15 From Islam, A Bangladesh Village.
16 Ghosh, The Moments of Bengal Partition, p.186.
17 Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, p.113.
18 Sengupta, p.119.
19 K. N. Dalal, AP, 16 October 1947, quoted by Ghosh, The Moments of Bengal Partition, p.42.
20 Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, pp.171–2.
21 Ghosh, The Moments of Bengal Partition, p.61.
22 Ghosh, The Moments of Bengal Partition, p.75.
23 Tuker, pp.476–7.
24 Symonds, p.145.
25 Symonds, p.153.
26 Nehru quoted by BBC, 27 March 1947.
27 Figures given by Andrew Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir, p.33.
28 Kirpalani, p.339.
29 This story is recounted in much more detail by Moon, Divide and Quit, pp.231–7.
30 Jinnah quoted by Hassan, Impact of Partition, p.35.
31 Singh Chopra, pp.221–2.
32 Singh Chopra, p.223.
33 Kharaiti Lal interviewed by Andrew Whitehead, 17 March 1997. SOAS Library OA3, India: A People Partitioned.
34 Indian Express, 1 August 1997; ‘Brutalised and Humiliated’ by Andrew Whitehead.
35 Singh Chopra, p.243.
36 Hodson, p.427.
37 Hodson, p.437.
38 Hodson, p.439.
39 Hodson, p.439.
Chapter 11: November
1 Whitehead, p.198.
2 Symonds, p.156.
3 Whitehead, p.34.
4 Whitehead, p.26.
5 Whitehead, p.27.
6 Whitehead, p.23.
7 Whitehead, p.47.
8 Quoted by Whitehead, pp.62–3.
9 Whitehead, p.107.
10 Hodson, pp.450–1.
11 Governor General’s Personal Report No.5, dated 7 November 1947.
12 From papers in the Indian Ministry of Defence’s ‘History of Operations in Jammu and Kashmir 1947–48’ and quoted by Whitehead, p.116.
13 Hodson, p.449.
14 Hamid, At The Forward Edge of Battle, the history of Pakistan’s Armoured Corps. There is a full description of 11th Cavalry’s operations on p. 578.
15 Mountbatten quoted by Whitehead, p.138.
16 Hodson, p.507.
17 Hodson, p.432.
18 Hodson, p.433.
19 Bolitho, p.209.
20 Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, pp.278–9.
21 Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, p.278.
22 Hodson, p.458.
23 Governor general’s Personal Report No.5, dated 7 November 1947.
24 Father Shanks’s account is taken from A Mission in Kashmir by Andrew Whitehead, to whom I am most grateful for his permission to draw so extensively on his research.
25 Quoted by Whitehead, p.76.
26 Whitehead, p.78.
27 Whitehead, p.127.
28 Whitehead, p.197.
29 Whitehead, p.132.
30 Interview by Frank Moraes in 1957, quoted by Whitehead, p.135.
31 Whitehead, p.150.
32 Whitehead, p.161.
33 Whitehead, p.160.
34 Whitehead, p.160.
35 Whitehead, p.187.
36 Whitehead, p.189.
37 Major General D. K. Palit interviewed by BBC British Library Sound Archive R193/9.
38 Mountbatten’s Personal Report as governor general, No.6.
39 Ismay, p.445.
40 Hodson, p.453.
41 Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, p.282. Hamid was present at the conference.
42 Auchinleck interviewed by David Dimbleby, 21 June 1974.
Chapter 12: December
1 Christie, p.110.
2 Details in Hodson, p.418.
3 Hodson, p.418.
4 Kirpalani, p.439.
5 Kirpalani, p.351.
6 Kirpalani, pp.365–7.
7 Hassan, p.36.
8 Chatterji, Spoils of Partition, pp.137–8.
9 Moon, Divide and Quit, p.258.
10 British Library Sound Archive C900/01580.
11 Imperial War Museum Sound Archive 31490.
12 Mountbatten’s Personal Report as governor general, No.8, quoted by Hodson, p.471.
13 V. P. Menon, The Integration of the Indian States, p.369.
14 Hodson, p.475.
15 V. P. Menon quoted by Hodson, p.475.
16 Tuker, p.503.
17 Tuker, p.503.
18 Interview with the author, February 2017.
19 Christie, p.114.
20 Mitchell, Chapter 7. There is no page number as this book was only produced as an audiobook.
21 Singh, The House of Marwar, p.183.
22 Inder Malhotra interviewed by the BBC. British Library Sound Archive C63/195/11.
23 Kushwant Singh interviewed by the BBC. British Library Sound Archive C991/13.
24 Mountbatten’s Personal Report.
25 K. M. Munshi, The End of an Era, p.107.
26 Christie, p.118.
27 Hodson, p.420.
28 Figures from Symonds, p.116.
29 Figures from Sen, Chapter 9.
30 Mountbatten’s Report on the Last Viceroyalty, September 1948. Reproduced by Hodson, p.548.
31 Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, p.127.
