Over four days and three nights, as many as fifteen thousand people were stabbed, stoned, speared, attacked with acid and brickbats, hacked to death with axes, or set on fire. The vast majority of them were Muslims. Shops and tenements were turned into smoldering shells, and vultures once again made lazy circles over the city. Roving mobs ransacked trains, stopped cars, killed their occupants, and then set all alight. Looting was indiscriminate and bodies were everywhere. John Auden went out in a jeep to check on his office staff, bringing food and provisions. If they were Muslim he moved them to Park Circus; if they were Hindu he drove them to South Calcutta. He took Sudhin to check on his mother on Cornwallis Street, passing by the decomposing bodies of a dozen Muslim hawkers en route. A neighbor, an alumnus of an English university, had incited their deaths, Sudhin learned. “Those in possession of their senses kept their doors bolted,” he would write, “and if thus they missed the fine glow imparted to the monsoon sky by houses blazing away at night, nowhere was there any escape from the stench of rotting carcasses.” The Statesman first described the days of bloodshed as the “Fury” before settling upon the “Great Calcutta Killing.”
Back at his flat, Sudhin destroyed a booklet he’d been writing arguing that his countrymen were allergic to violence. In an unsigned editorial he made the case that the Great Calcutta Killing, “a tragedy unparalleled in India’s tragic communal history,” called for a “special gesture.” He begged Nehru to keep open the seats he’d offered to Jinnah in his provisional government in hopes of an eventual Congress–Muslim League rapprochement. The League, in turn, might thereby desist from its “demonstrably disastrous” obstructionist stance in fear of hardening communal tensions still further. When a week passed with no movement toward a compromise, Sudhin bitterly blamed the “orgy of death” on the “gross negligence” of Chief Minister Shaheed Suhrawardy’s Home Ministry. Though Sudhin was never as close to Shaheed as he was to his brother, he had known him for twenty years. He imagined they were part of the same world and shared the same understandings. If this was true once, it was no longer.
Suhrawardy, who had stationed himself in the police control room at Lalbazar during the riots, blamed the commissioner of police for having lost control of the city. During the public inquiry that followed, a Congressman and political opponent in the Bengal Provincial Assembly stood up and denounced Shaheed, using Leo Amery’s paraphrase of Cromwell: “Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” Unlike Neville Chamberlain, Shaheed had chips to call in and soundly defeated a motion of no confidence.
“The devil was loose here for three days,” John wrote Wystan after the worst was over. He spent a day helping bury five hundred corpses. With the August heat it wasn’t long before the corpses were too putrid even for rats and vultures. They bloated into grotesque positions: legs splayed, buttocks thrust in the air, scrotums the size of footballs. The calloused soles of their feet, John couldn’t help but notice, peeled off like old carpet slippers. Those that were a week old were already skeletons. The perpetrators, he told Wystan, claimed Europeans would be next. They weren’t.
Flare-ups continued for months. Special Branch incident files described Muslim bustees set aflame, bodies pulled from manholes, found in gunnysacks, ponds, pumping stations, and slaughterhouses. During Diwali, a printed leaflet circulated. “The dark Diwali should be coloured with the blood of these Pakistani Muslims. In front of Mother Kali Muslims in place of buffaloes should be sacrificed.” Angry that their chief minister had done nothing to protect them, convinced that Hindus were arriving in the city by the trainload, Calcutta’s Muslims armed themselves with bombs, acid, and guns. An answering massacre of Hindus was orchestrated in Noakhali, in East Bengal. In an effort to quell the violence, Gandhi walked all over the district.
Neither Jinnah nor Nehru went to Calcutta. Jinnah addressed the riots from his home on Malabar Hill in Bombay and Nehru from his on York Road in Delhi. This was the sort of treatment Muslims will receive under a Hindu Raj, Jinnah declared. Nehru, adamant in his refusal to consider a partitioning of India, insisted nothing had changed.
