Where do we go?
By Gyanendra Pandey
Gyanendra Pandey captures the uncertainty of the Partition days and describes how this shaped the course of our history.
Hundreds of thousands of people were on the road in Punjab within days of the official Partition and the massacres, the nightmares, those other partitions that people would have to live with for decades to come, had begun. Nehru, brought to Punjab by this outbreak of violence on the scale of a war, had the enormity of it all brought home to him by what he saw after the massacre of Sheikhupura (near Lahore). “A very large number of persons was being done to death daily,” he wrote. “I do not mention the figure … as it is incredible.” Officials of the Indian High Commission in Pakistan telegraphed on the same date that “40,000 lives are in danger (in West Punjab) during the next 48 hours”.
Towards the end of September 1947 the London Times reported: “4 million on the move in Northern India. Minorities in a state of panic.” A month earlier, reports of the massacre of refugees fleeing by train were already common. Consider the Daily Mail correspondent, Ralph Izzard’s account of his train journey from Karachi to Lahore on 22-3 August 1947. Luckily the passengers on this journey escaped massacre, but their terror was palpable.
At Montgomery in Punjab, Izzard saw what he called the “first signs of trouble”. The platforms were “packed with Hindu and Sikh refugees waiting despairingly for transport to India. Those on the platform had been there three days, while on the siding a special train, packed to the doors and on all roofs with non-Muslims, had been waiting for five days”. The Muslim engine-driver of the special train had refused to cross the border to Ferozepur for fear that he would not return alive.
At Okara, Izzard continued, “My train was rushed by 5000 panic-stricken Hindu and Sikh workers from the local Birla textile mills, 40 crammed themselves into my compartment meant to hold 6 …” Beyond Raiwind, “… we met the vanguard of the Muslim refugees from India, each platform at Lahore being as crowded as previously they had been with non-Muslims, all as before with an utterly dazed … air”. A day or two earlier, the 15-Up from Delhi, a train with nine coaches and room enough, according to Izzard for “a thousand persons at least”, had arrived in Lahore seven hours late with eight battered Muslim survivors on board.
In the week ending October 30, 1947, over 570,000 Muslim refugees were said to have crossed into Pakistan via Amritsar and Ferozepur alone, while some 471,000 non-Muslims crossed the other way. By October 1, there were 80,000 Muslim refugees in the Purana Qila in Delhi - and many more in other camps in the city. On November 26, a British embassy official, motoring through Mewat, passed a ten-mile-long column - mostly Meos, he noted, but also other Muslims - being evacuated from a camp “where they had been held for some time”.
The uncertainty of it all
The advent of Partition and Independence was marked by extraordinary uncertainty. A fact that is easily overlooked today, precisely because of the categorical establishment of India and Pakistan as separate, sovereign states on August 15, 1947, is that it was just ten weeks before that date, in early June 1947, that the formal constitutional partition of British India was finally decided upon.
A month before that, in early May, Mountbatten, widely described as the author of the plan to divide India surgically and quickly as the best way out of the existing political and constitutional mess, was still discussing the repercussions (in Punjab and elsewhere) of a partition - ‘if it comes to that’. There was at the same time continued discussion of a possible agreement being reached among the major Indian political parties on some slightly modified version of the May 1946, Cabinet Mission Plan.
In late June, three weeks after the British announcement of their new plan to partition the subcontinent and withdraw from its government by August 1947, Congress workers and leaders in central India (today’s Madhya Pradesh) were still talking of June 1948 - the deadline earlier announced by Attlee - as the date when the British would hand over power to the Indians. There were many people in the country who were far from being persuaded that the British would actually leave.
From early June 1947, within a few days of the announcement that the principle of partition had been accepted, until July, Penderel Moon, concerned like many other Punjab civilians for the future well-being of ‘his’ province, made concerted efforts to get the Sikhs to “throw in their lot with their Muslim brethren in the Punjab”. In many parts of Punjab, relations between Muslims and Sikhs had already reached a nadir following the outbreak of mass violence and murder from March onwards.
It speaks of the openness of so many questions even at this stage that, in spite of the extreme polarization, the Sikh maharaja of Nabha and even Baldev Singh, perhaps the most prominent ‘constitutional’ representative of the Sikhs at this time, still responded to Moon’s initiative and considered the possibility of establishing a Sikh-dominated East Punjab unit within the new state of Pakistan, provided this unit had the right to secede if necessary. At the other end of the subcontinent, Abul Hashim, the secretary of the Bengal provincial Muslim League, joined H.S. Suhrawardy, the Muslim League chief minister of pre-Partition Bengal, and others in propagating the increasing wishful scheme of a sovereign and united Bengal.
The meaning of Partition was worked out step by step in 1947-8 and afterwards. The point is dramatically illustrated by some of the earliest reported reactions of Muslim League leaders in UP after the announcement of the Partition plan of June 3, 1947. Muslim League members of the UP legislature had “suddenly begun to coo like doves”, wrote the British governor of the province.
