by Yasmin Khan
In Pakistan, three months later, another episode equally signalled Partition's deep-seated political significance, which continues to resonate to the present day. On Independence Day 2005, President Musharraf attended a ceremony inaugurating a mammoth 330 million rupee building project in Lahore. The plan, known as Bab-e-Pakistan, has been in the pipeline since 1991. Architectural designs promise a sleek geometric structure, soaring into the sky, which will be reflected in a rectangular ornamental pool below; locals have also been promised a lavish new mosque, library, garden, restaurants and sports facilities. Standing on a platform in front of a large, graphic painting in which a pantheon of national heroes loomed as he inaugurated the start of the construction work, the President of Pakistan invoked the suffering of refugees and their sacrifices at the time of Partition. ‘They were fired by passion and had an unswerving hope in Pakistan,’ he declared.30 For the land on which Bab-e-Pakistan will stand is the exact site of the Walton refugee camp, the camp in Lahore through which millions of Pakistanis trudged on their traumatic journey, and the purpose of the project is to memorialise both the camp and the wider story of Partition. The monument (and the library and exhibitions to be hosted within it) will tell a linear story of the triumphal emergence of Pakistan and although the bloodiness of Partition will have a place in this tale, it will be glossed with the language of martyrdom and suffering in the cause of the Pakistani state. The Bab-e-Pakistan project has little to say about the experiences of non-Muslims and avoids delving into the shared responsibility for violence at the time of Partition.
These official versions of history have hardly gone unchallenged; some Pakistani observers immediately called for a more representative memorial. ‘If Bab-e-Pakistan has to be built,’ suggested a newspaper editorial pointedly, ‘let it represent suffering of all refugees from both sides.’31 Nevertheless, the memories of the squalid refugee camp are to be carefully repackaged in the form of a national monument, and the memories of bewildering social upheaval are to be replaced with a providential, chalked-out destiny.
All memorials and monuments, like history books, have their own rationales, and tell a very particular story. A different criticism sometimes levelled at the governments of South Asia is that they have failed to commemorate the brutality of 1947 in any way at all. In India there is only one official monument to the victims of Partition, the Martyrs' Monument in Chandigarh, the experimental city built after Independence as a symbolic focal point of national regeneration and as a new capital of Indian Punjab. Here, in a square enclosure near to the heart of governance, stone sculptures of a lion, a snake and a prone human figure are intended to symbolise the sufferings of the Punjabis in 1947. However, the lack of other, official, public memorials does not mean that Partition is in any way forgotten.
The political power of the memory of Partition, and the state's ability to appropriate and manipulate these memories, has been graphically shown since 1947. A subtle and diffuse but no less politicised picture of Partition has extremely wide currency. Throughout the length and breadth of South Asia the contents of well-thumbed schoolbooks in children's satchels, regurgitated in undigested chunks for school examinations, tell opposing and sanctified versions of the story of Partition. In India this blends together the tales of the Muslim League's intransigence, its ‘communal’ or religiously slanted political orientation that made it impervious to cries of unity and resulted in the fracturing of India. In this story, Pakistan's creation is entirely illegitimate and it is the failure of the Leaguers to accept a secular, plural, peace-loving state which is at fault. In this line of thinking, Partition as a violent, human tragedy is spliced together with Partition as a political mistake. For this reason, the Indian child hears very little about the ways in which the violence came about and the polarisation of the League and the Congress in wartime India, or of Congress's own ambivalences about religious nationalism and alliances with militant cadres.
This is at odds with the picture that emerges in Pakistan; here the state proactively engages in rewriting the history of Partition as one of martyrdom, courage and victimhood. Pakistanis, so the story goes, triumphantly created the state, and gave up their lives for it, in the face of a planned attempt to bring Pakistan to a point of collapse at the moment of the country's inception. In this reading, the Congress was little more than a front for a Hindu and Sikh conspiracy. In the textbooks of both countries, national leaders are extolled as heroes, and at its worst extreme this takes the form of a kind of morality play or fable about the foundational moment of the state. But it is the absences in the schoolbooks that are most striking. As Krishna Kumar, who has turned his critical eye on the production and consumption of these textbooks ironically observes, when it comes to the description of Partition violence, there are more similarities than differences in the way that Indian and Pakistan school histories approach the thorny question of Partition's bloodiness: ‘The two narratives come remarkably close in the cursory manner in which they deal with the violence associated with Partition. The horror and suffering that millions of ordinary men and women faced receive no more than a few lines of cold recording in most Indian and Pakistani textbooks.’32
The Partition of 1947 cannot simply be regarded as a historical event located in the past. It may appear in history books on sale in every bookshop of India and Pakistan but it is not history if ‘history’ is considered to consist of past events that are detached from the political decision-making processes of contemporary South Asian life. Advani's faux pas underlined how national interpretations of Partition – why it happened and who was responsible – have become ideological shibboleths and have a firm grip on the popular imagination in both countries. There are still strict taboos on what can be said about Partition, and national myths persist, far beyond the limits of the more extreme nationalist parties.
