THE GREAT PARTITION

Yasmin Khan was born in London and educated at St Peter's College and St
Antony's College, Oxford. She has familial links to both India and Pakistan, and
has lived in Delhi as well as having travelled widely on the subcontinent. Previ-
ously a history lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, she currently holds a
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and teaches politics in the Faculty of
History and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has
contributed to a global strategic consultancy on Indian and Pakistani political
developments, and was consultant editor on ‘India Britain 2020’, a report com-
missioned by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office about the future of
bilateral relations in 2005.
THE GREAT PARTITION
THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN
YASMIN KHAN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
 Copyright © 2007 Yale University
First printed in paperback 2008
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (be-
yond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.
For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
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Set in Minion by J&L Composition, Filey, North Yorkshire
Printed in the Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Khan, Yasmin, 1977–
The great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan/Yasmin Khan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–300–12078–3 (alk. paper)
1. India—History—Partition, 1947. 2. Nationalism—India—History.
3. Nationalism—Pakistan—History. I. Title.
DS480.842.K49 2007
954.04‘2—dc22
2007006713
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–300–14333–1 (pbk)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Javed Khan, in memory
 Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Glossary
Timeline of Major Events, 1945–1950
Introduction: The Plan
1 In the Shadow of War
2 Changing Regime
3 The Unravelling Raj
4 The Collapse of Trust
5 From Breakdown to Breakdown
6 Untangling Two Nations
7 Blood on the Tracks
8 Leprous Daybreak
9 Bitter Legacies
10 Divided Families
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
 Illustrations

1. Communist delegates marching during the Punjab Provincial Delegates

Conference, 1945 © Sunil Janah, 1945, 2007. From the web archive at mem-
bers.aol.com/sjanah (email: [email protected]).
2. Royal Indian Navy mutineers, Bombay, 1946 © Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library.
3. Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah holding a press conference,
Bombay, January 1946. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White © Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images.
4. People in Bombay lining up to vote in the general elections, 1946 © Sunil
Janah, 1946, 2007 ([email protected], members.aol.com/sjanah).
5. A co-educational zoology class at Aligarh Muslim University, May 1946.
Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White © Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
6. Lord Pethick-Lawrence, member of the British Cabinet Mission delega-
tion, looking over papers, 1946 © NMML.
7. A peace procession after the riots in Calcutta, 1946 © Sunil Janah,
1946, 2007 ([email protected], members.aol.com/sjanah).
8. Villagers in boats fleeing under cover of darkness from their burning vil-
lages during riots in Noakhali, an eastern district of undivided Bengal, 1946–7
© Sunil Janah, 1947, 2007 ([email protected], members.aol.com/sjanah).
9. Crowds look on during Gandhi's visit to encourage Hindu–Muslim unity in
Noakhali © NMML.
10. Muslims and Hindus attempt to promote peace by jointly flying the flags
of the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress, Calcutta, 1946 ©
Sunil Janah, 1946, 2007 ([email protected], members.aol.com/sjanah).
11. Nehru and Gandhi with refugees from West Pakistan at Haridwar, India,
1947 © NMML.
12. Nehru votes for Partition at the Congress Working Committee Meeting,
1947 © NMML.
13. Meeting of the Indian leaders with Mountbatten at which the plan to
partition the subcontinent was agreed, Delhi, 2 June 1947 © NMML.
14. ‘A Happy Ending Indeed!’, cartoon from Hitavada, 15 August 1947 ©
NMML.
15. The departure of British troops, 1947 © NMML.
16. Muslim refugees on the roof of a train near New Delhi, 19 September
1947 © Associated Press/PA Photos.
17. ‘Battles Ahead’, cartoon from the National Herald, 15 August 1957 ©
NMML.
 18. Refugees at a shelter near the border between West Bengal and the
newly created East Pakistan, 1947 © Sunil Janah, 1947, 2007 (sjanah@aol.
com, members.aol.com/sjanah).
19. Men near the Indo-Pakistani border in Punjab placing bodies in a mass
grave using a bulldozer, October 1947. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White
© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
20. Nehru addressing the crowds the day after Independence Day 1947,
Delhi © NMML.
21. Lady Mountbatten touring riot devastation at Multan, Punjab © NMML.
22. News of Gandhi's assassination reaches Calcutta, 1948 © Sunil Janah,
1948, 2007 ([email protected], members.aol.com/sjanah).
23. Nehru at a refugee township in Ludhiana, Punjab, 1949 © NMML.
24. Jinnah's sister Fatima Jinnah surrounded by women during their weekly
Saturday meeting making clothes for refugees at the Government House,
Karachi, December 1947. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White © Time & Life
Pictures/Getty Images.
25. Refugee children at Kurukshetra camp with Nehru and Lady Mountbat-
ten February, 1949 © NMML.
 Maps

1 India before Partition

2 India and Pakistan after Partition
3 The Radcliffe Line in Punjab
4 The Radcliffe Line in Bengal
 Acknowledgements

I was born in London two generations after the events described in this
book. Nonetheless people sometimes ask about my own ‘Partition story’. Both
my grandfathers were bit-players in the story of Partition as it unfolded in the
subcontinent and both had their own lives profoundly shaped by the ending of
the British empire. One was stationed as a British officer in an Indian Army tank
regiment. He stayed in the subcontinent during the postcolonial transition and
saw at first hand, from a base in Punjab, the creation of the two new states of
India and Pakistan. At the same time, not far away, my other grandfather who
was born in North India was supporting the Muslim League. He campaigned as
a candidate in the 1946 provincial elections and moved part of his family to
Pakistan after the new state was created.
Neither of them, I suspect, would have agreed very much, if at all, with my
interpretation of events here. Their walk-on parts in the Partition story, though,
and the stories that grew up around them, encouraged my interest in history,
and provoked my curiosity about the origins of modern India and Pakistan –
two states which are supposedly so different and yet have such recently inter-
twined roots. I am very grateful to friends and family in India, Pakistan and
Britain who lived through the Partition of 1947 and who shared their thoughts
with me. The subtext to this book is a will for peaceful rapprochement in South
Asia and I very much hope it will be read in this light.
My debts have been building up for many years now. I was fortunate to start
studying history under the careful eye of Lawrence Goldman at St Peter's Col-
lege, Oxford. Judith Brown and Ian Talbot both guided this work through earlier
incarnations and have been consistently generous since. At my way stations
over the past decade – Oxford University, the University of Edinburgh and Royal
Holloway, University of London – my thanks to: Sarah Ansari, Henry Mayr-Hart-
ing, Henrietta Leyser, Peter Carey, Roger and Patricia Jeffery, Anna-Maria
Misra, Francis Robinson, Crispin Bates, Imre Bangha, David Washbrook and
John Darwin. Alpa Shah is both friend and honest critic and helped improve the
manuscript. Markus Daechsel, likewise, and his own book has left an imprint
on my thinking about 1947. Heather McCallum at Yale has been a source of
encouragement and constructive ideas and my thanks to Yale for the care with
which the book has been produced.
The National History Center seminar on the subject of decolonisation held
in Washington DC in the summer of 2006 enabled me to see things from new
angles; I am grateful to Wm Roger Louis, Pillarisetti Sudhir and the other con-
veners and participants. Colleagues in the politics department at Royal Hol-
loway have been entirely supportive. Lance Brennan and Professor Anthony Ep-
stein both generously shared previously unpublished documents and Sunil
Janah's photographs add much to the text. Benjamin Zachariah, Shabnum Te-
jani, Andrew Whitehead, William Gould and Kaushik Bhaumik provided com-
ments and discussion at critical moments. My research would not have been
possible without the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and
the British Academy which have sustained me throughout my graduate years
and beyond. Countless expert librarians and archivists made research a more
pleasurable experience; particular thanks to Teen Murti Bhavan, Delhi, and the
Indian Institute, Oxford.
For hospitality and companionship in Karachi, Lahore, Delhi, Lucknow, Ox-
ford, Edinburgh and London, my thanks to: Jan-Peter Hartung, the Wright fam-
ily, Ram Advani, Dr and Begum Siddiqui, Umbreen Daechsel, Seema Ansari and
family, Pippa Virdee, Alexander Morrison, Timothy Phillips, Anthony Bale, Or-
landa Ruthven, Rebecca Loncraine, Saleema Waraich, Swati Roy, Naomi Fox-
wood, Blanche Rugginz, Amy Longrigg, Henry Longbottom, and Melody and Nat
Hansen. Most important of all, my mother, Finola Khan, and brother, Jamie
Khan. And, at last, I can finally record my gratitude to Ben Wright – for every-
thing else.
Although I have tried to acknowledge sources faithfully, every chapter bears
the hallmark of a broader debate among numerous researchers and acade-
mics. This may be a starting point for further reading about 1947: suggestions
for this are provided in the bibliography, particularly on the experience of Parti-
tion in Bengal which deserves a volume of its own. Errors of fact and omission
are, needless to say, my own.
 Abbreviations

