by John Keay
Further on, Darling heard tell of some fifty Rajput villages that had converted to Islam in around 1700. Recently they had offered to ‘return to the Hindu fold on the one condition that their Hindu kinsfolk would give them their daughters in marriage’. This was refused and they remained Muslims; ‘but they still interchange civilities at marriage, inviting mullah or Brahmin, as the case may be, to share in the feasting’. Such communal harmony was by no means unusual. Oral testimony has amply confirmed that even in Bengal and Bihar, the scene of the first great killings, Muslims commonly participated in Hindu festivals and Hindus in Muslim festivals. Each might also consult the other’s holy men, share their myths, mimic their greetings and in some cases partake of their food. Conduct might be no more reliable in deciding who was a Hindu or a Muslim than ethnicity.
South of Delhi, Darling’s route lay among the Meos of a region known as Mewat. ‘Clanny and feckless’, he thought, the Meos were once reputed a criminal tribe who lived by highway robbery. Few outsiders entered their often scruffy villages (one of which, Gurgaon, now challenges Delhi with its shopping malls and call centres), and here, for a change, Darling found the tables turned: it was the villagers who were quizzing him about his own caste. (‘No, I am not a Muslim.’ ‘Then are you a Hindu?’) The Meos had a particular interest in the matter because their own identity was problematic. Officially they were regarded as Muslims and, according to Darling, they already favoured the League. But fellow Muslims were not always anxious to acknowledge them as such, nor to intermarry with them. This was because they combined irregular attendance at the mosque and erratic performance of namaz (the Muslim prayers) with a passionate devotion to Lords Krishna and Rama.
Sadly, according to Shail Mayaram, a latterday champion of the Meos, such bi-confessionalism was being eroded from two sides. On the one hand, the tract-distributing Tablighi ‘mission’ was actively promoting Islamic orthodoxy among the Meos; and on the other, zealots of the Mahasabha, the Hindu triumphalist party, were actively promoting anti-Muslim sentiment among the Meos’ Hindu neighbours. Willy-nilly, the Meos were coming to think of themselves as Muslim because that was how others saw them. In an increasingly polarised society there was no place for a cross-communal community. Come Partition, the Meos would pay dearly for their heterodoxy, experiencing death and dispossession at the hands of their Hindu neighbours, then rebuffs and rejection at the hands of their Muslim ‘brethren’.15
Most of the Meos’ neighbours in that part of the Punjab that is now the Indian state of Haryana were Hindu Jats. Relations between the two communities had been cordial until the 1930s. Then population pressures had led to a period of agrarian unrest as the Jats coveted the Meos’ land. There were armed affrays and the troops had to be called in. But religion had not been an issue at the time. It only became so when Congress and the League squared up to one another in the 1940s. And in the country south of Delhi, all the way to Agra and Jaipur in fact, this politicisation of communal sentiment had especially dire consequences. For here agrarian, ethnic and religious tension was exacerbated by what was undoubtedly the greatest anomaly of all in a supposedly ‘united India’ – namely that much of it was far from united in that it was not actually ruled by the British. Indeed it never had been, for this was princely India.
Long before he reached Mewat, Darling’s equestrian odyssey had repeatedly taken him into territories whose administration owed nothing to his former fellows in the Indian Civil Service and everything to the good sense or otherwise of one of India’s innumerable princes. In the Punjab the princely states of Patiala and Nabha, both ruled by Sikh Maharajahs, had yielded a rather frosty welcome, and Bahawalpur state, ruled by a Muslim Nawab, was beset by poor harvests. Villages in the princely states were less likely to have a school than in British-ruled India, noted Darling, and the people were therefore less well informed.
