The Great Partition

by Yasmin Khan

  Pakistan and India are now established facts, distinctive nations, which have followed trajectories that were scarcely dreamed of by their founders and supporters in the 1940s. The Partition plan was, in some ways, a genuine compromise that allowed for a sharing of land and a division of people and materials. It acknowledged the right to self-determination of a large group of Muslims who, albeit in a contradictory and confused manner, had expressed their strong desire to extricate themselves from the Congress's control. For these reasons, the more optimistic onlookers in June 1947 welcomed the settlement as a solution to the problematic tensions that had been plaguing South Asian politics. The blueprint, which was loftily imposed from above in 1947, though, has never escaped the stain of illegitimacy that marred it. It was a plan that went catastrophically wrong: partly because it was sabotaged by militant groups who did not subscribe to it and partly because it did not make detailed allowances for many different grassroots realities that were shaping local politics in the provinces. Even those inside the limited loop of political information in 1947 were shocked by the speed with which Partition was imposed, the lack of clarity and reassurance provided to those living along the borderlines, the paucity of military protection written into the plan, the complete abnegation of duty towards the rights of minorities and failure to elucidate the questions of citizenship. One apparently contradictory aspect of Partition's nature is this tension between speed and sluggishness, decisiveness and prevarication. Far more power had already been devolved by 15 August 1947 than is usually acknowledged. The states that were coming into existence were works in progress. If not entirely responsible for the contending nationalisms that emerged in South Asia (which it certainly contributed to), the British government's most grievous failure was the shoddy way in which the plan was implemented.

  In a close approximation of each other, India and Pakistan swiftly moved to consolidate their nations and to define themselves as autonomous states using all the national apparel they could muster – flags, anthems and national histories – and by implementing more concrete measures: the policing of boundaries, the closure of lacunae in the definitions of citizenship and writing constitutions. None of this is too surprising, but the ‘other’ state necessarily became an object of comparison, a counterpoint, and was, to a greater or lesser extent, vilified in the process. A cornerstone of nation-making was securing control of a separate and powerful army. The Kashmir imbroglio and the subsequent wars since 1947 have, of course, sustained the tensions between India and Pakistan and further entrenched the conflict in new and difficult ways. New grievances and conflicts have arisen because of the growth of militancy, Pakistan's backing for violent atrocities carried out in Kashmir and beyond, Indian human rights abuses in the Kashmir valley, not to forget the complications caused by the creation of Bangladesh after the war of 1971, the acquisition of nuclear weaponry, and the complex interplay of national and regional identities in all three countries.

  Not all of South Asia's current problems can be laid at the feet of Partition. Events have moved on from 1947 and difficulties created by the Radcliffe line – such as the maintenance of illogical and tricky boundaries – instead of being salved with the balm of diplomacy have become running sores. Yet, the way in which Kashmir is usually cited as the cause of these problems overlooks the way in which Partition itself was the site for, and the origin of, so many of the ongoing conflicts in South Asia, not least because it was the source of the suspicions and national myths that are deeply rooted in the definition of one state against the other.

  Today a peace process is under way in earnest and there are reasons for optimism as the confidence-building measures agreed between the two governments are gradually implemented. New bus, rail and air services link up the two nations. The prospects for commerce are excellent and the surge in bilateral trade, which crossed the 500 million dollar mark in 2004–5, has outstripped earlier levels of economic interaction. Chambers of Commerce send eager delegations across the border. Film, entertainment and tourism all have wide attraction for Indians and Pakistanis who have a shared taste in humour, music and film. Pilgrims want to visit temples and sacred sites, artists would welcome the chance to perform to the transnational audience, businessmen know full well the market for their goods and services across the border which is confirmed by the thriving black market in everything from textiles to food products and electronics. There are recent signs that the ban on showing Indian films in Pakistani cinemas, which has boosted a pirate industry, may be lifted and Pakistani cinemas have been able to screen selected Bollywood movies for the first time in forty years.

