India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  Next in order of importance is that other – and more famous – public repository, the British Library in London. My base here was the old India Office Library and Records, which – while I worked there – was called the ‘Oriental and India Office Collections’ (it now functions under the label of ‘Asian and African Studies’. By any name it remains a happy place to work in, with its brisk and efficient staff, its close links to other collections, and – not least – the serendipitous meetings it allows with scholars from around the world.

  Among the other libraries and archives where I collected material for this book are those maintained by the National Archives of India, New Delhi; the Centre for South Asian Studies, Cambridge; the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; Cornell University; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; the University of Georgia, Athens; Friends House, Euston; the India International Centre, New Delhi; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Imperial War Museum, London; Oslo University; the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai; Tata Steel, Jamshedpur; and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. A special thanks is owed to the Centre for Education and Documentation in Bangalore, from whose fabulously comprehensive collection of news clippings Ihave extensively drawn.

  Aside from private papers and periodicals,t his book also draws on other books old and new, as well as pamphlets. Not many of these could I find in libraries (at least not the libraries in my home town, Bangalore, which is a great centre of science but not, alas, of the humanities).The bulk were bought from bookshops known and unrecognized. Iam grateful, in particular, to the Premier Bookshop, Bangalore; the Select Bookshop, Bangalore; Prabhu Booksellers, Gurgaon; the New and Secondhand Bookshop, Mumbai; and Manohar Booksellers, New Delhi. As handy and helpful were the unnamed pavement stalls in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain and Delhi’s Daryaganj – from whom and where, over the past two decades and more, I have obtained so much of the material for my work as a historian.

  The photographs that I have used here come principally from four collections: those maintained by the Press Information Bureau, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the Hindu and Ananda Bazaar Patrika group of newspapers. I thank these institutions for their assistance, and my wife Sujata for advice on the final selection.

  For help of various kinds, I would like to thank Chinmayi Arun; Kanti Bajpai; Suhas Baliga; Rukmini Banerji; Nupur Basu; Millicent Bennett; Stanley Brandes; Vijay Chandru; Shruti Debi; Kanak Mani Dixit; Zafar Futehally; Amitav Ghosh; my parents S. R. D. and Visalakshi Guha; Supriya Guha; Wajahat Habibullah; Rajen Harshe; Radhika Herz-berger; Trevor Horwood; Shreyas Jayasimha; Robin Jeffrey; Bhagwan Josh; Nasreen Munni Kabir; Devesh Kapur; Mukul Kesavan; Soumya Keshavan; Nayanjot Lahiri; Nirmala Lakshman; Edward Luce; Lucy Luck; Raghu Menon; Mary Mount; Rajdeep Mukherjee; Rudrangshu Mukherjee; Anil Nauriya; Nandan Nilekani; Mohandas Pai; Sriram Pan-chu; Prashant Panjiar; Shekhar Pathak; Srinath Raghavan; Nitya Ramak-rishnan; Ramesh Ramanathan; Jairam Ramesh; my nephew Karthik Ramkumar; Mahesh Rangarajan; Anuradha Roy; Tirthankar Roy; John Ryle; P. Sainath; Sanjeev Saith; Rajdeep Sardesai; Jalpa Rajesh Shah; Rajbhushan Shinde; K. Sivaramakrishnan; Arvind Subramanian; R. Sudarshan; Nandini Sundar; M. V. Swaroop; Shikha Trivedy; Siddharth Vara-darajan; A. R. Venkatachalapathy; Rajendra Vora; Amy Waldman; and Francis Wheen.

  Some friends deserve special mention, for their long-term help in matters professional and personal. These good souls are Rukun Advani, André Béteille, Keshav Desiraju, Gopal Gandhi, David Gilmour, Ian Jack, Sanjeev Jain, and Sunil Khilnani. André and David also provided detailed comments on a draft of the book. And I was kept going by the memory of my friend Krishna Raj, editor for thirty-five years of the Economic and Political Weekly, the journal whose own life is so closely bound up with the life of the Republic – as the notes to this book testify.

  I thank, for their support, encouragement, criticism and chastisement, my editors, Richard Milner of Macmillan and Dan Halpern of Ecco/HarperCollins. I promise to be less tardy with the books that might follow! In fact, without my agent Gill Coleridge even this one would not have been finished. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to take an extended holiday, or drop the book altogether. Each time it was Gill who brought me back, showing me the ways in which it might be continued and, in the end, completed.

  My greatest debt, as expressed in the dedication, is to the always interesting and occasionally exasperating Indians with whom I am privileged to share a home.

