The Great Partition Page 4

  Just as it had in Britain, the war effort strained, and ultimately reconfigured, the very nature of the political economy of the state and the partition that followed is difficult to comprehend in isolation from this upheaval. Daily terror and dread of an impending attack by the Axis powers had suffused life during the war years for many, especially once Singapore toppled to the Japanese in 1942. Even though such an attack failed to materialise on Indian soil, apart from the oft-forgotten Japanese bombing of Bengal, fear of imminent invasion had been inculcated quite deliberately by government propaganda. In North India blackouts and bomb shelters were not unusual in the homes of the wealthy, and fearfulness and rumour had become a feature of public life well before Partition appeared on the political horizon, as is attested by the withdrawal of bank savings and their conversion into cash and jewellery in Punjab.3 At the war's cessation, thousands of troops, fired up by exposure to new political ideas and expecting some recompense for the rigours of military service, returned to their villages. Troops housed in one camp twenty miles from Delhi, ‘had become accustomed to a new standard of living in Germany … some had the conviction that they were coming to a free India’ and others wrote to the newspapers. ‘We who have done real hard work and our duty as we were expected to do should be told frankly that we are not to expect anything from Government. If there is no expectation there will be no disappointment,’ appealed one officer stationed in Bangalore.4

  Expectations of freedom were sky high and India was set to become the first part of the empire, beyond the dominions, to win its independence, paving the way for the later decolonisation of other countries in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. At the same time, British civil servants in their isolated outposts throughout the country waited nervously for news that they could take long-overdue leave, and surveyed the political landscape with trepidation while local politicians found ready audiences on soapboxes and in the press. Book sales boomed, papers sold in unprecedented quantities and a sense of imminent change and transformation was palpable in the cities. Congressmen, jailed for the duration of the war, leaped back into the political arena after their release from prison in June 1945, talking more freely and provocatively than ever. ‘Independence will be attained soon. It has almost come to us. We have it. None can snatch it away from us’, a leading Congressman told the swollen crowds at a political rally in Agra, weeks after his three-year jail sentence had ended. ‘Yearnings and hunger for independence have so much increased that anyone who obstructs or comes in the way will be burnt to ashes.’5 Abstract notions of freedom and fine British sentiments would no longer do; the people were determined to have independence and to experience it for themselves.

  After two centuries of imperial rule the British had become confused, equivocal imperialists in India, at best. The state had postponed, or simply abandoned, many of the other projects which might have warranted attention in peacetime and resorted to a simplistic form of basic imperialism during the war: keeping the peace and extracting the necessary resources to fight the war. The bureaucracy itself, the notorious ‘steel frame’, was creaking under the weight of the new duties that it had assumed during wartime. Indians now outnumbered Europeans in the civil service and a deliberate policy of gradually Indianising the services had been greatly accelerated. It was becoming practically impossible to recruit young British men to staff the Raj and by 1943 Indian Civil Service recruitment in Britain had effectively dried up. By 1946, many of the British men who had enlisted during the Second World War were attracted by the business opportunities of the postwar world, and were not inclined to travel four thousand miles to manage a fading empire. High-ranking British policemen in India started casting around for openings elsewhere in the empire or even beyond: ‘this consulate alone has already been approached by three of the higher ranking officials who have been interested in the possibilities of obtaining positions in the United States,’ reported the American Vice-Consul in Karachi.6

  Grainy photographs of the Partition era sometimes hint that it was a ‘medieval’ horror that occurred in a poor and undeveloped landscape, but this is a manipulation of the truth; urban India was in the midst of rapid change by 1946, change which had been greatly accelerated by the industrial spurt caused by war, and although it is unwise to generalise about such a vast and variegated economy – which ranged from gritty industrial centres such as Jamshedpur (home to the largest single steelworks in the British empire pioneered by the entrepreneurial Tata family) to remote and extremely poor villages entirely dependent on agricultural crops – Partition took place in the mid-twentieth century. The battle over India and Pakistan was fought in towns and cities that would be instantly recognisable today.

