Читать книгу Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day - John Keay - Страница 12

It has often been asked why no one seems to have foreseen the hell that Partition was about to unleash. The Calcutta killings of 1946 and those elsewhere in Bengal and Bihar gave ample warning, as did the atrocities perpetrated in western Punjab in early 1947. A few officials, both Indian and British, did anticipate trouble and called for reinforcements. But in Delhi the excitement over independence claimed the moment to the exclusion of all else. Victory in the freedom struggle was not to be gainsaid. It was assumed that the entire nation shared in the rejoicings and that, in the prevailing spirit of goodwill, Partition could be effected without bloodshed. The haste with which it had been adopted might actually help. Instead of laborious consultations and the tensions that must result from them, most of the people affected were to be presented with a fait accompli. Territory would be allocated to India or Pakistan on the basis of the majority community; minorities, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, were to be reassured with soothing words and the glorious prospect of freedom.

Aside from an arrogance born of bureaucratic habit and indifference to the plight of the lower castes, this attitude overlooked the considerable novelty of communities being equated with territories and nations with sovereign states. It also ignored the fact that a British India riddled with princely states had never been the uniform entity that partitioning implied. And it took no account of South Asia’s prior acquaintance with political division and the concept of sovereignty as something layered rather than absolute. Nehru insisted that a sense of all-Indian nationhood could be traced back into the mists of antiquity; but for most of its interminable past the Indian subcontinent had not been governed as one. Fragmentation was in fact the norm, and a strong, centralised polity as championed by Congress very much the exception. Despite claims to the contrary, history was on the side of Partition.

In yet another paradox, it has been argued that it was not Jinnah but Nehru himself who was ultimately responsible for Partition and so, indirectly, for the imminent holocaust. The demand for Pakistan, say the protagonists of this view, need not have meant separation.¹ Jinnah wanted guarantees for his ‘Muslim nation’ in the form of a ‘Pakistan’ composed of all the existing Muslim-majority provinces of British India – so including the whole of Bengal (with Calcutta) and the whole of the Punjab (possibly with Delhi). The result in terms of population would have been something much nearer parity between this so-called ‘Greater Pakistan’ and a rump India composed solely of the non-Muslim-majority provinces. Such an arrangement should have sufficed to preclude mass migration and the killings that would accompany it, because Muslim opinion within the unpartitioned subcontinent would be well represented in the Constituent Assembly and could be decisive in the formation of a central government. Nothing if not consistent, in 1946 Jinnah had demanded a similar parity in respect of the interim government; indeed the Cabinet Mission’s ‘grouping’ of provinces could be read as foreshadowing this ‘Greater Pakistan’.

Jinnah’s somewhat excessive demands were informed by past experience. In the 1930s, Congress ministries in provinces with a vociferous Muslim minority, notably UP, had been accused of ignoring the sensibilities of Muslim constituents and shunning the claims to office of the Muslim League. Arguably, this could now be prevented; the League had emerged from recent elections much stronger, and the possibility of its retaliating in its own Muslim-majority provinces could be expected to act as a deterrent to Congress exclusivity.

Moreover, a Pakistan within India might be more manageable than one outside it. The anomalies and inconveniences of Pakistan’s two halves being themselves partitioned by a thousand kilometres of potentially hostile territory would be largely negated; a Pakistan within India might be less vulnerable to internal ethnic and linguistic contradictions than if left to its own devices; and the League would be well-placed to forge alliances with other non-Congress parties, like those representing the lower-caste and no-caste communities or lesser minorities like the mixed-race Anglo-Indians. Such an alliance might even contest power with Congress in the central government. Thus Jinnah, provided his ‘Greater Pakistan’ was forthcoming, had much to gain by not insisting on Partition. Some loose form of federation, or just a treaty that preserved a façade of unity, might suffice. It would be a small price to pay in terms of diminished sovereignty, and the arrangement was anyway to be subject to revision after ten years.

But if this was indeed what Jinnah wanted, he never actually said so. Adamant about what he would reject, he could be remarkably reticent about what he would accept. Nor was it what he was offered. For to Nehru, an India hobbled by a subordinate Pakistan had begun to look a worse option than an India relieved of a sovereign Pakistan. Only a strong central government could tackle India’s massive social problems, oversee the incorporation of the princely states, root out feudal and colonial attitudes, plan the framework of a modern economy, and set the world a proud example. A weak federal centre as posited by Jinnah would paralyse the state-building process and play into the hands of other possible separatists, for instance in the north-east and the south of the country. New Delhi would therefore be better writing off Pakistan completely and bidding good riddance to the unbending adversary who claimed to be its ‘sole spokesman’.

This did not, though, mean giving Jinnah the Greater Pakistan he wanted. The quid pro quo of conceding sovereignty was that the new Pakistan must be pared down to its Islamic heartland. With non-Muslims (Sikhs and Hindus) outnumbering Muslims in both the eastern half of the Punjab and the western half of Bengal, there was some logic to these two great provinces being themselves partitioned. In effect, instead of a Greater Pakistan albeit within India, Jinnah must be obliged to settle for a lesser Pakistan albeit outside India. ‘Maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten’ was his own description of the new construct; he would never accept it, he had declared. But in 1947, with his supposed bluff over separation called, that was precisely what he did have to accept. And hence, as the countdown to Independence proceeded, it was Nehru who readily endorsed Mountbatten’s Partition plan and Jinnah who, when asked to do so, merely hung his head. The gesture seemed to signify despair as much as assent.

*

August, though mid-monsoon, is not an unpleasant month in Delhi. Cloudbursts douse the heat and clearing skies excite the vegetation. Trees erupt into flower, puddles shrink into sward. Were the subcontinent’s New Year timed for the growth cycle instead of the daylight cycle, it would surely fall in August. In 1947, as mid-month approached, there was much optimism and some understandable self-congratulation. Mountbatten had chosen the date for the handover of power: 15 August. He thought it propitious as being the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, an event in which his own part as commander of Allied forces in South-East Asia would of course be noted. India’s astrologers also deemed it propitious, and Pakistan’s leadership contented itself with insisting on just a twenty-four-hour precedence. By opting for 14 August, Pakistan would be winning independence ahead of India, and so from the hands of the British government in London rather than from the Congress government in Delhi.

Incredibly, as it now seemed, both nations had wrested their freedom through largely non-violent pressure; and although the final round of negotiations had been conducted at breakneck speed, relations with London had never been better. In fact, the restraint shown by both sides had set a valuable precedent for future decolonisations elsewhere. The majority of erstwhile India remained intact. And even Pakistan, the two-part exception, looked to have secured the resources – military, diplomatic and economic – to defy the odds stacked against it. Bisection, though regrettable, had to be better than dissection; and if that was the price of liberation, then so be it. The delights of Independence would quickly allay the pangs of Partition.

Yet when addressing New Delhi’s Constituent Assembly on the eve of Independence, Nehru invited the people to reflect as much as to celebrate. The tone of his famous oration was more messianic than triumphant, its twin themes of redemption and destiny sounding positively Churchillian.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially … [The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges … The day has come – the day appointed by destiny – and India stands forth again … We have much to do before we redeem the pledges … no resting for any one of us until we redeem our pledge in full.²

The rhetoric lost nothing by repetition; a moment so ‘solemn’ positively invited a rambling retrospective. The ‘pledge’ was to ‘the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity’, while that quaint idea of a ‘tryst’, a prearranged meeting at an appointed hour, was intended to evoke a sense of common progression. History had ordained it, struggle had confirmed it. For Nehru, a formidable intellect and an ardent socialist whose moods could be attributed to his excessive workload, 15 August 1947 marked the nation’s longed-for epiphany. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ he intoned. Out with the Old; in with the New.