AICC All India Congress Committee

AIHM All India Hindu Mahasabha
CPI Communist Party of India
CWMG The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry
of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1958–)
FNR Fortnightly Reports
ICS Indian Civil Service
INA Indian National Army
IOR India Office Records
JP Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers, ed. Z.H. Zaidi (Islamabad: National
Archives of Pakistan, 1993–)
NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi
NWFP North West Frontier Province
R&R Relief and Rehabilitation
RSS Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh
SPC Sardar Patel's Correspondence, 1945–50, ed. D. Das (Ahmedabad: Navajivan,
1971)
SWGBP Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant, ed. B.R. Nanda (New Delhi and Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1993–)
SWJN Selected works of Jawaharlal Nehru, ed. S. Gopal, series 1 (New Delhi: Orient Long-
man, 1972–1982), series 2 (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund; distrib-
uted by Oxford University Press, 1984–)
TOP Constitutional Relations between Britain and India. The Transfer of Power, 1942–7
ed. Nicholas Mansergh and E.W.R. Lumby (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1970–
83)
UP United Provinces. The state was renamed Uttar Pradesh (literally ‘Northern
Province’) in 1950
UPSA Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow
USSA United States State Department Archives, Washington DC
 Glossary

ahimsa non-violence; policy of non-violence used by Gandhi

akhara gymnasium; club
anna small unit of Indian money
azadi freedom
Bakr-Id Muslim festival during which animals are sacrificed
bania shopkeeper; grocer
bhadralok Indian elite, especially in Bengal
bustees, shanty towns
bastis
charpoi bed or seat made from wood and rope
crore ten million
dalit literally, oppressed; untouchable, outcaste
fatwa notification of a decision of Muslim law; decree; verdict
ghat river bank; cremation site
goonda criminal, thug
harijan literally, children of God; untouchable, outcaste
hartal strike or protest, specifically, shutting the shops in a market
Holi Hindu spring festival during which coloured water or coloured powder is
splashed on friends, family or passers-by
Jai Hind Victory to India
jatha organised group, gang or band
kafan funeral shroud
kafila caravan or foot column
Kalma Islamic recitation
khadi homespun cloth
kisan cultivator, farmer
lakh one hundred thousand
lathi a staff or club
maulana title of respect for a Muslim learned man
maulvi a man learned in Muslim law; a teacher, especially of Arabic or Persian
mela fair or festival
mohalla quarter of a town; ward
Muhajir term used to describe a Partition migrant from North India to Pakistan; literally,
the companions of the Prophet Muhammad who fled from Mecca to Medina
Pakistan Long Live Pakistan
Zindabad
pan- village councils
chayats
pir descendant and trustee of Sufi shrine
qasbah town
raj literally, rule; Raj is also used to describe the British empire in India
sabha organisation
sadhu Hindu holy man, an ascetic
satya- literally, truth-force; Gandhian philosophy and practice of non-violent resistance
graha
shariat law of Islam
swadeshi self-sufficiency; anti-colonial movement
swaraj sovereignty, self-rule
zamindar; landholder; system of landholding in India
zamindari
 Timeline of Major Events, 1945–1950

1945

7 May End of the Second World War in Europe

14–15 June Congress Working Committee released from jail
5 July General Election held in Britain
25 June–14 July First Simla conference fails to form an executive assembly
26 July Labour landslide victory in British elections
21 August Viceroy Wavell announces Indian elections to be held in the winter
5 November Indian National Army trials start
Mid-December Polling for the Central and Legislative Assembly elections begins
Late December Results of elections to Central Legislative Assembly announced

1946

11 January Muslim League celebrate ‘Victory Day’

18–23 Febru- Royal Indian Navy mutiny
ary
19 February Secretary of State for India announces Cabinet Mission will visit India
22 February Communist Party of India calls for a general strike
25 March Cabinet Mission arrives in New Delhi
28 March Governors report results of the provincial elections
April Formation of provincial ministries
3–17 April Meetings between Indian leaders and the Cabinet Mission
7–9 April Meeting of League legislators in New Delhi
5–12 May Cabinet Mission convenes unsuccessful tripartite meeting in Simla
16 May Cabinet Mission puts forward its own federal solution in a statement;
broadcast on radio to Indian people
26 June Negotiations over an interim government fail
29 June Cabinet Mission leaves India
8 August Viceroy invites Congress to proceed in an interim government without the
League's participation
16–18 August The League's ‘Direct Action Day’ ends in violence in Calcutta
24 August Viceroy broadcasts on the radio regarding formation of an interim govern-
ment
2 September Interim government takes office without the League's membership; mem-
bers are sworn into office
Early Septem- Ahmedabad, Allahabad, Bombay: violent clashes
ber
Mid-October Massacres in Noakhali and East Bengal
26 October League members join the interim government
October–No- Massacres in Bihar
vember
6 November–2 Gandhi remains in Noakhali
March
Early Novem- Garhmukhteshwar killing in United Provinces
ber
9 December Constituent Assembly formed without League members, adjourned until 20
January

1947

24 Janu- Muslim League starts agitation for ‘civil liberties’ in Punjab

ary
20 Feb- Attlee's statement that the British intend to grant independence not later than
ruary June 1948
2 March Resignation of the Unionist Coalition Prime Minister, Khizr Tiwana, in Punjab
March Widespread destruction in Lahore and Amritsar Gandhi goes to Bihar
15 April Joint appeal for peace made by Gandhi and Jinnah
May Mass violence in Lahore
End May Widespread fighting and destruction of villages in Gurgaon
3 June The plan to partition the subcontinent is agreed and made public
20 June Bengal and Punjab Legislative Assemblies vote on partitioning the two provinces
June Violence in Lahore, Amritsar and Punjabi villages
1 July Partition Council formed (takes over from a special committee of the Cabinet)
1–10 Serious rioting in Lahore and Calcutta
July
8 July Radcliffe arrives in India
16–24 Bengal Boundary Commission holds public sittings in Bengal
July
20–30 Punjab Boundary Commission holds public sittings in Lahore
July
28 July Indian Constituent Assembly sub-committee votes against separate electorates
for Muslims in India

