The Great Partition

by Yasmin Khan

  This was not simply an ‘exchange’ of population or a straightforward swap. In the months following Independence, Pakistan lost its bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and clerks – the wheels came off the machinery of the state. Jinnah became increasingly panicked, saying that knifing Sikhs and Hindus was equivalent to ‘stabbing Pakistan’.50 In India, similarly, the sudden disappearance of Muslim railwaymen, weavers and craftsmen, agriculturalists and administrators, brought gridlock to production and trade and crippled the state's ability to function. Large numbers of the incoming refugees arrived with quite different occupational histories and could not or were not qualified to plug the gaps left by those who departed. In the autumn months of 1947 the refugee movement was a tragedy for the refugees themselves and also a tragedy for the two new states.

  In September 1947 Jinnah ordered a park packed with people in Lahore to ‘make it a matter of our prestige and honour to safeguard the lives of the minority communities and to create a sense of security among them’. Nehru had long been stressing India as the land for all Indians. As he wrote to his chief ministers, ‘we have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else’ and he urged that they must be given the same rights as other citizens and treated in a civilised manner, if the nature of the body politic itself was to be preserved.51 Political safeguards for minorities proved paper tigers, however, in the face of the Punjabi tragedy and they offered too little and too late to those who had lost faith in the state's ability to protect them; the speed of events on the ground outstripped deliberations about the rights of citizenship in the constitutional arenas of India and Pakistan. Across Punjab, coexistent communities fragmented as the entire non-Muslim population was exchanged for the Punjabi Muslim population of India. Elsewhere, across the whole of Pakistan, and in Bengal, Rajasthan, Bombay and North India, people started to leave their homes at a dizzying speed and a mass and unanticipated movement of people began to occur.

  There was a big difference in the way that people left. For the majority, especially in Punjab and the other heartlands of ethnic cleansing such as Gurgaon, it was part and parcel of the terror of violence, as they literally ran for their lives or were hurriedly formed into kafilas and made to march without as much as a few hours' notice. They did not know where they were heading or what their final destination would be. Rajinder Singh, who finally found his way to Delhi from Punjab, described to Urvashi Butalia how his family left in the middle of the night: ‘Whatever people could pick up, big things and small, they put clothes on top of those they were wearing, and threw a khes or sheet over their shoulders. They picked up whatever they could and then they joined the kafila. Who could take along heavy things? And the kafila began to move.’52

  Others adopted disguises or masqueraded as Hindus or Muslims to try and protect themselves. For others, with more forewarning, or further from the epicentres of violence, there were more tortuous and prolonged decisions about whether to stay or go, which sometimes divided families, as Damyanti Sahgal, living in a village 30 miles from Lahore, recalled. She tried to persuade her father to leave, but ‘Father didn't agree … the workers in his factory were mixed: Jats, Hindus, but on the whole it was a Muslim village so most of the workers were Musalmaans … at the time they were respectful and humble. They seemed safe … When I tried to persuade my father he said, well if you feel scared you go. I said but bhauji, he said no bibi, if you feel scared you go.’53 She left and made her way to Lahore, leaving her father behind. Further away from violence, the choices were different again. People could opt for one state or the other for ideological reasons, for business purposes or because they feared discrimination or job losses.

  At first the new governments tried to stop these movements of people. The Partition plan envisaged that groups of religious minorities would remain in both states. If anything, these pockets of minorities formed part of the intended plan as it was believed that they would be ‘hostages’ or guarantors against any discrimination or harassment of minorities across the border. Both states showed rhetorical commitment to plurality and both countries started hammering out in their Constituent Assemblies the legal and administrative frameworks that would be put in place to secure these minority rights. The plan had not made allowances for any potential mass population exchanges and the ensuing two-way movement of people caught both national leaderships unawares, pulling the rug out from under their feet and invalidating the safeguards that had been notionally built into the plan.

  At the end of August both governments reversed their initial strategy and admitted that, if the groundswell of refugees was beyond their control, they should be aiding rather than inhibiting it. On 7 September it was announced that the evacuation – at least across Punjab – was the ‘first priority’ and that Punjabi refugees would be given military and political support by both governments.54

  What had begun as a spontaneous exodus was rapidly merged into an organised evacuation operation. In the first week of September a Military Evacuation Organisation was formed and by late October 1,200 military and civilian vehicles were being used to transport refugees across Punjab.55 Twelve RAF Dakotas airlifted stranded officials. Gandhi disagreed with the policy at first and stood firmly in favour of replanting uprooted populations and continuously made the case for returning and resettling the refugees in their original homes. Others, with an eye on the fratricide and daily mortality figures and the grave dangers of unorganised and unsupported refugee columns, wanted the exchange to be as organised and rapid as possible.