  Notes

  Prologue: Unnatural Nation

  1

  Thetranslation is by Qurratulain Hyder.

  2

  See Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, ed. and trans., Ghalib, 1797–1869: Life and Letters (1969: reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 7.

  3

  John Strachey, India (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Co., 1888), pp. 2–5.

  4

  Thebest single-volume treatment remains Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan, 1985). For amore up-to-date account see Sekhar Bandopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), an additional merit of which is its excellent bibliography.

  5

  Interview in the Adelaide Advertiser, November 1891, quoted in the ‘NB’ column of The Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 2001.

  6

  E. H. D. Sewell, An Outdoor Wallah (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1945), p. 110, emphasis added. These words were written in 1934.

  7

  Winston Churchill, India: Speeches and an Introduction (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), pp. 38, 120, 125 etc.

  8

  These quotes are taken from Devesh Kapur, ‘Globalization and the Paradox of Indian Democracy’, mimeo, Department of Political Science, University of Texas at Austin, December 2005.

  9

  DonTaylor, ‘This New, Surprising Strength of Mrs Gandhi’, Evening Standard, 21 August 1969, emphasis in original.

  10

  The Statesman (New Delhi), 10 August 1998.

  11

  Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José António Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), quoted in Kapur, ‘Globalization’.

  12

  Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 4.

  13

  Krishna Kumar, What is Worth Teaching? 3rd edn (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), p. 109.

  14

  Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), p. xiii.

  15

  Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Essential Characteristics (1931; reprint London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), preface.

  1. FREEDOM AND PARRICIDE

  1

  Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India, 1958– ;hereafter cited as CWMG), vol. 42, pp. 398–400.

  2

  Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, with Musings on Recent Events in India (1936; reprint London: The Bodley Head, 1949), p. 209.

  3

  The Indian Annual Register, 1930,part I (Jan.–June), p. 23.

  4

  This account of the ceremonies is based on Jim Masselos; ‘“The magic touch of being free”: The Rituals of Independence on 15 August’, in Masselos, ed., India: Creating a Modern Nation (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1990); Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudesia, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 2; The Statesman,15 August 1947; reports in Philip Talbot Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (hereafter CSAS); reports and correspondence in Mountbatten Papers (Mss Eur F200), Tyson Papers (Mss Eur F341), and Saumarez Smith Papers (Mss EurC409), all in the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London (hereafter OIOC).

  5

  Actually, as Salman Rushdie once remarked, half the world
had not yet gone to sleep, and the other half was already awake. This witticism did not stop Rushdie from including Nehru’s speech in an anthology of Indian writing that he edited – the only piece of non-fiction to find a place in the volume.

  6

  As related in Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (New Delhi: Viking, 1993).

  7

  This section on Gandhi and the run-up to independence draws on D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamch and Gandhi, 2nd edn (1963; reprint New Delhi: Publications Division, 1990), vols 7 and 8; N. K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi (1953; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1990); N. K. Bose and P. H. Patwardhan, Gandhi in Indian Politics (Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1967); and relevant volumes of CWMG.

  8

  The words of the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, speaking on 8 August 1940.

  9

  B. R. Nanda, ‘Nehru, the Indian National Congress and the Partition of India, 1935–47’, in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 183.

  10

  The Statesman,16 August 1947.

  11

  The new governor was R. F. Mudie, a British member of the Indian Civil Service who had elected to stay on and work for the government of Pakistan. The quote is from a typescript in the Mudie Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur F164/12).

  12

  Quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 98.

  13

  See L/P and J/8/575, OIOC.

  14

  Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Punjab Boundary Force and the Problem of Order, August 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1974.

  15

  ‘Partition’ (1968), in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson(New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 803–4.

  16

  Quoted in Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Delhi: Viking, 1998), p. 65.

  Before he left India Radcliffe burnt all his notes and papers. He never wrote about his experiences in the subcontinent either. Auden was cynical about this silence, saying that ‘he quickly forgot the case, as a good lawyer must’.

  17

  This and subsequent quotes from Rees are from his papers deposited in the OIOC (especially files Mss Eur F274/66 to Mss Eur F274/70).

  18

  Quoted in H. M. Seervai, Partition of India: Legend and Reality (Bombay: Emenem Publications, 1989), p. 148.

  19

  Nehru to Rees, 3/9/1947, Mss Eur F274/73, OIOC.

  20

  Baroo, ‘Life in the Punjab Today’, Swatantra, 4 October 1947.

  21

  See Mss Eur F200/129.

  22

  Donald F. Ebright, Free India; the First Five Years: An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief and Rehabilitation (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1954), p. 28. Later estimates have pushed up the number of dead to a million or more.