14 Au- Independence Day in Pakistan

gust
15 Au- Independence Day in India
gust
17 Au- New ferocity in Punjab
gust
First British troops sail from Bombay
 Boundary Commission Award is announced
18 Au- Prime ministers Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan issue a joint statement from Amritsar
gust after visiting affected areas
28 Au- Nehru announces the Indian government will have to rethink policy regarding
gust transfer of populations
31 Au- Punjab Boundary Force dissolved; replaced by two military evacuation operations
gust
United Council for Relief and Welfare formed under the co-ordination of Lady
Mountbatten
2 Sep- Jinnah appeals for help for Pakistani refugees
tember
3 Sep- Joint dominion conference held in Lahore
tember
7 Sep- K.C. Neogy appointed first Indian Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation of
tember Refugees; Emergency Cabinet Committee established in India
19 Sep- Iftikhar-ud-din sworn in as West Punjab Refugees Minister
tember
21 Sep- Joint statement of Nehru–Liaquat Ali from New Delhi
tember
21 No- Numbers of evacuations in Punjab exceed eight million people
vember
6 De- Inter-dominion Conference, Lahore: operation to recover and restore abducted
cember women agreed
Decem- A.K. Azad recommends Indian Muslims join the Congress at a convention in Delhi
ber
14–15 All-India Muslim League Council meeting, Karachi. The League splits into two
Decem- branches: the Pakistan Muslim League and the Indian Union Muslim League
ber

1948

12 January Atrocity against trainload of refugees at Gujrat, Pakistan

30 January Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi
Ban on the RSS and Muslim National Guard in India
14 February Two weeks of mourning in India end; Gandhi's ashes immersed at Alla-
habad
28 February Last British troops in India depart
March Refugee–local conflicts in Godhra, Gujarat
Inter-dominion arbitral tribunal meets
Early July Hindu–Muslim riots in Bombay
July Over 15,000 abducted women recovered by both governments since De-
cember 1947
Permit system introduced in West Pakistan
12 September Jinnah dies
Mid-September ‘Police Action’ in Hyderabad and accession of the Nizam to India
30 September Indian banknotes no longer legal tender in Pakistan
November RSS initiates civil disobedience against the ban on the organisation
11 November Inter-dominion agreement sets out terms for recovery of abducted women
15 December Godse and Narain Apte hanged for Gandhi's murder
21–23 Decem- Idols found installed in the temple at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.
ber
December RSS begin a campaign against Golwalkar's detention

1949

1 January United Nations-sponsored ceasefire announced in Kashmir

19 February Tara Singh jailed for leading agitation for a Sikh homeland
12 March Objectives Resolution adopted by Pakistani Constituent Assembly
May Indian Constituent Assembly votes against reserved seats for religious minori-
ties
29–30 July All-India Refugee Conference, New Delhi
12 July Ban on RSS lifted in India
19 Decem- Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Bill passed in India
ber

1950

26 January Inauguration of the Republic of India

January– Attacks on non-Muslims in East Bengal, especially in Khulna, Chittagong, Bar-
March ishal and Sylhet
Early Attacks on Muslims in west Uttar Pradesh
March
8 April Nehru and Liaquat Ali sign pact on protection of minorities in New Delhi, fol-
lowed by further talks in Karachi
19 April Nehru accepts resignation of K.C. Neogy and S.P. Mukherjee owing to disagree-
ments over Pakistan
28 June Agreement signed on settlement of moveable assets lost during Partition
30 July All-India Refugee Conference, Delhi
15 Decem- Death of Vallabhbhai Patel, Indian Deputy Prime Minister
ber
1 India before Partition
2 India and Pakistan after Partition
3 The Radcliffe Line in Punjab
4 The Radcliffe Line in Bengal
 Introduction: The Plan