  Nevertheless, Indians and Pakistanis are still, despite the ongoing and encouraging liberalisation of the visa regime in 2006, kept apart. For sixty years Indians and Pakistanis have been largely segregated in a manner unthinkable to the protagonists who agreed to the plan at the fateful meeting on 3 June 1947. The way in which Pakistan and India have evolved as nation states and the literal, pedantic, policing of nationality in the interim seems in retrospect a product of the anxieties and insecurities of Partition. The failure at the time to define Indian and Pakistani citizenship fully, the contradictions of imagined nationalisms and the territorial realities of state-making left a difficult and acrimonious legacy. Today, queues outside visa offices remain long and depressing as families camp out from early in the morning trying to acquire the necessary paperwork to cross the border, while the visa regime explicitly favours the wealthy and cosmopolitan. Visas, when issued, still restrict visitors to specific cities, only allow trips of a short duration and involve complicated and dispiriting registration with the local police on arrival. It has become ever harder to recover a sense of what it was like to be a pre-Indian or a pre-Pakistani.

  Partition deserves renewed consideration and closer attention for abundant reasons. It was one of the twentieth century's darkest moments. The millions of people killed and forced to leave their homes merit greater recognition and a place closer to the heart of history writing for their own sake. The Partition of 1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different – and unknowable – paths. Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism. For better or worse, two nations continue to live alongside each other in South Asia and continue to live with these legacies.

  Notes

  Introduction: The Plan

  1. USSA 845.00/6–647 Box 6070. Gordon Minnigerode to US Secretary of State, 6 June 1947.

  2. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, ‘Who Killed India’, in Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 232.

  3. IOR L/PJ/5/140, Akbar Hydari to Mountbatten, 5 June 1947.

  4. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 106.

  5. N. Mansergh, ed., TOP, vol. 11, pp. 86–101.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid., p. 96.

  8. Ibid., pp. 97–8.

  9. As the historian Gyanendra Pandey has stressed, Independence and Partition marked out the problematic beginning of a process, ‘the normalization of particular communities and particular histories …’ See Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 52.

  10. Times of India, 4 June 1947.

  11. SWJN, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 506; Pakistan Assembly debate, 11 August 1947 reproduced in M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan 1941–1951 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 118.

  12. The numbers of people who died during Partition are ultimately unknowable. Figures discussed by contemporaries and historians range from 200,000 to one million.
On the difficulties with these figures see G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–91. Paul Brass also discusses the problem of counting the dead in ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–7,’ Journal of Genocide Research, 5.1 (2003), pp. 75–6.

  13. M. Hasan, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 156; The Journey to Pakistan: A Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: National Documentation Centre, Govt of Pakistan, 1993), p. 258. These incidents are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.

  14. TOP, vol. 11, p. 159. Viceroy's Personal Report, 5 June 1947. For a perceptive critique of Partition historiography after fifty years of Independence, see David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, Journal of Asian Studies, 57.4 (1998), 1068–1095.

  15. These examples are taken from Steven Wilkinson's data set reproduced in S. Wilkinson, ed., Religious Politics and Communal Violence (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 405–44. This lists towns with reported ‘communal’ riots in India (and for the pre-1947 period) Pakistan and Bangladesh; based on two data sets compiled by Wilkinson and Ashutosh Varshney using colonial and archival records, published government records, Indian and British papers and other secondary sources. Wilkinson acknowledges the many problems in deciding what constitutes a ‘communal riot’.

  16. J. Greenberg, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25.1 (2005), p. 90. Joya Chatterji similarly highlights the misleading use of surgical metaphors to describe the making of the international borderline between the two countries and the ‘clinical detachment’ with which the operation was presented by the British. Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies, 33.1. (Feb. 1999), p. 185.

  17. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst, 2000), p. 15. The phrase is from Roland Barthes.

  Chapter 1: In the Shadow of War

  1. M. Darling, At Freedom's Door (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. xiii, 35–6, 51, 68, 80, 194.

  2. Ibid., p. 109.

  3. Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi and London: Sage, 2005), pp. 284–5.

  4. Times of India, 8 Jan. 1946; Statesman, 2 March 1946.

  5. SWGBP, vol. 10, p. 392. Speech at Agra, 13 Nov. 1945.

  6. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082, 13 Nov. 1946.

  7. Winston W. Ehrmann, ‘Post-War Government and Politics of India’, Journal of Politics, 9.4 (Nov. 1947), p. 660.

  8. Daniel Thorner, ‘Problems of Economic Development in India’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 268 (March 1950), pp. 96–7.

  9. Ibid., p. 98.

  10. Searchlight, 9 March 1946. Cited in Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–1946 (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 290–1.

