Thirty-first Issue: The Partition of India

Before I start, I want you to know I’m going to be talking about genocide and rape. If you don’t want to read about that sort of thing don’t read this issue. I'm including pictures but none of them are graphic - but please know if you google things you ARE going to find some pretty graphic pictures so be careful.
 
I have been reading up on the Partition lately. I watched a (pretty bad) movie about it and it got me curious because it was such a momentous event, and yet I don’t remember learning about it much in school until I was a senior in high school. Even then, we learned about the politics and it was very dry, I don’t remember ever really hearing about the violence and horrors of it. My grandparents were born before the partition, but I don’t know if they’d remember much of it. They were young, and anyway they’re not alive anymore to ask. But I was curious, so I started reading more about it, and that’s what this issue of my newsletter is going to be about.

As you probably know, the British were in charge of India, as well as a lot of the rest of the world, but things started falling apart for them starting in the 1940s until about the 1960s and 1970s. It is my understanding that India had been wanting independence for a while, and agreed to fight for the British in World War II if they would be able to be independent afterwards. The British more or less agreed to this, but instead of India just becoming India, in 1947 it was separated into two countries, India and Pakistan. Pakistan would be Muslim and India would be Hindu. Muslims began to move East and West to either Pakistan (East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971), and Hindus and Sikhs moved in the opposite direction.

 

 

Religious diversity had been a feature of Indian life for years and years and all of a sudden people started attacking each other with “massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence”. I’m not going to describe all of the atrocities because it’s pretty graphic, but some British soldiers and journalists who had seen Nazi death camps said that the Partition was worse as far as the brutality of the injuries and deaths. By 1948, fifteen million people had moved or been moved, and around one or two million people had been killed.

 

 

Islam came to India in the 11^th century, and spread all the way to what is now Bangladesh. About one fifth of the population of South Asia identified as Muslim eventually, but the two religions of Hinduism and Islam often mixed especially in villages and folk religions. Sufi mystics respected Hindu scriptures and often took on some of their religious practices. Not every Mughal king was tolerant; Aurangzeb is known for the atrocities he committed against Hindus, but most of them were okay. The last Mughal emperor in 1837 wrote that Hinduism and Islam “share the same essence”. People didn’t really define themselves based on their religion but more on their geographical location.

The blame for the religious divide seems to be blamed on the British by some and on Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi by others, and of course there are decent cases to be made for both ideas. A British scholar Yasmin Khan said that the Partition “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.”

Others however say that as late as 1940 things could have gone a different way. The three biggest politicians at the time were Muhammad Ali Jinnah (leader of the Muslim League) and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (leaders of mostly Hindu Congress Party). They were all educated in England and they were all lawyers but they had different personalities and ideas.

Muhammad Jinnah was tough, determined, and known for being a bit cold. Sarojini Naidu of the Congress party even joked that “she needed to put on a fur coat in his presence”. However, Jinnah was secular, drank, wore fancy suits and ties, and married a non-Muslim woman. He actually didn’t initially want to bring religion into politics at all, and that’s why he didn’t like Gandhi, saying “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done”. However, Jinnah wasn’t nearly as popular or famous as Gandhi or Nehru, and they didn’t like each other. By 1940 Jinnah had gotten the Muslim League to agree to demand a separate country for the Muslims in India. However, he insisted that the country would have freedom of religious expression. He said religion had nothing to do with the state. But it was too late; things were already spiraling out of control.

The first widespread massacres happened in Kolkata (then Calcutta) in 1946. H.S. Suhrawardy, the Muslim League Chief Minister of Bengal, made speeches and wrote in newspapers that “bloodshed and disorder are not necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause”. Again, I won’t describe the ways that people were killed but just know they were awful. Imaginative and horrifying. Five thousand people were killed. An American photojournalist named Margaret Bourke-White who had just seen Buchenwald a year earlier said that’s what the streets of Calcutta looked like at that time.



At first the Congress Party hadn’t wanted Partition, but now they wanted to do it because it was the only way that they could get rid of the Muslim League and Jinnah. The British began to lose control of the situation and just wanted to get out as fast as possible. In March of 1947 Lord Louis Mountbatten* went to Delhi and was the final Viceroy of India, where he tried to get Jinnah to cooperate with him. When he wouldn’t, he just persuaded everyone that Partition was the only way to go. Partition was supposed to happen in 1948 but Mountbatten in June of 1947 announced that in August power would be transferred. This made things more chaotic because they had to draw the borders of new states in just forty days. It is honestly mind-blowing to me to think about the amount of time they had in which they basically changed millions of people’s lives forever. Once the British left, there was a power vacuum, as they had failed to plan for the actual logistics of how Partition would take place.

Anyway, nobody was really happy about the situation. Jinnah did not like that he got a bit of Pakistan to the east of India and a bit to the west, and he said that the partition of Punjab and Bengal “will be sowing the seeds of future serious trouble”, basically foreshadowing the war in 1971 that brought about the independence of Bangladesh.

