The Great Partition

by Yasmin Khan

  Whose freedom?

  ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’ Jawaharlal Nehru's haunting words filled the night air of the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi's Council House on 15 August 1947. The remarkable speech was broadcast throughout the country and reproduced in special newspaper editions. Huge jostling crowds thronged Lutyens's commanding sandstone buildings in New Delhi to take part in the tryst with destiny. They had done so in Karachi just twenty-four hours previously, where, in parallel, Jinnah had addressed the Pakistani Constituent Assembly meeting and spoken to the people over the airwaves of a ‘supreme moment’ and of ‘the fulfilment of the destiny of the Muslim nation’. In Karachi, the celebrations were ‘carried off with very scanty means and not in as perfect a manner as at Delhi’, recalled one member of the audience, ‘… but that never struck one as incongruous … it was improvised, Pakistan itself was being improvised’.28 Euphoria, an unprecedented collective feeling, marks many of the recollections of those who stood in the vast crowds, dazzled by the fireworks and illuminated buildings, not only in New Delhi, but in the major cities throughout South Asia. ‘We have to celebrate 15 August in such a way that people's psychology is metamorphosed into that befitting the citizens of an independent nation,’29 instructed a Congress secretary, and every effort was made to make it a memorable occasion. There was a profound sense of catharsis; a feeling of order up-ended and old constraints removed.

  Popular expectations meshed with political generosity. The moment promised new power, new potentialities and a sense of release. Provincial and district governments flung open the jailhouse doors and prisoners were released early at the moment of Independence. In Bombay on Independence Day every prisoner who had been behind bars for ten years or more was allowed to walk free, alongside those who had served two-thirds of their sentences. Death sentences were commuted to prison terms. Some of the recently arrested prisoners charged with violence in the Hindu–Muslim riots of the preceding weeks were also allowed to walk free or promised early release. More than 3,000 prisoners in Bombay City gained their freedom on the evening before Independence Day and, astonishingly, some 13,000 prisoners were released on 15 August in the Central Provinces.30 In Pakistan, prisoners might have preferred to stay within their cells; mobs reportedly lynched those who could not prove they were Muslims outside the prison doors.

  There was a darker side to freedom, though. The particular irony of Independence, and its interlocking with Partition, was the way in which it forced a new moment of national identification. Where there had been myriad localised groups, patriotic allegiance to either India or Pakistan was now mandatory. No Muslim was immune from the charge of disloyalty and many had to bend over backwards to try and prove themselves. ‘Half of my life I had to suffer such humiliation as a Congressman at the hands of the British Government in India,’ protested the Muslim Congressman from Bihar, Syed Mahmud, after his house and car were searched by police. ‘Now it seems for the remaining period of my life I have to suffer all these indignities and insults at the hand of the Congress Government. Am I wrong in this conclusion?’31

  Employees in intelligence branches intercepted letters to Pakistan and prosecuted anti-national behaviour – the familiar actions of governments that start to suspect the fidelity of their own citizens during a time of terror. Some Muslims, especially those with families living across the border in Pakistan, wavered, and did not express their allegiance to either India or Pakistan as they continued to reside in a grey netherworld in which these new borders remained porous. Others used subterfuge in order to explore the possibilities of making a new life elsewhere. One police sub-inspector in the northern industrial city of Kanpur, Mohammad Rizvi, caught corresponding with relations in Pakistan under a fictitious name while attempting to secure a permanent settlement permit in Pakistan, was arrested on discovery of the correspondence and dismissed. Considerations about whether to depart for Pakistan, often driven by mundane economic motives, were always interpreted by the government in the paradigm of loyalty or disloyalty to the nation state.32 This was a complex emotional and political process for all those people living in the former Raj but particularly difficult for millions of people who felt themselves to be in the ‘wrong’ country, were financially or physically ruined by Partition or had other, deeply felt, sub-nationalist identities. Was it right to celebrate in the middle of violence? Who was an Indian or Pakistani citizen now? Should you celebrate the creation of one state, both states or none? How could people's ‘psychology’ be ‘metamorphosed’ so that they became loyal citizens?