“Seemingly the whole attitude now is that in UP we must forget the past and become all brothers together … The truth is that … Pakistan is of little use to the UP. It has to be got across that the Muslim League everywhere was in favour of Pakistan and that nothing less than a ‘national home’ for the Muslims would meet the case. Now that the said home is almost certainly (sic) to be provided, our Leaguers quite obviously feel that they can drop out of the fight and look after their own local … interests”.
Consider, again, the matter of the exchange of populations which transformed Partition into one of the greatest mass migrations in history. Although Jinnah had earlier expressed the view that such an exchange may well become necessary on the establishment of Pakistan, the realization of that goal brought other hopes to the surface. In this respect, Jinnah’s position was not unlike that of the League leaders in UP when they learnt that the principle of partition had been conceded. Hence his address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly: “We are all … equal citizens of one state … Hindus would (soon) cease to be Hindus and Muslims would 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.”
Until almost the end of August 1947, Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru, along with a host of other leaders and officials on both sides, expressed their opposition to any large-scale transfer of populations. Yet by the beginning of September, several lakhs of Punjabi refugees were on the move, under official ‘coordination’ in both directions.
On September 15 Nehru, making a reconnaissance flight over the area, saw two convoys of refugees on foot that stretched for forty miles. Even at this stage, however, Jinnah and the governments of both East and West Punjab continued to express the hope that "officials of the opposite community would at a later stage come back (or, where they had not left, stay on) and serve in their provinces. And in 1948, while the struggle to keep Punjab as it once was had been abandoned, Suhrawardy was still urging the need to encourage the minorities to return to Sindh and East Bengal.It was in December 1947 that the government of India declared Pakistan to be ‘foreign territory’ for the purpose - and for this restricted purpose alone - of levying duties on raw jute and jute manufactures exported from India. Exit permits, passports and visas for travel between the two countries - a special ‘Pakistan passport’ first, and only later the standard passport needed for international travel - were still some time in the future. On the Indian side, in 1947-8, there was persistent talk of possible re-unification, and many - even in the highest political circles - thought that Pakistan simply would not last.
An unusually telling example of contemporary uncertainties comes from September 1947. Pakistani army headquarters approached the authorities of Aligarh Muslim University, eighty miles east of Delhi and practically in the heart of the political and sectarian upheaval in India at the time, to provide appropriate candidates from the university for recruitment to regular commissions in the Pakistan army.
That request, and the university authorities’ innocent response - “Those interested in the above (call for applications) should see me in the Geography Department with a written application giving full particulars” - indicates how little the idea had sunk in, even for people in government, that these were now separate countries and that existing lines of communication and supply would therefore have to be reconsidered, if not cut off.
There was not in August 1947, or for some time afterwards (in the case of Bengal, for many years afterwards), any way of knowing who would belong where when things finally settled down. While British India, and with it Punjab and Bengal, were officially partitioned on August 15, 1947, the precise boundary lines between the divided parts were not announced until August 17. There was, even after that, considerable uncertainty on the ground as to the exact arrangement of the dividing lines between India and Pakistan.
Had Gurdaspur, or Malda, or particular tahsils and even villages in those districts, gone to India or Pakistan? Where would this - or that - village ‘go’? The Chakmas are reported to have raised the Indian flag at Rangamati on August 15, 1947, when it was still unclear whether the Chittagong Hill Tracts (now part of Bangladesh, earlier of East Pakistan) had been ‘awarded’ to India or Pakistan; and the Marmas, the second largest non-Bengali group in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, raised the Burmese flag at Bandarban on the same day.
Where would, or could, Toba Tek Singh ‘go’, in Manto’s justly famous query? And where was home, or nation, to be for that Muslim employee of Aligarh Muslim University who woke up a faculty member early on the morning of August 15 and said, in some consternation, "I hear Pakistan has been established … (but) Aligarh is not in Pakistan? Consider, again, the protagonist of Intizar Husain’s An unwritten epic, who is ‘flabbergasted’ that Qadirpur, where he lives, could be outside of Pakistan.
This kind of uncertainty persisted in the case of several princely states, as we all know, for a considerable time. Where would Hyderabad or Kashmir, for instance, ‘go’? In the case of the latter, the question is still being asked.
The ‘three partitions’ - or three different conceptions of partition to which I have alluded are not easily separated. They are perhaps better conceived of as three different moments (or aspects) of the same event, or at least an event that has become single - and singular - in our reconstruction of the past. They flow into one another, overlap and depend upon each other. It scarcely needs to be said that what is involved here is more than the drawing of new lines on a map, the unfurling of new national flags and the installation of new national governments.
What we are dealing with is the tearing apart of individuals, families, homes, villages and linguistic and cultural communities that would once have been called nationalities; and the gradual realization that this tearing apart was permanent - and that it necessitated new borders, communities, identities and histories.
There are many different stories to be told about 1947, many different perspectives to be recovered. Stories and perspectives that tell of other histories and other political possibilities. I pursue the task of analyzing other stories and thinking other histories and politics in the remaining chapters of this book. It may help, however, to begin with the historians’ history of Partition - because it is the chief body of writing whose stated intention is to recount the ‘truth’ of that event, and because of its obvious influence.
Gyanendra Pandey is professor of anthropology and history at the John Hopkins university and is the founder of the Subaltern Studies group. He is the author of several books.