He was wrong. The Great Calcutta Killing changed everything. Sudhin would cite the Muslim-Hindu riots of August 1946, the first of their kind in India’s history, as the ignominious end to Pax Britannica in the very city where the British Empire had been born two centuries before. “With [these riots] disappeared the unity of India that was considered the greatest achievement of British rule; and perhaps the special destiny of Calcutta was thus fulfilled.” For the next seven months, similar if less deadly riots broke out all over India. In Bihar Nehru encountered a Hindu mob intent on lynching Muslims. Shocked at its ferocity, he had thrown its leader to the ground, nearly throttling him.
The last viceroy of India sensed what was coming. After six years of war, Britain had neither the troops nor the will needed to assert control over events. When Lord Mountbatten moved up the date of the handover by ten months, to August 15, 1947, a caul of foreboding settled over Calcutta.
17 Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi,
August 15, 1947
“American business magnates in appalling ties are arriving in India by the planeload,” John wrote Wystan, “offering in the name of democracy to uplift the masses with enormous contracts.” And not just India. One hundred and ninety-eight Russians were assigned to the Soviet embassy in Thailand, and the new maps of China included most of Burma. John imagined Mr. Norris, a shady character from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, arriving from Ostend to sell explosives and trawl for boys.
Evidently assuming Louis MacNeice was a fellow oilman, a Standard Oil scout appalled him on his flight out to India by cracking one crude joke after another. On a refueling stop in Cairo, the man pointed out the remarkable resemblance between the fez and the Shriner hat. Some clever American must have sold them on it, he crowed. Stopping to refuel in Baghdad, he mistook it for Delhi. When Louis pointed out he was in Iraq, he observed, “Ah yes, yes, the New Britain.”
The ink expended on English county cricket scores in the Delhi papers surprised Louis, but it was the letters to the editor urging that cow slaughter be made illegal that brought him to Aurangzeb Road. Ramkrishna Dalmia, the founder of the Anti–Cow Slaughter League, was known as the Henry Ford of India. Only Dalmia did not limit himself to one industry, but had holdings in alphabetized dozens, from aviation to biscuits to collieries. During the war U-boat attacks on shipping had effectively halted imports from England. The price of cloth quintupled, industrialization was kick-started, and vast fortunes were made. Dalmia was one of the victors. Many believed his cow crusade to be a stunt to divert attention from his sharp business deals.
“This campaign of yours for cow protection,” Louis asked the small, wizened man with a knife-edged face in a Congress cap, “is it primarily religious or economic?”
Dalmia’s blue silk suit matched his sofa. A steady stream of assistants filed in and out. Whenever Dalmia’s attention was diverted, Louis took in a drawing room fitted with splashy gold moldings, a color scheme repeated throughout the mansion. Dalmia’s nervous, flicking hand movements would pat his thigh to bring him back.
“My dear young man,” Dalmia replied, “you cannot separate things like that. Everything is one. Cow is sacred because valuable like the mother but more so. What benefits humanity is sacred and vice versa.”
Many of the Muslim senior bureaucrats Louis spoke to could trace their ancestral history in Delhi back centuries. “The Hindu abhors my insides,” one said. They were under enormous pressure to leave. For them the upcoming partition was a Hindu victory. Yet while the road to the railway station was cluttered with bullock carts piled high with babies and old women heading for Pakistan, these men seemed in no great hurry to pack up. Rumors of disturbances in the Punjab were indistinct amid the fireworks and festivities in the capital. Even Jinnah was said to be holding on to his house on Malabar Hill. Dalmia was a fast friend of his. Indeed, the mansion Louis was sittin
g in had until recently belonged to Jinnah. It was very confusing. But Dalmia had already moved on to his next pet scheme—One-World Government overseen by a benevolent autocrat.
Himself? Louis scribbled. Sincere? Probably. Megalom? Likely.
Democracy was finished, Dalmia said; the West had proved it. They were still counting up the dead from the war. Sensing Louis’s skepticism, he switched back to the subject of cow slaughter.
“The cow is like your mother, only more so; she goes on giving you milk. Tell me, would you kill your mother? And even when she’s very old, she still pays her way with her dung. I have statistics to prove that.”