  Giant metropolises – Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Calcutta – differed from the smaller towns founded on government service and small-scale production, such as Karachi, Lucknow, Dacca or Lahore, yet by the 1940s all these towns and cities had richly complex civic lives, with numerous banks, schools, hospitals, chambers of commerce, temples and mosques, densely packed roads, bazaars and alleyways. Colleges and universities swarmed with well-read, politicised students who awaited the start of a new era. Many wealthy landowners and members of princely elites failed to notice, or mistakenly ignored, the winds of change blowing through society and persisted with their annual rounds of balls, parties and dances.

  Among the middle classes, the buzz was about new poets, fashion magazines and pulp fiction. Eating out was becoming more popular, and there was a sudden rash of new restaurants and coffee-houses. Standing on the fringes of the middle class, city dwellers with jobs, perhaps as petty clerks or schoolteachers, could buy new types of consumer goods for the first time in the 1940s. They packed the cinema halls and took the opportunity to travel more than their forefathers, either by bicycle or train. New attitudes percolated through society: in Punjab women were increasingly going without the veil and favouring high heels and synthetic saris. Tea-drinking from ceramic cups was becoming more commonplace and smoking leaf tobacco was catching on. Markets selling brightly patterned cloth, gold jewellery and sweets would have looked entirely familiar. The towns, typically based on small trading businesses, petty shopkeeping and service trades, were, and are, disproportionately powerful in relation to a vast agricultural sector. ‘No favorite wife could have been treated with more favor than the town’, noted one observer, and provincial towns such as Amritsar, Lucknow, Lahore, Dacca and Karachi were the nerve centres of political life.7

  For those without money, the cities were darker and more dangerous places. Many landless agriculturalists were compelled to seek work and the overcrowding of the greatest cities had been greatly exacerbated by the wartime boom. ‘Nowhere in the world today’, wrote one eminent economic historian and well-travelled contemporary commentator, ‘are there slums worse than the single-story bustees of Calcutta or the multistory chawls of Bombay.’8 Cities such as the northern manufacturing metropolis Kanpur exploded during the war owing to the escalating demands for cotton, wool, jute and sugar and the population of the city, overwhelmed by migrant labour, nearly doubled between 1941 and 1951. At the end of the war, when much of this production contracted, labourers faced unemployment. Thousands of workers returned to their wives and children in their home villages, and tried to revive livelihoods as cultivators. Others remained as casual workers, or carved out a life on the margins of the city, living among other caste and community members, taking part in union politics, local clubs or akharas. In the 1940s, 40 per cent of the debt-ridden peasantry neither owned nor rented any land at all and were entirely dependent on casual, seasonal employment.9 Too many were barefoot, poorly dressed, sick or suffering, barely surviving on one meal a day. ‘It was market day,’ wrote a journalist from Bihar. ‘We were surrounded by starving people and in the whole of the market except for sag [spinach] and mahuwa [edible seeds and flowers] we found nothing else. For three months, rice had not been selling in the bazaar and the people were living on sag.’10 The empire had not deliv
ered much in the way of development to its poorest members. Unstoppable waves of sometimes seasonal, sometimes permanent, migration to the ballooning cities persisted, despite the post-war depression, and have continued ever since.

  For most Indians, especially town dwellers, life revolved around getting hold of daily essentials, especially bread. Wheat, grain, cloth, and kerosene were all in desperately short supply. In a classic Hindi novel of the time, Adha Gaon, Phunnan Miyan, the father of a soldier serving abroad in the army, anxious because he hasn't heard any news from his boy, is asked to donate money to a war fund towards the end of the war, and promptly retorts: ‘You can't get cloth. Eh, Bhai, everything to eat has disappeared from the bazaar. I couldn't get sugar to make offerings. Kerosene has become like the water of paradise. Only certain special people get it. I'm not giving an anna to the war fund. Do whatever you like.’11

