by Yasmin Khan
By the time that the Pakistani and Indian governments concluded their first ceasefire in Kashmir at the start of 1949, the leaders could look back at eighteen months which approximated a revolution. Two new states, different in shape and social composition to anything they had ever anticipated, had come into existence, born in the cauldron of a traumatic transition. Old battles between Congress and League supporters looked outdated and parochial in this new environment. At the same time, a sense of the other state and of its innate violence had begun to grow. This would fuel a conflict which has lasted for the lifetime of all the Partition's survivors.
10
Divided Families
The north-western corner of the Indian subcontinent suffered the bloodiest violence and the most severe dislocation in 1947–8 but after just a few years visitors were surprised by the speed of change and the ways in which these events had faded from view. The energies and expenditure of the governments, the imperative quickly to begin farming again in the Punjabi breadbasket states that supplied vital food to the rest of India and Pakistan, and the rapid, total exchange of Punjab's population meant that, publicly at least, a line was drawn under events by the time of the first Indian general elections in 1950. Chiselled Victorian luminaries on plinths were removed and the names of streets and parks changed overnight. The landscape became increasingly alien to old inhabitants as shop names were removed and freshly painted signs hoisted up in their place. Marketplaces and segments of the old walled parts of cities were reinvented. As the new order began, and the old order fizzled out, cultural, linguistic and economic changes followed in the slipstream of Partition. Refugees made up almost half of the population of Lahore, almost a third of the population of Delhi.
Communities of refugee squatters could still be seen, camped on the outskirts of towns, and rubble still marked the sites of riots. New cities rose from the ashes, though, such as Le Corbusier's angular, uncompromisingly modernist Chandigarh, the new capital of East Punjab. The resourceful Punjabi refugee became a national stereotype and an actor on the nation-building stage. Inevitably, many of the residents who had stayed in the same place during Partition and witnessed these transformations felt nostalgic for the old cities where there had been less traffic, business had been done face to face, prices were at least remembered as cheaper, and it was possible to cross cities such as Delhi in minutes rather than hours; and they mourned the emergence of the ‘vast sprawling multicoloured soulless monster of today which we continue to call by the same name’.1 The public memory of Partition in the north-west of South Asia was gradually put to rest. Grave and invisible legacies lived on in less tangible ways, in emotional scarring and sporadic political friction, but observers were happy enough to buy into the story of regenerative enterprise told by both national governments.
Beneath the glossy factories and the meteoric rise and endless expansion of new cities, though, Partition left deep and ragged fault lines. These ran through individual lives, families and whole regions, pitching Indians and Pakistanis into new conflicts and paving the way for the troubled bilateral relationship which blights South Asia to the present day.
In the 1940s and 1950s people were not well equipped with the language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; it was too much to hope for any systematic understanding of the collective trauma which a generation had experienced. Partition had a widespread psychological impact which may never be fully recognised or traced. This afflicted not only refugees but also eyewitnesses, perpetrators of violence, aid workers, politicians and policemen; arguably hundreds of thousands of people living in the northern and eastern parts of South Asia. The immediate trauma of the refugees was well testified in their frozen and fixed faces, uncontrollable tears and shocked inertia. More invasive mental health problems may have plagued some people for the rest of their lives. People who had managed to get away or who had been strong enough to secure themselves a place in a train compartment, or who had remained hidden while other members of their community were killed, felt guilt. Others experienced culturally specific shame and humiliation related to violations of religious or community rights that inverted the normal social order. ‘One woman wept hysterically,’ recounted Margaret Bourke-White, ‘as she told me how her home was polluted by Muslim goondas who placed raw meat on the window sills.’ For others, fear of starvation had left a deep mark – ‘they started stealing food,’ remembered Krishna Thapar who worked at an ashram in Punjab with rescued women: ‘we would find chapatis under their pillows, under their quilts, and their beds … Some of them had become psychological cases.’2 Some people went, quite literally, mad.