South Asians learned that the British Indian empire would be partitioned on
3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by
reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a popu-
lation of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the coun-
tryside, ploughing the land as landless peasants or sharecroppers, it is hardly
surprising that many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, did not hear
the news for many weeks afterwards. For some, the butchery and forced relo-
cation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first that they knew
about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and termi-
nally weakened British empire in India.
People who owned or could gather around wireless sets in family homes or
in shops, marketplaces and government offices, heard the voices of four men
carrying across the airwaves from the broadcasting station of All India Radio in
the imperial capital, New Delhi, at 7 p.m. Indian Standard Time on the evening
of 3 June. They were informed of the plan to divide up the empire into two new
nation states – India and Pakistan. A live link-up from Westminster, where
Prime Minister Attlee was making the announcement to the assembled
benches of the House of Commons, was relayed via Delhi across the Indian
empire's 1.8 million square miles, twenty times the size of Britain itself. In
cities from Quetta to Madras, Calcutta to Bombay, these voices carried out
along the streets, ‘By the evening of June 2, 1947, the atmosphere in Karachi
was one of suppressed excitement over the new plan for India and the
Viceroy's coming broadcast,’ observed an American vice-consul stationed in the
port city. ‘Thousands of persons from all classes of society had assembled in
the streets and public parks to hear the broadcast, while radio shops and
stores put on loud-speakers to give passers-by an opportunity to hear the an-
nouncement.’1 In Bombay, the writer and producer Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was
at a colleague's house discussing a new film project at the time. ‘Literally mil-
lions all over the yet-united India sat glued to their own or their neighbours’
radio sets, for the fate of India was to be decided that day,’ he later remem-
bered. ‘From Peshawar to Travancore, from Karachi to Shillong, India became
an enormous collective ear, waiting for the broadcasts breathlessly, helplessly
and hopelessly.’2 Far away from Bombay, in the Himalayan foothills of Assam,
where flooding and postal delays had cut off communications with the rest of
India, the Governor invited local politicians to his house to hear the live an-
nouncement.3 In Delhi, as the Viceroy and the Indian politicians approached
the All India Radio studio in their cars, ‘officials were leaning out of all the win-
dows and cramming the balconies’.4
In the tense studio in Delhi four statesmen spoke one after the other; first,
the British Viceroy, Mountbatten, then the Congress Party leader and future
Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, followed by Jinnah, the Muslim
League leader and Governor-General of Pakistan in waiting and, finally, Baldev
Singh, representative of the Sikhs.
It was a burning hot summer's evening. Rumours had been flying in all di-
rections that an announcement was imminent. Journalists had been well
primed and copies of the pre-prepared scripts that the leaders would read from
had been circulated in advance to give the press a head start in preparing the
special editions that would be rushed to print as soon as the broadcast had fin-
ished. After almost two centuries of imperial rule in India, the collapse of the
Raj and its recreation in the shape of two nation states was being declared. In-
dependence and Partition were mutually entwined.
The speeches themselves, though, were oddly flat. Even Mountbatten who
prided himself on his persuasive rhetoric gave a muted and hesitant perfor-
mance. Furthermore, the British announcements were masterpieces of obfus-
cation. It was stated that power would be handed to the Indian people before
June 1948. In fact, within days, the real date would be proclaimed: 15 August
1947, ten months earlier than anticipated. The plan paved the way for the par-
titioning of the highly contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal between the
Congress and the Muslim League, and Indian representatives of the legislative
assemblies in these two provinces, in the words of the British Prime Minister,
‘will be empowered to vote whether or not the Province should be partitioned’.
If Partition was decided upon, in Attlee's oblique words, ‘arrangements will be
made accordingly’.5 This meant, for those who could read between the lines,
that the campaign for a Muslim South Asian state, Pakistan, had succeeded.
These provincial fragments would be made into a separate sovereign state and
hived off from the remaining parts of British India, which would become inde-
pendent India. Yet, in these momentous and long-awaited announcements, nei-
ther Mountbatten nor Attlee mentioned the word ‘Pakistan’ once. The Viceroy
went further and couched the whole proposal as a theoretical question, depen-
dent on ‘Whichever way the decision of the Indian people may go’. This was
diplomatic frippery. The votes in the assemblies were a foregone conclusion
and the plan itself had been painfully hammered out in months of intense de-
bate between Indian leaders. It was self-evident to everyone who had lived
through the tumultuous months that preceded this announcement, who had
witnessed rioting and murders that stretched across North India from Bengal
and Bihar to Bombay, and had followed the near-misses of alternative peace
proposals and the collapse of the Cabinet Mission talks in 1946 that almost re-
sulted in a federal India, that these statements meant one thing: Pakistan was
going to be created, no matter what else happened.6
What did the creation of Pakistan mean? Nehru did not mention the P word
either, only once allowing that the plan laid down ‘a procedure for self-determi-
nation in certain areas of India’. Although he encouraged his listeners to accept
the plan that was being presented, it was ‘with no joy in his heart’ and although
he was clearly talking of a major change in the territorial map of the subconti-
nent, he told his listeners, confusingly, that ‘The India of geography, of history
and traditions, the India of our minds and hearts cannot change.’7 Nor were
there any maps to help even the most well-informed English-speaking listener
understand what was happening. It was left to the newspapers to publish their
own creative interpretations of exactly where a new borderline, snaking through
Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west, might fall once the country was di-
vided. The real line would not be presented to the public until two days after
the new states had come into existence, on 17 August, and would be hurriedly
marked on maps using censuses of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ populations. The
border would be devised from a distance; the land, villages and communities to
be divided were not visited or inspected by the imperial map-maker, the British
judge, Cyril Radcliffe, who arrived in India on 8 July to carry out the task and
stayed in the country only six weeks.
It was only Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League leader, dressed in a
white linen jacket and tie, who talked of Pakistan. Jinnah claimed to be the
leader of almost one hundred million South Asian Muslims who lived primarily
in the north-eastern and north-western corners of British India but were also
threaded in their millions throughout the subcontinent's population in towns,
villages and princely states. However, he showed little sign of triumphalism. Jin-
nah had initially been reluctant to talk at all and then hedged his speech with
qualifications and sub-clauses: ‘It is clear that the plan does not meet in some
important respects our point of view; and we can not say or feel that we are
satisfied or that we agree with some of the matters dealt with by the plan,’ he
announced. It would be up to the Muslim League to decide whether they
should accept the partition plan as ‘a compromise or as a settlement’. Rarely
has the birth of a new country been welcomed with so many qualifications by
its foremost champion. Clearly something strange and unprecedented was tak-
ing place.8
Over the next few days, in press conferences and speeches, the outlines of
the sketchy Partition plan would be fleshed out and greeted with a mixture of
joy, horror, bewilderment and fury. It is little wonder that the reactions to the 3
June plan were confused, contradictory and violent. The plan – for all its super-
ficial complexity and fine detail – was wafer thin and left numerous critical as-
pects unexamined and unclear. Where was India and where was Pakistan?
Who was now an Indian or a Pakistani? Was citizenship underpinned by a
shared religious faith, or was it a universal right, guaranteed by a state that
promised equality and freedom to all? Were people expected to move into the
state where their co-religionists resided in a majority? The tragedy of Partition
was that by the time people started to ask and try answering these questions,
unimaginable violence had escalated to the point of ethnic cleansing.
All in all, it was probably very difficult indeed in 1946 – without the aid of
fortune-telling powers – to imagine what a free South Asia was going to look
like. It was evident that two parties, the Congress and the League, would be at
the forefront of leading and designing the new state, or states, and that the
most prominent leaders – Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi – would be central to
carving out the future political orientation of the countries. Questions about
economic and social policy, national borders, political sovereignty and constitu-
tional rights, however, had barely been addressed or were highly contested.
And yet by 1950 two nation states stood alongside each other in South Asia,
with membership of the United Nations, full sovereignty and complete political
independence.
This book is about these months of transition and how, at the end of the
British empire, two states emerged from the South Asian landmass, unfortu-
nately with deep-rooted and lasting antipathy towards each other. It aims to dig
beneath the often hostile and justificatory rhetoric about Partition, as well as
imperial stories of a smooth and seamless ‘transfer of power’, to show just how
disorderly the whole process was and how it threatened the very existence of
the two new states. It also underscores how uncertain and ambiguous the
meanings of Partition and Pakistan were to people living through these events.
The brilliant success of the Congress and the League in writing post-dated
histories and retrospectively ascribing meaning to the support that they gained
at the time has obscured the ways in which notions such as swaraj (literally
meaning self-rule, and invoked by Gandhi to convey freedom from imperialism)
and ‘Pakistan’ were understood by people in 1947. There were various vocabu-
laries of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s. The story of the ‘transfer of
power’ used by both the outgoing imperialists and the incoming nationalist
powers has been so effective, well disseminated and uncompromising that it
has obscured the meanings of freedom at the time. Partition for many South
Asians was far more complicated and was the beginning of a process of their
construction as new national citizens, rather than simply the end point of na-
tionalist struggles. The words ‘Pakistan’, ‘swaraj’ and ‘Partition’ have acquired
concrete meanings in the intervening sixty years. In contrast, ‘freedom’ was not
clearly defined in 1947. This was a time before these histories and national im-
ages had become standard.9 It will become apparent that the meanings as-
cribed to these words in 1947 were regularly at odds with the ways that we un-
derstand them now so that nobody – from Mountbatten to the most humble
farmhand – foresaw their true meaning or what the future would deliver. The
plan to partition the Punjab and Bengal – which in the event delivered one of
the worst human calamities of the twentieth century – was heralded by a lead-
ing newspaper's special correspondent with great enthusiasm as a day which
would be ‘remembered in India's history as the day when her leaders voluntar-
ily agreed to divide the country and avoid bloodshed’.10
Both the Indian and Pakistani states have proved extremely adept at paper-
ing over these differences and muffling the multiple voices that made up the
‘nationalist’ groundswell in the late 1940s. The apparent support for the
League and the Congress as displayed in rallies and general elections in 1946
was enough sanction, and sufficient proof, that the modern nation states of
India and Pakistan had been envisaged collectively and that their citizens had
willed them into existence. A history-writing project was commenced immedi-
ately after Independence in both states, which slotted these nationalist up-
surges into a straightforward teleology that can still be viewed in the black and
white photographic exhibitions in the national museums of South Asian cities
or in schoolchildren's history textbooks. In short, both states have been good at
promoting themselves. The growth of the nationalist parties blends seamlessly
into the successful foundation of new countries. Nehru had this in mind even
before India had achieved freedom, suggesting exactly a year before Indepen-
dence that ‘we might hold an all India exhibition of the Congress struggle of
