The Great Partition Read online

  Even by the standards of the violent twentieth century, the Partition of India is remembered for its carnage, both for its scale – which may have involved the deaths of half a million to one million men, women and children – and for its seemingly indiscriminate callousness.12 Individual killings, especially in the most ferociously contested province of Punjab, were frequently accompanied by disfiguration, dismemberment and the rape of women from one community by men from another. Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus suffered equally as victims and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults. The killings bridged the barbaric and the calculatedly modern, they were both haphazard and chillingly specific. A whole village might be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls by impromptu firing squads using machine-guns. Children, the elderly and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and conversions from one faith to another occurred, alongside systematic looting and robbery clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives. It seems that the aim was not only to kill, but to break people. A scorched earth policy in Punjab, which would today be labelled ethnic cleansing, was both the cause and the result of driving people from the land. Militias, armed gangs and members of defence organisations went on the rampage. All this both preceded and accompanied the migration of some twelve million people between the two new nation states of India and Pakistan.

  The generality of these stories does little justice to the horror of individual tales, which are difficult even for the most hardened and dispassionate reader to digest. Small details give only a glimpse of a deeper tragedy, expressed in the cries of an unknown refugee who, when meeting Nehru as he toured the refugee camps, slapped him on the face, crying, ‘Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters to me!’ or in the grief of an unnamed villager ‘whose family had been wiped out’, who on meeting Jinnah as he toured the Pakistani camps in 1947, ‘sobbed uncontrollably’.13

  In New Delhi, politicians and officials created reams of memos and press releases, and held heated debates as they thrashed out the formation of Pakistan and India. This means very little, though, without reference to the millions of people whose lives were being shaped. The histories of Partition have had a tendency to segregate two sub-genres artificially: the histories of Partition victims, or survivors, and their epic journeys across the ruptured Punjab, and the histories of bureaucratic and political intrigue acted out in the marble-floored rooms of Lutyens's New Delhi. This human story is a very political one, though. After all, what is the history of Pakistan and India without reference to Pakistanis and Indians? Ordinary Indians suffered and were affected but also shaped the outcomes of 1947. Any suggestion that the political games in New Delhi were unrelated to the violence that occurred during Partition should be dispensed with by Mountbatten's revealing admission of almost breathtaking callousness when he admitted, on hearing that over sixty villages had been wiped out in Gurgaon, in Delhi's hinterland, ‘I could not help feeling that this renewed outbreak of violence, on the eve of the meeting with the leaders, might influence them to accept the plan which was about to be laid before them.’14 The Partition plan itself was brought about through acts of violence. Partition's elitist politics and everyday experiences are not as separate as they may seem at first glance because mass demonstrations, street fighting and the circulation of rumours all overlapped with the political decision-making process.

  I would argue for a more all-encompassing, and expansive assessment of Partition. It swept up people in very large territorial tracts of the subcontinent. Punjab, in the north-west of undivided India, has rightly been the focus of much recent writing about Partition, as this was the province most brutally sliced into two parts in 1947, and was the bloody battlefield of Partition where by far the greatest number of massacres of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims occurred. Judging the limits of Partition and its social, economic and political penetration of South Asia is hardly a precise science, and although I have attempted to give specific locations and examples of Partition ‘beyond Punjab’, and to draw attention to regional variations, there are inevitably times when this slides into generalisations. Yet to fail to do so, it seemed to me, would run counter to findings that paint Partition as a pan-continental event. Partition went far beyond the pinpointed zones of Punjab and Bengal and caught up people in hundreds or thousands of towns and villages in numerous ways.

  Beyond Punjab and Bengal, rioters wreaked havoc in many cities. Cities that declared riot zones at different times between 1946 and 1950 included Delhi, Bombay, Karachi and Quetta; in the province of Uttar Pradesh, the towns of Varanasi, Shahjahanpur, Pilibhit, Moradabad, Meerut, Kanpur, Lucknow, Bareilly, Garhmukhteshwar, Allahabad, and Aligarh among others; the hill stations of Simla and Dehra Dun; in the province of Gujarat, Ahmedabad, Godhra and Vadodara; and Ajmer and Udaipur in Rajasthan. Stretching into central and western India, Amraoti, Sangamner, Saugor, Nagpur, Lashkar and Gwalior were afflicted, and Chapra, Jamalpur and Jamshedpur in Bihar. A few outbreaks of Partition violence even occurred in the south, which in general stayed remarkably untouched by the conflict unfolding in the north, in riots in Secunderabad, in present-day Andhra Pradesh in 1947 and 1949.15 Princely ruled territories, especially Kashmir and Hyderabad, were involved as well as the directly controlled British locales. This was nothing short of a continental disaster.