Jinnah, a minaret of a man compared to Nehru, erect and impeccable with corbel-like cheekbones and a coiffed cupola of silver hair, was both more cautious and more cautionary. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August, he seemed scarcely able to believe that his call for a sovereign Muslim nation was being realised. Only what he called ‘an unprecedented cyclonic revolution’ could have brought about the birth of Pakistan; it was the consummation of a scheme so ‘titanic’, so ‘unknown’, that it had ‘no parallel in the history of the world’. Yet for Pakistan to function, grievances like those voiced by Malcolm Darling’s anxious informants must be quickly addressed. Bribery and corruption would be put down ‘with an iron hand’, he warned, jobbery and nepotism would never be tolerated, and ‘black-marketing’ in foodstuffs was the greatest crime of all.

No less important was the suppression of what Jinnah now called ‘the angularities of the majority and minority communities’. In an outspoken assertion of cross-communal equality – one that would come to haunt the new nation – the man already hailed as Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) announced to the Pakistan Assembly that:

You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another … [If] we keep that in front of us as our ideal … you will find that in the course of time Hindus … cease to be Hindus, and Muslims … cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.³

Nehru, the champion of secularism, could not have put it better. For Jinnah too, freedom meant casting off not just the bonds of foreign rule but those of communal rivalry. The ‘Muslim nation’ must be all-inclusive. To a state predicated and won on the uncompromising basis of a shared religion he now offered as its guiding principles ‘justice and complete impartiality’. The success of the Pakistan movement was down to ‘an evolution of the greatest possible character’, plus those vaguely ‘cyclonic’ forces. In keeping with this unspecified agency, Pakistan might ‘become one of the greatest nations of the world’, provided it demonstrated neither ‘prejudice or ill will’, neither ‘partiality or favouritism’. Islam received not a single mention in the speech. Its unacknowledged presence was like that of a no-longer-welcome guest. Evidently the advent of nationhood heralded a new departure in national definition.

Mountbatten, too, milked the moment for all it was worth. Where so many of his countrymen had floundered over the last three decades, he had triumphed in a matter of weeks. The nettle of Congress–League distrust had been grasped, the Gordian knot of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims summarily severed. Not a single British life had been lost in the act of disengagement; and though about to be anything but peaceful, the bisection of the subcontinent was deemed to be unmarred by actual war. In British eyes, Mountbatten made the loss of empire almost palatable. The manner of its surrender was portrayed as a credit to all concerned, and the abiding friendship of the successor states was construed as a benediction on the whole two-hundred-year Raj. Individually, each of the successor states had opted to join the British Commonwealth; each was pledged to liberal values and democratic government; neither felt inclined to humiliate the ex-imperialists; and both retained the services of some senior British personnel. It was a more amicable parting of the ways than had seemed possible during the previous decades of acrimonious struggle.

Like the monsoonal cloudbursts, the plaudits rained down on the beaming Mountbatten from all sides. New Delhi invited him to stay on as Governor-General. Prime Minister Attlee noted that ‘broadly speaking the thing went off well’, and ‘we left behind so much good will’. Churchill, defender of the empire and inveterate opponent of Indian independence, was greatly reassured by India’s and Pakistan’s willingness to join the Commonwealth. And to the already impressive royal connections of his last ever Viceroy, King George VI added an earldom. While modestly deflecting the praise, Mountbatten yet lapped it up. His showmanship had paid off; a career that might so easily have been tarnished by failure or tarred by the shame of retreat had in fact been burnished. Yet, looking back many years later, he would be less sanguine about his achievement and a lot less delicate. ‘I fucked it up,’ he told John Osman, a BBC journalist, in 1965.⁴

Wrong-footing critics with outrageous volte-faces was all part of the famous Mountbatten charm, yet this disclaimer was not insincere. At the time his main regret had been his failure to secure an invitation to become Governor-General of Pakistan as well as India; for, much to his fury, Jinnah insisted that he himself would be Governor-General of Pakistan. Jinnah was deeply suspicious of the cosy relationship between Nehru and the Mountbattens – especially that between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten – and he didn’t trust the ex-Viceroy to act as an impartial arbitrator in the division of the spoils between the two dominions, principal among these being the army. Nor, unlike Nehru, could Jinnah afford to relinquish even the trappings of his authority to a post-imperial pawnbroker. From the Chittagong Hills to the North-West Frontier fissiparous tendencies already menaced the bipolar Pakistan. The new India could be expected to exploit them.

To share a common Governor-General with Hindustan [i.e. the new India] would have given Congress an excuse to use this joint office to make terms separately with the Muslim areas [i.e. Pakistan] in the event that the Pakistan constituent assembly fell to pieces. It was to avoid this disaster, that Jinnah had to exercise the powers of a Governor-General himself and in the process consolidate the [Muslim] League’s authority over the Muslim [majority] areas.⁵

Mountbatten blamed himself for not having secured a prior understanding. As he told his daughter at the time, ‘Your poor Daddy has finally and irretrievably “boobed” … made a mess of things through overconfidence and overtiredness.’⁶ He ought to have foreseen Jinnah’s move and, but for the pressure of his own deadline, he thought he would have. But much later he seems to have had second thoughts not about the governor-generalship but about the deadline itself. In retrospect it was this more than anything that had ‘fucked it up’.

Bringing forward Attlee’s cut-off date of June 1948 to his own of August 1947 has often been supposed Mountbatten’s masterstroke. Yet at the time it had appalled his staff and confounded those who had habitually complained of Britain’s procrastination. Nehru had thought the new timetable ‘too much of a rush’, the princes needed all the time – and more – that they could possibly get, and the Muslim League doubted whether such a schedule, however agreeable to the prospects of Pakistan, was actually feasible.⁷ Announcing his plan on 3 June 1947, Mountbatten had allowed just over ten weeks for its implementation. There was to be no time for second thoughts, and precious little for negotiation. That was the point. As he advised London, speed – one might almost say panic – was of the essence.

For Mountbatten this urgency was tactical: it would concentrate minds, demonstrate good faith, and narrow the options. It was not a sine qua non of the terms of transfer. It was not even an immediate imperative. The threat of civil war had in fact receded. Calcutta still simmered, but since April the communal outbreaks in the Punjab had subsided and, but for the plight of the Meos in and around the princely states south of Delhi, there had been nothing on a comparable scale elsewhere. Those, therefore, who professed to hold the unity of India so dear, like Nehru, might reasonably have challenged a deadline which, while making Partition virtually inevitable, allowed almost no time to prepare for it. That they did not object was significant. Gandhi had famously declared, ‘You shall have to divide my body before you divide India.’ But Gandhi, now seventy-seven and sidelined by Congress, was devoting his remaining energies to dousing the embers of communal violence wherever they smouldered. Jinnah continued adamant for a Pakistan of some sort; and Nehru did nothing. Persuaded by the realisation that India would be stronger without Pakistan, and mindful of that viceregal promise to stampede the princely states into accession, he let it stand. Thus the responsibility for Partition may be said to have itself been partitioned – not perhaps ‘equally or in full measure but very substantially’.

*

Dividing the assets of an empire between two deeply suspicious heritors called for wisdom and an ongoing spirit of compromise. Neither was much in evidence. Nehru had brains and breadth of vision, Jinnah tenacity and stature, and Mountbatten bravado plus breeding. But none had the time, the inclination or the skills needed to apportion sundry budgets, deconstruct entire ministries, allocate all manner of weaponry and aircraft, number-crunch everything from pipe bands to pencil sharpeners, manage the logistics of cross-border transfer, and delineate the actual frontier. Carving up the turkey was down to the attributes of their lieutenants – the hard-nosed pragmatism of the burly Sardar Patel plus the mandarin-mind of V.P. Menon (for India), and the resourcefulness of the dependable Liaquat Ali Khan (for Pakistan).