The night before independence, people began to flee. “As the remaining British officials in Lahore set off for the railway station, they had to pick their way through streets littered with dead bodies. On the platforms, they found the railway staff hosing down pools of blood. Hours earlier, a group of Hindus fleeing the city had been massacred by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting for a train. As the Bombay Express pulled out of Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village”.

 

 

Punjab saw the worst of the violence, as “foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.” There are stories of bodies, disfigured and swollen, showing up in rivers and canals months later. There are stories of dismembered women and babies.

Before Partition, Karachi in Pakistan was almost half Hindu. Delhi was a third Muslim. By the end of Partition, almost every Hindu in Karachi fled and two hundred thousand Muslims left Delhi. Those who lived through the Partition could not figure out how such a thing could happen. The movie I mentioned earlier that I was watching (again, it was kind of bad but got me curious about this) illustrated this well, showing workers in the palace dividing up books, spoons, plates, musical instruments into two piles and marking one half for Pakistan and one for India.

It was that ridiculous. There’s a story about a man named Ghulam Ali. He was a Muslim from India who made artificial limbs for a living. “He opted to live in India, but at the moment when Partition was announced he happened to be at a military workshop on the Pakistan side of the border. Within months, the two new countries were at war over Kashmir, and Ali was pressed into service by the Pakistani Army and prevented from returning to his home, in India. In 1950, the Army discharged him on the ground that he had become a citizen of India. Yet when he got to the frontier he was not recognized as Indian, and was arrested for entering without a travel permit. In 1951, after serving a prison sentence in India, he was deported back to Pakistan. Six years later, he was still being deported back and forth, shuttling between the prisons and refugee camps of the two new states. His official file closes with the Muslim soldier under arrest in a camp for Hindu prisoners on the Pakistani side of the border.”

Below are pictures of refugees seeking shelter in old forts.

 

 

 

Lahore was known for its poets, universities, architecture, and bookstores, and it was “reduced to rubble”. Amritsar, known for carpet and silk weavers, was so destroyed it took five years to clean it all up. There were hundreds of refugee camps around South Asia, and 70,000 women suffered sexual violence of some kind.



As most people know, India and Pakistan have disliked each other basically since 1947 until now. They fought over Bangladesh in 1971, and they’ve been fighting over Kashmir for decades. They both have nuclear weapons and they often come very close to war. It doesn’t seem like anything will be resolved anytime soon. Most of the issues are more complicated than can be easily explained away, but a lot of the animosity between the two countries can be traced back to Partition.

A lot of the history around Partition focused on the politics and the interactions between the four men who basically decided everything – Mountbatten, Jinnah, Gandhi, and Nehru. That’s the part of history I learned in school. But nowadays people are realizing that time is running out to record history about Partition from people who were there. Historians are gathering eye-witness testimony and a lot of that is available online. Here are some places I found some, but of course be forewarned that they are pretty intense.

People are not always willing to talk about the horrible things that happened during Partition to their families – a house that was theirs for centuries now lost, people killed, moved, lost – but they are definitely not willing to talk about how their own people may have also contributed to the violence. There’s a lot people don’t want to share.

Some people say that those who committed atrocities were just crazy. Some say that they were returning soldiers from World War II, now armed and trained, and convinced that the ‘others’ needed to be rooted out in ethnic cleansing. Tactics of propaganda that have been used in almost every genocide in recent history were used, and many local leaders tried to take advantage of the situation for their own gain. Some used the opportunity to get revenge for old family feuds, but many were just encouraged by the politicians and the media who were demonizing whichever religious group was not their own.

Another thing that was lost is the idea that South Asia was ever united. Nowadays people think there’s no way that the two religions could have mixed, but before the British came, “the land in which vernacular Sanskrit-based languages were cross-pollinated with Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, in which Rajput princesses married Mughal rulers, and musical and artistic styles had thrived on the fusion of influences from central Asia and local courtly cultures.” The British had a part in dividing and conquering, and then Partition completely got rid of this concept to lead to the way that India and Pakistan exist now. It can never go back to the way it was.

 

(Above are Indian and Pakistani soldiers at the Punjab border)

*When I visited India this past winter, one of our tour guides mentioned the rumor that Lord Mountbatten's wife, Lady Mountbatten, may have had an affair with Nehru, who she had met in Singapore a year before. That certainly may have made things harder for Lord Mountbatten with Jinnah, if it is true.

Here are some long and informative articles I found a lot of the quotes above from, one is from the Guardian and one is from the New Yorker. Here is a video without sound of some of the devastation and clean up after the Calcutta riots. And to end it on a slightly more positive note, here is a list of some people who helped others during the Partition. Unfortunately the source isn't really great and I can't find any verification of some of these stories, but I want to end on a nicer note.