Few telephones were working, so the BBC team was reduced to sending messages by tonga. That was how Louis got in touch with John Auden’s friend Sinbad Sinclair. Sinclair had arranged the Dalmia interview and proved to be rather cultivated for an oilman and something of a dandy. He lived in a grand bungalow not far from Dalmia’s mansion. His wife was in England with the children, Sinbad said; Louis was welcome to stay. Returning each evening, Louis would sit on a lawn the texture of velvet, drink Sinbad’s whiskey, and try to make sense of it all.
In a frantic round of teas and lunches, he met colonels and commissioners, finance ministers, museum directors, and archaeologists with curly mustaches, even a former head prefect from Marlborough. The sheer variety of humanity overwhelmed him, though the incompetence of the local BBC office meant he missed half of the pre–Independence Day festivities he had tickets to. At a cocktail party at the viceregal residence, with “Old Man River” on the gramophone, the poet and Congress leader Sarojini Naidu told him she was disappointed that he didn’t have a blue beard.
God only knew where she got that. John Auden?
He met a Congressman who told him he’d edited a highbrow literary quarterly with Aldous Huxley at Oxford. He was charming, spoke beautifully, and had been repeatedly imprisoned by the British. Executive types tended to spice their talk with “old chap” and “what the dickens,” phrases he hadn’t heard since Edward was king. Field Marshal Kodandera Cariappa, veteran of Waziristan border conflicts, was more Sandhurst than Sandhurst and was celebrated for having introduced the loudspeaker as a field tactic. He demonstrated for Louis by curling a loose fist around his mouth.
“Salaams to you, our brothers of the hills,” he trumpeted, startling the assembled. “It has been reported to me that you have fired several shots at one of my pickets. This disturbs the peace of our camp and prevents us from sleeping. Salaams to you. If you continue to disturb us we shall have to kill you. We do not wish to do this. Salaams to you. I suggest therefore that you all go away and go to bed. If any of you has any complaints let him come and see me in the morning. Good night, our brothers of the hills. Salaams to you.” Cariappa now made a practice of using a mobile van and loudspeaker to drive about Delhi quoting a bit of the Koran, a bit of the Gita, to get the attention of mobs growing more restive by the minute. “Chaps will fall for it, you know,” he said. “Jolly good show.”
The number of servants running to attend to him left Louis in a constant state of embarrassment. Each morning a south Indian in a spotless turban jumped out of nowhere to put his socks on for him. Sinbad had his calves massaged and powder put between his toes every morning while he read the paper. And then there was the wee fellow from the Hindustan Times who asked Louis what might be done to solve India’s problems. He made some vague noises only to have the man say mournfully, “I will come again in September when perhaps you will have more definite ideas.” That about crushed him.
At the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly, India readied itself to declare its independence. From his seat in the high gallery, Louis looked down through a windy whir of ceiling fans into a sea of Congress caps and flapping homespun. The president came off like an old Labour MP and Nehru seemed exhausted. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the new vice president, gave what Louis believed was the best speech. The one discordant note was the braying conch in the middle of bells chiming midnight.
In a beautifully lit garden at Government House the following evening, he was finally introduced to India’s new prime minister. A number-one charmer, Louis thought, noting Jawaharlal Nehru’s varsity English and parson-like bearing. An estimated half million people had been present that afternoon at India Gate for the ceremonial raising of the Indian flag. Nehru had nearly been stranded in a flood of excited humanity.
“You must be quite tired,” Louis said.
“I’m quite fond of a crowd,” Nehru said. “My first instinct is to pitch myself into it but sometimes I have to rush out and beat it.” He had beaten a man with his own topee in that afternoon’s crush, but Louis imagined instead a crowd in a worshipful frenzy trying to tear off his clothes. Nehru invited him for lunch two days hence, a Sunday. He wanted to talk about something other than politics.
Sunday was publication day of the map of all maps. An English barrister named Sir Cyril Radcliffe, knowing nothing of India, had reviewed censuses and land records wrapped in red cloth (Assistant District Officer Carritt’s doubtless among them) to decide where the new borders would fall. Bengal was partitioned once again: Punjab for the first time. The map would outline a nation in two parts, East and West Pakistan, with the breadth of India between.