1920–1946’. Meanwhile, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan,
was considering the displays in a new national museum days before Pakistan
even came into existence.11 All the states involved, including Britain, have pro-
jected back on to events their own nationalistic, and indeed skewed, readings
of why and how the subcontinent was partitioned.
Even by the standards of the violent twentieth century, the Partition of India
is remembered for its carnage, both for its scale – which may have involved the
deaths of half a million to one million men, women and children – and for its
seemingly indiscriminate callousness.12 Individual killings, especially in the
most ferociously contested province of Punjab, were frequently accompanied
by disfiguration, dismemberment and the rape of women from one community
by men from another. Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus suffered equally as victims
and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults. The
killings bridged the barbaric and the calculatedly modern, they were both hap-
hazard and chillingly specific. A whole village might be hacked to death with
blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned in a barn and burned alive, or shot
against walls by impromptu firing squads using machine-guns. Children, the el-
derly and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and conversions from
one faith to another occurred, alongside systematic looting and robbery clearly
carried out with the intention of ruining lives. It seems that the aim was not
only to kill, but to break people. A scorched earth policy in Punjab, which would
today be labelled ethnic cleansing, was both the cause and the result of driving
people from the land. Militias, armed gangs and members of defence organisa-
tions went on the rampage. All this both preceded and accompanied the migra-
tion of some twelve million people between the two new nation states of India
and Pakistan.
The generality of these stories does little justice to the horror of individual
tales, which are difficult even for the most hardened and dispassionate reader
to digest. Small details give only a glimpse of a deeper tragedy, expressed in
the cries of an unknown refugee who, when meeting Nehru as he toured the
refugee camps, slapped him on the face, crying, ‘Give my mother back to me!
Bring my sisters to me!’ or in the grief of an unnamed villager ‘whose family
had been wiped out’, who on meeting Jinnah as he toured the Pakistani camps
in 1947, ‘sobbed uncontrollably’.13
In New Delhi, politicians and officials created reams of memos and press
releases, and held heated debates as they thrashed out the formation of Pak-
istan and India. This means very little, though, without reference to the millions
of people whose lives were being shaped. The histories of Partition have had a
tendency to segregate two sub-genres artificially: the histories of Partition vic-
tims, or survivors, and their epic journeys across the ruptured Punjab, and the
histories of bureaucratic and political intrigue acted out in the marble-floored
rooms of Lutyens's New Delhi. This human story is a very political one, though.
After all, what is the history of Pakistan and India without reference to Pakista-
nis and Indians? Ordinary Indians suffered and were affected but also shaped
the outcomes of 1947. Any suggestion that the political games in New Delhi
were unrelated to the violence that occurred during Partition should be dis-
pensed with by Mountbatten's revealing admission of almost breathtaking cal-
lousness when he admitted, on hearing that over sixty villages had been wiped
out in Gurgaon, in Delhi's hinterland, ‘I could not help feeling that this renewed
outbreak of violence, on the eve of the meeting with the leaders, might influ-
ence them to accept the plan which was about to be laid before them.’14 The
Partition plan itself was brought about through acts of violence. Partition's elit-
ist politics and everyday experiences are not as separate as they may seem at
first glance because mass demonstrations, street fighting and the circulation of
rumours all overlapped with the political decision-making process.
I would argue for a more all-encompassing, and expansive assessment of
Partition. It swept up people in very large territorial tracts of the subcontinent.
Punjab, in the north-west of undivided India, has rightly been the focus of much
recent writing about Partition, as this was the province most brutally sliced into
two parts in 1947, and was the bloody battlefield of Partition where by far the
greatest number of massacres of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims occurred. Judging
the limits of Partition and its social, economic and political penetration of South
Asia is hardly a precise science, and although I have attempted to give specific
locations and examples of Partition ‘beyond Punjab’, and to draw attention to
regional variations, there are inevitably times when this slides into generalisa-
tions. Yet to fail to do so, it seemed to me, would run counter to findings that
paint Partition as a pan-continental event. Partition went far beyond the pin-
pointed zones of Punjab and Bengal and caught up people in hundreds or thou-
sands of towns and villages in numerous ways.
Beyond Punjab and Bengal, rioters wreaked havoc in many cities. Cities that
declared riot zones at different times between 1946 and 1950 included Delhi,
Bombay, Karachi and Quetta; in the province of Uttar Pradesh, the towns of
Varanasi, Shahjahanpur, Pilibhit, Moradabad, Meerut, Kanpur, Lucknow,
Bareilly, Garhmukhteshwar, Allahabad, and Aligarh among others; the hill sta-
tions of Simla and Dehra Dun; in the province of Gujarat, Ahmedabad, Godhra
and Vadodara; and Ajmer and Udaipur in Rajasthan. Stretching into central and
western India, Amraoti, Sangamner, Saugor, Nagpur, Lashkar and Gwalior were
afflicted, and Chapra, Jamalpur and Jamshedpur in Bihar. A few outbreaks of
Partition violence even occurred in the south, which in general stayed remark-
ably untouched by the conflict unfolding in the north, in riots in Secunderabad,
in present-day Andhra Pradesh in 1947 and 1949.15 Princely ruled territories,
especially Kashmir and Hyderabad, were involved as well as the directly con-
trolled British locales. This was nothing short of a continental disaster.
There are no doubt cities which have been, for specific if contested rea-
sons, particularly riot-prone in South Asia's past, while others have remained
especially peaceful. Each riot had its own causes and could be written about in-
dividually. There were also powerful countervailing forces against violence, not
least the well-honed provincial identities and regional patriotism marking out
some areas and the work of peace groups, Gandhians and activists, especially
on the Left. Nevertheless, riots, beyond the limits of Punjab and Bengal, added
immeasurably to the social dislocation of Partition and generated their own
economic crises, wrenching refugee upheavals and visible destruction. Add to
this the random stabbing attacks that started to become a feature of life in
other towns of North India and the anxiety of people with relatives living in the
war-torn Punjab, or with children studying at faraway educational institutions or
who suffered from dishonoured business contracts, who worried about the fear
of violence, even when this did not materialise, and the number of people
touched by Partition in one way or another starts to swell.
The South Asian middle class became particularly implicated in, and af-
fected by, Partition's violent repercussions. Urban wage-earners, bureaucrats,
clerks and peons in government service, teachers, landlords, traders and stall-
holders, and petty manufacturers are the subject of many of the stories pre-
sented here. This is partly because the evidence about them is more immedi-
ately accessible in archival and newspaper sources than is that of the rural
peasantry, but mostly because it was these groups that provided the man-
power behind many Congress and League campaigns. The middle class spread
the nationalist ideals and became closely interconnected with ‘nation-building’
in the post-Independence era, through work in government institutions, the
media and business.
The refugee crisis had a shocking visibility in places far away from the Ben-
gali and Punjabi focal points as refugees drained away from Punjab and made
their homes in the further corners of the subcontinent, whether by their own ini-
tiative or through the forced dispersal of government relocation projects. Most
conspicuously in New Delhi, where large numbers of journalists and civil ser-
vants were on hand to record the devastating scenes for future historians, but
also in many other provinces; there were more than 160 government-operated
refugee camps in independent India with three in Madras, 32 in Bombay presi-
dency and 85 in East Punjab. Refugees resettled as far north as Peshawar and
as far south as Madras, and some Bengali refugees were rehoused in the An-
daman and Nicobar archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Press coverage, propa-
ganda (well circulated either by political partisans or by the state itself) and the
radio spread news of the crisis. Stories of Partition evoked feelings of fear,
sympathy and horror long distances away. This was the full force of Partition.
 During Partition and its aftermath, an empire came to an end and two new
nation states were forged from its debris. This ‘operation’, which is often de-
scribed using the metaphors of surgery, was far from clinical. Partition played a
central role in the making of new Indian and Pakistani national identities and
the apparently irreconcilable differences which continue to exist today. We
could even go as far as saying that Indian and Pakistani ideas of nationhood
were carved out diametrically, in definition against each other, at this time. Par-
tition, then, is more than the sum of its considerable parts – the hundreds of
thousands of dead, the twelve million displaced. It signifies the division of terri-
tory, independence and the birth of new states, alongside distressing personal
memories, and potent collective imaginings of the ‘other’. Partition itself has
become a loaded word, with multiple meanings in both English and the vernac-
ulars, and triggers complex feelings with deep psychological significance.16
The history of Partition is very much a work in progress, with major oral his-
tory projects still under way and new archival sources still to be unearthed, and
there have been seismic reappraisals of Partition in the past decade. Many
writers in recent years have been rather allergic to national histories, preferring
to deal with provincial, local or regional arenas, sensitive to the risk of oversim-
plification and the constraints imposed by attempting national narratives. The
continental dimensions and domestic variations in South Asia, of language,
caste and religion, and the local peculiarities and sensibilities of these commu-
nities, are legendary. Often what might be a critically important regional event
in one place bears little relevance to the wider nation. Instead, the trajectory
has been towards micro-histories, inflected by anthropology, sociology and the-
ory, which rightly resurrect the ordinary, everyday Indian in the picture and re-
store him or her to the past. Urvashi Butalia, the foremost chronicler of Parti-
tion voices, expressed her distaste with the clinical neutrality which charac-
terised some of the earlier works about 1947 and her deep suspicion of histo-
ries ‘that seem to write themselves’.17 She is right: Partition stories are per-
sonal, intensely subjective, constructed through memory, gender and ideas of
self, and span the subcontinent.
This book engages with the idea of two nations, however, as it seems diffi-
cult to overlook the fact that two antithetical states emerged in 1947. For all
their domestic heterogeneity and irrespective of widespread and popular de-
mands for peace, the reality is that these states have repeatedly fought wars
against each other, restricted trade and interaction between their citizens,
spent vast amounts on arms, developed nuclear weaponry and are suspended
in ideological conflict. The gross tragedy for ordinary people which Partition in-
volved – the migration of huge numbers to unknown places, the violence which
deliberately targeted refugees and minorities, and the particular terrors for
women – sit alongside the immense problems families faced in reconstructing
their lives anew. These histories are intrinsically important but also part of this
broader story of national reconstruction and international rivalry.
Individuals were caught between the pull of two opposing nationalisms and
had their citizenship settled and fixed as Indian or Pakistani. The Indian and
Pakistani governments had to undertake the complex governmental business
of teasing out two new states, with full administrative and military apparatus.
All this took place just at the time when social uncertainty, the loss of trained
manpower and the lack of resources were testing their administrative abilities
to the utmost. India and Pakistan were built on messy and turbulent founda-
tions. Partition set in motion a train of events unforeseen by every single per-
son who had advocated and argued for the division. Above all, this book revisits
how and why this happened; how the British empire disintegrated in South
Asia, and how two new nations materialised. The grave implications of this
stretch into the present day for these two vitally important, and now distinctive,
countries.
 1
In the Shadow of War