  More controversially still, this policy could be exploited to ‘clean out’ an area and purify it of minorities. Local administrators now had the chance – either accidentally or explicitly – to help with the ethnic cleansing agenda. Administrators and police forcibly shifted whole communities as the priority became dispersal rather than violence: ‘there were certain people in plain clothes who were asking people to leave that place and go to Pakistan … but people were resisting this, people said: we won't go to Pakistan … then another military truck came, and on the top of it was some leader. He brought out a pistol and said you must leave, as soon as he said that immediately a caravan was formed, and everybody cooperated,’ recalled one Punjabi eyewitness, Harcharan Singh Nirman.56 In swathes of central and western India, Muslim communities were drummed out of India, just as Hindus and Sikhs were hounded out of many parts of Pakistan. Although some pleaded desperately for evacuation, others resisted the suggestion that they should migrate and felt angered by the confused message of the governments.

  Elsewhere people wanted to leave but were being dissuaded by politicians and local magistrates, and in October, in the Punjabi district of Jhelum, a Gandhian envoy, Pandit Sundralal, called for the suspension of the evacuation in the local press. ‘The Jhelum Hindus seemed perturbed by all this,’ noted the aid worker Richard Symonds, who was co-ordinating local relief activities. ‘They wanted to leave, not to be pawns in a political game.’57 Politicians were accused of meddling in the internal affairs of the other state when they intervened and once again the political and the social were closely entwined; Acharya Kripalani raised objections to the obstacles preventing people's evacuation from Sind when he visited his former home in September.58 Penderel Moon remembered asking the blue-turbaned leader of a group of Jat Sikhs, who had halted by the roadside with their bullock carts for the night, why they had left their villages. ‘He replied, “Hukum Hai” (It is an order.) I asked him, “Whose order?” But to this he would give no clear reply, but just went on repeating, “It is an order. We have received an order. We have to go to Hindustan.”’ A little later in the month, Moon was shocked to hear that government officials were pushing Muslims out of East Punjab – ‘If the Sub-Divisional Officer was acting under orders, where was this all going to end? We might have the whole Muslim population of India thrust upon us’ – only to have the double shock of finding out that this transfer of people in Punjab, had, overn
ight, become official policy.59 Such confusion only exacerbated the voluminous problems faced by ordinary people.

  Whether the state encouraged them to leave or not, the greatest numbers of people on the long march across the border had no access to transport. Circumstances compelled them to travel by foot. Foot columns sometimes 30–40,000 strong, created human caravans 45 miles long in places. It was 150 miles for those Punjabis coming to India from Lyallpur or Montgomery districts, and Muslim Meos from the Gurgaon region of India took three weeks to reach Pakistan. ‘According to our latest reports they are now without food and their cattle are rapidly dying for lack of fodder, or are being slaughtered by them for eating; their bullock carts (wherever they had any) are being used as fuel-wood and other difficulties are aggravated by the onset of winter which with their physical debility will make them an easy prey to diseases like pneumonia and influenza.’60 The journey itself proved a cruel physical punishment for many.

  Luggage was very often confiscated or looted along the way or simply abandoned as people became too weak to carry it; sores developed on bare feet; women gave birth to babies en route; and people died of starvation, exhaustion, cholera and grief. It must have seemed as if all the fates were conspiring against the refugees; to make matters worse the infernal temperatures on the Punjabi plains in June were followed by dust storms. A thick pall of dust caked the refugees and flies were omnipresent. ‘We went on with the convoys week after week’, later wrote the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White, ‘until our hair became stiff and grey with dust, our clothes felt like emery boards, my cameras became clogged with grit …’61 These were followed by unusually heavy storms and torrential rains in Punjab at the end of September. The countryside was suddenly awash with mud. These rains burst the banks of the Beas River, destroying railway bridges and roads, washing away camps and belongings, soaking and drowning some of the refugees who became caught in the currents. Fear of the descent into a bitter winter followed, and there were concerns that families would freeze or succumb to disease if living out in the open, badly dressed in thin cotton clothes or rags.

  Both states snidely criticised the facilities provided for ‘their’ refugees and the treatment they received in transit camps and en route. Hanging over all this was the question of national belonging. This difficult question was grossly complicated by the influx of refugees. Who should have priority access to housing and accommodation? Should refugees or the remaining minority populations be given the same rights and protection as other citizens in India and Pakistan? This issue urgently needed to be clarified by the central leaderships. Some did speak out for liberal, plural, secular, multi-ethnic states but they were not the loudest voices. At the crucial moment, numerous leading politicians and their parties hesitated and dodged the question of citizenship – or actively promoted the idea of India for Hindus-Sikhs and Pakistan for Muslims. This bullishness of the top branches of the political networks intersected with, and was influenced by, the gravity of violence. Confusion about who was a legitimate citizen of each state was endemic. Disagreement sliced vertically through society from cabinet-level indecision, especially in conflict between Nehru and his Deputy Prime Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, to uncertainty about who was a compatriot among ordinary people in the smallest villages and towns.