  11. Rahi Masoom Reza, The Feuding Families of Village Gangauli: Adha Gaon, trans. from Hindi by Gillian Wright (Delhi: Penguin, 1994), p. 140.

  12. Times of India, 31 Jan. 1946; Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal ed.P.Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 224.

  13. Times of India, 25 March 1946.

  14. The Statesman, 12 March 1946.

  15. Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–45’, Past and Present, 176 (Aug. 2002), pp. 187–221. On the Indian role in the Second World War see also, Judith Brown, ‘India’, in I.C.D. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, eds, The Oxford Companion to the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 557–65 and Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon, 2005).

  16. By 1938–9 the All India membership figures for the Indian National Congress were 4,511,858. Source: B.R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–1942: The Penultimate Phase (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 86.

  17. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India, a People Partitioned (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), A.S. Bakshi interviewed in Chandigarh, 16 March 1997.

  18. The colonial applications and implications of the decennial census are discussed in N. Barrier, ed., The Census in British India (Delhi: Manohar, 1981). CWMG, vol. 85, p. 448, 1946.

  19. The British granted the principle of representative government to Indians in 1861, 1892, 1909 and more substantially by the parliamentary Acts of 1919 and 1935, although the franchise was always highly selective and powers were carefully curtailed.

  20. The literature on the growth of Muslim and Hindu nationalism and the use of religious symbolism by nationalist parties prior to 1947 is extensive. For a variety of perspectives see, P. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); S. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000); Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Peter Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy, eds, Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Indian community relations prior to the arrival of European colonialism, see David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). For an excellent analysis of some of the major theoretical debates, see Gail Minault, ‘Some Reflections on Islamic Revivalism vs. Assimilation among Muslims in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 18 (1984), pp. 301–2, and Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim Society in South Asia: A Reply to Das and Minault’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 20 (1986), pp. 97–104.

  21. On the terms ‘communal’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno-religious’, and their relative merits, see Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and Ayesha Jalal, ‘Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of “Communalism”: Partition Historiography Revisited’, Modern Asian Studies, 30. 3 (1996), pp. 681–9.

  22. C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives, 1935–1947 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 409–10.

  Chapter 2: Changing Regime

  1. A.K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (First published 1959, edition cited, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1989), pp. 92, 122.

  2. Times of India, 27 March 1946.

  3. Circular to all Provincial Congress Committees, 11 Jan. 1947, reprinted in Congress Bulletin (AICC, Delhi, 1947), pp. 10–15.

  4. CWMG, vol. 85, p. 35. Letter to V. Patel, 21 July 1946.

  5. SWJN, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 2; Malcolm Darling, At Freedom's Door (London, 1949), p. 17.

  6. Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal, ed. P. Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 202.

  7. Memoir of B.C. Dutt, one of the leaders of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, quoted in S. Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition: 1946 Provincial Elections in India (Delhi: Manohar, 19
98) pp. 114–15.

  8. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983) pp. 405–8.

  9. A.K. Gupta, The Agrarian Drama: The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934–1951 (Delhi: Manohar, 1996), p. 287.

  10. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082.

  11. Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradition in India (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 23. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 442–6.

  12. Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Little, Brown, 1997), p. 597.

  13. TOP, vol. 6, p. 393. Twynam to Wavell, 25 Oct. 1945.

  14. Times of India, 8 March, 1946.

  15. Desmond Young, Try Anything Twice (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 330.

  16. TOP, vol. 6, p. 554. Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, 27 Nov. 1945

  17. TOP, vol. 6, p. 576. Clow to Wavell, 1 Dec. 1945; IOR, L/PJ/5/168 Colville to Wavell, 3 Feb. 1947.

  18. SWGBP, vol. 10, pp. 378–9. Speech at a public meeting in village Syed Raja, Varanasi district, 27 Oct. 1945.

  19. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, pp. 418–23.

  20. TOP, vol. 6, pp. 512, 516. Intelligence Bureau, Home Dept 20 Nov. 1945. It was also reported that leaders at most of the 160 political meetings held in the Central Provinces during the first half of October demanded the release of INA men.

  21. TOP, vol. 6, pp. 554, 555.

  22. Address by King George VI at Opening of Parliament, 15 August 1945, The Times, 16 August 1945.

  23. The total electorate for the provincial elections was 41,075,839. As a proportion of the adult population over twenty years old, this may have been approximately 28 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women. See Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition, p. 47.