The Great Partition

by Yasmin Khan

  In the autumn months of 1946, whenever the potential for a compromise between the different parties seemed likely, it was knocked off the front pages by news of the atrocities occurring in the provinces. In Delhi, League politicians finally decided to join the interim government and were sworn in on 26 October. They would work alongside their Congress colleagues at least in the day-to-day running of India, if not in the formulation of a constitution. But news of this positive move barely caused a stir in Bombay where it was ‘swamped completely’ by the impact of tales of atrocities from Noakhali.41

  Placing the blame

  In late 1946, A.P. Hume, a British district magistrate stationed in Varanasi – India's most holy city for Hindus where the dead are cremated on ghats lining the banks of the Ganges – surveyed the scene around him with mounting trepidation. A forty-two-year-old Methodist and conservative, Hume felt morose about relinquishing Britain's hold on the empire. ‘]It is] most painful and depressing,’ he wrote to his parents, wife and young children back in England, ‘to assist in the passing of a great empire.’ Derogatory about Muslims and Hindus, convinced of western moral superiority and condescending in the extreme about India's readiness for democracy, Hume bore all the hallmarks of an unreconstructed imperialist at the high noon of empire. He kept a copy of the New Testament open on his desk in the hope of inspiring his Indian visitors. The scene unfolding in India, was, in his eyes, predestined because of the depravity of Islam and Hinduism.

  ‘I ask myself whether it is worth the while even trying to stem the onrush of decadence and decay,’ he wrote, anticipating the prospect of violence between the local communities in Varanasi, and weeks later, ‘No matter what Wavell, Nehru and Jinnah may patch up temporarily Hindu and Muslims will fly at each other's throats sooner or later.’ This fatalism and expectation of disorder cloaked all his attempts to carry out his duties in the district with a dark pessimism and fatalistic despair, ‘I should think it quite likely,’ he was soon saying, ‘that Benaras eventually will be burnt down.’ As refugees arrived in Varanasi from Bihar, Hindu Mahasabha representatives toured the city with loudspeakers spreading news of killings – both real and imagined – and in November sporadic stabbings started to occur almost nightly in the city's poorly lit streets. Hume was active in trying to bring a semblance of order to the city but was even more concerned with getting out of India. He began making inquiries with the United Nations about possible positions and sharing his feelings with other British district magistrates who felt similarly moribund; a neighbouring Collector and friend he described as ‘thoroughly disgusted’ and thinking ‘only of getting out of India for good’.42

  Hume was an extreme case and represents the worst of the British in India. Others were doubtless more astute and more liberal. Some stayed on. Some worked hard to stem the violence. Yet Hume's letters open a vista on the state of North India and the collapse of the administration as the British withdrew both their manpower and the moral will to continue the Raj. At the chalk face of empire, as 1946 drew to a close, men such as Hume were disgruntled by the orders of their superiors – he had been rebuffed when he asked the British Governor about the possibility of retirement and was told it was his ‘moral duty to stay on’. Hume was also cynical about the Governor's fine words: ‘he talked with what was intended to be reassurance of the steps being taken promptly to prepare for disturbances which might arise in the near future’. As India approached the moment of freedom, British officials such as Hume looked on with a detached and diluted sense of responsibility – ‘I observe all that is going on around me as if from a distant safe place’ – and eyed their Indian successors with suspicion. Those who had become accustomed to ruling by personal fiat in their districts disliked consulting the Indian politicians who motored in from the provincial capital when riots took place. Right until his final days in India, against the backdrop of the mayhem that was unfolding, Hume went on camps, shooting parties and summer holidays in the Himalayan hills. His closest encounter with violence was when telephone reports came into the magistrate's bungalow of stabbings, interrupting his dinner and causing him to carry out late night tours of the city. The pressures of an imperial ending meant that some British colonial officials absolved themselves of responsibility for the crisis on their watch. In the New Year of 1947, with relief, Hume filed his own application to leave India.

  The Indian political classes were in a state of shock by the closing weeks of 1946. Trust had been broken between the major parties and the violence was directly affecting the decisions and attitude of politicians. ‘You would realise how difficult it is for an Indian Home Member,’ Patel told the British negotiator, Stafford Cripps, ‘to sit in his office quietly day by day, when innumerable piteous appeals and complaints are received for some kind of help which could give these unfortunate and helpless victims some protection.’ Official inquiries into the riots became saturated with political posturing. Older procedures now went to the wall. In the aftermath of the Garhmukhteshwar massacre an official inquiry was announced, but it was indefinitely postponed and the Governor admitted feeling ‘lukewarm on the subject’. Similarly, the Muslim League was asked to drop their demand for an inquiry into violence in Bihar by Mountbatten because of the risk of embitterment.43 An inquiry into Calcutta's disturbances was set up but, once it became obvious that it would never reach a conclusion, it was quietly dropped six months later. Impartial adjudication, or even the semblance of impartial adjudication, was impossible.