32 Roberts, pp.130–1.
33 James, Raj, p.637.
34 Ismay, p.445.
35 R. Thapar interviewed by the BBC in 1986. Imperial War Museum Sound Archive 14678-2-1/2.
NOTES ON THE SOURCES
There is a wealth of material relating to the events of 1947, both in written and oral form. Given that there are not many people left alive who were intimately involved in the politics, it is fortunate that there are literally hundreds of recorded interviews and libraries full of personal recollections. This makes writing about it both easier, in that there is so much to draw on, but also more difficult as one could easily end up writing ten volumes. The problem, as usual, is what to leave out.
There are some key source documents. First, The Transfer of Power is a massive twelve-volume compendium of all official correspondence relating to Indian Independence and partition between 1942–7. Published by the British government between 1970 and 1983, it is a godsend for a historian, gathering as it does all the government documents in one well-edited series. However, the researcher should be aware that because Mountbatten tended not to have anyone taking notes in his meetings, instead debriefing his version of what was said afterwards, some of his records should be treated carefully.
Another key set of publications is the Indian Council of Historical Research’s multi-volume Towards Freedom series. This covers the years 1937 to 1947 and combines both official correspondence with press articles, letters and other documents and therefore offers a wider field than The Transfer of Power. There seems to be some doubt as to whether the whole series was actually completed but certainly the volumes I consulted gave comprehensive coverage of 1947 and were invaluable.
Many British official papers that were not important enough to be included in The Transfer of Power are held in the British Library, now home to the India Office Records, or in the Public Record Office. The Army headquarters files in the British Library are particularly revealing and I have listed the key ones below. There are equally many very valuable collections in the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, Sussex (Rees Papers) and Southampton (Mountbatten papers) University libraries. In Amritsar the recently opened Partition Museum looks like becoming a most valuable centre for future research.
The British Library holds an extensive oral archive on Indian Independence although it suffers from being held in several different files. I have listed some of the interviews I found most useful but there are hundreds more. Some are copyright-protected, which means they can be referred to but not quoted from at any length. However, the families I contacted to obtain copyright when I did want to quote directly were always happy to allow it. Confusingly some of the interviews are reproduced elsewhere without any
copyright restriction, such as Alice Faiz’s. Another key source of interview material is Andrew Whitehead’s oral archive in the SOAS Library in London and the University of Louisiana Archive in Baton Rouge; again, some of these interviews are copyright-protected and I am most grateful to Andrew Whitehead for his generosity in allowing me to draw on his material and to the Lamarque family for access to their family records in Baton Rouge.
I am particularly grateful to Robert Beaumont for his very kind permission to quote in full from his father, Christopher Beaumont’s, personal papers and for so generously copying these to me. These remain private although they formed the basis of an article in the Daily Telegraph on the Ferozepore issue in February 1992. They have been invaluable to my research, as has Robert’s kind permission to draw in full on his father’s copyright-protected interview in the British Library Sound Archive.
Of the other works that cover 1947, I found Henry Hodson’s The Great Divide particularly useful. Hodson was Reforms Commissioner before V. P. Menon so consequently had a very good understanding of the issues and personalities. It is not necessarily holiday reading but an impressively complete work of scholarship. Patrick French’s Liberty or Death is equally good, particularly on the road to Independence in the preceding decades. Collins and Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight, which seems to have formed the basis for the film Viceroy’s House is an exciting read but historically doubtful and was largely based on interviews with Mountbatten when his memory was perhaps beginning to fade.
Pakistan and Bengal have, in general, been written about less than India and the Punjab. I am much indebted to Anil Seal and Ayesha Jalal for their thorough work on Jinnah, The Sole Spokesman, and to Joya Chatterji for her authoritative works on the partition of Bengal. There is a particular lack of material on Jinnah. What correspondence of his has been released is dry and one can only hope that somewhere in the archives in Karachi or Islamabad there is a wealth of personal papers awaiting publication.
Lastly, I am especially indebted to Andrew Whitehead for his excellent A Mission in Kashmir, which contains so much original interview material and which I used as the basis of November. There can be few better books on the subject.
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