In this exercise India had a head start. Not least, this was because it was still ‘India’. The new Union of India, which was celebrating its independence in 1947, would become the Republic of India after the adoption of the Constituent Assembly’s new Constitution in 1950; but either way, India stayed ‘India’. The term ‘Hindustan’ (‘Hindu-land’), as hitherto applied to an India minus the Muslim-majority provinces, and as preferred by many Pakistanis to this day, was allowed to lapse. ‘It is nevertheless significant that until the bitter end the [Muslim] League continued to protest against Hindustan adopting the title “Union of India”,’ reports Ayesha Jalal.⁸ Jinnah objected to both the ‘Union’ and the ‘India’, and is said to have seen the rebuff of his protest as further evidence of collusion between Mountbatten and the Congress leadership.

Etymologically, the ‘India’ word might actually have suited Pakistan better: it derives from ‘Indus’, and originally indicated just those lands beside the Indus river that today constitute Pakistan. But ‘Pakistan’ had been preferred by the Muslim League ever since the 1930s, when the term had been coined in Cambridge as an undergraduate acronym for the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west: thus ‘P’ for the Punjab, ‘A’ for Afghania (a contentious name for the North-West Frontier), ‘K’ for Kashmir, ‘S’ for Sind, and an unconvincing ‘TAN’ for Balochistan. (There was no ‘B’ for Bengal, a telling omission at the time and one fraught with the potential for further partition, notably in 1971.) By a happy coincidence, another reading of ‘Pak-istan’ had it to mean the ‘Land of the Pure’. Either reading would do. Jinnah relished it, and had no designs on the ‘India’ word himself. But he had sound reasons for objecting to New Delhi’s coopting it. On the strength of it, the new India would claim the old India’s seat at the United Nations. It also arrogated to the new India what Jinnah regarded as a spurious continuity and a provocative precedence.

Others objected on the grounds that the ‘India’ word did not convey enough continuity and precedence – indeed, that it was tainted as being of foreign origin. Ceylon, a British colony but never a part of British India, would gain its independence in 1948 and redesignate itself as Sri Lanka in 1972, so reviving an ancient indigenous name, shedding a Graeco-Roman and colonial one, and appeasing nationalist sentiment. India nearly did the same. The term ‘Bharata-varsha’, or simply ‘Bharat’, figured in the Sanskrit epics and was strongly urged by those who thought a primordial name hallowed by Hindu tradition more appropriate. Although Nehru, the arch secularist, would have none of it, ‘Bharat’ still features in the writings of Sanskrit-minded apologists for Hindu nationalism. It appears on numerous maps, occasionally resurfaces in national debate and could yet be officially preferred.

If antiquity was ambivalent about India’s identity, recent history offered ample compensation. New Delhi’s Congress government had the advantage of stepping into the capacious shoes of the British Raj. The ruddy imperial edifices that reared above the capital’s leafy canopy needed only to be renamed. The rotunda that had been the Legislative Assembly building became the Parliament building, and the monumental Government House (the residence of the Viceroys) became Rashtrapati Bhawan (the residence of the Presidents). Kingsway was renamed Rajpath (Government’s Way), and Queensway Janpath (People’s Way). Within the colonnades of the central government’s sandstone secretariat buildings the peons and the pigeons were joined by flocks of khadi-clad freedom fighters, now with ministerial portfolios. What with inheriting the lion’s share of the erstwhile Indian Civil Service (soon renamed the Indian Administrative Service) along with the archives, the high court, various other national institutions and surveys, and an abundance of both state offices and office stationery – including the pins used as paperclips – India’s new government took possession of a capital already equipped with all the paraphernalia of power.

Pakistan came off less well. Entire ministries had to be improvised in tin sheds, and quite senior clerks took up residence in a railway station. Packing cases were converted into desks, meals were often served in alfresco canteens, and long thorns were gathered from the roadside shrubbery because the supply of paper pins had failed to arrive. Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Punjab province, would have been the obvious choice as the home of the new government, but it was ruled out on the grounds that it was too close for strategic comfort to the new border with India. A safer haven might have been afforded by Dhaka (then spelled ‘Dacca’) in East Bengal. As the one-time capital of Bengal’s Nawabs it had some fine buildings and lay at the heart of what was now Pakistan’s most populous province. Yet such was the bias – social, linguistic, cultural, military and strategic – in favour of Pakistan’s western provinces that Dhaka’s claims were barely entertained. Instead Karachi, a foetid port-city near the mouth of the Indus that doubled as the administrative headquarters of the lately formed province of Sind, had been chosen.

Karachi was declared merely the interim capital. Like much else in Pakistan, it was a makeshift arrangement. For while the new India inherited a functioning state, plus its majestic capital, the new Pakistan was having to improvise everything from scratch – and to do so under the direst national emergency imaginable. Already thousands, rising to millions, were on the move. Already the chain reaction of atrocities had resumed. Ahead loomed a crescendo of killing unlike anything ever witnessed elsewhere in so-called peacetime. Pakistan, which was itself in Jinnah’s words the product of an ‘unprecedented cyclonic revolution’, was about to occasion a second ‘titanic’ convulsion ‘with no parallel in the history of the world’.

*

War, even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan in the latter half of 1947. It had begun in early August in the Amritsar district of east Punjab, when gangs of armed Sikhs started exacting revenge for the atrocities of the previous March in west Punjab. Muslims were massacred and their villages set on fire. The pogrom then spread to Lahore, as Muslims retaliated against both Hindus and Sikhs. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) were trashed, Hindu temples desecrated, infidels butchered. And the mayhem continued, fiercer than ever, even as, far away in Delhi and Karachi, the high-flown rhetoric poured forth and the two nations deliriously hailed their independence. ‘Rejoicings; Happy Augury for the Future’ read a headline in the Times of India on 18 August. ‘The Jeremiahs who foresaw trouble’ had been utterly confounded, it reported. In doing so, the newspaper not only belied the idea that ‘trouble’ of some sort was wholly unexpected, but lulled its readership into a dangerously blinkered complacency about the conflagration in the neighbouring Punjab.

There, dawn on 15 August – Independence Day in Delhi, but the day after in Pakistan – found a memorably named British official, one Penderel Moon, being driven into Lahore from his post as Minister and adviser to the Nawab of Bahawalpur. A Muslim princely state contiguous to Muslim west Punjab, Bahawalpur was about to join Pakistan. Confident that the transition would be peaceful, the Nawab was sojourning comfortably in Surrey, and Moon was heading for the hills and a fortnight’s holiday. Bahawalpur itself was quiet. The Punjab, give or take a few roadblocks, seemed much as usual. Not until Moon reached Lahore itself did he notice anything untoward.

As we approached the built-up area, we overtook a military lorry in the back of which there was a soldier with a rifle and two or three bloodstained corpses bouncing about on the floor. A little farther on five or six men were lined up along the side of the road with their hands up and a soldier covering them with his rifle. Two hundred yards beyond there was a corpse lying on a charpoy … and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense columns of smoke were rising into the air.⁹

Lahore, in short, was not celebrating. It was burning. Over lunch at Faletti’s Hotel, Moon learned that the city’s largely Muslim police, in a pattern that would be emulated by both sides, were siding with the killers and even affording them covering fire. Under the circumstances he was strongly discouraged from proceeding to Simla by car. Instead he sallied forth for the railway station and a non-existent train.