The eccentric and itinerant retired Indian civil servant Malcolm Darling
toured North India on horseback at the end of 1946 to ascertain ‘what the
peasant was thinking’ and ‘how his way of life had been affected by the war’. It
was clear that the end of the British empire in India was imminent and Darling
was fully conscious of the momentous days that he was witnessing. The Sec-
ond World War was over and change was afoot. Darling desired to know what
Independence would mean for ordinary Indians living in villages and small
towns on the Punjabi and North Indian plains. He could, of course, have chosen
to travel by motor car, but Darling intended to chronicle the end of the empire
as an equestrian, self-consciously styling himself as the direct heir to Arthur
Young who had ridden across France in the eighteenth century. By doing so,
Darling suggested that the end of the British Raj in India was a historical mo-
ment directly comparable with the French Revolution. He was interested in ob-
serving a panoply of concerns, including improvements in living standards, the
status of women and the uptake of novel farming techniques, but one of the
questions which preoccupied him – and which he asked repeatedly of the hun-
dreds of villagers, soldiers and administrators who provided hospitality, hot tea
and chit-chat along the way – was what people wanted from Independence;
what their dreams of a life free from imperial rule looked like.
Darling met hundreds of villagers on his ride and they all answered his
questions about azadi, or freedom, differently: among a group of Punjabi Mus-
lims, he noted, ‘The village headmen riding with me were all supporters of the
League. “What is its object?” I asked them. “Sanun kuchh patta nahin – we
have no idea,” said one of them and another added: “It is an affair of the Mus-
lims”.’ A third was more explicit and said: ‘If there were no League, the Hindus
would get the government and take away our land.’ In another village named
Balkassar, he met prosperous members of the Khatri Sikh community who told
him, ‘Sikh and Muslim … had lived together in harmony, but now, with the cry
for Pakistan, each eyes the other critically and keeps apart.’ ‘But surely you
want azadi?’ Darling asked. ‘Azadi’, said one of the younger men ‘is bebadi –
destruction, and Pakistan is kabaristan – a graveyard.’ In another village, Miani
Gondal in Punjab, he asked the difference between the Congress and the
League. Someone piped up saying, ‘we don't bother about that’ and another at-
tempted to explain the meaning of Pakistan. ‘Our area’, he said, ‘must be sepa-
rate, and the Hindu area must be separate.’ When he asked a group of Sikhs
on the other side of the Chenab River in a central Punjabi village in the district
of Lyallpur, ‘What would they do with freedom?’ he recorded, ‘When the word
azadi – freedom – was mentioned there was no dissentient voice. All wanted it
and when I asked what they would do with it when they got it, a Sikh replied,
“Now we are slaves. When we are free we shall serve ourselves and do as we
like. Then we shall gladly pay more taxes.” Another colonist, one of the more
educated present wearing a fine black achkan [long coat] said that when they
were free they would have prosperity.’ Darling could not help but conclude that
azadi is ‘the word which comes up sooner or later at every meeting’.1
Darling's account must be handled with suspicion because he was, for all
his liberal compassion and interest in Indians, ambivalent about the end of the
Raj. His stories play down the great strength of nationalist feeling in India at the
time and can be read as justification for the prolongation of empire. There was
absolutely no shortage of well-educated, articulate and fiercely political Indians
alive at the end of the war, determined to start shaping the fate of their own
state. The central question though was a valid one. What did ordinary Indians
expect from Independence and what were the hopes and dreams at the end of
the Second World War as people felt themselves to be on the brink of a revolu-
tion? Above all, Darling was right about one thing. ‘What a hash politics
threaten to make of this tract, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are as mixed up
as the ingredients of a well-made pilau,’ he predicted as he rode across the fer-
tile Punjabi plains that winter.2 Within a year this region would be divided in
half and many of the people he met along the way in these ‘mixed-up’ popula-
tions would have been wrenched out of their homes, made destitute or mur-
dered.
The land which Darling rode through was much changed from the pre-war
years. At the end of the war India was either an exciting and exhilarating or a
dangerous place, depending on your particular circumstances and viewpoint.
The divisive question about how best to settle the representation of Hindus,
Sikhs and Muslims in a future Indian state was only one of numerous problems
facing the British government as it tried to resume service after the summer of
1945, and it was by no means certain that it would become the most critical.
The demands and compromises made during the war had badly cracked the
foundational scaffolding of the Raj. This structure, which was so good at giving
the illusion of permanence and durability, was actually built on specific sets of
relationships between British administrators and an unlikely coalition of Indian
princely rulers, self-promoting landed oligarchs, hand-picked civil servants, lo-
cally hired policemen and soldiers. By the end of the Second World War, a
thread had loosened in the political fabric of the state. An unparalleled naval
mutiny shook the authority of the Raj to its foundations and strikes, student ac-
tivism and peasant revolt reverberated throughout the country, while an ill-ad-
vised attempt to prosecute members of the rebellious Indian National Army be-
came a national cause célèbre. Above all, this was a time of transition, and
India, and its old colonial system of governance, was irreversibly altered by the
tremendous economic, social and psychological consequences of war.
Just as it had in Britain, the war effort strained, and ultimately reconfigured,
the very nature of the political economy of the state and the partition that fol-
lowed is difficult to comprehend in isolation from this upheaval. Daily terror and
dread of an impending attack by the Axis powers had suffused life during the
war years for many, especially once Singapore toppled to the Japanese in
1942. Even though such an attack failed to materialise on Indian soil, apart
from the oft-forgotten Japanese bombing of Bengal, fear of imminent invasion
had been inculcated quite deliberately by government propaganda. In North
India blackouts and bomb shelters were not unusual in the homes of the
wealthy, and fearfulness and rumour had become a feature of public life well
before Partition appeared on the political horizon, as is attested by the with-
drawal of bank savings and their conversion into cash and jewellery in Punjab.3
At the war's cessation, thousands of troops, fired up by exposure to new politi-
cal ideas and expecting some recompense for the rigours of military service, re-
turned to their villages. Troops housed in one camp twenty miles from Delhi,
‘had become accustomed to a new standard of living in Germany … some had
the conviction that they were coming to a free India’ and others wrote to the
newspapers. ‘We who have done real hard work and our duty as we were ex-
pected to do should be told frankly that we are not to expect anything from
Government. If there is no expectation there will be no disappointment,’ ap-
pealed one officer stationed in Bangalore.4
Expectations of freedom were sky high and India was set to become the
first part of the empire, beyond the dominions, to win its independence, paving
the way for the later decolonisation of other countries in Asia, Africa and else-
where. At the same time, British civil servants in their isolated outposts
throughout the country waited nervously for news that they could take long-
overdue leave, and surveyed the political landscape with trepidation while local
politicians found ready audiences on soapboxes and in the press. Book sales
boomed, papers sold in unprecedented quantities and a sense of imminent
change and transformation was palpable in the cities. Congressmen, jailed for
the duration of the war, leaped back into the political arena after their release
from prison in June 1945, talking more freely and provocatively than ever. ‘In-
dependence will be attained soon. It has almost come to us. We have it. None
can snatch it away from us’, a leading Congressman told the swollen crowds at
a political rally in Agra, weeks after his three-year jail sentence had ended.
‘Yearnings and hunger for independence have so much increased that anyone
who obstructs or comes in the way will be burnt to ashes.’5 Abstract notions of
freedom and fine British sentiments would no longer do; the people were deter-
mined to have independence and to experience it for themselves.
After two centuries of imperial rule the British had become confused, equiv-
