Murder and arson were a daily occurrence, and there had been several major outbreaks of violence. In August 1946, Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, had seen three days of Hindu versus Muslim rioting which had left approximately 5,000 dead and 10,000 injured, in what came to be known as the ‘Great Calcutta Killings’.11 The Muslim League had announced that they would declare 16 August a public holiday to celebrate their withdrawal from the Congress-dominated Interim Government. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League’s dynamic leader and ‘Sole Spokesman’12 had also declared it to be ‘Direct Action Day’ although neither he nor the Muslim Premier of Bengal, Huseyn Suhrawardy, had specified exactly what that meant. Unruly mobs in Calcutta, Muslim and Hindu goondas needed little encouragement to interpret it in their own way and it took the army four days to restore order. The journalist Nikhil Chakravarty could not recall having seen so much devastation. He remembered hundreds of people lying dead in the street, the bodies shrinking in the terrible Bengal summer heat and the stomach-churning stink. He saw an old Muslim laundryman in a good neighbourhood being beaten up by well-to-do Hindus who all knew him well – but now he represented to them a species that must go.13
One of the most feared Hindu gang leaders was Gopal ‘Patha’ Mukherjee. He was, recalled Andrew Whitehead, who interviewed him afterwards, ‘an unlikely retired gang leader. He is positively beatific, with his thick, black-rimmed spectacles, long white hair tied up on top of his head’. Yet his gang of 800 murdered hundreds of Muslims. Gopal saw it as his duty. ‘It was a very critical time for the country’, he told Whitehead. ‘We thought if the whole area became Pakistan there would be more torture and repression.’ If one Hindu was murdered he instructed his boys to kill ten Muslims in retaliation. They used all sorts of weapons – ‘small knives, big choppers, sticks, rods, guns and pistols. During the Second World War the American Army were in Calcutta. If you gave them Rs 250 or a bottle of whisky, they would give you a pistol and a hundred cartridges’. One day Gopal killed four Muslims himself in one go.14
What was so shocking was the ‘unbridled savagery with homicidal maniacs let loose to kill and kill and maim and burn’ wrote General Sir Francis Tuker, who witnessed much of it. The worst butchery was in the south of the city. As the soldiers moved in they had to clear over 150 corpses from one crossroads so that they could get their vehicles past. In one bustee, or slum, area they found a house with fifteen bodies in the first room and twelve in the second. They came across a rickshaw stand where not only the passengers but also the wretched pullers had all been cut down. Many of the bodies were horribly mutilated. The majority of those killed in Calcutta were Hindus. A favourite trick of the Muslim goondas was to tie people to a pole with their hands behind their back and then bore a small hole in their forehead so that they bled slowly to death through their brain. Hardened soldiers of the York and Lancaster Regiment who had fought through the campaigns against the Japanese were sick on the spot.15
Phillips Talbot, a hardened American journalist, was in Calcutta at the time. He wrote to Walter Rogers at the Institute of Current World Affairs:
It would be impossible to describe everything we saw. In street after street rows of shops had been stripped to the walls. Tenements and business buildings were burned out and their contents strewn over the pavements. A pall of smoke hung over many blocks, and buzzards sailed in great, leisurely circles. Most overwhelming were the neglected human casualties; fresh bodies, bodies grotesquely bloated in the tropical heat, slashed bodies, bodies bludgeoned to death, bodies piled on push carts, bodies caught in drains, bodies stacked high in vacant lots, bodies, bodies, bodies.16
Naffese Chohan, aged fifteen and safely at home miles away in the Punjab, heard a violent knocking at the door in the middle of the night. It was her cousin, who was like a brother to her. He ‘had a good education, in an “English” school and spoke English well’. He had been working in Calcutta. Now he stood outside the door of their house just with the clothes he was wearing and without shoes. Her mother asked what on earth had happened. ‘Don’t ask’, he replied, but soon the story emerged. He said there had been ‘killing and blood everywhere’. It would soon, he warned, come to the Punjab, but the old people did not believe him.17
The Great Calcutta Killings were just the beginning. The trouble in Bengal then spread outside Calcutta itself, to the rural areas of Chittagong, Tippera and Noakhali in eastern Bengal where Muslim gangs under Ghulam Sarwar went round Hindu villages demanding forcible conversion of Hindus and butchering those who refused. Congress was blamed for exaggerating the numbers killed, which were fewer than in Calcutta but nevertheless significant.
