When political uncertainty grew during the Second World War, large numbers of Muslims turned to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted to establish a homeland or a place of safety for their community in parts of north India where Muslims were in a majority. The Indian National Congress failed to acknowledge the gravity of this demand. As late as 1946, Jinnah’s Muslim League was willing to accept a federation in which defence, foreign policy and communications remained under common control, rather than a fully independent Pakistan. During the final negotiations, Jinnah was boxed in by a triumphalist Congress and British incompetence: the result was the bloody and disastrous partition of the Indian empire into two dominions, Pakistan and India.
It was a time of accelerated history, when a political leader’s decisions might have enormous and fateful consequences. In the largest mass migration in history, Hindus and Sikhs escaped to India and Muslims escaped to Pakistan. Even setting aside the vast, unexpected convulsion during the creation of the two new wings, East and West Pakistan, the shape of free India remained highly unclear. Most significantly, the status of India’s princely rulers was left unresolved at independence. Each kingdom had its own treaty with London, and control could not legally be handed over to the successor government—controlled by the Congress—without a signature.
Take Jodhpur as an example: Hanwant Singh was a volatile young man, and like most princely rulers he was not accustomed to being told what to do. Tall and bulky with a toothbrush moustache, he was called “Big Boy” by his father. He liked playing polo, shooting sand grouse and performing magic tricks. As heir to the dry, flinty kingdom of Jodhpur in the west of India, a princely state not much smaller than England, his life had been mapped out for him. When he went to boarding school, he took with him two cars, a stable of horses and a retinue of servants, including a tailor and a barber.4
In June 1947, life became more complicated. His father died, making him Maharaja of Jodhpur just as India was about to become free. On the personal side, the 23-year-old intended shortly to breach protocol by marrying a European, although not long before that he had taken a sixteen-year-old princess from Gujarat as his first bride. He dealt with the tension by going off on pig-sticking hunts, but the decisions facing him could not be postponed because he was in an unexpectedly important political position. Jodhpur bordered the emerging Muslim homeland of Pakistan, and its founder, Jinnah, had asked him to break with India and link his kingdom to the new nation. Unfortunately, the prince and most of his people were Hindu. Jinnah offered extraordinarily favourable terms: the maharaja could use Karachi as a free port, purchase whatever weapons he wanted, control the railway line to Sindh and receive free grain for famine relief. It sounded like a good deal. He agreed to sign up for Pakistan. Then, as he was about to touch his fountain pen to the paper, he learned that none of his fellow Rajput princes had yet thrown in their lot with the Pakistanis and he got cold feet. He told Jinnah he would go home and think about it.5
India’s capital had moved earlier in the century from Calcutta to a processional new city on the edge of ancient Delhi. A few days after he met Jinnah, the maharaja was staying at New Delhi’s finest hotel, the Imperial. A short south Indian man appeared there and told him he must come to Government House and meet the viceroy. This was unexpected. Unlike other members of the princely order, the Maharaja of Jodhpur disliked the British, and was glad they were leaving, even if his late father had been made a Knight Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India by the King Emperor George V. He claimed that as a boy he had at night crept out of his marble and sandstone palace (which had been built by his father over fifteen years, using 3,000 skeletal labourers) and put up anti-colonial wall posters. Hanwant Singh did as he was told, and accompanied the south Indian man to Government House.
Here the departing imperial power, in the form of the suave viceroy Mountbatten, told him it would be unwise to join Pakistan since his subjects could rise up in rebellion.6 The maharaja was incensed. It was clear that what the viceroy was really saying was that independent India’s new rulers—lawyers, agitators, socialists, Gandhians; the sort of people who had never shot a sand grouse—would foment revolution against His Highness. He wanted the imperialists to leave, but he certainly did not want their power or his patrimony to be taken over by the Indian National Congress. So would the new Indian government, then, give him what Pakistan had promised? Mountbatten looked to his adviser. No, said the short south Indian man—V. P. Menon, the senior political reforms commissioner—but they might offer a donation of grain. The big prince argued and blustered at Lord Mountbatten, and prevaricated and argued some more, and finally signed the instrument of accession.
At this point the viceroy left the room—he had other things to do—and the Maharaja of Jodhpur found himself alone with V. P. Menon. The encounter was too much. He had no entourage with him here, no cowering Rajput retainers to show him respect in the usual manner. All the young maharaja had was the painful knowledge that he had just given up control over the huge kingdom his family had ruled for many hundreds of years. Should he have gone with Pakistan? Might he have stood out for full independence, and approached the United Nations for protection, as some other rulers such as the Nizam of Hyderabad were thinking of doing? And why, anyway, was this snaggle-toothed southerner, this clerk, telling him what to do? Enraged, he pulled out a .22 calibre pistol, pointed it at his tormentor and shouted, “I refuse to take your dictation.” He added for good measure that he was descended from the Sun, and would shoot down Menon like a dog if he betrayed the people of Jodhpur.7
V. P. Menon responded coolly and bureaucratically to the irate young Maharaja of Jodhpur, focusing on the matter at hand. His brief was to snare every princely kingdom for the new Indian union (few princely states fell inside Pakistan’s borders).