  Nobody could see a way out. ‘We are not yet in the midst of a civil war. But we are nearing it,’ Gandhi warned simply in his paper, Harijan, and analysing the Indian scene at the end of 1946, the distinguished Canadian writer and critic of empire Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote, ‘Of late the situation in the country has deteriorated menacingly … Instead of an India with freedom for all, united in friendly communal partnership, there have been signs pointing to, at best, a stagnant India of intense mutual bickering, on problems of constitutions and of problems of daily bread, within an atmosphere of moral degradation and of riots; and at worst, an India of civil war.’44 Others – of many political persuasions – started advocating a partition, and the separation of territory, as the best solution. They erroneously believed it would bring an end to the problem, not foreseeing that it would, in fact, mark the beginning of new calamities.

  5

  From Breakdown to Breakdown

  The wheat-growing tracts of the Punjab – the land of the five rivers – had long been a special, and specially treated, part of India. A vast military recruiting ground for the British army, it was also renowned as a prosperous, cultivated land, studded with trading towns. It had its own distinctive culture and its own strategic importance, and was both the birthplace of Sikhism and home to a closely knitted Punjabi-speaking population of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. The Punjab had been a valuable jewel in the Raj's crown ever since its conquest in 1849 and the imperial rulers had bent over backwards to please and sustain the landlords and army families who propped up this vital backbone of empire. If it was a divided society in 1947, this was most dramatically apparent in terms of class. A core of elite Indian administrators, businessmen and senior military men and their wives patronised the renowned artists, writers and musicians in the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore, sometimes described as the ‘Paris of the East’. Memories of Lahore before 1947 sparkle with nostalgia and a good dose of idealisation, of its courtesan quarter which ‘came to life at night with reverberating sounds and glittering sights, when fun-loving Lahorias would flock to it for entertainment’ and of its food, architecture and poetry. Around the major cities lay hundreds of miles of countryside cultivated by peasants and yeoman farmers, raising wheat, rice and pulses with ox-driven ploughs.1

  By the New Year of 1947, though, the frivolities and pleasures of life in the Punjabi cities were already fading from memory. Drawing immense strength from the large student population, the Muslim League National Guard and the RSS had been recruiting
and arming for months. This was the eye of the storm; the ready availability of weapons (a British policeman remembered ‘continually finding dumps of live grenades’ in the countryside left by soldiers who had brought back ‘souvenirs’ from the Second World War),2 the large highly politicised middle class and the complicated religious make-up of the state made for a combustible mixture. All sorts of smaller armed gangs and bands proliferated.

  The League, bypassed by coalition-building in the Punjabi assembly, waged an insistent, daily street campaign against the ministry of Khizr Tiwana, attempting to bring it to the point of collapse. Well-off Muslim women and students found a new liberation from the constraints of domesticity, marching in huge demonstrations against the ministry, fighting their way up buildings and hoisting flags made from their green scarves, courting arrest and putting up resistance to police when they came to arrest their husbands and sons. When the Punjabi government dared to try and restrict the activities of these militias and banned them on 24 January 1947 there was uproar. The circle of protesters widened, as shopkeepers, artisans and butchers pulled down their shutters and joined the crowds with placards and ready slogans against the ban. The ban on the RSS and Muslim League National Guard was lifted before the end of the week. The government had signalled its weakness. A League newspaper headline was printed within hours, telling the activists to ‘Smash the Ministry’.

  All this deeply affected daily life in the cities. Specific political contests between elite members of the League and the Congress were transmuted into a more amorphous sense of Muslim versus Hindu. This was plain to see. Some Hindu women took to wearing the tilak on their foreheads. Sales of the Jinnah cap boomed. Hindus who may have casually wished their neighbours hello or goodbye with a Persianised ‘adab’ or ‘Khuda Hafiz’ abandoned these greetings while Muslims jealously guarded ‘their’ phrases. It was suggested in a Punjabi newspaper that Anglo-Indians and Christians in Punjab should wear a cross as a marker of their identity, presumably to ward off the risk of accidental involvement in riots. The newspaper Dawn, mouthpiece of the League, started printing quotations from the Qur'an on its front page. More than in the past, household servants were recruited by their co-religionists and job advertisements started to specify communities: ‘Wanted Muslim or Christian steno-typist and an accountant.’ Gentlemanly League leaders, who were usually more likely to be found in the clubhouse or on the croquet lawn than in the mosque, started to pray ostentatiously. Even the rulers of princely states, generally better known for their profane, secular excesses and their eclectic admixture of pomp and ceremony, did not escape these pressures to display religious affiliation publicly; the ruler of Jind declared in 1947 that his pious New Year's resolution was to grow his beard and hair.3 People bought arms and kept them in their houses for ‘selfdefence’. All the dangerous signs that had preceded violence in other parts of India were here in full force in the Punjab – weak and partial government machinery, armed gangs and militias and an anxious population with heightened expectations of freedom and terror of domination by the ‘other’.