  23

  Note by Major William Short dated 17 October 1947, in Mss Eur F200/129, OIOC.

  24

  As reported in Pyarelal, ‘In Calcutta’, Harijan, 14 September 1947.

  25

  This quote, and much of the preceding two paragraphs, draw from Denis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), chapter 5, ‘The Calcutta Fast’.

  26

  See Richard Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  27

  The violence against the Meos is described in Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  28

  Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, pp. 112–31.

  29

  ‘To Members of the R.S.S.’, Harijan, 28 September 1947.

  30

  Nehru to Patel,30 September 1947, in Durga Das, ed., Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, 1945–50, 10 vols (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1971-74), cited hereafter as SPC, vol. 4, pp. 297–9.

  31

  Entry dated 13 September 1947, in Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1953), p. 189.

  32

  ‘A.I.C.C. Resolutions’, Harijan, 23 November 1947.

  33

  Golwalkar, We, or Our Nation Defined (1938; Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan, 1947), pp. 55–6, quoted in Mohan Ram, Hindi against India: The Meaning of DMK (New Delhi: Rachna Prakashan, 1968), p. 64.

  34

  Hindustan Times,8 December 1947.

  35

  Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, pp. 246–66.

  36

  Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1969), pp. 637–41; see also Ashis Nandy’s fascinating essay on Gandhi and Godse in his At the Edge of Psychology and other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  37

  Patel spoke in Hindustani. The English translation used here is from The Statesman, 31 January 1948.

  38

  Quoted in Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 320–1.

  39

  See the correspondence between Nehru and Patel in SPC, vol. 6, pp. 8–31.

  2. THE LOGIC OF DIVISION

  1

  Khizar Hayat Tiwana to Major Short, 15 August 1947, Short Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur. 189/19).

  2

  There is a massive literature on Partition, which includes: (i) memoirs by key civil servants and military officials who served in the government at the time; (ii) biographies of the important politicians involved in the negotiations – Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Mountbatten et al.; (iii) regional studies of Partition in the Punjab and in Bengal; and (iv) wider analytical overviews. To this must be added the volumes of original documents published both in Britain (the Transfer of Power project) and in India (the Towards Freedom Project plus the published correspondence of Nehru, Patel,Gandhi, et al.). A fine recent overview, with much of the relevant literature cited therein, is Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000). An earlier work representing most of the competing points of view is C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970).

  3

  See the revealing portrait in the memoir of Jinnah’s former junior, M. C. Chagla, Roses in December: An Autobiography (1973; reprint Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1994), chapter 5.

  4

  Lord Birkenhead to Lord Reading, quoted in John Grigg, ‘Myths about the Approach to Indian Independence’, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 211.

  5

  See Khalid bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1857–1948,2ndedn(Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. chapter 6. Two magisterial treatments of Muslim consolidation during late colonial rule are C. S. Venkatachar, ‘1937–47 in Retrospect: A Civil Servant’s View’, in Philips and Wainwright, The Partition of India; and Hamza Alavi, ‘Misreading Partition Road Signs’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2–9 November 2002.

  6

  Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 221.

  7

  ‘The Pakistan Nettle’, in Moon Papers, OIOC (Mss. Eur F230/39).

  8

  This account of the 1946 elections is based largely on Sho Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition: 1946 Provincial Elections in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), supplemented by David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and ‘A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationa
lism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 40, no. 3, July 1998; and I. A. Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab Election’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1980.

  9

  See Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889–1952 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), part V.

  10

  Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (Freedom’s Dawn), as translated from the Urdu by V. G. Kiernan in Poems by Faiz (1958; reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 123–4.

  11

  Humayan Kabir, ‘Muslim Politics, 1942–7’, in Philips and Wainwright, The Partition of India, p. 402.

  12

  Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten (London: Collins, 1985), p. 439.

  13

  Andrew Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, in his Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994).

  14

  Jenkins to Mountbatten, 3 May 1947, Mss Eur F200/125, OIOC.

  15

  Jenkins to Mountbatten, 30 July 1947, Mss Eur F200/127, OIOC.

  16

  J. D. Tyson to ‘Dear Folk’, 5 May 1946, Mss Eur E341/40, OIOC.

  17

  Note by Sir Francis Burrows,14 February 1947, Mss Eur F200/24, OIOC.

  18

  See Malcolm Darling, At Freedom’s Door (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).

  19

  Nicholas Mansergh, editor-in-chief, Constitutional Relations between Great Britain and India: Transfer of Power, 1942–47, 12 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983), cited hereafter as TOP, vol. 12, items 200, 209, 389 and 489.

  20

  Quoted in Richard Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1924–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.