For women the trauma of rape, molestation and abduction was so grave, and made even worse in many cases because of the cultural taboos surrounding it, that it is unclear how recovery was possible at all. Relief workers were under enormous strain. ‘None of us had the ability to understand the psychology of these women nor did we try,’ admitted the social worker Anis Kidwai. ‘The few sentences that are spouted at such occasions proved totally ineffective, and often we ended up saying very unpleasant things to them.’3 Social workers often tried to steer the conversation away from memories of trauma, encouraged their charges to look to the future, and had a limited grasp of their psychological needs. They can only be judged against the standards and practices of the time. For those who saw scenes of devastation or lost loved ones, life was punctured by panic attacks and ugly nightmares for many years.
Some twenty years later, Begum Ikramullah wrote, ‘I somehow have never been able to get over the shocked impact the Calcutta riots had on me’ and Manzoor Quraishi's otherwise prosaic account of life in the Indian Civil Service is suddenly interrupted by the memory of a brother who lost his life on a train to Pakistan: ‘I loved my younger brother and could not get over the brutal and tragic end of a brilliant career at the young age of 24 years. For months I could not sleep properly and insomnia that I got from this horrible and traumatic experience has haunted me now and then throughout my life thereafter. My mother whose youngest child [had died] was completely heartbroken and cursed “Pakistan” till she died in 1978 …’4 Urvashi Butalia has pointed to the ongoing trauma of those who had been children in 1947, ‘his wife told us that he still had nightmares, that he woke in the night feeling an intense heat rising up around him, the flames which surrounded him as he lay by his father's body in 1947’, while in one instance a perpetrator of violence is also haunted by the events of the time: ‘Another Sikh living in Bhogal in Delhi who had actually been part of a killing spree as a child, would often wake in the night screaming. His wife said he could not forget the screams of the Muslims he had helped to kill.’5 These could have been exceptional cases but it seems more likely that Partition continued to echo, unrecorded, in anonymous stories of breakdowns, alcoholism and suicide.
A prolonged Partition
There were other invisible trails left by Partition. By late 1948, politicians were relieved that violence had subsided, and Nehru in particular was delighted that the annexation of the troublesome state of Hyderabad passed without trouble elsewhere in India. He saw this as a sign that the corner had been turned and was elated that ‘not a single communal incident occurred in the whole length and breadth of this great country’.6 Sadly though, questions of citizenship and belonging still hung in the balance and there were numerous people and communities who had grey, uncertain allegiances to India or Pakistan and had slipped between the cracks formed by these neat parameters of nationhood.
In Bengal, in contrast to the north-west, the physical reality of the refugee crisis was only just beginning to take shape in the 1950s. By 1951, there were at least three million refugees squeezed into every nook and cranny of Calcutta. They slept on pavements and in Nissen huts, made their homes on railway platforms and along riverbanks. The consequences could not be easily ignored and the unceasing flow of refugees brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war in early 1950. As Nehru wrote to the British Prime Minister, Attlee, in
1950 the treatment of minorities in both countries was ‘far more important for the maintenance of peace than the settlement of the Kashmir dispute’.7 A proclamation of emergency was kept ready to be used at a moment's notice in West Bengal and the Governor suggested declaring a state of martial law. The prolonged, tortuous Partition of Bengal would prove a whole chapter in the Partition story. It was a political and social drama which stretched well into the twentieth century. The war of 1971, and the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, exacerbated the human crisis in the region and, by 1973, West Bengal was coping with a refugee population of around six million.