Perhaps in inviting Louis for Sunday lunch, Nehru believed that, having acceded to Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan, India might be healed of its communal fever, like an abscess lanced by a knife. Perhaps this was how Nehru imagined he might turn away from politics for an hour, and speak of something else. But with the publication of the Radcliffe maps, violence on both sides of the line dividing the Punjab exploded. Hindus and Sikhs traveling east were set upon by Muslim mobs before they could reach the Indian border, sparking a chain reaction of revenge on the other side, as gangs of Sikhs armed with guns and spears lay in wait for trains filled with Muslims heading west. Lunch was canceled.
“Others were able to play on our weakness because we had them,” Radhakrishnan had said at the midnight session. Decades of listening to high British officials use the Hindu-Muslim conflict as a stalking horse deepened this divide and blinded many to its growing strength. Addressing the assembled lawmakers still mourning the loss of an undivided India, Radhakrishnan asked, “Were we not victims, ready victims, so to say, of the separatist tendencies foisted upon us?”
The violence reached Delhi after Louis left for Lahore in the Punjab. On the night of September 6, the Muslim neighborhoods of Old Delhi were set aflame. Crazed-looking Sikhs waving kirpans above their heads surrounded the bungalow Louis had only just vacated, demanding that the Muslim servants be sent outside. Armed with his prize niblick and mashie, Sinbad Sinclair faced them down.
Louis found Delhi a ghost town on his return. The beggars were gone; tongas and taxis nowhere to be found. The home of the Muslim secretary of the Constituent Assembly, where he had been served a sumptuous meal a month before, had been looted. At the fort where sixty thousand Muslims were corralled in the open air, he watched Pakistan’s portly prime minister give a speech from a lorry, begging them to stay in India, promising the Hindus wouldn’t kill them. Everywhere Louis looked children were squatting and shitting. From there he went to Gandhi’s prayer meeting. Gandhi had just returned from Calcutta, where the papers were saying he had single-handedly stopped the violence. Louis was dubious.
That night, back at Sinbad Sinclair’s bungalow, the skies opened with biblical ferocity while Louis lay awake thinking about the refugees and about Gandhi.
After reflecting on vanity, in the Ecclesiastical sense, Louis went to bed. And the next morning he caught a train for Calcutta.
Suite no. 6, 6 Russell Street, Calcutta,
September 25, 1947
Despite his criminal handling of the Bengal famine and his evasion of blame for the Great Calcutta Killing, Shaheed Suhrawardy had remained royally ensconced as Bengal’s premier de jure, the leader of over sixty million people. He had, nonetheless, gone into a complete pan
ic upon hearing that Gandhi, rather than be party to Independence Day festivities in Delhi, was en route once more to the backwaters of Noakhali. Having failed to stop the partition of India, Gandhi thought he might at least sacrifice himself on behalf of those who would be in the crosshairs when East Bengal became East Pakistan.
Should Gandhi be murdered on his watch, Shaheed’s political prospects would never recover. Even worse would be the bloodbath of Calcutta Muslims sure to follow. Shaheed sped to the Sodepur Ashram to beg the old man to remain in the city and help him maintain peace. When Shaheed personally guaranteed the safety of the Noakhali Hindus, Gandhi relented, but on one condition. Shaheed must share his lodgings. They moved to the ramshackle home of a Muslim trader in the mixed and restive neighborhood of Beliaghata. Shaheed went further, exchanging his bespoke suits for penitential khadi pyjamas.
Independence Day passed without incident. Hindus and Muslims fraternized openly on streets that had run with their blood exactly one year before. The boundary map had divided Bengal so that Calcutta had made it into India and this provided an occasion of joy for both communities. When attacks on Hindus were threatened in what was now East Pakistan, they were quelled. Shaheed shared Gandhi’s vegetarian meals (though he was seen on occasion to slip away to a restaurant) and sat alongside him during prayer meetings. He even accepted responsibility for the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946. Tributes flowed in from the viceroy and the Muslim League. Gandhi had wrought a miracle in Calcutta, the newspapers said.
The Last Englishmen Page 33