There was, though, he thought, something to be said for princely rule. Justice – a commodity that his Qureshi informants found as scarce as cloth, sugar and wheat – tended to be abundant there. It was swifter, cheaper and more effective than under the British dispensation. As a result, crime was rarer and the roads safer. The classic case was Swat, a long sub-Himalayan valley that debouched into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and which Darling had skirted in the first week of his ride. In Swat’s alpine setting, holidaymakers pitched their tents and anglers cast their lines without a care for the notoriously unruly Pathan clans of the valley. It was all thanks, explained one of Darling’s informants, to the Wali (or ruler) of Swat rigidly enforcing ‘the Shariat, the Law of God’. ‘[In Swat] a man commits a murder and in twelve hours he will be arrested, tried and shot. Here [i.e. in the British-run NWFP] it may take a year or two and as likely as not, when tried, he will get off, and then a blood feud starts.’ On the whole, Darling thought this ‘a sad reflexion on our [i.e. British] rule’.16
Sixty-three years later, when sharia law was reintroduced into Swat by Taliban zealots, it would receive no such endorsement. The government in Islamabad at first prevaricated, then panicked. Mobile-phone footage of a convicted adulteress being publicly flogged brought howls of protest from Benazir Bhutto’s Western backers and prompted a massive military intervention by the Pakistan army. Thousands died; and in scenes reminiscent of Partition’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands streamed out of the valley to avoid the carnage. Almost no one recalled that sharia law had a long pedigree in Swat and might not be entirely distasteful to the Swatis. Though rough and gender-biased, it slashed the crime rate, ensured the security of property and persons, and was a more effective deterrent than the slow, corrupt and painfully overloaded judicial system operating in the rest of Pakistan.
In 1947, along the sandy trails south of Delhi, Darling found justice less of an issue than religion. Mewat – it simply means ‘the Meo country’ – extended from British-administered Gurgaon deep into the territories of three princely states, two of which (Bharatpur and Dholpur) had Hindu Jat Maharajahs. Entering Bharatpur, Darling noted how the traffic tailed off and the wayside murmurings became a veritable ‘cataract of complaints’. Here the export of grain was forbidden, that of cattle taxed, the land revenue was higher, the corruption worse, ‘and of course no one had any sugar or cloth’. The Meos were reduced to rags, with not a garment that was free of holes. (Darling suggested darning, then remembered the state of his socks.)
For these woes, Meos and Jats were united in blaming the Maharajah of Bharatpur’s administration; but they did so for different reasons. ‘There is a good deal of political agitation going on in the State,’ explained Darling, ‘sponsored, if not engineered, by supporters of Congress, and doubtless this [cataract of complaints] was an echo of it.’17 But while the Meos blamed the Congress agitators for turning the administration against them as Muslims, the Jats took exception to the Congress agitators as godless secularists who were indifferent to Hindu rights and were anti-monarchist republicans to boot. Their Maharajah Brijendra Singh was himself in no way to blame. On the contrary, the Jats looked to him as their saviour. They saw no contradiction between nationalism and princely absolutism because the nation to which by preference they subscribed was Jat, not Indian, and their Maharajah epitomised it.
A ‘Jatistan’ along the lines of the Muslim ‘Pakistan’ or the Sikh ‘Khalistan’ was already being bandied about. Just six weeks after Darling passed through the Jat country, it would surface in a pithy slogan: ‘With biri in hand and pan in mouth we are busy making Jatistan.’ Biri, the peasant’s smoke, and pan, his betel-leaf digestif, were markers of Hindu identity. The Jat’s sub-nationalism thus announced its Hindu credentials. In this it had the full backing of the Maharajah. As a patron of the ultra-Hindu Mahasabha, His Highness’s Hindu supremacism was as far to the right in terms of India’s religious spectrum as his monarchist convictions were in terms of its constitutional spectrum.
Fatally, if rather desperately, in the spring of 1947 the Meos met this Jat challenge with calls for their ow
n ‘Meoistan’. While accommodating their unorthodox beliefs, Meoistan was to be an agrarian republic informed by both the Communist class struggle and consensual village custom. It was thus ‘both a radical and a traditional [alternative] based on a vision of intercommunal solidarity and a decentring of power’. But come the summer, continues Shail Mayaram, ‘what it elicited was a mass extermination campaign’ – one in which the campaigning was done mainly by the Bharatpur Jats and the extermination was suffered mainly by the luckless Meos.18 Many thousands would be massacred, many thousands more ‘converted’, and many hundreds of thousands would swell the flood of refugees. Within the context of Partition all of them would be seen, and counted, simply as casualties of the great Hindu–Muslim conflagration. As elsewhere, their sub-national agrarian, economic and governmental anxieties went largely unrecorded.
