by Yasmin Khan
21. IOR Mss Eur. C290, Unpublished memoirs of C. Pearce (UP Police, 1945–7) c. 1977.
22. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, B.L. Dutt interviewed at home in Chandigarh, 15 March 1997.
23. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 164.
24. IOR Mss Eur. F161. Notes of E.S. Thomson, Railway Protection Force, c. Sept. 1947 [undated] see also IOR Mss Eur. 147, Demi official reports by D. Cruickshank, East India Railways, 13 Sept. and 22 Sept. 1947.
25. Ibid.
26. Ian Copland, State Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c. 1900–1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 156–7.
27. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082, 8 Sept. 1947.
28. SPC, vol. 6, p. 319. Patel to Nehru, 4 May, 1948.
29. IOR L/PJ/5/167, Fortnightly reports, Oct. 1946.
30. The Rape of Rawalpindi (Lahore: Punjab Riot Sufferers' Relief Committee, c. 1947), unpaginated.
31. G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A survey of events leading up to and following the Partition of India (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 133.
32. AICC, CL-9 (File 1) (1946–7).
33. BBC news online: ‘Indian director Mahesh Bhatt is hoping to make the first ever Indian film shot entirely in Pakistan – a project he described as a “South Asian Schindler's List”.’ 16 May 2003.
34. M. Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: the Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 96.
35. AICC, G–18, Part 2 (1947–8), M. Brelvi to Sadiq Ali, 24 Oct. 1947.
36. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Dalit Joginder, interviewed 18 March 1997.
37. Ian Talbot's introduction to Ahmad Salim, ed., Lahore, 1947 (Delhi: tara-india research press, 2006), p. 6.
38. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Shanti Seghal interviewed in Delhi, 1 Feb. 1947.
39. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 120.
40. AICC, G–10 (1947), Report of Meerut District Magistrate, 13 Feb. 1947.
41. IOR L/PJ/5/168, Colville to Wavell, 16 March 1947.
42. SPC, vol. 6, p. 266. R. Prasad to V. Patel, 14 May 1948.
Chapter 8: Leprous Daybreak
1. P.N. Chopra, ed., Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel: 1936–50 (New Delhi: Vision Books, 2001), pp. 164–9.
2. Richard Symonds, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 34.
3. Partition Emergency Committee Minutes, 16 Sept. 1947, reprinted in appendix to H.M. Patel, Rites of Passage: A Civil Servant Remembers ed. Sucheta Mahajan (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2005), p. 360.
4. Partition Emergency Committee Minutes, 16 Sept. 1947, reprinted in appendix to Patel, A Civil Servant Remembers, p. 360.
5. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 180; Judith Brown, Nehru: A political life (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 176.
6. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, pp. 33–4. Many stories of Nehru's agitated state were in circulation at this time, including one that he had kicked a group of sadhus, or Hindu holy men, who had blockaded the entrance to his house and refused to move: see USSA 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147 Box 6071, 5 Aug. 1947.
7. Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 17.
8. M.M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G.D. Birla (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 243. Birla to Katju, 29 Sept. 1947.
9. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An eye-witness account of the Partition of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 154.
10. Extract written by the Urdu journalist Shorish Kashmiri reproduced in M. Hasan, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 156.
11. S.M. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, 1947–8 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 14. Press conference, 14 July 1947.
12. Suhasini Das, ‘A Partition Diary’, trans. Kumkum Chakravarti, Seminar, 510 (Feb. 2002).
13. F. Tuker, While Memory Serves (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 530.
14. M. Hasan, ed., India Partitioned, vol. 2, p. 194.
15. Epstein Papers (Private Collection), Letter to Parents, 15 May 1947.
16. IOR Mss Eur. 147 Demi-official reports by D. Cruickshank, East India Railways, 13 Sept. and 22 Sept. 1947.
17. Mahatma Gandhi, Delhi Diary: Prayer speeches from 10 Sept. 1947 to 30 Jan. 1948 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), 28 Oct. 1947.
18. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 33.
19. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 441. Letter to Provincial Premiers, 15 Oct. 1947.
20. Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, pp. 178–9.
21. The Journey to Pakistan: A documentation on refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of Pakistan, 1993), p. 256. Jinnah's speech, 14 Sept. 1947 on the establishment of the Quaid e Azam Relief Fund.
22. Millions on the Move: The Aftermath of Partition (Govt of India, Delhi, 1948), photograph and caption facing p. 4.
23. R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), p. 232.
24. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 54; Tuker, While Memory Serves, p. 476.
25. USSA, 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147 Box 6071, Howard Donovan to Secretary of State, Washington, 30 Sept. 1947. Encl. extracts from a personal letter written by a retired British officer (unidentified), Simla 17 Sept. 1947.
26. Millions on the Move, p. 55.
27. Pakistan Times, 26 Aug. 1947.
28. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (School of Oriental and African Studies, 1997, 2000); Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, interviewed in Delhi, 15 March 1947; Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, p. 35.