At exactly the same time, Nehru and the Mountbattens were forcing their way through the flag-waving crowds along Delhi’s Rajpath. They had just attended the Independence Day ceremonies at India Gate. King George VI had assured India that freedom-loving people everywhere would want to share in their celebrations, but such was the press of freedom-savouring Indians that the formalities had had to be curtailed. Mountbatten could barely salute the Indian tricolour from the safety of his carriage. His daughter had managed to reach the podium only after removing her high heels and clambering over the densely packed masses, helped by, among others, Nehru. ‘An enormous picnic of almost a million people, all of them having more fun than they’d ever had in their lives’ was how Mountbatten described the gathering.¹⁰ It was fun all round. The bandsmen couldn’t reach their bandstand, and the gun salutes were drowned out by the cheering. Nehru found himself thrust into the viceregal carriage by well-wishers, there to be joined by some sari-ed matrons scooped up by Lady Edwina Mountbatten lest they be trampled underfoot. ‘The rest of the day was taken up with parties, speeches and almost impossible progressions through the undiminishing throngs in the streets.’¹¹

Lahore, on the other hand, was silent. Even the railway station, reportedly ‘a veritable death trap’ at the time, indeed ‘a scene of wholesale carnage … under a continuous rain of bullets’, was in fact almost deserted.¹² Penderel Moon found only twenty Sikh policemen, all cowering behind a barbed-wire barricade for their own protection, plus a displaced and distraught stationmaster. The stationmaster had just arrived, having escaped from his charge at the nearby Mughalpura depot by requisitioning a locomotive. Two days previously forty-three non-Muslims, many of them Sikhs, had been massacred there; now their brethren were retaliating. ‘We were attacked by 8,000 Sikhs,’ he reported. ‘They have killed several hundred. I have been telephoning for help for thirteen hours.’¹³

Moon, a goggle-eyed administrator with progressive views, supposed this estimate of the carnage an exaggeration, but he admitted that cross-border trains were already being targeted. A week earlier one carrying Muslim clerks to staff the new Pakistan government in Karachi had been scheduled to pass through Bahawalpur en route from Delhi. It never arrived; a bomb had derailed it near Ferozepur, leaving three dead and numerous wounded. ‘This was one of the first train outrages and the first incident to make any noticeable impression on the Muslims of Bahawalpur.’ In the same week several hundred terrified refugees had detrained in the state unannounced. They claimed to have been driven out of their homes in the Indian princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur (near Delhi). Lucky to be escaping imminent genocide, they were in fact the first of a mass migration of Meos. But as refugees they were no more welcome in Bahawalpur than in Bharatpur. The authorities ‘told them that if they were seeking the promised land of Pakistan they had come to the wrong place and better go on to Punjab or Sind. Gradually they drifted away.’¹⁴ Educated Muslims were badly needed in Pakistan; threadbare peasants with lax ideas about Islam it could do without.

Giving up on the trains, Moon travelled on to Simla in a military convoy that was escorting members of the British administration in the Punjab on the first leg of their long journey home. They were leaving the province, he noted, in much the same state as they had found it a hundred years earlier, blood-soaked and in chaos. Yet this was only the beginning. Within hours the situation would dramatically worsen. Partition, in principle so reasonable, was in practice anything but.

At the time, much of the precise border between the two new nations was still uncertain. While the flags of the successor states were being saluted all over the subcontinent, in the vicinity of the expected border it was unclear which flag should be flying. The broad terms of one partition, that of India and Pakistan, had been agreed, but the precise alignment of the subsidiary partitions in Bengal and the Punjab had been entrusted to a third party and then kept under wraps. Several millions thus greeted Independence, if they greeted it at all, not knowing for sure to which country they belonged. Only when the boundary award was announced and published would they discover their fate, make plans accordingly, and so open the floodgates to the twentieth century’s greatest transfer of population.

In the hectic last days of British rule, boundary commissions for both Bengal and the Punjab had been set up. Maps had been hastily consulted, opinions sought and red lines drawn. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge who had never before visited the subcontinent, had been entrusted with this heavy responsibility and assured of complete independence. He had also been told to finish his work ahead of the transfer of power. This he did, but without the luxury of being able to inspect the actual terrain, acquaint himself with its peculiarities (like those errant rivers in Bengal) or derive much support from his commissioners: two Muslim League and two Congress nominees, these commissioners invariably upheld the interests of their political patrons and divided accordingly. It was Radcliffe’s casting vote that was decisive.

‘Nobody in India will love me for my award,’ he wrote. They would not. The sealed documents were delivered to Mountbatten two days before Independence, but were only made public two days after. By then Radcliffe had emplaned for London, never to set foot in South Asia again. All parties had agreed to respect his findings, and it was accepted that implementation would be the responsibility of the successor governments. Mountbatten, heading for the hills like Moon, considered his work done. British hands, already washed and ready for congratulatory shaking, were not to be soiled by any last-minute bloodletting.

The only exception was a British-commanded Boundary Force, supposedly 50,000 strong, that was to keep the peace in the Punjab and oversee its partition. Though active enough, it failed to do either. No more than about 25,000 troops materialised; ‘this meant there were fewer than two men to a square mile’.¹⁵ And instead of operating under a unified command, the Force was itself quickly partitioned. Suspicious of its impartiality, on 29 August, at the height of the massacres, the successor governments opted to exercise distinct commands, disband the Force and deploy the troops intended for peacekeeping to protect and succour their co-religionists.

The mutual suspicion was made worse by the terms of Radcliffe’s actual award. Dividing erstwhile India into its Muslim- and non-Muslim-majority provinces had been comparatively straightforward, but the lesser territorial units to be parcelled out when dividing up the Punjab and Bengal posed a trickier challenge. These lesser elements had been specified merely as ‘areas’; they might be districts, sub-districts or even smaller units. And although the twin principles of partition – division on the basis of the religious majority plus contiguity to ‘areas’ of a like complexion – were generally paramount, ‘other factors’ (like local traditions, irrigation networks and strategic necessity) might be taken into account. There was thus scope for exceptions, and still greater scope for suspicions about exceptions. Well-founded rumours would circulate that Radcliffe had indeed been ‘influenced’. India’s expectations in respect of the Punjab border, especially where it afforded an access route to Kashmir, seem to have found favour with him. So did Indian demands in respect of a northern corridor, or ‘chicken-neck’, linking West Bengal and Assam; concessions to Pakistan in the Chittagong and Khulna areas of East Bengal were supposedly made in return.

In Karachi and New Delhi these matters were warmly debated. But to the toiling masses for whom the border’s various ‘corridors’, ‘salients’, ‘irrigation headworks’ and ‘enclaves’ were home – and had been since time immemorial – the announcement of the new border was positively incendiary. Being ‘awarded’ to what was considered a hostile state, or excluded from what was considered a supportive one, amounted to an existential threat. As Indian Muslims seeking Pakistan, and Pakistani Sikhs and Hindus fleeing from it, began pouring across the border, Punjabis on either side of the delimited but still undemarcated line were swept along by the tide.