Those know-alls in the newsrooms and the corridors of power who simply counterposed Hindu and Muslim when agonising over the partition of a ‘united India’ ignored a host of other identities and relevant factors. In reality the rising tide of communalism was obliterating existing communities as readily as it fashioned new ones. The polarisation of Muslim and Hindu, while providing the impetus for the Pakistan movement, was also the product of that movement.
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Although the Cabinet Mission Plan took no account of all these sub-national identities, its failure to clarify the future status of the princely states themselves was surprising. By leaving open the question of what was to become of the states, the Plan not only generated unrealistic expectations (like that for ‘Jatistan’) but also ensured that the princely issue would loom large in the final run-up to Independence. Thereafter it would dog Indo–Pakistan relations, and in the case of Kashmir rankle to this day. All of which was also somewhat ironic, in fact doubly so. For while the existence of the princely states belied the notion of pre-Independence India being a single entity, it was the terms of their accession that would ensure that post-Independence India was not a single entity either. Indeed, the new ‘India’ would remain pretty much the same size as the old, since ‘the combined area and population [of the princely states] nearly matched that of the districts claimed by the [Muslim] League for Pakistan’.19
In total, the princely states accounted for about 40 per cent of India’s territory and 25 per cent of its population. Their number is usually put at around six hundred, though most were quite insignificant, being little more than fragmented landholdings, perhaps embracing a village or two. In Saurashtra (now in Gujarat but then an intricate tapestry of mini states), the nicely named principality of Veja-no-ness extended to under an acre ‘and had a population, in 1921, of 184’.20 Another was apparently little more than a well. Once traded as jagirs – revenue-yielding fiefs – among rulers and their allies, such holdings had been frozen in time at the moment of British conquest. Their incumbents, assuming they had either assisted the British or not opposed them, had been recognised as rightful rulers in return for their own recognition of the British Crown as the paramount power. This involved surrendering the right to conduct their external relations and accepting a degree of British supervision in respect of their internal affairs.
But in practice such arrangements involved all manner of different relationships. Smaller states like Veja-no-ness had no jurisdictional powers and could scarcely claim even a residual sovereignty; the larger ones were effectively self-governing, maintained their own forces and jealously clung to all the trappings of a sovereignty that was freely acknowledged by the paramount power.
Of these larger princely states, over a hundred were accounted ‘salute states’, their rulers being entitled to proclaim their sovereignty on ceremonial occasions with a gun salute of up to twenty-one salvos. About a dozen of them were vast, their territories, populations or both exceeding those of most member states in the newly founded United Nations. The composite state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Himalayan spin-off of the former Sikh ‘empire’, claimed a land area bigger than France; Hyderabad in the south had a population equivalent to that of Italy. Nor were they all cesspits of reaction and feudal privilege. Travancore on the Kerala coast boasted a literacy rate far above that of directly ruled India; others had developed an industrial capacity or were richly endowed with mineral resources; and several had endorsed some form of popular representation and set up consultative or legislative bodies.
Although many of the smallest states were concentrated in western India, the rest were scattered fairly evenly about the subcontinent and were not often contiguous. Maps thus gave the impression of British India’s fabric being as perilously holed as a Meo’s outworn kurta. Yet this was only half the story. Their variety was as challenging as their distribution. Some were ruled by Muslim Nawabs (including Hyderabad’s Nizam and Swat’s Wali), others by Maharajahs, Rajahs or lesser variants of the same who might be either Hindu or Sikh; and whatever the ruler’s faith, it was not uncommon for the faith of the majority of his subjects to be different. Famously, the greatest princes commanded immense wealth and built ever more fanciful palaces; less famously, the least were hopelessly in debt and lived in shabby obscurity. And not even the mapmakers of the Survey of India had been able to do justice to the unconsolidated nature of princely holdings. Erratic boundaries and isolated enclaves and counter-enclaves abounded. Communications suffered accordingly. As Darling had discovered, road transport was stifled by innumerable state customs barriers where duties were levied, bribes extorted, and some goods could not pass at all. It was the same with the railways and the postal service. Fifty years later Indian Railways would still be grappling with the illogic of state-centred networks and the numerous different rail gauges bequeathed by princely whim.