ocal imperialists in India, at best. The state had postponed, or simply aban-
doned, many of the other projects which might have warranted attention in
peacetime and resorted to a simplistic form of basic imperialism during the
war: keeping the peace and extracting the necessary resources to fight the war.
The bureaucracy itself, the notorious ‘steel frame’, was creaking under the
weight of the new duties that it had assumed during wartime. Indians now out-
numbered Europeans in the civil service and a deliberate policy of gradually In-
dianising the services had been greatly accelerated. It was becoming practically
impossible to recruit young British men to staff the Raj and by 1943 Indian Civil
Service recruitment in Britain had effectively dried up. By 1946, many of the
British men who had enlisted during the Second World War were attracted by
the business opportunities of the postwar world, and were not inclined to travel
four thousand miles to manage a fading empire. High-ranking British policemen
in India started casting around for openings elsewhere in the empire or even
beyond: ‘this consulate alone has already been approached by three of the
higher ranking officials who have been interested in the possibilities of obtain-
ing positions in the United States,’ reported the American Vice-Consul in
Karachi.6
Grainy photographs of the Partition era sometimes hint that it was a ‘me-
dieval’ horror that occurred in a poor and undeveloped landscape, but this is a
manipulation of the truth; urban India was in the midst of rapid change by
1946, change which had been greatly accelerated by the industrial spurt
caused by war, and although it is unwise to generalise about such a vast and
variegated economy – which ranged from gritty industrial centres such as
Jamshedpur (home to the largest single steelworks in the British empire pio-
neered by the entrepreneurial Tata family) to remote and extremely poor vil-
lages entirely dependent on agricultural crops – Partition took place in the mid-
twentieth century. The battle over India and Pakistan was fought in towns and
cities that would be instantly recognisable today.
Giant metropolises – Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Calcutta – differed from
the smaller towns founded on government service and small-scale production,
such as Karachi, Lucknow, Dacca or Lahore, yet by the 1940s all these towns
and cities had richly complex civic lives, with numerous banks, schools, hospi-
tals, chambers of commerce, temples and mosques, densely packed roads,
bazaars and alleyways. Colleges and universities swarmed with well-read, politi-
cised students who awaited the start of a new era. Many wealthy landowners
and members of princely elites failed to notice, or mistakenly ignored, the
winds of change blowing through society and persisted with their annual
rounds of balls, parties and dances.
Among the middle classes, the buzz was about new poets, fashion maga-
zines and pulp fiction. Eating out was becoming more popular, and there was a
sudden rash of new restaurants and coffee-houses. Standing on the fringes of
the middle class, city dwellers with jobs, perhaps as petty clerks or school-
teachers, could buy new types of consumer goods for the first time in the
1940s. They packed the cinema halls and took the opportunity to travel more
than their forefathers, either by bicycle or train. New attitudes percolated
through society: in Punjab women were increasingly going without the veil and
favouring high heels and synthetic saris. Tea-drinking from ceramic cups was
becoming more commonplace and smoking leaf tobacco was catching on. Mar-
kets selling brightly patterned cloth, gold jewellery and sweets would have
looked entirely familiar. The towns, typically based on small trading businesses,
petty shopkeeping and service trades, were, and are, disproportionately power-
ful in relation to a vast agricultural sector. ‘No favorite wife could have been
treated with more favor than the town’, noted one observer, and provincial
towns such as Amritsar, Lucknow, Lahore, Dacca and Karachi were the nerve
centres of political life.7
For those without money, the cities were darker and more dangerous
places. Many landless agriculturalists were compelled to seek work and the
overcrowding of the greatest cities had been greatly exacerbated by the
wartime boom. ‘Nowhere in the world today’, wrote one eminent economic his-
torian and well-travelled contemporary commentator, ‘are there slums worse
than the single-story bustees of Calcutta or the multistory chawls of Bombay.’8
Cities such as the northern manufacturing metropolis Kanpur exploded during
the war owing to the escalating demands for cotton, wool, jute and sugar and
the population of the city, overwhelmed by migrant labour, nearly doubled be-
tween 1941 and 1951. At the end of the war, when much of this production
contracted, labourers faced unemployment. Thousands of workers returned to
their wives and children in their home villages, and tried to revive livelihoods as
cultivators. Others remained as casual workers, or carved out a life on the mar-
gins of the city, living among other caste and community members, taking part
in union politics, local clubs or akharas. In the 1940s, 40 per cent of the debt-
ridden peasantry neither owned nor rented any land at all and were entirely de-
pendent on casual, seasonal employment.9 Too many were barefoot, poorly
dressed, sick or suffering, barely surviving on one meal a day. ‘It was market
day,’ wrote a journalist from Bihar. ‘We were surrounded by starving people and
in the whole of the market except for sag [spinach] and mahuwa [edible seeds
and flowers] we found nothing else. For three months, rice had not been selling
in the bazaar and the people were living on sag.’10 The empire had not deliv-
ered much in the way of development to its poorest members. Unstoppable
waves of sometimes seasonal, sometimes permanent, migration to the bal-
looning cities persisted, despite the post-war depression, and have continued
ever since.
For most Indians, especially town dwellers, life revolved around getting hold
of daily essentials, especially bread. Wheat, grain, cloth, and kerosene were all
in desperately short supply. In a classic Hindi novel of the time, Adha Gaon,
Phunnan Miyan, the father of a soldier serving abroad in the army, anxious be-
cause he hasn't heard any news from his boy, is asked to donate money to a
war fund towards the end of the war, and promptly retorts: ‘You can't get cloth.
Eh, Bhai, everything to eat has disappeared from the bazaar. I couldn't get
sugar to make offerings. Kerosene has become like the water of paradise. Only
certain special people get it. I'm not giving an anna to the war fund. Do what-
ever you like.’11
This depth of feeling opened a window of opportunity for the politicians as
perilous food shortages and hunger, the threat of hunger, and anxiety about
food supply were running sores in 1946. India had been living ‘hand to mouth
for the past three years,’ admitted the Secretary of the Food Department. A
devastating cyclone destroyed crops in the west of the country and the mon-
soon failed in the south. Nearly half the Indian population was subject to ra-
tioning. In the early months of 1946, the Viceroy was preoccupied by the food
issue, which, in his own words, ‘threatened calamity’.12 Farmers were tempted
to dodge fixed-price government procurement, keep back their rice, wheat and
vegetables and to sell their produce on the black market. ‘One way to defeat
the food law-breaker is to report him to the authorities. Another is to hound him
out of society,’ instructed a government-sponsored newspaper advert. ‘Hound
him out!’13 Despite the adverts, selling on the black market became common-
place and the government itself admitted that food could be bought for nearly
three times its ration price in the small towns.
Understandably, resistance to forced requisitioning broke out as the poor
and ravenous rebelled. In a Gujarati town, hungry labourers refused to load
bags of wheat on to lorries and a sympathetic crowd gathered to join their
protest, tearing at the sacks with their hands.14 The very poorest were worst hit
as they were compelled to make do with the paltry, leftover rations doled out by
the state. At the close of the war large painted hoardings in Calcutta could still
be seen, sponsored by the biscuit-maker Britannia, which depicted smiling, uni-
formed soldiers. The slogan in neat letters accompanying the picture spelt out
the wartime food equation with stunning brevity: ‘Their needs come first!’ A
shocking lesson that Calcutta had come to feel only too painfully. In the Bengal
famine of 1943 the Bengali public had been left starving to death, and perhaps
as many as three million died because of shoddy government food allocation
and skewed political priorities.
It is not easy to say, then, where wartime politics ended and the politics of
partitioning began. Partition took place in a society only partially emerging from
long years of war. Two-and-a-half million Indian soldiers served in the Second
