by Nisid Hajari
Ordinary citizens joined the ranks of the goonda mobs, which bloomed in all corners of the city. They went about their work with an almost casual murderousness. One horrified Briton recounted how his butcher had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the street and using the same knife to slit the throat of a Hindu passerby.47 A European professor at Calcutta University entered her office to find the severed head of her servant placed carefully on her desk.48 Muslims descended on a Hindu dairy colony and slaughtered all of its inhabitants, down to the last herdsman and calf. Sikhs, a tiny minority in Calcutta who controlled much of the transport industry, roared around town in taxis and armored jeeps, slashing away at Muslims with fearsome broadswords.
The bloodletting raged unchecked throughout Saturday, then Sunday. The units that Lieutenant-General Bucher had finally deployed struggled against the hit-and-run tactics of the mobs. Whenever troops managed to concentrate their firepower enough to subdue one neighborhood, trouble broke out in another. The gangs put spotters on rooftops to alert them with flags and flashing signal lights as patrols drew near; rioters would scatter into alleys, only to coalesce again once the danger had passed. A flood of emergency calls overwhelmed the authorities: some were legitimate, others were false alarms meant to draw troops and police away from intended targets.49
Whole swathes of the city became no-go zones. Makeshift barricades sprung up dividing faith from faith, neighborhood from neighborhood. Unlike the highly professional army, the local police quickly took sides.50 On Saturday, Burrows helplessly watched a mob beat to death three men with bamboo staves as his police escort stood by. Only a shot fired into the air by a British sergeant broke up the melee.51
After his speech on the Maidan, Suhrawardy had spent several hours at the police control room, clamoring for help to be sent to Muslim neighborhoods. His blatant partiality infuriated the British. On Sunday afternoon, Bucher bundled the premier into his sedan and drove around the city with an armed escort. Suhrawardy leaned forward in his seat, sleepless and agitated, and repeatedly pressed the driver to halt. “He pointed at Hindu after Hindu, accusing them of lying in wait for peaceful Muslims,” Bucher later recorded. At one point the army commander asked Suhrawardy why Calcutta’s Muslims and Hindus could not live as brothers like those serving in the military had for decades. “General,” the premier said darkly, “that Hindu-Muslim unity will not exist very much longer, of that I can assure you.”52
Local Hindu politicians issued equally strident complaints about bloodthirsty Muslims, Bucher reported. Shockingly, as the unrest entered its third day, not a single national Congress or League figure deigned to visit the city. Jinnah and Nehru chose to remain at their perches in Bombay and Delhi, and to use the news of the riots as ammunition in their ongoing blame game. Jinnah coldly described the tragedy—which in the end would claim more Muslim than Hindu victims—as “what treatment the Muslims should expect from the Hindu majority if they exist as a minority in undivided India.”53 Nehru told reporters dismissively that “such events as have taken place in Calcutta, deplorable as they are, do not make any major difference to the course of events.”54 Naturally, their followers expressed themselves with less restraint.
Bucher called in reinforcements. By Monday some 45,000 British, Indian, and Gurkha troops had at last begun to regain control over the streets.55 But the chaos had upended Calcutta like a cyclone. Phillips Talbot and other Delhi-based foreign correspondents had finally managed to get into the city the night before. What they saw as they drove in from the airport stunned the veteran reporters, who after the war were scarcely unaccustomed to bloodshed:
We drove through deserted streets in which nothing moved. . . . Occasionally the sweeping headlights . . . picked up the bare walls of a corner shop, obviously stripped clean. Finally someone, seeing what we had all been sensing, muttered, “There’s one.” Visible momentarily in the beam of the headlights, avoided by a slight swerve, the body was again swallowed up in the darkness. “Four on this side,” someone else said. In a moment we were in the thick of them, weaving to miss the ghoulish forms which flashed into view and as quickly merged into the night behind us. . . .