All this rendered the states highly vulnerable. Making a case for hereditary monarchy in the mid-twentieth century was difficult enough, and it was not helped by the reluctance of many rulers to welcome reform. Inevitably it was the princes’ outrageous eccentricities and their lavish expenditure on foreign travel, luxury cars and well-stocked zenanas that made the headlines. All, great or small, recognised that their best chance of retaining their rights lay in presenting a united front, yet their wildly different circumstances seldom admitted of their sustaining it. The smaller states resisted federating with the larger; and the larger resented their claims to special treatment being muddied by the unrealistic expectations of the smaller.
Of course national sentiment, not to mention common sense, demanded that they throw in their lot with either Congress or the League. It would dispel the suspicion that they were British puppets, be welcomed by most of their subjects, and deserve a generous response from the political parties. For Congress and the League badly needed the states. Without them, an independent India would be denied the territorial uniformity expected of a modern nation state and be incapable of planning an integrated economy. And the same went for a possible Pakistan: without the states and some semi-autonomous tribal areas, its territory would be even more perforated than the ‘moth-eaten’ periphery for which Jinnah would eventually have to settle.
On the other hand, and much to British relief, individually the states were still less viable. All of them depended to some extent on the directly administered provinces not just for ‘oil, cloth, sugar and wheat’ but also coal, power and even water. Moreover, not one of them was readily defensible. A few had written treaties that obliged the British to afford them indefinite protection; but in the absence of British troops this would scarcely be practicable, and Westminster therefore had no intention of honouring the treaties. According to Cripps, ‘the efflux of time and change of circumstances’ had rendered the treaties no longer ‘appropriate to the conditions of the modern world’. With the departure of the paramount power, ‘paramountcy’ – one of those barely definable terms, like ‘suzerainty’ and ‘dependency’, with which empires disguise their dominion – would lapse. Although Congress demanded that all such obligations pass to the new paramount power as part of the ‘transfer of respons
ibility’, the Cabinet Mission had demurred. In a rare reference to the matter, it reiterated the British contention that ‘all rights surrendered … to the paramount power will return to the states’. At a press conference Cripps went even further, opining that the states would thus ‘become wholly independent’.
This was music to princely ears. Hyderabad and Travancore immediately gave serious thought to joining the world’s concourse of sovereign nations by despatching ambassadors and applying for UN membership. They and many other states expected to retain their links with the British Crown by negotiating their individual or collective entry into the British Commonwealth. And all recognised that the retraction of paramountcy did at least improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the new political leadership represented by Congress and the League.
The League was generally supportive of the states; its desired Pakistan would contain comparatively few, of which only Kashmir was a possible contender for independence. But it was otherwise with Congress. As the voice of all India’s peoples it claimed to represent the subjects of the princely states as well as those of British India. In the Chamber of Princes (the princely forum), Congress was thus confronted by a second grouping of potential secessionists who, though less vociferous than the League, could be just as unaccommodating.
While insisting that paramountcy must lapse, the British government had urged the princes to negotiate their future status with the nationalist leadership. Indeed, the Cabinet Mission Plan had envisaged the princes participating in both the Constituent Assembly and the interim government. But, like the League, the Chamber of Princes had prevaricated. It too insisted on disproportionate representation in the Constituent Assembly, while demanding numerous concessions in respect of the legitimacy of monarchical government and a large measure of autonomy in the states’ internal affairs. In early 1947 Nehru, whose centrist, socialist and democratic sentiments were no secret, steeled himself to offer sufficient safeguards to split the princely Chamber into pro- and anti-accessionists. But there still remained the problem of how to win over the latter, and anyway the Constituent Assembly had been prorogued in the face of Jinnah’s refusal to participate. Meanwhile the British government’s February announcement of a deadline for independence had left the future status of the princes unchanged.