29. Mangla Prasad, United Provinces Provincial Congress Secretary, Lucknow, to all district and town Congress committees, 30 July 1947. Quoted in Tan Tai Yong and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 37.
30. Times of India, 13 Aug. 1947; 18 Aug. 1947.
31. Syed Mahmud to S.K. Sinha, c. 1948 (undated) in V.N. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn, eds, A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics: Selected Letters of Syed Mahmud (Delhi: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 263–4.
32. UPSA, Home Department Police (A), Box 22, 63/1948.
33. Hindustan Times, 22 July 1947. Cited in Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, p. 42. For a very detailed account of Independence Day ceremonies and celebrations, on which my account draws, see ibid., pp. 29–77.
34. Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition, pp. 29–77.
35. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 115.
36. A.N. Bali, Now it can be told (Jullundur: Akash Vani Prakashan, 1949), p. 39.
37. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned; Amjad Husain, interviewed in Lahore, 11 Oct. 1995.
38. Ibid., Saroj Pachauri interviewed in Delhi, 28 Jan. 1997.
39. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 125.
40. Times of India, 12 Aug. 1947.
41. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan debates, 11 Aug. 1947 in M Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan, 1941–51 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 117.
42. Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 162.
43. IOR FNR, L/PJ/5/276, Wylie to Mountbatten, 10 Aug. 1947.
44. Ayesha Jalal, Gyanendra Pandey and Mushirul Hasan have analysed these conflations and confusions which were worsened by setting up ‘nationalism’ as a binary to ‘communalism’. See, for instance, Ayesha Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in S. Bose and A. Jalal, eds, Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); G. Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?�
�� Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41.4 (1999),and M. Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence (London and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
45. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, p. 28. Speech to Constituent Assembly, 11 Aug. 1947.
46. Abdul Quaiyum Khan to Syed Mahmud, 8/10 Feb. 1948 in Datta and Cleghorn, eds, A Nationalist Muslim, p. 267.
47. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Danial Latifi interviewed in Delhi, 23 Dec. 1996.
48. Figures are taken from tables and appendices in After Partition (Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1948) and The Journey to Pakistan (Govt. of Pakistan).
49. Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (first published in 1956; edition cited Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black, New Delhi, 1988), p. 57.
50. JP, 1st ser. vol. 2, pp. 824–5, ‘Jinnah Anxious to have non Muslims live in Pakistan’.
51. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 442. Letter to Premiers of Provinces, 15 Oct. 1947.
52. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 80.
53. Ibid., p. 92.
54. Emergency Committee minutes, 7 Sept. 1947, reprinted in H. M. Patel, A Civil Servant Remembers, p. 292.
55. Millions on the Move, p. 6.
56. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned Harcharan Singh Nirman interviewed in Chandigarh, 17 March 1997.
57. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 55.
58. Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 54.
59. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 180–1.
60. The Journey to Pakistan, p. 34.
61. M. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom. A Report on the New India in the Words and Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1949), p. 20.
62. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
63. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Kuldip Nayar, interviewed in Delhi, 29 Oct. 1996.
64. Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan, p. 57.
65. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned Nasreen Azhar, interviewed in Islamabad, 25 Sept. 1995.
66. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 110–11.
67. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 158; Mian Amiruddin's ‘Memories of Partition’, in Ahmad Salim, ed., Lahore, 1947 (Delhi, 2006), pp. 257, 251.
68. Millions on the Move, p. 67.
69. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Khorshed Mehta, interviewed in Delhi, 18 Jan. 1997.
70. The Indian government estimated at the end of 1947 that there were 1.25 million refugees in 160 camps in India and the Pakistani government estimated that there were 1,116,500 refugees in 16 camps in West Punjab (Sources: After Partition and The Journey to Pakistan).
71. Report by K.M. Malik Khuda Baksh, 4 Oct. 1947, reproduced in The Journey to Pakistan, p. 209.
72. Anis Kidwai, ‘In the Shadow of Freedom’, trans. from Urdu and reproduced in Hasan, ed., India Partitioned, vol. 2, pp. 167–80.
Chapter 9: Bitter Legacies
1. Note by Delhi's Superintendent of Police, 4 Jan. 1948 enclosed in SPC, vol. 6, pp. 260–1.
2. SPC, vol. 6, p. 162.
3. Catherine Rey-Schirr, ‘The ICRC's Activities on the Indian Subcontinent following Partition (1947–1949)’, International Review of the Red Cross, 323 (1998), pp. 267–91, p. 268.
4. SPC, vol. 6, p. 244. Nehru to V. Patel, 12 Jan. 1948.
5. Ibid., pp. 119–20. Bardoloi to Patel, 5 May 1948.
6. Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 46–121.
7. The Journey to Pakistan: A Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of Pakistan, 1993), pp. 310–11.
8. Quoted in Urvashi Butalia, ‘An Archive with a Difference: Partition Letters’, in Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 219. Urvashi Butalia's brilliant account of these letters suggests that, ‘notwithstanding their sense of reproach, and sometimes alienation’, through all the letters ‘ran a thread of commitment to the new nation, and to the newly-forming state’.