Whole villages, clans, sub-castes and kinship groups upped sticks, sometimes literally as they detached the roof joists of their homes to cart them away in the hope of re-using them. In early September, Penderel Moon, back in Bahawalpur after curtailing his holiday, recorded the arrival there of a dishevelled and unwashed gentleman called Bagh Ali. ‘He arrived on foot … along with 5,000 members of the Sakhera tribe, many of whom were his tenants’; after a week on the road ‘one could hardly imagine that he was a wealthy Muslim landowner and a MLA [Member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly]’, recalled Moon. Bagh Ali and his people hailed from Ferozepur, a place expected to go to Pakistan but which had in fact been awarded to India. But what most distressed Moon was the news that this throng, along with their bullocks, carts and farm implements, had been officially ordered to migrate. It was not the feared Sikh paramilitaries who had forced them out, but a government directive from Ferozepur’s Sub-Divisional Officer. Unbeknown to Moon, Delhi and Karachi had just agreed on an exchange of population between the two halves of the partitioned Punjab. The arrangement was intended to reduce the violence, which both governments roundly condemned. But forcible migration was a different matter. In the Punjab it was state-sponsored.

Over the long border between western India and the western wing of Pakistan some ten to twenty million people are thought to have crossed, some going east, others west, during the months of August, September and October. Additionally, anything between 200,000 and one million were massacred – in their homes, in their fields, on the road, in the trains – or left to die by the wayside. In a sandy tract near Fazilpur in Bahawalpur, Penderel Moon spied what he thought were some piles of manure. Closer inspection revealed them as heaps of bodies.

In two and threes and sixes and tens, more and more came into view as we rounded the curve of the village … till they lay ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the vale of Vallambrosa’. Men, women and children, there they all were jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures, some of them so life-like that one could hardly believe that they were really dead.¹⁶

It reminded Moon of pictures he remembered from his childhood of the Napoleonic battlefields. Three hundred and fifty Hindus had been mown down by Pathan rifle fire in this one incident.

Hundreds of thousands more were plundered of their chattels, a term that was taken to include their womenfolk and children. Girls and young mothers were perceived as embodiments of all that the other community held most sacred and were picked off accordingly. Abducted, exposed, traded, raped, mutilated or forcibly appropriated, most would never know justice and many would prefer suicide. Those who would later be ‘recovered’ and repatriated fared little better. Dishonoured, they might find themselves unwanted by their former loved ones; traumatised or not, they might be locked away by them.

The horror lay as much in the obscenity of the atrocities as the scale; and to these atrocities, as to all the other massacres and burnings, there was often a pattern. Though characterised as ‘lunacy’, the mayhem was a madness with method. On both sides the perpetrators were invariably male, well armed and often ex-soldiers or paramilitaries. Incitement came in the form of pamphlets, partisan press reports and pronouncements from political and religious leaders; premeditation was evident in both the planning and the execution of the attacks; and guns as much as knives were the weapons of choice.

This was not haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systematic ethnic cleansing. Large groups of men, with their own codes of honour and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other.¹⁷

Of the few things that disqualified the conflict as ‘war’, the near absence of battles was the most obvious; for the aggressors, instead of engaging one another – something which respect for the border largely precluded – directed their attacks exclusively at the innocent and the defenceless. Conversion was occasionally an option for the victims, mere surrender rarely so. For the assailants, the objectives were simply expropriation and maximum slaughter.

Most refugees travelled on foot, with or without livestock and sometimes accompanied by wagons bearing their possessions. The caravans stretched as far as the eye could see where they converged at river crossings. An airborne Nehru following the line of a cross-border road in east Punjab would recall overflying the same massed column for all of sixteen kilometres. He put its human component at over 100,000 souls. Another caravan, tracked in west Punjab, was thought to number 400,000. In September Penderel Moon recorded an influx into Bahawalpur of 40,000–50,000 Muslims from Rohtak and Hissar (west of Delhi); they were so severely undernourished that ‘some two thousand of them died within a few days of their arrival’.¹⁸ As late as November an official from the British High Commission in Delhi, while driving through Mewat, encountered a ten-mile column of Meos still on the move.¹⁹

Exposure, debilitation, dehydration, starvation, disease and drownings (the monsoon had returned with a fury in September) may have claimed as many fatalities as the knife and the bullet. Yet the subsequent figures would seldom distinguish deaths from natural causes, nor would they attempt to define what causes might be considered ‘natural’. All that can be said with confidence is that the scale of the tragedy was such as to frustrate accurate assessment at the time – and ever since.

‘Estimates of casualties are largely a matter of guesswork,’ noted Moon, who nevertheless gave his own calculation of the number killed: it was ‘unlikely to have been more than two hundred thousand’, and was probably rather less. This was based on ‘fairly precise figures for about half the districts of West Punjab and … intelligent guesses regarding the remainder’; in this total, on the basis of reports from across the border, he had included twice as many fatalities for India’s east Punjab, plus much fewer for the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, Sind and Balochistan.²⁰ Moon was writing only of the border between India and West Pakistan; he did not include fatalities in Bengal or elsewhere in India, nor apparently those in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. But his ‘guesswork’ deserves some respect. As a one-time member of the British Indian Civil Service, a current member of the Pakistan Administrative Service (Bahawalpur formally joined Pakistan in early October) and a soon-to-be member of the Indian Administrative Service, he straddled the divide and had no particular axe to grind.

Nor, having witnessed some of the attacks and collected descriptions of many more – indeed having accepted responsibility for not having prevented some of them – could Moon be accused of generalising about them. It has been suggested that any consensus around higher estimates of half a million to a million, or even two million, fatalities may be a means of ‘distancing ourselves from the specificity and details of those killings even as we seek to underline their enormity and consequence’.²¹ This recourse to rounded-up figures is thought to be especially common practice in respect of the atrocities suffered by those classed as ‘others’ rather than ‘ours’; ‘their’ losses could be approximately quantified, ‘ours’ tended to be recorded in gruesome and specific detail.

Into this error falls the account produced by Gopal Das Khosla in 1989. An avuncular figure, Cambridge-educated, Justice Khosla was much respected in Indian government circles as ‘a safe pair of hands’, and would head several government-sponsored investigations. By the 1980s he was semi-retired and often in Manali (Himachal Pradesh), there with walking stick to pace the hill paths and write his Stern Reckoning. Using the records of a 1948 Government of India ‘Fact Finding Organisation’, he came up with a total for non-Muslim fatalities of ‘between 200,000 and 250,000’, to which he ‘believed’ that an equal number of Muslims who ‘perished in the riots in India’ might be added. Hence the ‘half a million’, a figure which more than doubled that given by Moon. Khosla further ignored Moon’s careful calculation of the fatalities in Pakistan’s west Punjab (Moon had given 60,000 instead of Khosla’s 200,000–250,000); and he contradicted Moon’s contention that the killings in India’s east Punjab might be twice as many. Yet by combining these two assessments – Khosla’s 200,000–250,000 in the west and Moon’s ‘twice as many’ in the east – the total could be, and was, further conflated to three-quarters of a million.

To substantiate his findings, Khosla compiled a tabulated appendix listing over five hundred places where mass killings, conversions and conflagrations had taken place. Each entry included a note on the nature of the atrocities (‘Murder, arson, mass conversion and loot’, ‘Murder, rape, loot and abduction’ etc.) together with an estimate of the numbers killed, injured, forcibly converted or expelled. Yet on examination, all his listed incidents occurred in Pakistan, the victims being Sikhs and Hindus, as were Khosla’s informants. Of the Muslims who died in the massacres in the new India – or ‘the riots’ as he preferred to call them in this case – there is no listing at all. Nor does it appear that the figures given for any of the listed incidents were corroborated by Pakistani witnesses. Yet this was crucial, as a relief worker at the time discovered. In the Sialkot district of Pakistan, Richard Symonds was informed by the Indian Liaison Officer that in a recent assault ‘1,500 were killed’; yet ‘the Pakistan account said only thirty’. Or again, two weeks after an attack at Mianwali, ‘estimates of the number of Hindus killed varied between 400 and 2,000’.²² In the face of such flagrant misrepresentation, probably by both parties, extreme caution is in order. Without it, ‘otherising’ becomes just as partial as the blatant propaganda that has marred – indeed ‘dis-figured’ – nearly all such later calculations.²³

A further explanation for the wildly divergent assessments of Partition’s casualties lies in the uncertainty over the figures for the other province to be partitioned, namely Bengal. While some calculations, Moon’s and Khosla’s for example, ignore Bengal altogether, a few go to the opposite extreme and infer a casualty rate comparable with that in the Punjab. This is absurdly pessimistic, and the ‘guesswork’ here is even more conjectural. Much depends on how ‘Partition’, a flimsy term when stripped of its more horrific associations, is defined and on what is taken to be its timeframe.