In street after street . . . tenements and business buildings were burned out, and their unconsumed innards strewn over the pavements. Smashed furniture cluttered the roads, along with concrete blocks, brick, glass, iron rods. . . . Fountains gushed from broken water mains. Burnt-out automobiles stood across traffic lanes. A pall of smoke hung over many blocks, and buzzards sailed in great, leisurely circles.56
The sight reminded Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who was riding in the same van, of Auschwitz. “At the end of three dreadful days, corpses bestrewed the town,” Statesman editor Ian Stephens later wrote. “On plots of waste ground, you could see mounds of decomposing, liquefying bodies, heaped as high as the second floors of the nearby houses because of lack of space elsewhere.”57 To visit the police morgue, Stephens had to use a respirator: rotting cadavers were stacked to the ceiling.
No one knows the final death toll in what would become known as the Great Calcutta Killing. Many bodies were washed down the Hooghly or consumed in fires. The generally accepted estimate is that five thousand Calcuttans were killed, while another ten to fifteen thousand had their bones broken, limbs hacked off, or bodies charred.58 It was by far the worst communal massacre in the annals of British rule in India.
Whom should history blame? Ever since those bloody days, the idea that Suhrawardy and Calcutta’s Leaguers had laid plans to attack Hindu homes and businesses on 16 August has been central to the Indian narrative of Partition. Direct Action Day marks the moment when the political battle between Hindus and Muslims—until then waged around negotiating tables and in debate halls—turned violent. The question of who launched the first blow is thus freighted with immense meaning: the guilty party is, by extension, held to be responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths to come. According to this version of the story, the League hoped both to intimidate Calcutta’s Hindus and to convince the British that the two communities could not possibly live together in a united India.59
But Hindus—three-quarters of Calcutta’s population—had also prepared for trouble that day. Early that first morning, as he ran to the top floor of his apartment building and huddled on the roof with his family, Nanda Lal could see Hindu gangs armed with staves and clubs confronting the intruders in the alleys below. Soon, “clawing, surging mobs” were tearing into one another amid cries of “Jai Hind!” (Hail, India!) and “Pakistan Zindabad!”60
Ultimately, it is not possible to assign blame entirely to one side or the other. What exploded so suddenly in Calcutta in August 1946 were the pent-up fears of communities convinced that they faced imminent subjugation by the other. Riot no longer sufficed as a description. The Statesman grasped for a better label: “It needs a word found in mediaeval history,” the paper wrote, “a fury.”61
Something had fundamentally broken in Calcutta. For the city’s millions, the only bonds that still mattered now were those of one’s own community. “Dazed, suspicious survivors showed none of the camaraderie . . . which tends to spring up among victims of a severe bombing,” Talbot wrote. Far from it: “Their eyes revealed hatred, bitterness, distrust, and fright.”62 To a Hindu in Calcutta, every Muslim now looked like a potential killer, and vice versa.
Refugees jammed the Howrah railway station, fleeing the devastated city for villages in the interior of Bengal. Hindu families clustered around their lumpy sacks of possessions and the occasional cow, boarding westbound trains.63 Muslims eyed them warily from the opposite platform, heading to the east of the province. Along with their few ragged belongings, the refugees would carry with them horrific tales of the slaughter. In all too many cases, they had the burns and amputated limbs to back them up.
Wavell, responsible for keeping the peace across the subcontinent, feared that the furies released in Calcutta would quickly spread. The only way to prevent a repeat—
and a complete collapse of order—was to reassure Leaguers that they would have a place and a political voice in a united India. That burden fell on Nehru and the Indian National Congress, by far the more powerful of the two parties.
In Delhi, the viceroy called Nehru and Gandhi into his dark, wood-paneled office on 27 August, begging them to work out a compromise with Jinnah before another Great Killing erupted somewhere else. Wavell hinted that in the absence of a deal, he might have to withdraw the offer to let Nehru form a government. The normally pacific Gandhi erupted at the threat. Whatever happened, he insisted, Britishers could no longer deprive Indians of the right to decide their fate for themselves. “If India wants her bloodbath,” the Mahatma declared, slapping Wavell’s desk for emphasis, “she shall have it!”64
2
Jinnah and Jawaharlal
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1946, Wavell invited the nationalist poetess Sarojini Naidu to Viceroy’s House for dinner. Naidu was a big, bawdy, irreverent woman—a scintillating raconteur and dinner party companion, especially compared to the often dour Indian politicians. Not even Gandhi escaped her lacerating wit: she impishly called the Mahatma “Mickey Mouse” for the way his ears stuck out from his bald head.1
Naidu had been friends with most of the leading Indian politicians, including Gandhi and Nehru, for decades. She had known Jinnah almost since his first days as a twentysomething lawyer in Bombay, when he had struggled to find clients and supposedly had had to hustle games of billiards on the side to pay the rent.2 Naidu was the one who had joked that she needed “a fur coat” to be friends with the Muslim leader.