  There are no doubt cities which have been, for specific if contested reasons, particularly riot-prone in South Asia's past, while others have remained especially peaceful. Each riot had its own causes and could be written about individually. There were also powerful countervailing forces against violence, not least the well-honed provincial identities and regional patriotism marking out some areas and the work of peace groups, Gandhians and activists, especially on the Left. Nevertheless, riots, beyond the limits of Punjab and Bengal, added immeasurably to the social dislocation of Partition and generated their own economic crises, wrenching refugee upheavals and visible destruction. Add to this the random stabbing attacks that started to become a feature of life in other towns of North India and the anxiety of people with relatives living in the war-torn Punjab, or with children studying at faraway educational institutions or who suffered from dishonoured business contracts, who worried about the fear of violence, even when this did not materialise, and the number of people touched by Partition in one way or another starts to swell.

  The South Asian middle class became particularly implicated in, and affected by, Partition's violent repercussions. Urban wage-earners, bureaucrats, clerks and peons in government service, teachers, landlords, traders and stallholders, and petty manufacturers are the subject of many of the stories presented here. This is partly because the evidence about them is more immediately accessible in archival and newspaper sources than is that of the rural peasantry, but mostly because it was these groups that provided the manpower behind many Congress and League campaigns. The middle class spread the nationalist ideals and became closely interconnected with ‘nation-building’ in the post-Independence era, through work in government institutions, the media and business.

  The refugee crisis had a shocking visibility in places far away from the Bengali and Punjabi focal points as refugees drained away from Punjab and made their homes in the further corners of the subcontinent, whether by their own initiative or through the forced dispersal of government relocation projects. Most conspicuously in New Delhi, where large numbers of journalists and civil servants were on hand to record the devastating scenes for future historians, but also in many other provinces; there were more than 160 government-operated refugee camps in independent India with three in Madras, 32 in Bombay presidency and 85 in East Punjab. Refugees resettled as far north as Peshawar and as far south as Madras, and some Bengali refugees were rehoused in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Press coverage, propaganda (well circulated either by political partisans or by the state itself) and the radio spread news of the crisis. Stories of Partitio
n evoked feelings of fear, sympathy and horror long distances away. This was the full force of Partition.

  During Partition and its aftermath, an empire came to an end and two new nation states were forged from its debris. This ‘operation’, which is often described using the metaphors of surgery, was far from clinical. Partition played a central role in the making of new Indian and Pakistani national identities and the apparently irreconcilable differences which continue to exist today. We could even go as far as saying that Indian and Pakistani ideas of nationhood were carved out diametrically, in definition against each other, at this time. Partition, then, is more than the sum of its considerable parts – the hundreds of thousands of dead, the twelve million displaced. It signifies the division of territory, independence and the birth of new states, alongside distressing personal memories, and potent collective imaginings of the ‘other’. Partition itself has become a loaded word, with multiple meanings in both English and the vernaculars, and triggers complex feelings with deep psychological significance.16

  The history of Partition is very much a work in progress, with major oral history projects still under way and new archival sources still to be unearthed, and there have been seismic reappraisals of Partition in the past decade. Many writers in recent years have been rather allergic to national histories, preferring to deal with provincial, local or regional arenas, sensitive to the risk of oversimplification and the constraints imposed by attempting national narratives. The continental dimensions and domestic variations in South Asia, of language, caste and religion, and the local peculiarities and sensibilities of these communities, are legendary. Often what might be a critically important regional event in one place bears little relevance to the wider nation. Instead, the trajectory has been towards micro-histories, inflected by anthropology, sociology and theory, which rightly resurrect the ordinary, everyday Indian in the picture and restore him or her to the past. Urvashi Butalia, the foremost chronicler of Partition voices, expressed her distaste with the clinical neutrality which characterised some of the earlier works about 1947 and her deep suspicion of histories ‘that seem to write themselves’.17 She is right: Partition stories are personal, intensely subjective, constructed through memory, gender and ideas of self, and span the subcontinent.

  This book engages with the idea of two nations, however, as it seems difficult to overlook the fact that two antithetical states emerged in 1947. For all their domestic heterogeneity and irrespective of widespread and popular demands for peace, the reality is that these states have repeatedly fought wars against each other, restricted trade and interaction between their citizens, spent vast amounts on arms, developed nuclear weaponry and are suspended in ideological conflict. The gross tragedy for ordinary people which Partition involved – the migration of huge numbers to unknown places, the violence which deliberately targeted refugees and minorities, and the particular terrors for women – sit alongside the immense problems families faced in reconstructing their lives anew. These histories are intrinsically important but also part of this broader story of national reconstruction and international rivalry.

  Individuals were caught between the pull of two opposing nationalisms and had their citizenship settled and fixed as Indian or Pakistani. The Indian and Pakistani governments had to undertake the complex governmental business of teasing out two new states, with full administrative and military apparatus. All this took place just at the time when social uncertainty, the loss of trained manpower and the lack of resources were testing their administrative abilities to the utmost. India and Pakistan were built on messy and turbulent foundations. Partition set in motion a train of events unforeseen by every single person who had advocated and argued for the division. Above all, this book revisits how and why this happened; how the British empire disintegrated in South Asia, and how two new nations materialised. The grave implications of this stretch into the present day for these two vitally important, and now distinctive, countries.