“I told him,” he wrote later, “that he was making a very serious mistake if he thought that by killing me, or threatening to kill me, he could get the accession abrogated.”8 The pistol disappeared. What Menon did not mention was that Jodhpur would soon be absorbed into the new state of Rajasthan, and that the days of the maharajas, rajas, nawabs and nizams were over, even if they were allowed to use regal red licence plates on their cars. Five years later, during the voting in India’s first general election, Hanwant Singh died along with his Muslim third wife in a plane crash; he never did learn that he had just been elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Jodhpur.9
Imagine for a moment you are the good-looking Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. With your colleagues, you have to decide what shape the new system of administration is going to take. Gandhi and Jinnah are old, and shortly to die, one from an assassin’s bullet, the other from lung disease. You are in your late fifties, a widower, and have spent in total nine years of your life in prison. How do you proceed?
Nehru had been given much time, like Nelson Mandela after him, to refine his political thinking. His jail during the Second World War was not a place of orange jumpsuits, black goggles and dead headphones: he and other members of the Congress Working Committee were installed in Ahmadnagar Fort, located in a dry region to the east of Bombay, and treated in something like gentlemanly fashion. He cultivated a small garden, and the group held impromptu seminars. He told his niece Chandralekha in a letter that he was “dabbling in Persian,” and learning much from his fellow detainees. “Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Sindhi and Oriya—we practically cover every important language of India.”10 His family sent books to him, and he wrote The Discovery of India, an elegant combination of history and propaganda. It was an engaged, nationalist work which drew on the wide learning of his fellow detainees, including his room-mate, Maulana Azad, the Mecca-born scholar who, unusually for a Muslim, had become a Congress leader.
The book’s premise was that India’s present culture was linked to the Indus Valley civilization of four or five thousand years ago, a sophisticated sphere of planned cities, baths and sculptures. While Hindui
sm had been a common thread for millennia, he felt it would be “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture,” since it contained Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influences too.11 The emperor Ashoka had brought unity to the subcontinent more than 2,000 years ago, and it would be wrong, he said, to describe the repeated invasions by Muslim marauders over the last millennium as Muslim invasions, “just as it would be wrong to refer to the coming of the British to India as a Christian invasion … The Afghans might well be considered a border Indian group, hardly strangers to India, and the period of their political dominance should be called the Indo-Afghan period.” Although the Mughals were outsiders from Central Asia, “they fitted into the Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.”12 Having travelled widely in India during the 1930s, Nehru knew the nation had “depth of soul” and realized that although its people varied hugely, “everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us.”13 In this optimistic interpretation, India was a cheerfully composite and syncretic civilization, which would remain united.
London liked to think of Nehru as the last Englishman to rule India: rather, he came from a wealthy, Anglicized, Hindu Brahmin family, originally from Kashmir, which had been influenced both by the West and by the refined, mannered culture of the Muslim nobility. It was a world in which literary references were expected to range from ancient Indian thinkers to contemporary European writers. His view of history came from this intellectual collision: the culture of the nawabs met Cambridge University. Nehru had a liberal, modern, perceptive, pluralistic view of India’s past, and his ambition was to make it come true for the future too. The Discovery of India was a fine, slanted and sometimes romantic version of history.
Come freedom, how would he implement his nationalist dreams? Would it be easier to borrow the mechanisms of the departed colonialists? You could have an autocracy where one social group prevailed, or a dictatorship where progress grew out of the barrel of a gun. Or—and this is where India was unusual—you could have a public discussion about the ideal system of government, and which outdated traditions should be given up.
First, it was necessary to secure the nation, the rashtra. When the British empire closed down, it was near to collapse. The police were demoralized, the army was breaking along religious lines and the administration was cracking. The imperialists had left no effective peace-keeping force; nearly bankrupt after depending on American financial support during the Second World War, Britain’s main concern was to get out.14 In independent India the situation was particularly unstable because, from a legal and practical perspective, the government was inheriting less than half of the empire’s original land mass. The north-east and north-west became Pakistan, leaving six complete provinces (Bombay, Madras, Orissa, Bihar, the United Provinces and the Central Provinces) which had been under British rule, and the partitioned remnants of three others (Punjab, Bengal and Assam). The princely rulers, whose states had covered more than a third of the empire, were in theory free to do as they liked. Some had private armies, while the larger kingdoms like Kashmir and Hyderabad—which had a government income equal to that of Belgium—thought they might stand alone.