With over sixty million inhabitants, Bengal had been easily British India’s most populous province (pre-Partition Punjab had about twenty-eight million). It was also its most volatile. The potential for sectarian strife had already been demonstrated in the Calcutta Killings of August 1946 and in the subsequent massacres in Noakhali and Tripura (Tipperah). Violence like that which seems to have taken so many by surprise in the Punjab was here expected. In anticipation of it, Gandhi had already re-established himself in Noakhali, from where he transferred to Calcutta two days ahead of Independence. He needed to be at the likely epicentre when the seismic shift of 15 August occurred.

Now frailer and seemingly smaller than ever, the Mahatma was trundled round the city in an ancient Chevrolet. As he toured the trouble spots and drew massive crowds to his evening prayer meetings, his reputation transcended the religious divide. He talked up a spirit of mutual regard and inspired a sense of brotherly achievement in maintaining the peace. Mountbatten called him his ‘One Man Boundary Force’. For three critical weeks he remained there, preaching communal harmony, praying for it and fasting to exact pledges of it. He also promoted it by example, cohabiting with Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the bon-viveur barrister ‘with a nimble brain but an irritating habit’ who led the Muslim League in Bengal. Lately Chief Minister of the province, it was Suhrawardy whose incitement had been widely blamed for the earlier killings.²⁴

Notwithstanding their incompatibility, such was the influence of the two men – the stick-like Mahatma and the ‘rotund’ Muslim Leaguer – and such the military presence prompted by fear of another bloodbath, that the tactic worked. Observing the near absence of sectarian massacres in the subcontinent’s greatest metropolis, first Gandhi and then the press dubbed it ‘the miracle of Calcutta’. Optimists noted ‘a spectacle of friendship and fraternity between Hindus and Muslims’; Communists detected a comradeship born of working-class solidarity; and intellectuals rejoiced in what they took to be evidence of the Bengalis’ cultural superiority. The normally dyspeptic general who headed Eastern Command went further. ‘The love in Calcutta was impressive above all other places,’ he recalled. But he ascribed it less to Gandhi’s non-violence than to a combination of the Muslim community’s ‘depression’, the non-Muslim community’s exultation and his own increased troop levels.²⁵

The euphoria in Calcutta lasted throughout the crisis months immediately after Independence, and dissolved only when the city reverted to its usual levels of industrial strife, social upheaval and chronic politicisation in 1948. Overall, when compared to Lahore and the Punjab, Calcutta and Bengal seemed to have got off lightly. The death toll could almost be described as bearable, while the atrocities were largely localised. On the other hand, the population transfer was here more destabilising than in the Punjab, much more protracted and ultimately perhaps greater.

Dispersal being a lesser evil than death, this raises the question of why the Partition experience in Bengal differed so from that in the Punjab, and whether the precautions taken in Bengal could have proved equally effective in the Punjab. The answer to the last is probably no. In the Punjab there were more guns, for one thing. There, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, society prided itself on its decidedly military ethos. The north-west had long been the British Indian army’s main recruiting ground, and accounted for around half its intake; service families, military colonies and paramilitary fraternities abounded. Come the end of the war, many thousands of Punjabi Sikh, Muslim, Hindu (Dogra and Jat) and Pathan servicemen had been demobilised; but not all surrendered their arms, and of those who did, many were emboldened to reacquire them or obtain equivalents of local manufacture. In championing the anxieties of their co-religionists and avenging the massacres reported from across the border, Punjabi ex-servicemen of every persuasion found employment in a cause that was lucrative, congenial to their traditions and applauded by their kinsmen.

This was not the case in Bengal. Generally Bengalis, whether Hindu or Muslim, were supposed to disdain the military arts. The province was thus under-represented in the army’s ranks and almost devoid of officers. When he arrived in Dhaka as East Bengal’s first General Officer Commanding in late 1947, the then Brigadier Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s future ruler, found ‘there was no army’, just two half-battalions, and ‘no office, no table, no chair, no stationery – virtually nothing at all’.²⁶ Firepower had played little part in the earlier ‘riots’ in Bengal, and there had been even less evidence of tactical planning. The killing sprees had often seemed spontaneous and unpredictable; and in West Bengal the heavy, and usually heavy-handed, presence of the largely Muslim police had already been depleted by migration. In short, Gandhian pressure, plus greater official awareness here stood a chance. Conversely, against the professionals orchestrating the carnage in the Punjab such intervention would probably have failed.

Other factors were also important. Given the deltaic terrain, communications in Bengal were notoriously slow and depended more on waterborne transport than on roads and railways. In the monsoon conditions of August and September whole districts were temporarily submerged, so distracting the inhabitants from mutual hostilities and severely restricting their mobility. In addition, the governments of India and Pakistan, though in the Punjab officially sponsoring an exchange of population, here actively discouraged it. It was supposed that mass migrations might destabilise the delicate political arithmetic on which both the Congress in West Bengal and the League in East Bengal based their prospects of retaining power. If conducted on any scale, migration could easily deplete one half of the province while overwhelming the other; and both Prime Ministers, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, were dead against it. ‘I have been quite certain, right from the beginning,’ Nehru wrote, ‘that everything should be done to prevent Hindus in East Bengal from migrating to West Bengal … even if there is a war.’²⁷ Throughout the period 1949–52, when a further two million Hindus from East Bengal joined the million or so who had migrated in 1947–48, Nehru remained firm. But twenty years later Indira Gandhi, when faced with precisely the war scenario that her father had envisaged, would take a very different line. East Pakistan’s Bengalis, now calling themselves Bangladeshis, would be admitted to India whatever their religion, so furnishing the justification for another Partition, this time of Pakistan.

Discouraging migration did not, of course, prevent it. In 1947 the new border had yet to be marked, and was impossible to police since it wandered across existing roads and railways as capriciously as the annual floods. Wags quipped that Radcliffe could not have been sober when he wielded his red marker. Until new roads and rail tracks could be laid, India’s West Bengal was cut in two, and its north-eastern extremity in Assam (and beyond) was little better than an enclave, reachable only by air or by obtaining authorisation to cross Pakistani territory. Such authorisation was not impossible to obtain, and refugee trains continued to operate between Dhaka and Calcutta until 1965. Calcutta’s Sealdah station turned into a vast dormitory for displaced persons; public spaces throughout the city, and even private gardens, were similarly commandeered. Yet to many Bengalis this may not have been entirely alarming. Refugees often considered their displacement temporary, and expected to return to the homes and lands they had left behind as soon as circumstances permitted. At the time it seemed quite inconceivable that the economic, cultural and social links that bound the commercial and manufacturing centre of Calcutta to its productive eastern hinterland could simply be severed by constitutional diktat.