  There was ambivalence about whether Independence should be a day of jubilation at all, given the contingencies and trauma of the ongoing violence. V.D. Savarkar, the Hindu nationalist supremo, and others in the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS who staunchly opposed Partition boycotted the celebrations. Gandhi was also conspicuously absent, praying and fasting in Calcutta and promoting peace: ‘This much I certainly believe – that [the] coming August 15 should be no day for rejoicing whilst the minorities contemplate the day with a heavy heart.’ He urged a day of fasting, praying and spinning instead. ‘It must be a day for prayer and deep heart-searching.’33 In his refusal to endorse the festivities, Gandhi was sensitive to the perversity of holding firework displays, dances and feasting as massacres continued elsewhere, but this also placed another question mark over the legitimacy of Pakistan and the new Partition settlement.

  In public places the line between religious rituals, holy institutions and the national cause was blurred. Both India and Pakistan included a significant religious component in their official state rituals of celebration. Listeners to Pakistan Radio at one minute past midnight on 14 August heard the announcement of Pakistan's birth followed by readings from the Qur'an. In New Delhi, at a private residence, Nehru and his ministerial colleagues sat cross-legged around a holy fire as Hindu priests from Tanjore chanted hymns and sprinkled holy water on them. N.A. Sherwani, a Congress minister and a Muslim, unfurled the striped gold, green and white national flag over the Bharat Mata, or Mother India, temple in the sacred city of Varanasi.34 Elsewhere, diverse and impulsive ceremonies centred on historic sites associated with the heroes who had fought the British in the uprising of 1857, or the Quit India movement of 1942. Others organised ecumenical, multi-faith ceremonies with readings and prayers from all religions.

  In the Punjabi cities where massacres were still taking place, there were far fewer signs of celebration. When Penderel Moon arrived in the imperial centre of Lahore on 15 August he recalled a deathly stillness. ‘The Mall empty, every shop shut and as silent as the grave. I made for the railway station to find out about trains to Simla. As I passed down Empress Road a fire station was coping with a burning house, and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense columns of smoke were rising from the air.’35 At the ‘festivities’, later that day, only one Hindu and no Sikhs attended the Governor's inauguration for which only one-fifth of the invitations could be delivered. For many who had not yet escaped the risk of violence, the memories of Independence Day were overshadowed by fear and this fuelled the resentment of refugees who felt abandoned by their compatriots. ‘The evening was drawing to a close. I turned the radio to Delhi,’ recalled a refugee from Lahore.

  The babble of tongues, the excitement of the vast assembled crowd near the Red Fort could be clearly heard. The announcer was giving a running commentary on the whole show; the Independence of India was being inaugurated … Just then a bullet was fired in the Sanda Road Chowk, hardly fifty yards from my kothi [bungalow] … Of course the Delhiwalas must have had a gala night. Stuffing themselves with fruit, sweets and drinks, soft or strong, they must have gone to sleep dreaming of pleasant dreams … Of course, a few of them had seen but many of them had only heard that there was ‘some trouble' in the Punjab. But what was Punjab's trouble as compared to the Azadi of the other parts of the country?’36