Congress had not come this far, had not endured the Morley–Minto reforms (which allowed a limited number of Indians to elect legislators) and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre (in which nearly 400 unarmed demonstrators were killed) and the Simon Commission (talks about talks) and the Round Table conferences (further talks, in London) and the Government of India Act of 1935 (which introduced some provincial self-government) and the Quit India movement (total opposition to British rule during the Second World War) and the Cripps Mission (a time-wasting exercise) and the Bengal famine (in which several million people perished) and the Simla conferences (further talks) and the tortuous negotiations with viceroys Wavell and Mountbatten and the baroque bigotry and chilly indifference of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, let alone the beatings and marches and bandhs (general strikes) and dharnas (mass sit-ins) and the repeated terms of imprisonment, only to concede power to hereditary monarchs. According to the Gujarati lawyer and Congress power-broker Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the princes of India were parasites, “rotten fruit … incompetent, worthless human beings, deprived of the power of independent thinking and whose manners and morals are those of the depraved.”15 To break their substantial influence, though, would require subtlety.
This was where V. P. Menon proved the perfect flexible operator. Clever and thoughtful, he was the son of a schoolmaster from Kerala in the far south, and had worked as a railway stoker, coal miner and Bangalore tobacco company clerk before gaining a junior post in the civil service. He had an unusual home life: after his wife left him and returned to southern India, he had moved in with the Keralite friends who had arranged their marriage, and the couple helped to bring up his two sons. When the husband died, Menon married his widow, who was some years his senior.16 In the years between the two world wars, he had worked his way up the civil service and become a respected senior bureaucrat.
Menon had recently drafted the text under which Congress and the Muslim League agreed the terms of independence. When Mountbatten asked him how to deal with the princes, he said they should be encouraged to join the new nation, giving up control of external affairs in return for the retention of autonomy and a chunk of local taxation—their “privy purses.” He wrote craftily later: “The alternative to a peaceful and friendly settlement of the states’ problem was to allow political agitation to develop in the states and to create, especially in the smaller ones, dire confusion and turmoil. Anyone conversant with the conditions in the country after partition must be aware of the inherent dangers of such a course.”17 Despite his own royal connections, Lord Mountbatten was a pragmatist who preferred Menon’s plan to risking the possible Balkanization of India into a subcontinent of warring states, as had happened in China during the 1920s. So he personally persuaded the princes to sign up.
After independence, as the north imploded in the violence and chaos of partition, Menon worked under the iron guidance of Vallabhbhai Patel to integrate the remaining princely states. It was an epic task (there were estimated to be 554 kingdoms in all) which he performed with great speed and diligence. Patel was clear in his intentions, telling his staff, “Do not question the extent of the personal wealth claimed by [the princes], and never ever confront the ladies of the household. I want their states—not their wealth.”18 V. P. Menon’s experience with the pistol-wielding Maharaja of Jodhpur was to be one of many bizarre encounters from Srinagar to Cape Comorin. His targets ranged from seriously obscure potentates to sophisticated royals who kept suites in the grander hotels of Paris or London; some taluqdars, or landowners, even approached him and asked to make treaties of accession despite having no princely status. The powerful and progressive Maharaja of Bikaner called on all hereditary rulers to be true patriots and embrace independent India, while an irate but inconsequential raja from near Mysore, who had only 16,000 subjects, refused to sign until the latest possible moment.
The complication was Kashmir, which should logically have joined Pakistan since it had a Muslim majority. The Hindu ruler thought otherwise, and India and Pakistan fought their first war within months of the end of empire. This led to the rough partition of its territory in a form that left everyone unhappy.
Each Indian kingdom was different, showing the sheer range of the subcontinent’s social, ethnic and religious communities. Up in the ancient hill kingdom of Tripura in the north-east, the monarch was a child, and his mother signed away the state on his behalf. In Orissa, Menon found “excited aborigines” were fighting the local raja with bows and arrows in an effort to make him join India. A neighbouring Oriya prince was attempting to sell his kingdom’s mineral rights in perpetuity before surrendering. In Rewa, a nervous V. P. Menon found himself gheraoed, or surrounded, by a
fierce mob which refused to let him enter the palace. He suspected the ruler had himself arranged this reception, and asked him to put in writing that he refused to cooperate; the maharaja became nervous, and backed down.
Menon crisscrossed India by aeroplane, working out the best way to integrate the new nation. In Danta, a tiny state in Gujarat, a peculiar problem occurred: he could not contact the ruler. It seemed His Highness spent much of each day and night performing Hindu rituals, and between June and September in particular had not a moment to spare for official duties. In October 1948, he agreed his son could take the throne and sign the document of accession. In Cochin the royal family included several hundred princesses, and Menon made special provision for them because he thought they resembled “a rare collection of birds” that would be unlikely to survive if released into the wild. Where necessary, he made symbolic concessions, enabling rulers to retain their ancient princely dignity; in one case, he allowed a grant for the supply and maintenance of royal cars. “It is high statesmanship,” wrote Mountbatten’s press attaché admiringly, “that can cover a revolutionary act in the mantle of traditional form.”19
Without the integration of the princely states, it would not have been possible for India to become a cohesive nation, or to invent itself as a modern democracy. In the crack-up of partition, the temptation might have been to reach for the gun and the edict. For many people, though, bloodshed would be the abiding memory.
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