Hence, instead of the fraught and one-off mass migrations typical of the Punjab, in Bengal in 1947 ‘there was no immediate interchange of population, nor even panic’. In fact in India’s West Bengal ‘it was not till December 1949 that it became obvious that an influx of refugees from East Pakistan had started’.²⁸ Thereafter the millions of comings and goings, sometimes by the same people, would extend over a period of years and eventually decades. How many crossed or recrossed, whether permanently or temporarily and whether coerced or voluntarily, it is impossible to say. In India such ‘refugees’ were quickly downgraded as ‘evacuees’ or ‘optees’. They might thereby be entitled to some minimal relief but they were not, as in the Punjab, afforded compensation in the form of land grants or rehabilitation expenses; such favourable treatment might have acted as an incentive and increased the flow. As a result, many incomers went unrecorded and the surviving tallies are far from complete.

Yet they kept on coming. A million or so Muslims crossed out of West Bengal and Assam to East Bengal in the first five years, many being originally from Bihar, from where they had earlier fled to Calcutta during the 1946–47 massacre in their homeland. It was thus their second such migration, though by no means their last; in the case of these Muslim Biharis the nightmare of dispossession would continue on down the generations. In the same period anything from four to ten million Hindus from East Bengal crossed into the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The largest of these migrations took place in the 1950s and ’60s, prompted by the persecution of Hindus in East Bengal (early 1950s) and Muslim outrage over events in Kashmir (1963–65). Later disturbances, like the birth pangs of Bangladesh in 1971, that country’s first military coup in 1975, and the communal disturbances in India after the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque, would precipitate still other dramatic exoduses.

The introduction of frontier formalities to some extent regulated this ebb and flow. Passports became mandatory in 1952, immigration certificates in 1956 and visas after 1965. Yet such obstacles also served to divert the tide of migrants away from the regulated crossing points to the 2,700 kilometres of poorly patrolled frontier in between. The real number of migrants thus became more incalculable than ever. Pocked with enclaves and punctured by waterways, the border in the east remained decidedly ‘soft’ and, in the eyes of many, only quasi-legitimate. As late as 1950 no less a figure than ex-Chief Minister Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy saw nothing odd about attending Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi while continuing to make his main place of residence in India’s West Bengal, in fact in a salubrious part of Calcutta. Similarly Nurul Amin, the then Chief Minister of East Bengal, continued to rely on his old physician in West Bengal for medicine. The latter was none other than Dr B.C. Roy, the Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal; ‘and would you believe it, when Nurul Amin’s gout was very bad, he came to Calcutta just for an hour by plane for a consultation’, reported an East Bengali informant. ‘Despite the riots [of 1950], the two are still good friends.’²⁹

If ‘Partition is both ever-present in South Asia’s public, political terrain and continually evaded,’ this may in part be because, in the east as in Kashmir, it is still being enacted.³⁰ Indeed in Bengal a degree of population movement appears to be endemic. Once somewhat unfairly described as ‘a rural slum’, East Bengal in 1947 had no industrial base; even its cash crop of jute was dependent on West Bengal’s processing mills. Its population stood at around forty-two million, of whom about eleven million (i.e. 26 per cent) were Hindus, mostly lower-caste agriculturalists and artisans but with an influential landowning and commercial elite. On the other hand, across the border, India’s West Bengal, along with Assam, had just six million Muslims, about 16 per cent of their total population, most of these being landless labourers or urban poor. Additionally, West Bengal embraced Calcutta, India’s largest industrial and commercial centre, while the tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills and Assam afforded a further source of employment. In Bengal as a whole, therefore, the post-1947 movement of peoples was overwhelmingly one-way, from east to west, Pakistan to India; and although triggered by sectarian killings or the fear of such violence, it was often lubricated by more practical considerations such as economic advancement, employment opportunities, educational advantage or marital ties.

This was nothing new. The east–west flow, the rural–urban drift, and the quest for improved livelihoods may be rated permanent features of the Bengali economy. As a result of the 1943 famine, Calcutta already hosted a large refugee population before Partition. Floods and agrarian distress in East Bengal/Bangladesh would replenish the resettlement camps of both Calcutta and Dhaka with depressing regularity. Distinguishing between political refugees and economic migrants is here problematic.

How to cope with the influx of often destitute and traumatised millions taxed both successor governments, so detracting from their ability to conduct the business of administration. In the Punjab, on both sides of the border, the problem had been somewhat eased by the availability of land. Since most migrants were agriculturalists, landholdings vacated by uprooted Punjabi emigrants were hastily re-allocated to grateful Punjabi immigrants. This ensured continuity of food production and warded off famine. It also created tenacious settler communities whose intransigent attitudes towards their former country of residence would bedevil future Indo–Pak relations and be compared to those of Israeli settlers on the West Bank. But in West Bengal it was different. There was almost no available land. The smallest of the new India’s provinces, West Bengal was also much the most densely populated and had the highest rate of unemployment. Prospects for the incoming flood of refugees were grim.

In the immediate aftermath of Partition it was Delhi that had been convulsed by the levels of violence and displacement expected of Calcutta. Refugees from Lahore and other cities in West Pakistan, many of them Sikhs, poured into the capital, there to spread horrific tales of the violence they had either suffered or witnessed at the hands of Muslims in what was now Pakistan. Naturally this excited hostility towards the city’s large Muslim community and brought calls for revenge. The patriotic crowds that had hailed Independence on 15 August were baying for blood by the end of the month. Muslims, regardless of whether they supported Pakistan or had any intention of moving there, found themselves liable to be massacred in the streets; their homes were appropriated, their womenfolk molested, their businesses plundered and torched.

As the mayhem extended from Old Delhi to New, some 60,000 Muslims sought refuge behind the high walls of the Purana Qila, a craggy ‘old fort’ that supposedly complemented Rashtrapati Bhawan at the opposite extremity of Rajpath; others encamped round the Taj-like tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun or barricaded themselves in quarries on the ridge to the north-west of the city. Until mid-September ‘the Indian government regarded these camps as the responsibility of the Pakistan High Commissioner’. He, however, was ‘hardly in a position to move out of his house’, noted the relief worker Richard Symonds. In ‘places that could not properly be called camps but rather areas in which humanity was dumped’ eminent families squatted side by side with once-prosperous shopkeepers from Old Delhi and never-rich Meos from nearby villages like Gurgaon.³¹ There was no sanitation, few tents, little food and only a skeleton guard to man the gates.

You might meet anyone from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered thousands of rupees if we could hire them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to a hawker’s box of matches.³²

Taxis did change hands. As of September 1947 beturbanned Sikhs replaced henna-ed Muslims at the wheel of most of the capital’s public conveyances. The burning, looting and lynching lasted the best part of a month; and as with the next pogrom to overtake the capital – that of 1984, in which Sikhs would be the target – some officials were accused of connivance and numerous political hotheads of incitement. On both occasions, adequate troops failed to materialise, with the peacekeeping burden in 1947 being assumed by a variety of volunteer organisations.

On one occasion Nehru himself joined the volunteers. Leaping from his official car, he laid into a Hindu trundling a handcart piled high with stolen goods. He demanded that they be returned. The man refused, whereupon the Prime Minister seized him by the throat and shook him. The offender did not strike back. ‘If I must die, it is an honour to do so at your hands,’ he croaked. Nehru then relented.³³

*

In the camp at Humayun’s Tomb, which backs onto railway tracks, Taya Zinkin, a young volunteer and later a reporter, welcomed the news that some of the refugees were to be moved out by train to Pakistan. They, however, refused to budge without a military escort and an assurance that she would personally hold herself responsible for their safety. Both safeguards were forthcoming, and ‘7,500 men, women and children piled into the train, onto it, under it and in between it’.