  This depth of feeling opened a window of opportunity for the politicians as perilous food shortages and hunger, the threat of hunger, and anxiety about food supply were running sores in 1946. India had been living ‘hand to mouth for the past three years,’ admitted the Secretary of the Food Department. A devastating cyclone destroyed crops in the west of the country and the monsoon failed in the south. Nearly half the Indian population was subject to rationing. In the early months of 1946, the Viceroy was preoccupied by the food issue, which, in his own words, ‘threatened calamity’.12 Farmers were tempted to dodge fixed-price government procurement, keep back their rice, wheat and vegetables and to sell their produce on the black market. ‘One way to defeat the food law-breaker is to report him to the authorities. Another is to hound him out of society,’ instructed a government-sponsored newspaper advert. ‘Hound him out!’13 Despite the adverts, selling on the black market became commonplace and the government itself admitted that food could be bought for nearly three times its ration price in the small towns.

  Understandably, resistance to forced requisitioning broke out as the poor and ravenous rebelled. In a Gujarati town, hungry labourers refused to load bags of wheat on to lorries and a sympathetic crowd gathered to join their protest, tearing at the sacks with their hands.14 The very poorest were worst hit as they were compelled to make do with the paltry, leftover rations doled out by the state. At the close of the war large painted hoardings in Calcutta could still be seen, sponsored by the biscuit-maker Britannia, which depicted smiling, uniformed soldiers. The slogan in neat letters accompanying the picture spelt out the wartime food equation with stunning brevity: ‘Their needs come first!’ A shocking lesson that Calcutta had come to feel only too painfully. In the Bengal famine of 1943 the Bengali public had been left starving to death, and perhaps as many as three million died because of shoddy government food allocation and skewed political priorities.

  It is not easy to say, then, where wartime politics ended and the politics of partitioning began. Partition took place in a society only partially emerging from long years of war. Two-and-a-half million Indian soldiers served in the Second World War, over 24,000 were killed and 64,000 wounded. This, the largest volunteer army in history, which had served in theatres from Greece to Burma, was now in the process of a euphoric and disruptive demobilisation. It was only a fortnight after Victory Week in Delhi, when huge processions of soldiers, brass and pipe bands with regimental flags rolled through the centre of the city to celebrate the end of the war, that the members of the British delegation sent to negotiate a constitutional settlement for India, and to plan its disengagement from empire, arrived in the capital. Partition emerged from a cauldron of social disorder. The Indian economy, which had been completely geared towards feeding soldiers and supporting the war effort, now shifted in a new direction. The Second World War and Partition bled into each other. Indian society, like the British, was undergoing widespread readjustment and demobilisation from 1946–7 and this determined the lines upon which the state fractured.15 Indians stood on the threshold of change and revolution but, as yet, the shape of this change was unknown and frighteningly uncertain.

  A religious divide?

  How and when the British should leave India, and who they should leave power to, were the vital questions dominating all facets of Indian political life by 1946. The Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League were unquestionably the frontrunners in the race to acquire official sanction as ‘leaders’ by the mid–1940s. Indian imperialism had long operated through a careful balance between the forced coercion and the assistance of Indians who had entered into public life in India, both in cooperation with, and in resistance to, the political and administrative structures erected by the Raj.

  The most successful party, the Indian National Congress, created in 1885, would have been unrecognisable to its founders by 1946. Under the leadership of Gandhi an elite, patriarchal group of lawyers had, since the 1920s, transformed itself from a polite pressure group into a mass nationalist party, with over four-and-a-half million members and many more sympathisers. The League, in contrast, was far more of a latecomer to the political scene. Although it was founded in 1909 the League had only caught on among South Asian Muslims during the Second World War. The party had expanded astonishingly rapidly and was claiming over two million members by the early 1940s, an unimaginable result for what had been previously thought of as just one of numerous pressure groups and small but insignificant parties.16 By the late 1940s the League and the Congress had impressed on the British their own visions of a free future for Indian people. These visions appeared, on the surface, to be incompatible as one, articulated by the Congress, rested on the idea of a united, plural India as a home for all Indians and the other, spelt out by the League, rested on the foundation of Muslim nationalism and the carving out of a separate Muslim homeland. Yet, things were far more finely nuanced than these simple equations between the League as the-party-of-the-Muslims and the Congress as the-party-for-everyone-else would suggest, especially as both parties continued to vacillate about the future nature of a free India, and its constitutional division of powers.