9. A classic example of this thinking is Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons in Bombay State: A Decennial Retrospect (Govt of Bombay, 1958), p. 28: ‘The rehabilitation of millions of displaced persons from Pakistan, who have migrated to our country, no doubt, has presented special problems but viewed broadly, it has to be regarded as an essential aspect of development of the economy of the country as a whole.’ On the intellectual consensus around ‘development’ as a state goal, the prioritisation of scientific expertise and state welfare, and its interpretation by nationalist elites in the late colonial state, see in particular, Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History c. 1930–50 (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
10. Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons (Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt of India, 1948), p. 17.
11. The Indian and Pakistani governments also used Victorian terms such as ‘the deserving poor’ and ‘sloth’ (no doubt inherited from the lexicon of the Raj) in their discussion of the displaced. Hard-working refugees who would stand on their own two feet were to be rewarded and encouraged while ‘measures to eliminate forced idleness’ were essential. While touring the kitchens of refugee camps in Lahore, Jinnah instructed the staff to, ‘Make the refugees work. Do not let them nurse the idea that they are guests for all time.’
Dependency on the state was an expensive sin to be discouraged, and this official mindset was entirely compatible with socialistic, centralised planning projects.
12. AICC, G–18 (Part 1), Frontier and Punjab Riot Sufferer Committee to Pant, 4 Oct. 1947; UPSA, Relief and Rehabilitation, 197(18)/47, Pakistan Sufferers Cooperative Housing Society.
13. Ravinder Kaur, ‘Planning Urban Chaos: State and Refugees in Post-partition Delhi’, in E. Hust and M. Mann, eds, Urbanization and Governance in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2005), p. 235. This attitude was most pronounced in the different way that Bengali and Punjabi refugees were treated by the Indian government. Punjabis had the lion's share of these schemes and benefited most from government help while the Bengalis were often left to fend for themselves. Less money was spent, per head, on Bengali than Punjabi refugees. The Punjabi crisis was more visible in the national capital than the Bengali one as the region was closer and Partition's damage was more concentrated, bloody and horrifying. But as the historian Joya Chatterji has illustrated, Congress politicians also drew on old colonial stereotypes and blatantly discriminated between the hardy Punjabis and the ‘weak’, ‘dependent’ Bengalis. Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal’, in Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory.
14. NMML AIHM C–177. The Hindu Mahasabha claimed that 15 were killed and 60 injured in the firing.
15. L. C. Jain, The City of Hope: the Faridabad Story (Delhi: Concept Publishing Co., 1998), p. 75.
16. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 68 153/51, Disbanding of women's home at Darbhangha Castle, Allahabad.
17. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation C, File MC/50 14 July 1951.
18. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation Dept, 273/48 Box 18, 12 March 1950.
19. Ata-ur-Rehman, ed., A Pictorial History of Pakistan Movement (Lahore and Karachi: Dost Associates, c. 1998).
20. The Journey to Pakistan, p. 296.
21. Ibid., Letter to the editor of the Pakistan Times on conditions at Walton camp, 23 Aug. 1947 from Mohammad Qureshi, p. 231.
22. The Journey to Pakistan, 19 Sept. 1947 p. 258.
23. W. Anderson and S. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder: Westview, 1987), p. 50.
24. Mawdudi's statement, 7 Oct. 1947, reproduced in The Journey to Pakistan, pp. 267–8. On Jam ‘at-i Islami and refugee rehabilit
ation in Pakistan, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994), pp. 88–9.
25. Mudie to Jinnah, 5 Sept. 1947, cited in Khalid B. Sayeed, Pakistan: the Formative Phase, 1857–1948 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 262.
26. I. Talbot, Freedom's Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 174.
27. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 441.
28. Emergency Committee minutes, 18 Sept. 1947, reproduced in H. Patel, Rites of Passage: A Civil Servant Remembers (New Delhi: Vedam, 2005), p. 367.
29. V.N. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn, eds, A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics. Selected Letters of Syed Mahmud (Delhi: Macmillan, 1974), Nehru to Syed Mahmud, 26 Feb. 1948, p. 268.
30. SPC, vol. 8, pp. 46–7.
31. SPC, vol. 8, pp. 49–50, 1 Dec. 1949.
32. Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 48.
33. After Partition (Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1948), p. 35.
34. Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70–98.
35. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 5, pp. 1–15.
36. The contrast with Liaquat Ali Khan's assassination could not have been more striking: he too died of gunshots to the chest, in October 1951. The motive of the assassin, a civil servant from NWFP, remained obscure, and the death of the premier did little to assuage social tensions.
37. M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan, 1941–51 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 121, Radio broadcast, 7 Oct. 1947.
38. ‘Gandhi Foresees Race for Armaments’, Civil and Military Gazette, 9 July 1947.