Jharna Chowdhury was nine years old at the time. One morning in the middle of October 1946 she remembered ‘hundreds of people came to our house with flaming torches. They were shouting Allah-o-Akbar. Then they set the house on fire. We fled and laid in a nearby garden. There were so many attackers . . .’ but what shocked her was that among them she saw people from her own village, neighbours whom she had known all her life. It was a pattern that would be repeated many times across India in the coming year.18
Chandra Pal had been working away from home. He returned to find that his ‘parents’ house had been attacked and looted but luckily lives were spared. But our neighbours’ houses, the big zamindars’ (landowners) houses and those of big business families – those houses had been looted like anything; people had been massacred and their women taken away’. This was to be another disturbing aspect of the trouble that lay ahead. Pal also thought that ‘the rioters wanted vengeance against those with money and power’, and certainly the majority of the big landowners in Bengal were Hindus.19
‘Many people jumped into ponds to save themselves’, remembered M. K. Majumdar, a retired schoolteacher. ‘They tried to hide under the water hyacinths. But the attackers killed them with fishing spears.’20 For weeks afterwards Hindu men were forced to offer namaz, ritual Muslim prayers, and adopt Muslim names. The fate of the abducted women was particularly grim. Ashoka Gupta, married to a judge, recalled one man approaching her in tears. His wife was being carried off and raped every night by the same group of men and he was helpless to stop them.
The ageing Gandhi took it on himself to tour the area in a peace pilgrimage. Ashoka Gupta also remembers his arrival. He came by boat and crowds turned out to cheer him, both Hindu and Muslim. Abdul Rauf, a local Muslim, was initially impressed by him. ‘He was wearing two pieces of khadi (homespun) cloth and there was a watch at his waist. He took support from the shoulders of two women.’ But the Muslims soon got rather fed up with him. They noticed he seemed dependent on milk from his accompanying goat; one night a group of them kidnapped the goat and barbecued it.21
Worst came in Bihar, the neighbouring province to Bengal, where about 8,000 Muslims were massacred in October by Hindu gangs, a death toll promptly exaggerated to 20,000 by the Muslim League. One of the most shocking incidents occurred at the Garhmukteshwar Fair on 6 to 7 November. The fair was a traditional rural gathering on the banks of the River Ganges. Although primarily a Hindu festival, many Muslims went as traders. On the evening of 6 November, a shout went up that a Muslim had insulted a Hindu woman, a Jat. Almost immediately, and in a move that many considered premeditated although nothing substantial has ever been proved, gangs of Jats moved in and killed every Muslim man, woman and child in the most appalling fashion.
Pregnant women were ripped up, their unborn babies torn out and infants’ brains bashed out on walls and on the ground. There was rape, and women and children were seized by the legs by burly fiends and torn apart. Most were killed with spears but some of the killings were by strangulation. The murderers’ women stood about, laughing with glee, egging on their men folk.22
The next day the Jat gangs moved from the fairground on the Ganges into the town of Garhmukteshwar itself, repeating their savagery. What was most shocking about this whole dreadful incident was that the Garhmukteshwar police, all Hindu, did absolutely nothing to stop
it. The army reckoned at least 2,000 Muslims had been killed over the two days.