Reluctantly, Wavell had sworn in Nehru’s interim administration on 2 September without the League’s participation. Naidu did not envy the viceroy the task of bringing Jinnah and Nehru to a meeting of minds. As she explained over dinner, Jinnah’s wariness of the Congress leaders went back thirty years. It was an operatic history. “Mrs. N. spoke of Jinnah rather as of Lucifer,” Wavell recorded in his journal that night, “a fallen angel, one who had once promised to be a great leader of Indian freedom, but who had cast himself out of the Congress heaven.”3
Indeed, at the beginning of his political career, Jinnah, not Jawaharlal, had looked like India’s man of destiny. Unlike Nehru, the Muslim leader had come from humble beginnings. His father ran a struggling trading business in Karachi. When Jinnah studied at the Inns of Court in London in the late 1890s, he survived for three years on what the charmed young Nehru later spent in one.4 His difficult early years as a lawyer in Bombay instilled in Jinnah a lifelong penuriousness. Years later, after his bank accounts had fattened with rupees, friends would ask him why he still totted up the servants’ salaries and expenditures every day. “This is hard-earned money!” he’d exclaim. “This is hard-earned money!”5
Jinnah had a cold, relentless courtroom style that earned him enemies but also victories; by 1916 he had become a force at the Bombay Bar. At the beginning of the twentieth century, politics on the subcontinent was a matter for gentlemen—successful lawyers, doctors, and wealthy industrialists—who gathered under the auspices of the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, to debate how to move the country gradually toward self-government within the British Empire. Jinnah fit right in with this crowd. If anything, his Savile Row suits were better tailored, his pants more sharply creased, his two-toned shoes even shinier than those of more established figures. Within the Congress, he quickly became known as a man to watch.
Jinnah’s relative youth set him apart—he had not yet turned forty—as did his rapier intellect. But his religion is what made him truly unusual among the well-heeled Congress grandees. Ten years earlier, he had been one of only 44 Muslims among 1,500 delegates at the party’s annual session. At the time, most prominent Muslims had no interest in kicking out the British. By sheer force of numbers, Hindus would dominate any democratic India. Only under British rule, these Muslim leaders believed, would their interests be safeguarded.6 With British encouragement, a group of noblemen and large landowners had formed the Muslim League in 1906 specifically to act as a counterbalance to the Congress.
Like other Congressmen, Jinnah believed the British were deliberately stoking Muslim anxieties in order to justify the continuation of the Raj. “I say to my Musalman friends: Fear not!” Jinnah thundered in one speech. He called the specter of Hindu domination “a bogey, which is put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from cooperation and unity, which are essential for the establishment of self-government.”7 In 1916, while still a member of the Congress, Jinnah accepted an invitation to lead the Muslim League. He hoped to broker an alliance between the two parties that the British would be unable to ignore.
Jinnah knew the frictions between the subcontinent’s two great communities had deep roots, of course. Several of the Muslim conquerors who had dominated India before the British had brutalized their defeated Hindu foes, massacring thousands and demolishing their flower-strewn temples. That history often got mixed up with contemporary economic tensions—where Hindu peasants continued to struggle under oppressive Muslim landlords, for instance. But the animosities cut both ways. Muslims bristled at the fact that their Hindu neighbors refused to share food with them or water from the same vessels, for fear of ritual pollution. The Hindu moneylenders who proliferated across India held all too many poorer Muslims in financial bondage.
In many parts of India, Muslim and Hindu families lived together amicably, even attending each other’s weddings and festivals. Even then, however, bloody riots periodically broke out when religious sensibilities were offended. Muslims attacked Hindu devotees when they marched past mosques during Muslim prayer-time noisily ringing bells and chanting. Hindus assaulted Muslims when they slaughtered the cows held sacred in Hinduism. Muslims caricatured Hindus as banias, or merchants—haggling tricksters who were not to be trusted. Hindus stereotyped Muslims as violent and brutal.