It was an incredible sight. They were riding to safety and a new life. In the setting sun they waved at me from the roofs, the windows, the footboards. I stood on the platform waving back … My train was the biggest train to Pakistan. For a long time it would be the last. It was ambushed in Patiala by the Sikhs. The military escort did its duty to the last man; not one survived; they were Gurkhas. Five hundred refugees reached Lahore safely but as the train pulled up in the Lahore station there were 3,000 dead and 4,000 so severely wounded as to be left for dead.

By the time calm had been restored in Delhi, the city could no longer be described as having India’s largest urban concentration of Muslims. Not all were evacuated to Pakistan, but the incoming tide of Hindus and Sikhs so swamped their numbers as to transform the city’s demography and geography and launch its population’s inexorable growth from around a million in 1950 to nearly twenty million by the century’s end. The same tragic scenes and the same dramatic growth were witnessed in Lahore, which became a wholly Muslim city when its sizeable Hindu-Sikh population virtually disappeared overnight. Other cities on both sides of the new border were similarly affected. Karachi, though comparatively calm, lost its large Hindu mercantile community to Bombay. In their stead, it absorbed the bulk of those Muslims from cities in central and northern India (principally Lucknow, Allahabad, Bhopal, etc.) who had opted for Pakistan. Mostly Urdu-speakers and once prime movers in the demand for a Muslim homeland, these muhajirs (a term cognate with haj/hijra that sanctified their ‘flight’ from India by associating it with that of the Prophet from Mecca) would jealously retain their identity in their promised land and contribute a clamorous new element to Pakistan’s ethnic mix. As muhajirs competed with Sindhis, Pathans and Balochis for jobs and housing in what was Pakistan’s commercial as well as its administrative capital, Karachi underwent a transformation into Pakistan’s Calcutta.

Even places in the extreme south of the subcontinent were affected when the Indian government in Delhi urged constituent provinces/states, like Madras, to take such refugees as they could handle. But the response was not always favourable, mainly because it was unclear whether the control and expense of relief and rehabilitation should be borne by the states affected or by the central government. Friction and delays resulted. Nor were the refugees themselves always keen on resettlement in distant lands. The rains there might fall at the wrong time of year, the crops might be new to them and the language unknown to them. Just as Punjabis preferred to be accommodated in the Punjab, Bengalis expressed a preference for staying in Bengal.

This was bad news for Calcutta. As East Bengali refugees poured into the city after 1948, the numbers living on the streets or sleeping on the railway platforms could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, and those corralled into shanty towns and squatter camps in the millions. The camps spread to the west bank of the river Hooghly and to all the city’s surrounding districts: ‘what was once a rural hinterland was transformed in less than two decades into a huge urban sprawl’.³⁴ By the 1990s it was estimated that there were 2,000 bustees, or shanty slums, on the east bank of the river and a further 1,500 on the west bank. Three million people lived in them, representing 49 per cent of the city’s total population; and of these, 87 per cent were classed as immigrants, mostly from East Bengal.

Amongst the immigrants themselves there was a sense that they were in Calcutta as of right. Mostly Hindus and all Bengali-speakers, they felt safe among other Hindu Bengalis and, though now in India, were consoled to be still in their native Bengal. Conditions might be appalling but they were reluctant to embrace onward resettlement in some totally alien corner of the subcontinent. A few lucky thousands were squeezed into vacant lands either within West Bengal itself or in neighbouring Bihar. And some of the urban colonies actually prospered as employment initiatives blossomed and the tents gave way to mud and thatch, then clapboard, corrugated iron and a semblance of permanence. For most, though, a sheet offered the only shelter and minimal government relief the only sustenance. Laid out like sardines on roadsides and railway platforms, they blocked the thoroughfares and fouled the amenities. Cholera became rife. The city was choking to death on a surfeit of people.

To address the situation, an ambitious scheme was launched in the late 1950s. A substantial part of West Bengal’s East Bengali intake was to be resettled five hundred kilometres away in sparsely populated forest uplands along the borders of Orissa and what is now Chattisgarh. The 200,000 square kilometres allocated for this exercise in pioneering was known as Dandakaranya, a term that translates as either ‘the forest of Dandak’ or ‘the forest of punishment’. Trees and scrub were cleared, plots laid out, loans offered, wells dug, roads cut, and by 1973 some 25,000 families had removed there. But they had often done so reluctantly, and already they were drifting back to Bengal. By 1979 nearly half had left. To riverine rice-farmers, getting crops to grow in the thin and moisture-unretentive soil was worse than punishment; dams had failed to materialise, crop yields were dismal, there was no alternative employment and the indigenous tribal people deeply resented the newcomers. The settlers, in short, were far from settled. ‘They say that their love for West Bengal is alive as their hope about Dandakaranya is dead,’ ran a 1978 news report of the new exodus, ‘that all their Dandakaranya days were dark and dreary … “because of the humiliating conditions in which they lived”.’³⁵

But returning to Bengal was not that easy. By now the whole issue of the East Bengali refugees had been heavily politicised. To the astute politicians of West Bengal the grievances of a vast and heavily concentrated community had initially represented a desirable vote bank. Leftist parties, especially the Communist Party of India, had espoused the refugee cause and had duly fought the Dandakaranya plan on their behalf. Congress, happy to see the Communist vote depleted, had supported it. But by the time the Dandakaranya settlers began drifting back, the Communists were in power in West Bengal as part of a Left Front government. The votes of the returnees were no longer a priority. Re-rehabilitating them could only alienate existing supporters and damage the prospects of reconstruction. Tens of thousands were therefore turned back. Thousands more were forcibly evicted from an island they had nevertheless illegally occupied amid the mangroves of the Sundarbans.

Exiles four times over – from East Bengal, West Bengal, Dandakaranya and then the Sundarbans – this pathetic band typified the tragedy of Bengal’s ‘long Partition’. What became of them is unclear, but it may be no coincidence that in the wake of their wanderings there would spread what in 2010 Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, would call the nation’s ‘gravest internal security challenge’. He was referring to the so-called ‘Naxalite’ or ‘Maoist’ revolutionaries whose armed insurrection was terrorising large parts of eastern and central India. In one of several attacks, seventy-six members of the Central Reserve Police Force had just been ambushed and killed by a Naxalite group calling itself the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee. Dandakaranya itself, according to the Times of India, was now ‘the den’ of the Naxalites; and their supporters, many of them indigenous tribal people, candidly traced both their grievances and their political indoctrination to the unwelcome influx of Bengali settlers in the wake of Partition.

Sixty-five years after the event, the impact of the Great Partition is still being felt – and not just in Bengal and the Punjab. In Karachi the influx of Muslim muhajirs from India was on a scale comparable with that of East Bengalis into Calcutta. Literate and industrious, the muhajirs would stay put and through their MQM party become a thorn in the flesh of successive regimes in Islamabad. Not without bloodshed, they still control much of Pakistan’s largest metropolis. Parts of Hyderabad, the south Indian city that was the scene of another Partition-related crisis, are periodically devastated by motorbike bombers keen to incite their large Muslim component. Markets in Delhi and suburban trains in Bombay have also been targeted.

But, sporadic and essentially domestic, these outrages pale into insignificance compared to the horrors witnessed in Kashmir. In this former princely state, Partition’s business has yet to be concluded. Compounded by the excesses of the military and paramilitaries, the same atrocities prevailed at the end of the century as in 1947. The same arguments over the state’s status were being replayed and the same colossal troop levels maintained. More than anywhere else in South Asia, Kashmir was set to ensure that the legacy of Partition would not be forgotten.