  Crossing over

  What of the experiences of the refugees themselves? Many refugees did feel, superficially at least, patriotic on reaching the new states simply because of their relief on reaching a place of safety. Crossing the border was a momentous act. Breaching the border became a spur, and something to aim towards for those who had lost all motivation, and is remembered in a remarkably similar way in refugee accounts. One convoy pitched camp ‘with much more cheer than usual’ on an evening when they knew that the border of Pakistan was only 50 kilometres away.62 On crossing into India at the Wagah border post another convoy was momentarily united in relief as people called out, ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ (Long Live Mother India). In 1947, Kuldip Nayar, who later became a distinguished Indian journalist and parliamentarian, crossed at the Wagah border post on foot, on his long and painful journey from Sialkot to India, and remembered that there was nothing there on the windswept Punjabi plain, just a solitary Indian flag flying on a wooden pole and some overturned drums, partly painted white, partly black. ‘And I just crossed. Nobody checked to see if I had any documents, nothing.’63

  Ironically, those who had been living with ambiguous and multivalent ideas of ‘Pakistan’ ‘India’ and ‘Freedom’ were being remade into loyal citizens. Passengers arriving by boat at the port of Karachi cried ‘Allah-O-Akbar’ when they first sighted the unfamiliar Pakistani coastline. ‘The engine driver started blowing the whistle,’ Khushwant Singh writes in his fictional but evocative novel of the time, as a train steams through the Punjabi farmland, ‘and continued blowing till he had passed Mano Majra station. It was an expression of relief that they were out of Pakistan and into India.’64 Nasreen Azhar, a Pakistani feminist, was a child when she crossed the border into Pakistan on her journey from the imperial hill station of Simla, and similarly remembered ‘we felt very safe because we arrived in Multan and it was the day after Bakr Id … and people were sacrificing goats openly … people were being Muslim openly, so that was a very wonderful feeling.’65 Crossing into the new country was marked with its own symbolic significance.

  Certainly, some of the new arrivals, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, were met with hospitality. Arrangements were made along the tracks and at stations to greet Pakistani clerical staff passing through their new home – at Bahawalpur, ‘to cheer them on their way and offer them refreshments’.66 The Mayor of Lahore later claimed that the inhabitants of the city baked naan bread for the displaced and gave ‘a right royal reception to the newcomers. Cauldrons of rice could be seen cooking all over the place for distribution among the refugees.’ Radio appeals were broadcast for donations for the hungry and shopkeepers, housewives and bakers delivered food parcels to the refugee camps.67 In Delhi, the local population baked 280 maunds of chapattis when news spread of two stranded and starving foot convoys, one of 30,000 people and one of 60,000, moving southwards from Punjab, and the Indian Air Force airlifted the food parcels to the refugees the following morning.68 Newspapers in Punjab demanded charity from the prosperous and, in the language of the London Blitz, asked, ‘Have you done your bit?’ In all these ways, the refugees were being encouraged to see themselves as welcome citizens of either India or Pakistan, to submerge their other identities and to embrace their new nationality unreservedly.

  It is doubly ironic then, that, taken as a whole, the refugees themselves completely rejected any simplistic affinity with their new national governments. They were experiencing unimaginable hardships and daily difficulties; their experiences were entirely at odds with the lip-service and promises of the politicians; and there were manifold political problems caused by the difficulties of assimilating new refugees at the crux of Independence. In reality, a definite tension was already emerging between the new national characteristics that were being imposed from on high, and the sub-identities of region, caste, class and community. Fleeting moments of imagined unity and camaraderie were almost immediately undercut by the real experience of the refugees and migrants.

  The ordeal of the refugees on the trains did not end when they reached the inhumanly packed platforms of their new homelands in Delhi, Calcutta, Lahore or Amritsar, and their experiences clashed with the language of national solidarity. Greeted by scenes of misery, they had to pick their way through the crowds camped on the railway station concourse, cramped with their ragged belongings, lying or sitting in every available space. Pimps and brothel owners, gang leaders and paedophiles were not easily distinguishable from legitimate refugee camp workers who came to collect the new arrivals, and women and children were bewildered by offers of adoption, marriage or positions as domestic servants. ‘All these brothel people used to stand at the platform trying to grab them,
and we had to make sure that they are not taken away,’ remembered Khorshed Mehta, a voluntary worker who looked after distraught women arriving at New Delhi's main railway terminus in 1947.69 Able-bodied young men and united families were at a distinct advantage, as they could elbow their way to the front of queues, find information and watch each other's luggage while the frail, single women and the orphaned young were the most vulnerable. The weakest ended up in camps.

  Refugee camps were ubiquitous and the crisis rippled out across the rest of the subcontinent. It could not possibly be contained in two corners of the former British India. The Indian government constructed more than half its camps outside Punjab, including thirty-two in the Bombay Presidency and even three in the most southern state, Madras. The largest and most notorious camp in India, Kurukshetra, was a proto-city, built over nine square miles in East Punjab and housing over a quarter of a million refugees. Hospitals and kitchens were established, cholera inoculations and cooked food were distributed. And yet, despite the war footing of the operation and the organised dispersal of quilts and tents, lentils, rice and flour, the camp buckled under the weight of the sheer numbers of people still moving across the border. Kurukshetra grew ten times in size in just six weeks from mid-October to the end of November 1947. Sometimes as many as 25,000 people would arrive, unanticipated, in the middle of the night – and even receiving them and guiding them to a suitable space was a difficult task because of the shortage of electric lighting. The Indian government resettled some as far away as the remote Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.