  Meanwhile,
in private homes some people fused the secular and the profane, improvising ceremonies, distributing coloured sweets or hoisting flags. Families and individuals found their own way to negotiate rocky questions of national loyalty and allegiance to one state or the other. ‘On Independence day, when the announcement came on the radio,’ remembered the Punjabi journalist Amjad Husain, who was in Lahore in 1947, ‘father took the Holy Qur'an in hand and made all family members take an oath of loyalty to Pakistan. I still remember that every family member took an oath.’37 In much the same way, elsewhere, people were busy designing and improvising their own ceremonies to mark the occasion. A Sikh, Saroj Pachauri, a child at the time, recalled painting Pakistani flags and watching her father participate on the dais in the Punjabi town of Rawalpindi during the Independence Day celebrations, only weeks before the whole family fled to safety in India.38 Many people celebrated Independence Day in the ‘wrong’ country, as they later moved as refugees from India to Pakistan or vice versa. Some even celebrated it twice, once in each state. For some, participating itself was a kind of insurance against violence and ‘proof’ of loyalty to the new nation, and for the terrified, newly converted Muslims, seen along the roadside near a hamlet in Bahawalpur, it must have been a strange kind of ‘freedom’. They were jigging desperately around ‘a miserable bit of green cloth’ which was ‘a stick with a little green flag tied to the end’ and protesting ‘this is our flag. We now have Pakistan and Muslim Raj.’39 In fact, the group had been forcibly made to convert to Islam and had gathered under the flag for safety, to try and prove their Pakistaniness.

  As the 3 June plan had been so rushed and inadequately thought out, there had been little meditation on who was a rightful Indian and who was a rightful Pakistani. At the heart of these uncertainties and dilemmas was the undefined question of citizenship. Did this just depend on religious identity? As each new government tried to earmark its own citizens, a diplomatic quarrel erupted about who should be celebrating Independence and which country they should be endorsing. The Congressman Acharya Kripalani suffered his own family's displacement from Sind. He was personally badly shaken by Partition's events. Now he issued a directive to provincial Congressmen living in areas that were soon to become Pakistan: ‘The hearts of all Congressmen and Congress sympathisers in Sind, East Bengal, West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province are lacerated at the division of the country,’ he wrote; ‘they are, therefore, in no mood to rejoice with the rest of India. Under these circumstances there is no need of celebrating August 15, in these areas which have been separated from India.’40 A bad-tempered row broke out immediately with Pakistani politicians who saw things in a different light; weren't these Hindus and Sikhs now Pakistani citizens and, if so, why should they not take pride in Pakistan's green and white crescent moon flag?

  Flags had become powerful, sometimes lethal, symbols. The Pakistani flag had unmissable Islamic connotations. This provoked anger and confusion among Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan as they contemplated staying in the country. The Pakistani Prime Minister tried to fudge the issue, rebuffing a complainant with the claim that it is ‘not a religious flag’ and arguing that the ‘Moon and stars are as common to my Honourable friend and they are as much his property as mine’. Such disingenuous claims hardly washed with a community already shattered by violence and frightened about the protection of its religious freedoms.41 Similarly in India, Krishna Sobti recollected the fuzzy sense of belonging among different people, depending on their status, religion and outlook: ‘Our entire family was gathered around the radio. Our servants, many of whom were Muslims, were also present. When Nehru spoke our reaction was very different from theirs. After tea, sweets were passed round (green and orange ones known as ashrafian). None of the Muslim servants touched them. But when the national anthem was sung and we stood up, they did too. They realized that they too, had paid a price for freedom.’42 We do not know what was going through the minds of these particular servants. But as loyalty to the Congress party and allegiance to an Indian state got rolled up together, this could cause confusion and panic.

  Emphasis on loyalty to Congress symbols, such as khadi, the Gandhi cap, and the spinning wheel, alienated many people who had been political opponents of the Congress but now felt pressure to submit to the emblems of the party as well as to those of the nation state in order to gain acceptance as loyal and law-abiding citizens. The Congress Chief Minister of the United Provinces made all the police in his province wear a Congress armband on Independence Day in August 1947. As the departing British Governor noted, ‘Pant would have his pound of flesh out of the police in the UP.’43 The Congress flag and the national flag – which were very similar in any case – were used interchangeably on Independence Day. People who had been involved in the intense electoral campaign in 1946 in opposition to the Congress or policemen and officials who had worked in the service of the colonial state strongly associated these symbols with an old adversary. In the past, they had rallied against these flags and ripped them down. These changes could be hard to bear, and the insistence upon these old symbols could be regarded as a show of Congress triumphalism.44