In the summer of 1916, Jinnah himself ran up against one of the most stubborn communal prejudices. His good friend Sir Dinshaw Petit had invited him to escape Bombay’s suffocating heat and spend several weeks in cool Darjeeling, high in the eastern Himalayas. Petit was a Parsi, one of India’s small but hyper-successful community of Zoroastrians, and heir to a textile fortune. More importantly, he had a sixteen-year-old daughter—a sinuous beauty named Rattanbai, or “Ruttie.” Jinnah would have been hard-pressed to ignore her presence. She wore gossamer-thin saris that clung to her body and had a ready, flirtatious laugh. One prim memsahib described her as “a complete minx.”8
Like many Indians, Jinnah had been married young to someone of his parents’ choosing, a fourteen-year-old Gujarati village girl named Emibai. A year later she had died while he was away studying in London. He told friends that he hadn’t kissed a woman since then (although, hearing that particular tale, the irrepressible Sarojini Naidu trilled, “Liar, liar, liar!”).9 Jinnah left no record of what transpired between him and Ruttie amid the emerald tea plantations of Darjeeling, but clearly a romance blossomed. In July Ruttie penned a breathless letter to her friend Padmaja, Naidu’s sixteen-year-old daughter. “I am no Philistine who would think the outpour of fine emotions akin to madness,” she wrote. “If it really is madness, why can’t all of us be mad!”10 She was in love.
When they returned to Bombay at the end of the summer, Jinnah asked Petit how he felt about intermarriage. The Parsi didn’t realize what his Muslim friend was angling at. A capital idea, Petit declared—just the thing to help break down the foolish barriers that divided Indians from one another. Jinnah’s next question horrified him, though. The nearly forty-year-old Muslim marrying his teenage daughter? The idea was “absurd.”11 Petit not only refused but took out a restraining order against Jinnah to prevent the couple from seeing one another.12
Jinnah was not to be discouraged, however, either personally or politically. He and Ruttie continued to correspond secretly. Like many of the youths in her circle, she was enthralled by the romance of the na
tionalist movement, and that winter she eagerly followed the news coming out of the graceful Mughal city of Lucknow, capital of the United Provinces, where Jinnah had helped arrange for the League and the Congress to hold their annual sessions simultaneously. For the first time the two parties agreed on a common set of demands to make of the British—what became known as the Lucknow Pact. Jinnah won for Muslims a guaranteed percentage of seats in any future legislature, among other safeguards that would ensure they would not be perpetually outvoted by the Hindu majority.13 By coincidence, the lead negotiator for the Congress was another successful lawyer, a Kashmiri Hindu who had been involved in nationalist politics for years—Nehru’s father, Motilal.14
The Lucknow Pact raised Jinnah’s political stock sky-high. The next year, Sarojini Naidu published a glowing, almost treacly tribute to him entitled “Ambassador of Unity”; he seemed a shoo-in to become president of the Congress one day. In November 1917, Secretary of State for India Sir Edwin Montagu met with Jinnah on a visit to Bombay. “It is, of course, an outrage that such a man should have no chance of running the affairs of his own country,” the impressed Briton noted in his diary that night.15 A few months later, soon after Ruttie had turned eighteen, she and Jinnah scandalized Bombay’s Parsi community by eloping. They quickly became one of the city’s most glamorous couples, cruising down Marine Drive in Jinnah’s convertible at sunset each night, her hair loose in the wind.
Then Jinnah threw it all away. Just as his political career was reaching its zenith, the spotlight in India shifted to another Gujarati lawyer, born just 30 miles from Jinnah’s ancestral village. In 1915, forty-five-year-old Mohandas Gandhi had returned to India from South Africa, where he had lived for the past two decades. Having given up his English suits for a simple white dhoti, and his barrister’s wig for an enormous turban, he looked more like a farmer than a revolutionary. He was wiry like Jinnah and much smaller in stature. Too nervous to stammer out arguments in court, he hadn’t been much of a lawyer. Yet some inner vitality coursed through him, illuminating his mischievous eyes and expanding a taut chest. He had the intensity of a sage.