Most worrying of all for Wavell and the government in Delhi was the possibility of a major breakdown of order in the Punjab. If India was described as the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, then the Punjab was the brightest part of that jewel. Not only did its population produce nearly half the manpower for the Indian Army but it was also India’s most fertile province. Its agricultural land, watered by the five rivers from which it takes its name, and an elaborate and effective canal system, produced almost one third of India’s wheat as well as 10 per cent of its cotton and rice. Its capital at Lahore was one of the great cities of Asia, a former Mughal capital with a sophisticated and cosmopolitan society. Yet the Punjab also had a delicate balance of communities. The Muslims were narrowly in the majority, forming 57 per cent of the population of approximately 25 million, but were concentrated mostly in the west. East of Lahore, centred on their holy city of Amritsar, were 5 million Sikhs who, although only 20 per cent of the population, exercised a disproportionate influence. Originally a religious sub-sect of Hinduism, they had emerged in the seventeenth century as a ‘distinct and militant community as a result of the proselytising zeal of the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb’.23 Sikh organisation and military prowess had enabled them to rule the Punjab as a separate kingdom under Maharajah Ranjit Singh as the Mughal Empire declined. Conquered by the British in a series of wars in the 1840s, they had subsequently been among the Raj’s most loyal supporters, and were to form a major part of the Indian Army after the Mutiny in 1857. In January 1947, the Punjab was ruled by a coalition government, much to the fury of the Muslim League who felt the majority of Muslims in the province should have entitled them to power. On 24 January they urged their supporters to ‘smash the ministry’ and their newspaper Dawn started printing quotations from the Holy Qur’an on its front pages.24 The Punjab’s population was polarising rapidly. People were becoming passionately and ostentatiously Muslim or Hindu.
In what the British referred to with some understatement as ‘Viceroy’s House’, the enormous palace in Delhi designed by Edwin Lutyens, with its staff of over a thousand, including one man whose job was simply to pluck chickens and another to make butter pats, Wavell was beginning to realise that the machinery of the Raj was falling apart. It had only ever been at best skin deep, able to rule India and maintain law and order when not challenged. The war had masked its decline but now the police, never the strongest of the Raj’s institutions, was collapsing and the Indian Civil Service overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and unsure how much authority they still held. ‘I see with sorrow and dismay the rising tide of ruin which is engulfing this great country of India’, A. P. Hume, an ICS officer of nineteen years standing, had written to his father at the end of 1946. ‘The administrative machinery has already broken down in large areas, and justice and orderly government are being submerged in a morass of corruption, incompetence and misrepresentation of the truth.’ His father had, unhelpfully, forwarded the letter to Attlee. Even Sir Olaf Caroe, one of the most experienced and able, if controversial, provincial governors, had written that ‘the administration is running down, crime is going up and revenue not coming in’.25
The only branch of government Wavell knew he could rely on was the army, nearly half a million men of the Indian Army and 30,000 British troops still positioned strategically in mobile brigades around India. The Labour government was not impressed with the Indian Army’s ‘complete lack of leadership’, which Bevin believed would ‘cause the disaster that will overtake the British Empire’.26 Even allowing for Bevin’s tendency to overstate his case, it was strong criticism, but it was the army that Wavell might ultimately have to rely on. In late 1946 he had asked Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief in India and responsible for all the Indian armed forces, to conduct an exercise to establish how prepared the army was to deal with a complete breakdown. The results of Exercise Embrace were used to draw up plans to deal with an ‘open insurrection’.27 In the cool of early January, when the weather in Delhi was still bearable, Wavell realised that he was not only presiding over the end of the Raj but that he could end up doing so amid the most terrible violence.
The India that Wavell ruled in 1947 as the King Emperor’s representative was the second-largest country in the world by population. Of its 400 million people, 300 million lived in eleven provinces directly under British rule. Three of these were the great provinces of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, which had grown from being the earliest trading posts and later administrative centres of the East India Company; all British territory in southern India was divided between Bombay and Madras. It was, though, Bengal that had long presented the British with their greatest challenges in India. Conquered in stages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with its principal city of Calcutta on the Hooghly river, it was vital to British trade partly as a place where vessels engaged in the China trade could cross-load and partly for its own rich resources such as jute; Bengal would dominate the world jute trade well into the twentieth century.