After 1947 East Pakistan's ability to survive hung in the balance and the province's continued viability as a part of Pakistan was already in doubt. The desperately poor, waterlogged province, economically dependent on the unreliable jute crop and physically distanced from the Pakistani capital one thousand miles away, had to struggle with two dominant issues from the moment of its independence: on its borders it faced a refugee crisis of epic proportions and a brewing conflict with India, while East Bengalis also began a long battle with their compatriots in Karachi, who began trying to stamp their cultural and political imprint on the province. Jinnah declared Urdu the Pakistani national language in 1948, deaf to the passion of Bengali linguistic patriotism and the complaints of the majority of Pakistanis who could not speak the language. After Independence, East Pakistan suffered from inflation and shortages of basic goods as it was cut off from Calcutta, but the Chittagong port, which was critical for East Pakistan's industrial development and imports, was developed too slowly. All this was underlined by bigotry shown towards the rural Bengali peasantry and a barely concealed implication that the province was a poor cousin to the ‘real’ Pakistan: Jinnah took seven months to make his first brief visit to Dacca and although Liaquat Ali Khan announced that he would aim at two visits a year, he never managed to reach his own target. The fissures which would eventually result in civil war, the bloody cracking apart of the country and the creation of Bangladesh in 1970–1 were already visible in 1947.
Meanwhile, massive communities of Hindus who remained in East Bengal found little to commend in their poorly administered new country, and clung tenaciously to their older political affiliations. Many had ties to Calcutta and remained unreconciled to Partition, which was seen as an arbitrary imposition from outside. ‘Their temple bells can be heard in the evening and in their shops in the bazaar are exhibited portraits of Nehru, Patel and other Indian leaders,’ noted one foreign visitor to Dacca.8 Hindus had overwhelmingly been the zamindars, or landlords, in undivided Bengal, while Muslims had been the tenants, and Hindus remained the wealthy gatekeepers of Bengali bhadralok culture; even in 1950 they still dominated the Dacca bar and held one third of the university's places.9 Simultaneously, the promises of Pakistani nationalism had fired the imagination of Muslim tenants who hoped to improve their lot at the expense of their erstwhile masters. In this light, well-meaning Pakistani guarantees of a plural state decreed from the capital, and the promise of a 30 per cent reservation for the minority, looked hollow and capricious from the perspective of the East Bengali Hindu who, although represented in the provincial Legislative Assembly, had no figurehead in the cabinet and little reason to believe that his children or grandchildren would benefit from the same access to educational opportunities and legal rights as himself.
Fears of outright persecution were strengthened by real assaults and murders of East Bengalis in the grievous riots in Khulna, Chittagong, Barishal and Sylhet in 1950 and the ruthless requisitioning of Hindu property by a partisan and unaccountable state administration. Disentangling the truth from fiction about the persecution of East Bengali minorities is still immensely problematic, but as news of rapes, murders and massacres gained currency, fears of war between the two countries over Kashmir and the worried intercessions from family members and political groups on the Indian side of the border all added to the maelstrom. Rich and poor Bengali Hindus became fused in a new collective consciousness of their vulnerable minority status. The full ambiguities of Pakistan's territorial creation came to light as many Bengalis on both sides of the border lamented its creation and echoed Vallabhbhai Patel's declaration that Partition was a tragedy.
Ultimately, although some minorities held out in East Pakistan and tried to preserve their community rights, there was an alternative option for those who decided that they could not remain in East Bengal: migration to India. Many did not think this would be permanent, while some remained in East Pakistan for as long as possible and tried to claim their political rights, waiting for the storm to pass. Migration decimated ever more communities, leaving small isolated families targets for criminals and creating a vicious circle. By early 1950 some of the Congress regarded war as possibly the only solution that would stop the tide of refugees, push back Pakistan's borders and create a safe zone for non-Muslims in East Bengal which could be subsumed within Indian territory. Daily border clashes and riots in East Bengal started to threaten the security of Muslims in North India, in Calcutta and West Bengal and in March 1950 riots in East Bengal had ‘repercussions’ hundreds of miles way. The reflex action of many Indian Muslim communities was to pack up their belongings and to consider the possibility of migration to Pakistan. ‘The common folks are concerned – peasants, artisans, metal workers, domestic servants and the like,’ Nehru lamented. ‘Their panchayats decide and whole groups pack up and want to go.’10
Independence had not delivered on its promises. J.N. Mandal, the leader of the local dalits who had vigorously backed the Pakistan demand and had been sworn in as a minister in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, was racked with regret and dashed expectations. In 1950 he resigned from his post and migrated to India. It was the result of a long personal tussle with his own emotions and responsibilities. ‘It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustration at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses of East Bengal,’ he wrote sadly in his resignation letter, ‘that I feel compelled to tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet.’ The daily persecution and harassment of peasants whom Mandal was elected to represent had become too much as ‘untouchables’ found themselves discriminated against, attacked and persecuted in East Pakistan, lumped together in popular thinking with ‘Hindus’ and exploited by unaccountable administrators who, Mandal was convinced, were determined to squeeze out all the minorities from the land.