  1

  In the Shadow of War

  The eccentric and itinerant retired Indian civil servant Malcolm Darling toured North India on horseback at the end of 1946 to ascertain ‘what the peasant was thinking’ and ‘how his way of life had been affected by the war’. It was clear that the end of the British empire in India was imminent and Darling was fully conscious of the momentous days that he was witnessing. The Second World War was over and change was afoot. Darling desired to know what Independence would mean for ordinary Indians living in villages and small towns on the Punjabi and North Indian plains. He could, of course, have chosen to travel by motor car, but Darling intended to chronicle the end of the empire as an equestrian, self-consciously styling himself as the direct heir to Arthur Young who had ridden across France in the eighteenth century. By doing so, Darling suggested that the end of the British Raj in India was a historical moment directly comparable with the French Revolution. He was interested in observing a panoply of concerns, including improvements in living standards, the status of women and the uptake of novel farming techniques, but one of the questions which preoccupied him – and which he asked repeatedly of the hundreds of villagers, soldiers and administrators who provided hospitality, hot tea and chit-chat along the way – was what people wanted from Independence; what their dreams of a life free from imperial rule looked like.

  Darling met hundreds of villagers on his ride and they all answered his questions about azadi, or freedom, differently: among a group of Punjabi Muslims, he noted, ‘The village headmen riding with me were all supporters of the League. “What is its object?” I asked them. “Sanun kuchh patta nahin – we have no idea,” said one of them and another added: “It is an affair of the Muslims”.’ A third was more explicit and said: ‘If there were no League, the Hindus would get the government and take away our land.’ In another village named Balkassar, he met prosperous members of the Khatri Sikh community who told him, ‘Sikh and Muslim … had lived together in harmony, but now, with the cry for Pakistan, each eyes the other critically and keeps apart.’ ‘But surely you want azadi?’ Darling asked. ‘Azadi’, said one of the younger men ‘is bebadi – destruction, and Pakistan is kabaristan – a graveyard.’ In another village, Miani Gondal in Punjab, he asked the difference between the Congress and the League. Someone piped up saying, ‘we don't bother about that’ and another attempted to explain the meaning of Pakistan. ‘Our area’, he said, ‘must be separate, and the Hindu area must be separate.’ When he asked a group of Sikhs on the other side of the Chenab River in a central Punjabi village in the district of Lyallpur, ‘What would they do with freedom?’ he recorded, ‘When the word azadi – freedom – was mentioned there was no dissentient voice. All wanted it and when I asked what they would do with it when they got it, a Sikh replied, “Now we are slaves. When we are free we shall serve ourselves and do as we like. Then we shall gladly pay more taxes.” Another colonist, one of the more educated present wearing a fine black achkan [long coat] said that when they were free they would have prosperity.’ Darling could not help but conclude that azadi is ‘the word which comes up sooner or later at every meeting’.1

  Darling's account must be handled with suspicion because he was, for all his liberal compassion and interest in Indians, ambivalent about the end of the Raj. His stories play down the great strength of nationalist feeling in India at the time and can be read as justification for the prolongation of empire. There was absolutely no shortage of well-educated, articulate and fiercely political Indians alive at the end of the war, determined to start shaping the fate of their own state. The central question though was a valid one. What did ordinary Indians expect from Independence and what were the hopes and dreams at the end of the Second World War as people felt themselves to be on the brink of a revolution? Above all, Darling was right about one thing. ‘What a hash politics threaten to make of this tract, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are as mixed up as the ingredients of a well-made pilau,’ he predicted as he rode across the fertile Punjabi plains that wi
nter.2 Within a year this region would be divided in half and many of the people he met along the way in these ‘mixed-up’ populations would have been wrenched out of their homes, made destitute or murdered.

  The land which Darling rode through was much changed from the pre-war years. At the end of the war India was either an exciting and exhilarating or a dangerous place, depending on your particular circumstances and viewpoint. The divisive question about how best to settle the representation of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in a future Indian state was only one of numerous problems facing the British government as it tried to resume service after the summer of 1945, and it was by no means certain that it would become the most critical. The demands and compromises made during the war had badly cracked the foundational scaffolding of the Raj. This structure, which was so good at giving the illusion of permanence and durability, was actually built on specific sets of relationships between British administrators and an unlikely coalition of Indian princely rulers, self-promoting landed oligarchs, hand-picked civil servants, locally hired policemen and soldiers. By the end of the Second World War, a thread had loosened in the political fabric of the state. An unparalleled naval mutiny shook the authority of the Raj to its foundations and strikes, student activism and peasant revolt reverberated throughout the country, while an ill-advised attempt to prosecute members of the rebellious Indian National Army became a national cause célèbre. Above all, this was a time of transition, and India, and its old colonial system of governance, was irreversibly altered by the tremendous economic, social and psychological consequences of war.