between co-religionists. ‘Why this anti-Hindu policy?’ the pamphlets of the Hapur Hindu Defence Committee complained after a collective fine of 200,000 rupees was obtained from a portion of the town's community after a spate of bloody killings there.34 The state, yet again, was treating Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as undifferentiated groups. Indian and Pakistani ministries continued this practice of imposing collective fines in a way reminiscent of their colonial predecessors.

  Extremists exploited loopholes and misunderstandings in this habitual use of ‘fines’. Ideally, collective fines were meant to be used as compensation for the victims of riots but this policy had inherent risks. In Noakhali, League activists forcibly levied a ‘charity fund’ on Hindus in order to compensate Muslim victims of the Calcutta riots who resided hundreds of miles away. Local officials turned a blind eye as this money was extorted.35 This kind of illegal activity parroted the logic of the colonial state as co-religionists were assumed to have a natural affinity with one another that stretched across time and space. In the turbulent Kolaba district of Bombay, a group of Muslims was compelled by activists to sign written denunciations of events in Noakhali, to denounce the idea of Pakistan and to put on Gandhi caps.36 It was not too much of a stretch from this to using violence to ‘avenge’ riots in one part of the country in another completely different place. The vast differences between Hindus and Muslims – in class, language and local culture – were conveniently overlooked and political provocateurs set out deliberately to link together chains of riots in different parts of the country, by defending their actions in the language of revenge, retribution and compensation.

  Even in peaceful, undisturbed areas with much stronger regional cohesion and little tendency to inter-religious conflict, the presence of refugees from outside the limits of the province, political rhetoric and deliberate provocation combined with a dearth of reliable information could act to poison the relations between harmonious communities. By the end of 1946, approximately 25,000 refugees from Noakhali had taken shelter in the mountainous region of Assam and there were recurrent bouts of false alarms and rumours of violence in the province. Government reports were replete with trivial, yet momentous, detail: ‘Some families left Sukchar for Dhubri but are being persuaded to return. The movement of a lorry load of tea garden labourers on the way home from a festive event in Karimganj subdivision led to newspaper reports about secret journeys of lorry loads of Pathans. On occurrence of a rumour in Kamrup that poisoned biris [cigarettes] were in circulation stocks of biris are reported to have been burnt …’37 In Assam, as elsewhere, the chastity and protection of women was a touchpaper for anxiety; there was a lot of talk of abducted women being brought into the area from Bengal, under the cover of burqas.

  People started to move in with their relatives, or considered selling up and shifting to a different part of town. It was not unusual for one community to predominate in a city quarter, but this was not a clear divide and the outer edges of enclaves shaded together. Now in affected towns, co-religionists moved closer together, advised to do so by local leaders, and numerous alleyways lost their rich ethnic complexity. Sometimes these moves were temporary but sometimes they were the first stop in a longer chain of unsettling moves and homelessness. Crossing the lines became increasingly difficult and the assumption was that the enemy lurked in ‘other’ settlements even in times of calm; it was not right
, an upper-caste Hindi newspaper in Kanpur complained in its editorial, that ‘the Hindus of the ward Patkapur have to cross three Muslim bastis in order to reach the ration shop and are greatly inconvenienced’.38

  The economy was also starting to suffer. Influential business magnates such as G.D. Birla – who bankrolled the Congress – felt frustrated and worried. Birla was impatient to get on with building the India of his dreams, and complained about the mayhem that was affecting production at his own factories. ‘It is hardly necessary for me to draw your attention to the economic consequences of the disturbed conditions,’ he told the Congress leaders.

  If I do so it is only to emphasize the danger and I hope that our Government may be able to take timely steps to prevent the catastrophe which is hanging on our head … in provinces like Bengal, Bihar UP, production is seriously affected. Today you can't even build a house … serious labour shortages, coal shortages, no bricks, Muslim mistries [workmen] don't come in Hindu areas and Hindu labour don't [sic] enter Muslim areas.39

  In the minds of some influential individuals such as Birla, the seed of an idea had been growing for a long time: that a rapid and decisive solution to India's constitutional stalemate had to be found.

  Populist governments were not expected to take action against their ‘own’ people. When the party in power did pursue the perpetrators and strove to dissociate itself from the violence, and when the administrative scramble to halt and restrain rioters began, in late 1946 and early 1947, as the devastating risks of the violence spreading became evident, nonplussed supporters grew angry, having thought they would be shrouded in protection by their political connection to the governing party. These massacres were not just the random, violent background noise to the constitutional decision-making process but were designed purposefully to influence and shape its outcome by enforcing a mono-religious state and purging the land of ‘the other’ – whether Hindu or Muslim. By the autumn of 1946, fear for personal safety was spreading in much of North India and cleavages between previously amicable communities had widened. Towards the end of December, Penderel Moon found a member of the Amritsar municipality busily repairing the municipal hose-pipes. ‘The city will soon be in flames,’ he reportedly explained with exceptional prescience. ‘I'm making such preparations as I can.’40