The riots in East Bengal 1950 proved the final straw for Mandal like many others. ‘The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock,’ he wrote. ‘I was really overwhelmed with grief.’ Shortly afterwards, Mandal made his way to India. The final part of the sorry tale came afterwards in a twist which reflects both the ironies and the complications of defining citizenship in the partitioned subcontinent. Mandal's departure was rewritten as treachery and anti-nationalism. The Pakistani Prime Minister, standing on an airfield in Karachi, when asked about his minister's departure declared that he hoped Mandal would come back to Pakistan. ‘A number of nationals betray their country and run away,’ Liaquat Ali Khan declared imperiously to the assembled journalists, ‘but by doing that they do not cease to be the nationals of that country.’11
Once again the murky lack of clarification about citizenship entangled the two states. The bitterness engendered by Partition was still palpable and in 1950 the prime ministers bickered in personal letters to each other about responsibility for the violence in 1947.12 ‘The disturbances which led to mass migrations covered three hundred thousand square miles in Pakistan,’ argued an Indian government pamphlet, ‘while the area affected in India was only eighty-seven thousand square miles.’13 The real cost of Partition was lost in this scramble to attribute blame.
Both governments became blind to the real human misery of the refugees as the ‘refugee question’ became another focal point for Indo-Pakistani co
nflict. In provocative rhetoric the governments fixated on their own righteousness, undermined the journalism and reportage emanating from the other nation's press and denied their own culpability for what had happened in 1947. ‘Wielding administrative power and having at their command the police and the military as engines of oppression, these [Pakistani] officials committed the worst savagery in human history. The riots in West Punjab had their natural repercussions in East Punjab, of which exaggerated reports were published in the Pakistan press and broadcast by the Pakistan radio,’14 claimed the Indian government publications division while Pakistani propaganda perpetuated similarly partial interpretations in pamphlets such as The Sikh Plan in Action. The question of culpability for the crisis of 1947 remained a powerful silence in the background of later diplomatic discussions over Kashmir, and it still exerts a deep-seated force in the official mindset of both nations.
War over conditions in Bengal was narrowly averted in 1950. The Indian and Pakistani prime ministers sealed the peace – at least temporarily – by signing a far-sighted pact in April 1950. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact addressed desperately urgent questions of fair press reportage, protection for migrants in transit, affirmation of minority rights, the property rights of migrants and restoration of women who had been held captive against their will. It came just in the nick of time.
In Delhi in May 1950 newspaper editors gathered from India and Pakistan at a joint conference. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact encouraged journalists to tone down their alarmist coverage of what was happening in the two countries. Journalists spent hours talking, trying to get to the bottom of what was happening across the border and learning about life in a place which had now become mysterious and inaccessible. A Pakistani journalist admitted that he was relieved to find that the reports he had seen in Pakistan of gangs massacring Muslims had been exaggerated.15 At the conference, journalists wept to see each other for the first time in three years. On hearing this, Nehru reflected that the two states had to find a way to get their people to meet as often as possible. Sadly, the pact was a temporary sticking plaster and this aspiration towards open borders remained a vain hope.