  In Delhi, meanwhile, the constitutional negotiations were pushed forward by priorities and deadlines set far away from India. In London, daily life in Punjab was far from the mind of the policy-makers. Concerns were about the frosty Cold War climate, the health of British balance sheets, the safety of British civilians in India, Britain's international reputation in the global press and the risk of British involvement in civil strife in Palestine and Greece which could end up badly overstretching the capabilities of the British army.4 These priorities were evidently now quite at odds with domestic considerations about the safety or security of Indians: London's aim was to cut British losses, by leaving a united India if possible, a divided India if not, a view far detached from the intricate community politics of the subcontinent. At every turn the British government now accelerated the speed of events, and the Indian public was stunned by Attlee's statement on 20 February 1947 that the British intended to pull out from the subcontinent no later than June 1948. ‘This announcement meant Partition,’ remembered Penderel Moon, ‘and Partition within the next seventeen months. Whatever London might think, everyone in Delhi knew that the Cabinet Mission's proposals were as dead as mutton.’5 This, of course, only intensified the bombastic rhetoric in Punjab, added to the size of the crowds, and boosted the exaggerations and outright lies printed in the papers. The resignation of Khizr as premier of Punjab on 2 March and the collapse of his fated ministry was the final straw and marked the Punjab's descent into civil war.

  Punjab on fire

  By the end of the first week of March, within days of the collapse of the ministry, quarters of most of the major cities in Punjab were burning: Lahore, Amritsar, Jullundur, Rawalpindi, Multan and Sialkot all had sections gutted. Gangs roamed the streets, some wearing steel or tin helmets, setting shops and houses on fire (the government quickly restricted the sale of diesel and petrol), firing weapons and throwing heavy rocks and glass soda bottles. ‘I was living in an area that was predominantly Muslim but every night we were afraid that there'd be an attack on us; so we used to be on house tops all night, watching whether an attack was coming or not, that was a perpetual feeling … we thought an attack could come at any time,’ later recalled the journalist Amjad Husain who was a young man in Lahore at the time.6 On 20 March Standard General, a major Punjabi insurance company, placed a large advertisement cancelling all its new riot protection policies, of which it had been doing brisk sales. Throughout March and April markets and shops could only open for brief intervals and essential services fell into a state of decay. These riots went on for weeks. In April, H.K. Basu, the postmaster of Amritsar, dismayed at the mountains of undelivered mail at the central sorting office, personally went around the city in a van from house to house, trying to entice his postmen back to work. Some did go with him to the GPO to sort the mail but not one could be persuaded to deliver the letters on the streets of the city. It was simply too dangerous. Municipal revenues suffered too; in Amritsar the municipality claimed it had lost 70,000 rupees from tax receipts. No electricity or water rates had been paid for months, not least because it was impossible to send out the bills.7

  Depressing features of Partition in other parts of the subcontinent were taken to new extremes in Punjab. In Bombay in March 1947, even during lulls between episodic stabbings, people were nervous about crossing into each other's ‘zones’. League National Guards escorted Muslims back from cinemas. Visitors to Calcutta reported that residential streets were being divided up along ‘communal’ lines.8 In Punjab, this was occurring on a new level. Barricades and gates were erected while protection racketeers and vigilantes stalked the streets, and in the worst affected areas the religion of all those entering the mohalla would be solemnly checked. It was easy to cloister off the dense overhanging mohallas in the old parts of cities such as Lahore but this practice spread to the more open and wide-avenued middle-class colonies. ‘May I bring to the notice of the Amritsar local authorities,’ wrote one anxious Punjabi, ‘that the people belonging to the various communities are losing confidence in each other because, among other things, of the big iron gates by which the people are blocking their streets.’9 As the evocative novel Tamas reflects, ‘Overnight dividing lines had been drawn among the residential colonies and at the entrance to the lanes and at road crossings, small groups of people sat hidden from view, their faces half-covered, holding lances, knives and lathis in their hands.’10

  Security was the paramount need of the hour. Anxious families acquired basic arms or barricaded in their allies but this had an escalating effect as it made other neighbouring communities feel more insecure. Crucially, local politicians, who often had far more authority in their own districts than Gandhi or Jinnah, made the call to arms. Master Tara Singh who had already warned that Sikhs must be prepared to die for their cause, called for the formation of an Akali Fauj, or Sikh army, and stood defiantly brandishing his unsheathed kirpan on 3 March 1947 on
the steps of the Lahore legislative building, vowing, ‘We may be cut to pieces but we will never concede Pakistan.’ Extremist groups swelled as moderates who used to belong to the Congress, or Unionist parties, lost their political influence. As one former Punjabi Congressman says to his colleague in the novel, Tamas, ‘will you come to save my life when a riot breaks out? … The entire area on the other side of the ditch is inhabited by Muslims, and my house is on the edge of it. In the event of a riot, will you come to save my life? Will Bapu [Gandhi] come to save my life? In a situation like this I can only rely on the Hindus of the locality. The fellow who comes with a big knife to attack me will not ask me whether I was a member of the Congress or of the Hindu sabha …’11 Politicised elites stoked stereotypes and the delay during the implementation of the Partition plan gave armed brigades exactly the time they needed to circulate rumours, stockpile weapons and prepare ambush plans. Lulls in the episodic violence were frequently illusory as at these precise moments plans were being laid while defensive organisations honed their techniques.12