This does not mean that Partition is ignored. Far from it: Partition crops up repeatedly, on South Asian television, in the newspapers, and in a torrent of published memoirs, cinematic and fictional accounts, and these interpretations have a direct bearing on how each neighbour perceives the other. Memories and histories of Partition continue to reinforce and shape each other and are intimately bound to the understandings of nationhood which have come to predominate in both of these countries.
South Asians are simultaneously wary of and hungry for stories of Partition, whether discussing the publication of previously unpublished political diaries or debating the representation of events in the latest Bollywood film or bestselling novel. It is living history that is preserved inside family homes by women and men, many of whom live alongside memories of terrible trauma, which are retold and passed on to descendants. Stories about Pakistan and Partition impress themselves upon the reader during a random browse through any issue of an Indian news magazine: a television show that features debates about Indo-Pakistani relations between guests from both countries, an article about a recent India–Pakistan cricket match, including a story about the experiences of an elderly Indian couple who took the opportunity to return to the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, ‘where they easily located their old family home. To their delight, it still bears their father's nameplate’, an article on the suppression of popular Indian satellite channels on Pakistani television.
On the Pakistani side of the border, an equivalent magazine will throw up parallel stories: the construction of a railway station to receive the newly planned cross-border Thar Express train, an article recounting a recent visit to India by a Pakistani artist who enjoyed touring Jaipur and Hyderabad and also took the opportunity to meet up with distant relatives, commenting, ‘My cousins in India are now the third generation after partition.’33 Echoes of Partition resonate in contemporary discourse, and domestic and foreign policy decisions are shaped, and received, by the experience and memories of 1947. Definitions of each country's own nationhood have often been made dialectically, through an engagement with and perception of the other state and for this reason it is difficult to
evade the analogies of birth and childhood in descriptions of bilateral relations, and the characterisation of the emergence of the two states as sibling-rivals.
Both national capitals have produced one-dimensional versions of the past. There has been a lot invested in perpetuating false memories and myth. Nevertheless, a broad sweep of Indians and Pakistanis remember 1947 in far more subtle ways. In films, novels and poetry the violence of Partition has seeped deeply into the cultural imagination. Bollywood has approached Partition from many angles; some films, such as Deepa Mehta's Earth and Chandra Prakash Dwivedi's Pinjar, are beautifully restrained depictions of the times. In the 1980s, the novel Tamas was controversially serialised on Indian television to great acclaim. Other films are, however, gung-ho excuses for nationalistic posturing. Sales of translations and new editions of Partition fiction and poetry are booming in both countries, and the work of writers such as Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni and Intizar Husain are as popular as ever, while new writers revisit the perennial yet ever-intriguing themes of lost homelands, regret, the pain of separation and the gross violence. Responses to Partition cannot easily be pigeonholed. They traverse the full range of human emotions from the acrimonious and bitter to the regretful and nostalgic.
Nevertheless, nationalist blinkers have more often than not shaped the way in which the history of Partition's events has been viewed. The master narratives, even if not accepted simplistically or without cynicism, have been remarkably potent. The messy ambiguities of Partition have been underplayed, and the anachronistic gloss of nationalism varnishes later accounts. As this book has shown, there is a gulf between these later renderings and the actual experiences of Partition, between the idea and the reality of making two nations in the theatre of decolonisation in 1947.
Epilogue
The Indian Raj was at the centre of the experimental tentative process of forging nation states in the aftermath of empire. Sometimes it has been celebrated – in British thinking at least – as a successful act of British decolonisation, in comparison to the complications that bogged down other European powers in South East Asia and Africa. Alternatively, it has been presented as a series of gruesome horrors far removed from political calculations. These stale views demand reappraisal.
More often than not the history of the Partition of India is read backwards. It is incredibly difficult to see Partition from the perspective of individuals caught up in the post-war whirlwind; people who carried on living daily life through the disintegration of an imperial regime and its replacement by two new nation states. The fog of nationalist myth-making has been thick and coats Partition histories in a dark cloak of inevitability. Partition becomes a stepping stone on a well-trod path and it is too easy to forget how euphoric, confusing, uncertain or strange those days must have been for people who did not know or trust that new states were going to replace the tired and discredited British Raj. Instead, in many history books Partition becomes the end point, or the apex, of a great national struggle and the moment at which one set of historical stories, about achieving liberation from colonial rule ends, and another – about the building up of these new states – starts. As Nehru, the newly appointed Prime Minister of India, and a brilliant practitioner of narrative history, unequivocally stated in 1947, Partition was a ‘watershed’ which was ‘dividing the past from the future’.1 The result has been that we have taken our cue too readily from the politicians and the creation of the Indian and Pakistani political economies of the 1950s are taken for granted. Partition was, in this reading, a massive but contained historical event. This underestimates the scale of disruption of 1947 and the dangers of the crisis which, arguably, threatened the collapse of the new post-colonial governments. The outcome was never a foregone conclusion.