  Now formally labelled as ‘minorities’ in the official mindset, groups of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, and Muslims in India, felt thoroughly compromised. ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan,’ Jinnah told Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan in an acclaimed speech at the time of Independence, even as arson attacks on these religious buildings and the murder of their worshippers continued unabated.45 Jinnah's commitment to a plural state was both principled and economically pragmatic, given Pakistan's position on an economic precipice. As the Chief Minister of the North West Frontier Province put it bluntly six months later, ‘We had more than one reason for wishing the Hindus and Sikhs to stay on. They controlled all the banking, trade and industry in this Province and their sudden departure has hit us very hard.’46 Some Pakistani leaders realised that the state had much to gain from stemming the flow of migration.

  It was also possible for non-Muslims to be, at least in the early days of the state, enthusiastic Pakistanis. J.N. Mandal, an ‘untouchable’ from Bengal, was elected chairman of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly. The other members cheered as he signed the roll book in Karachi on Independence Day and he called on other Pakistani ‘minorities’ to be ‘responsible, loyal and faithful to the state’. Soon afterwards he was promoted to a coveted ministerial position. Mandal's experience was hardly typical, though. Everywhere minorities were feeling deeply insecure about their physical safety and their citizenship rights. It was these fears that drove people from their homes and started one of the greatest mass migrations in history.

  As well as marking the end of a nationalist struggle against colonialism, then, 15 August underscored the moment at which a new project began. People felt compelled to decide upon unalloyed national attachments, demarcate clearly their patriotism and express unwavering belief in the power of one nation state or another. This was all vastly different from the mélange of communities and national beliefs that had been in coexistence at the end of the Second World War in India.

  Unforeseen exodus

  It had been unthinkable that twelve million people would move, absolutely impossible to conceive, even if anyone had believed it to be desirable. The mass migrations were the sting in the scorpion's tail, the unknown face of the Partition plan. The tides of people flowing out of Pakistan and India were so fantastical, so vast and so thorough, that they unbalanced the entire substructure on which Pakistan had been built. As Danial Latifi recalled years later, the plan had backfired: ‘I was in favour of self-determination … and to the extent that the Muslim League stood for self-determination I was with the Muslim League, but self-determination did not involve transfer of large groups of people.’47 The movement of millions across the new international border meant that the plan did not work as originally envisaged and this
massive upheaval changed the entire composition of India and Pakistan.

  Once the Radcliffe line became clear, the numbers of refugees crossing Punjab and moving out of the state intensified frighteningly quickly. In 42 days from 18 September to 29 October, 849,000 refugees entered India in formally organised foot convoys alone. Between August and November an additional 2.3 million crossed the borders by train. Thirty-two thousand, mostly the rich, the privileged or essential administrative staff, arrived by air in both directions. In East Punjab in one month alone over a million gallons of petrol were consumed carrying people across the border and 1,200 vehicles moved back and forth carrying the stranded and vulnerable. In addition, there was a much slower, more protracted movement by sea and rail from all corners of the subcontinent, from Sind to Bombay, from Dhaka to Calcutta, from Lucknow to Lahore. Numbers involved in this were impossible to count. In November alone, 133,000 people arrived into Bombay's docks by steamer from Sind. By November 1947 perhaps eight million refugees had crossed the borders in both directions.48 These figures are almost beyond belief. One in ten people in Pakistan was a refugee. Each country had to resettle, feed and house a group as large as the total population of Australia.

  Overspilling trains have provided the most enduring images of Partition. In the opening scenes of Khushwant Singh's influential novel, Train to Pakistan, a train inhumanly crammed with refugees passes through Punjabi countryside near the Indo-Pakistan border. ‘Like all the trains it was full. From the roof, legs dangled down the sides on to the doors and windows. The doors and windows were jammed with heads and arms. There were people on buffers between the bogies.’49 Partition refugees did move in other ways, on foot, mostly in great columns or kafilas, but also by car and boat. Yet it is the trains piled high with people and hastily assembled goods that have provided the totemic image of Partition.