Calcutta had been the logical place for the East India Company and later the British Raj to base their government until in 1911 it was decided to move to the more central Delhi, the old Moghul capital. Yet Bengal was also a difficult province to administer. It was overpopulated, with the majority of the population living in miserably poor rural villages. It was also, like the Punjab, divided between Muslims and Hindus. In 1905, with Bengal’s population topping 80 million, Lord Curzon, viceroy since 1899, decided the province should be partitioned for ease of administration, and with some political benefits from the British perspective, creating a separate Muslim-dominated East Bengal and a Hindu-dominated West Bengal. The resulting outcry from the Hindu population and the rising Indian nationalist movement made this plan unsustainable and in 1911 it was reversed. The two halves of Bengal were reunited but two new Hindu-dominated provinces, which had previously been incorporated in West Bengal, were created. The first, Bihar, included Orissa, and, secondly, North Bengal became a separate province as Assam.
West of Bihar and Orissa, the British ruled the vast plains of Central India from two provinces, the United Provinces with its capital at Lucknow to the north and the Central Provinces, established in 1861 to rule the land taken from the Marathas, with its capital at Nagpur, to the south. Both these provinces had Hindu majorities, albeit with sizeable pockets of Muslims. There were then two provinces to the north and west. The first, Sind, was the low-lying area where the Indus river system empties into the Indian Ocean, with its principal port and city at Karachi. Sind had been conquered by troops of the East India Company under Lord Napier in 1843, giving rise to Napier’s famous quip ‘Peccavi’ (‘I have sinned’), which, in all its classical glibness, seems to summarise so much of the British attitude to ruling India. Originally administered as part of Bombay, in 1936 Sind became a separate province. It was predominantly Muslim, but had a sizeable Hindu mercantile community and many low-caste Hindu workers. North of Sind, and bordering Afghanistan as its name suggests, the North West Frontier Province, with its capital at Peshawar, had been established in 1901 to administer the bandit lands, police the ill-defined Afghan border and to keep some sort of order among the Pathan tribes who lived along it. It was the North West Frontier that was to dominate so much of British India’s strategic thinking and give rise to the popular image of the Raj.
These eleven provinces only covered part of the vast territory that comprised British India. Approximately one third of it remained under its traditional rulers, families who had made treaties with the Raj and who were allowed to continue to administer their territories as many had done for centuries. There were 562 of these ‘Princely states’ with a combined population of just under 100 million. They ranged from enormous territories such as Hyderabad, dominating central southern India, and the size of Italy, with a population of 16 million, to pieces of land that were really no more than large country estates. Some of thes
e were ethnically and religiously coherent, with rulers and population coming from the same stock, such as the ancient Hindu Rajput states, while others had a ruling family whose religion was different from the majority of their population. The Nizam of Hyderabad, for example, reputedly the world’s richest and meanest man, was a Muslim but the vast majority of his subjects were Hindus; in Jammu and Kashmir a Hindu maharajah ruled a state that was 75 per cent Muslim. It was a tension that was to cause considerable problems later in the year.
Wavell was, like so many of his British contemporaries, devoted to India and genuinely thought that he was putting Indian interests first. In that curiously patriarchal manner, so patronising to Indians and yet so natural to a class of British soldiers and administrators who had been brought up to rule an empire, Wavell believed that it was people like him who understood the ‘real India’. They had soldiered with her sons, lived in her remote villages and in her hills and thought they knew her best interests better than the wily, urban politicians of Congress and the Muslim League. They certainly thought they knew India better than the Labour politicians at home who seemed obsessed with Britain’s domestic problems, and with Palestine. It was an attitude summarised so well by one of the brightest of the British officials in India, Loftus Tottenham, who thought that ‘to contemplate handing over the people of India in the name of democracy to be governed by an oligarchy of people who are more oppressive and more selfish than anything you can conceive is really funny . . . If it weren’t tragic’.28
That many individual British officials were so well intentioned towards India would certainly contribute to the quite remarkable lack of antagonism between Britain and the future nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was, however, a misunderstanding that was to have catastrophic consequences and to lead to a degree of complacency that would contribute to the tragedies of the coming August.
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