This book has taken a rather different angle. It has shown how, for several years, South Asia was in a deeply ambiguous, transitional position between empire and nationhood that threatened the very existence of the new states themselves. There was no straightforward exchange of the baton of government. The protracted, unruly end of empire in South Asia was a shock of epic proportions that destabilised life for millions of its inhabitants. In 1946, people felt entirely uncertain about what the future would deliver. It is not implausible that South Asia could have spiralled into an even more devastating civil war, or that Pakistan could have failed to come into existence. It is not improbable that the new states could have been created along entirely different lines or that some of the princely states could have succeeded in their bids for autonomy. There was nothing inevitable or pre-planned about the way that Partition unfolded. Well accustomed as we are nowadays to the contours of these states on the world map, and given the terrific speed with which they acted to establish themselves, it is very challenging to visualise the moment at which they could have been forged in different ways, and what that future might have looked like.
On 15 August 1947 the first part of the British empire was unhooked from the imperial metropolis. This history of Partition has suggested that modern nation states had to be crafted out of a chaotic, diffused situation in which myriad voices made their claims and counter-claims. As the first Asian countries to win their freedom from empire, India and Pakistan pioneered decolonisation. Few aspects of this were preconceived or well mapped out.
The flip-side of the story of liberation from colonial rule was the chaos and violence that engulfed and almost overwhelmed the new states. Nationalism exacted its own blood price. The violence of 1946–8, so regularly and conveniently portrayed by contemporaries and by later historians as the unstoppable thuggery of madmen and hooligans, in an uncanny parody of the colonial language of governance, was, instead, often planned, strategic and linked to middle-class party politics. The black and white imagery of ragged refugees and bloodthirsty peasants should be replaced with a technicolour picture of modern weaponry, strategic planning and political rhetoric, which was used to encourage and legitimise the killers and their actions. Fuelled by appeals to an ideal society and determined to bring about their own interpretations of swaraj and Pakistan, some of the murderers no doubt operated with the mistaken idea that they were doing what was best for their nation. Others, living under the shadow of curfew, daily stabbings and bombings, and exposed to misinformation and rumour, turned from a position of strategic self-defence to overt aggression. It is beyond doubt that nationalist politicians and enthusiasts from leading political parties colluded with, and became tangled up in, the massacres.
Individuals and communities felt the full brunt of Partition, far beyond the gravest and most deadly sites of violence in Punjab. Centripetally, its effects radiated out from the nerve centres in the north in a broader arc than is usually presumed. It ripped apart the operation of everyday life in cities across North India and often made ordinary life altogether impossible. The lives of factory workers, teachers, government clerks and shopkeepers were massively, albeit temporarily, disrupted because of the closure of offices and factories, ruptured train lines, the heightened and abnormally anxious circulation of news and rumour. Unfamiliar and desperate batches of refugees speaking strange tongues started to turn up unannounced at local railway stations. Relationships with communities of local people – who were suddenly branded as ‘minorities’ or ‘not one of us’ – were cast in a new light, especially when these groups began to cluster together and move to another place for their own safety.
New opportunities to make extra profit or to secure promotion opened up for some. For others, there were major and agonising decisions to make about whether to leave for India or Pakistan. For the refugees, life would never be the same again. In the worst affected places, in an almost carnivalesque manner, relationships between men and women and between families became upended and distorted as every taboo was broken and people clutched at older caste or regional identities while trying to recreate in strange new conditions and alien cities something of their former existence. There were small glimmers of opportunity which
enabled, for instance, women to work outside the home, or to seize the political initiative in their new refugee camp or housing colony. But it is difficult to see these attempts at an autonomous, dignified life as anything other than small triumphs in the face of unending adversity.
After Partition, there was a sea change. The new national governments in India and Pakistan worked spectacularly hard at supplanting the endemic confusion with order and at recasting the disorder as the handiwork of thugs and hooligans. Newly emerging nations, economically and politically precarious in 1947, quickly turned from defensive weakness to literal and metaphorical fortification. From the earliest days of Independence, middle-class contemporaries regarded state-building and nation-making as part of their inescapable duty. As this book has argued, new types of nationalism were consolidated in the aftermath of Partition, not only in its prelude. Whether people had previously supported the League or the Congress had become a secondary consideration by 1947. Crucially, Partition had its own intrinsic revolutionary repercussions. It was not just the product of the decades of electrifying change which preceded it.