  Evidently, in the run up to Partition something had gone badly wrong between Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. The nature of this breakdown has remained mysterious and unfathomable even to some of those who experienced it or who were caught in the middle of it. As a civil supplies officer, A.S. Bakshi, a turbaned, Sikh civil supplies officer from the fertile district of Jullundur later puzzled, ‘we used to be together … for days and nights, all of a sudden they lost confidence in us … at that time there were only two things … Muslims, and non-Muslims’. These feelings run to dismay as well as bitterness: ‘we have lost the best of our friends, the people whom we loved, the places … so much of us was embedded in every brick where we'd stayed for genera-tions’.17 The sorrow at the centre of numerous Partition stories – and the lack of reconciliation with Partition among so many people – hints at the lack of legitimacy in the division, the wider feeling that good social relationships had been ruptured by a settlement forcefully imposed from on high.

  Most histories of Partition necessarily cast back in time, to the 1920s or earlier, to find the answer to this dark question at the heart of Indian nationalism, to understand why Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims grew apart, and debate whether this schism and sense of division were actually widespread. In the three decades preceding Partition a self-conscious awareness of religious ethnicity – and conflict based on this – had undoubtedly escalated in intensity and was becoming more flagrant. Riots, which had been breaking out on religious festivals such as the festival of colour, Holi, or in connection with the slaughtering of sacred cows or when Hindu religious music was piped too loudly in front of mosques during prayer time, broke out after increasingly shortened intervals, and with more frightening ferocity, from the end of the First World War onwards. Groups working for religious education and conversion were becoming ever more adept at winning followers and were powerfully entrenched by the 1940s. Reformist groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat, Arya Samaj, and Jam ‘at-i Isla
mi became richer, stronger, more dogmatic and more persuasive. They blended, in different ways, politics and religious symbolism, the internal personal quest with an external missionary zeal. Inevitably, perhaps, they also clashed doctrinally and politically with each other. The most important storm centres of this new type of conflict tended to be the cities and towns of north and west India and the newly minted identities were strongest in the educated, middle-class urban milieux of the burgeoning cities.

  By the end of the war, many people were revelling in new and simplistic expressions of religion. There was nothing ancient or predestined about these politicised manifestations of identity. The experience of colonial rule had doubtless stirred up these divisions and added to a sense of separation, especially among elites. Reminders of religious ‘difference’ were built into the brickwork of the colonial state; a Muslim traveller would be directed to the ‘Mohammedan refreshment room’ at a train station and drinking taps on railway platforms were labelled ‘Hindu water’ or ‘Muslim water’. Religious holidays were factored into the official working calendar and government statistics, maps, gazetteers, routine instructions, laws and, above all, the census, all operated on the premise that highly distinct communities, of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus resided in the subcontinent. ‘A stranger travelling in Indian trains may well have a painful shock when he hears at railway stations for the first time in his life ridiculous sounds about pani [water], tea and the like being either Hindu or Muslim,’ lamented Gandhi in 1946. ‘It would be repulsive [for this to continue] … it is to be hoped that we shall soon have the last of the shame that is peculiarly Indian.’18

  Generations of European administrators, travellers and scholars foregrounded the ‘spiritual’ in all their interpretations of India and, in their eyes, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were inescapably separate and mutually incompatible. As a result of this short-sightedness and an inability to see the finely grained distinctions and differences within, and between, these peoples, all sorts of misguided imperial interventions on behalf of ‘communities’ were put in place. Well-intentioned policies intended to show British fair play and even-handedness could end up encouraging co-religionists to bond more tightly together. The most important of these moves was the decision to give separate electorates to different religious communities from 1909 so that they were represented by their ‘own’ politicians.19 Religious groups acquired stronger voices and more visible spokesmen. New types of association and organisation could link up together, using the railways and the power of the printing press. All this backfired catastrophically as religious boundaries, both more porous and less sharply defined in an earlier age, now hardened.