World War, over 24,000 were killed and 64,000 wounded. This, the largest vol-
unteer army in history, which had served in theatres from Greece to Burma,
was now in the process of a euphoric and disruptive demobilisation. It was only
a fortnight after Victory Week in Delhi, when huge processions of soldiers,
brass and pipe bands with regimental flags rolled through the centre of the city
to celebrate the end of the war, that the members of the British delegation sent
to negotiate a constitutional settlement for India, and to plan its disengage-
ment from empire, arrived in the capital. Partition emerged from a cauldron of
social disorder. The Indian economy, which had been completely geared to-
wards feeding soldiers and supporting the war effort, now shifted in a new di-
rection. The Second World War and Partition bled into each other. Indian soci-
ety, like the British, was undergoing widespread readjustment and demobilisa-
tion from 1946–7 and this determined the lines upon which the state frac-
tured.15 Indians stood on the threshold of change and revolution but, as yet,
the shape of this change was unknown and frighteningly uncertain.
A religious divide?
How and when the British should leave India, and who they should leave
power to, were the vital questions dominating all facets of Indian political life by
1946. The Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League were un-
questionably the frontrunners in the race to acquire official sanction as ‘lead-
ers’ by the mid–1940s. Indian imperialism had long operated through a careful
balance between the forced coercion and the assistance of Indians who had
entered into public life in India, both in cooperation with, and in resistance to,
the political and administrative structures erected by the Raj.
The most successful party, the Indian National Congress, created in 1885,
would have been unrecognisable to its founders by 1946. Under the leadership
of Gandhi an elite, patriarchal group of lawyers had, since the 1920s, trans-
formed itself from a polite pressure group into a mass nationalist party, with
over four-and-a-half million members and many more sympathisers. The
League, in contrast, was far more of a latecomer to the political scene. Al-
though it was founded in 1909 the League had only caught on among South
Asian Muslims during the Second World War. The party had expanded astonish-
ingly rapidly and was claiming over two million members by the early 1940s, an
unimaginable result for what had been previously thought of as just one of nu-
merous pressure groups and small but insignificant parties.16 By the late
1940s the League and the Congress had impressed on the British their own vi-
sions of a free future for Indian people. These visions appeared, on the surface,
to be incompatible as one, articulated by the Congress, rested on the idea of a
united, plural India as a home for all Indians and the other, spelt out by the
League, rested on the foundation of Muslim nationalism and the carving out of
a separate Muslim homeland. Yet, things were far more finely nuanced than
these simple equations between the League as the-party-of-the-Muslims and
the Congress as the-party-for-everyone-else would suggest, especially as both
parties continued to vacillate about the future nature of a free India, and its
constitutional division of powers.
Evidently, in the run up to Partition something had gone badly wrong be-
tween Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. The nature of this breakdown has re-
mained mysterious and unfathomable even to some of those who experienced
it or who were caught in the middle of it. As a civil supplies officer, A.S. Bakshi,
a turbaned, Sikh civil supplies officer from the fertile district of Jullundur later
puzzled, ‘we used to be together … for days and nights, all of a sudden they lost
confidence in us … at that time there were only two things … Muslims, and non-
Muslims’. These feelings run to dismay as well as bitterness: ‘we have lost the
best of our friends, the people whom we loved, the places … so much of us was
embedded in every brick where we'd stayed for genera-tions’.17 The sorrow at
the centre of numerous Partition stories – and the lack of reconciliation with
Partition among so many people – hints at the lack of legitimacy in the division,
the wider feeling that good social relationships had been ruptured by a settle-
ment forcefully imposed from on high.
Most histories of Partition necessarily cast back in time, to the 1920s or
earlier, to find the answer to this dark question at the heart of Indian national-
ism, to understand why Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims grew apart, and debate
whether this schism and sense of division were actually widespread. In the
three decades preceding Partition a self-conscious awareness of religious eth-
nicity – and conflict based on this – had undoubtedly escalated in intensity and
was becoming more flagrant. Riots, which had been breaking out on religious
festivals such as the festival of colour, Holi, or in connection with the slaughter-
ing of sacred cows or when Hindu religious music was piped too loudly in front
of mosques during prayer time, broke out after increasingly shortened inter-
vals, and with more frightening ferocity, from the end of the First World War on-
wards. Groups working for religious education and conversion were becoming
ever more adept at winning followers and were powerfully entrenched by the
1940s. Reformist groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat, Arya Samaj, and Jam ‘at-
i Islami became richer, stronger, more dogmatic and more persuasive. They
blended, in different ways, politics and religious symbolism, the internal per-
sonal quest with an external missionary zeal. Inevitably, perhaps, they also
clashed doctrinally and politically with each other. The most important storm
centres of this new type of conflict tended to be the cities and towns of north
and west India and the newly minted identities were strongest in the educated,
middle-class urban milieux of the burgeoning cities.
By the end of the war, many people were revelling in new and simplistic ex-
pressions of religion. There was nothing ancient or predestined about these
politicised manifestations of identity. The experience of colonial rule had doubt-
less stirred up these divisions and added to a sense of separation, especially
among elites. Reminders of religious ‘difference’ were built into the brickwork
of the colonial state; a Muslim traveller would be directed to the ‘Mo-
hammedan refreshment room’ at a train station and drinking taps on railway
platforms were labelled ‘Hindu water’ or ‘Muslim water’. Religious holidays
were factored into the official working calendar and government statistics,
maps, gazetteers, routine instructions, laws and, above all, the census, all op-
erated on the premise that highly distinct communities, of Muslims, Sikhs and
Hindus resided in the subcontinent. ‘A stranger travelling in Indian trains may
well have a painful shock when he hears at railway stations for the first time in
his life ridiculous sounds about pani [water], tea and the like being either Hindu
or Muslim,’ lamented Gandhi in 1946. ‘It would be repulsive [for this to con-
tinue] … it is to be hoped that we shall soon have the last of the shame that is
peculiarly Indian.’18
Generations of European administrators, travellers and scholars fore-
grounded the ‘spiritual’ in all their interpretations of India and, in their eyes,
Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were inescapably separate and mutually incompati-
ble. As a result of this short-sightedness and an inability to see the finely
grained distinctions and differences within, and between, these peoples, all
sorts of misguided imperial interventions on behalf of ‘communities’ were put
in place. Well-intentioned policies intended to show British fair play and even-
handedness could end up encouraging co-religionists to bond more tightly to-
gether. The most important of these moves was the decision to give separate
electorates to different religious communities from 1909 so that they were rep-
resented by their ‘own’ politicians.19 Religious groups acquired stronger voices
and more visible spokesmen. New types of association and organisation could
link up together, using the railways and the power of the printing press. All this
backfired catastrophically as religious boundaries, both more porous and less
sharply defined in an earlier age, now hardened.
So the experience of empire exacerbated religious difference. Of course,
taboos about purity and pollution, especially about eating, drinking and inter-
marrying, did have a far longer pedigree and much older historical precedent;
internecine warfare had taken place in the past. Yet Partition and its build-up
was something entirely new in India and directly related to the ending of em-
pire. Soldiers in the wars of the pre-European era would have considered their
religious affiliations in much more localised and less universal ways. They
would not necessarily have identified with other co-religionists in other parts of
the region, let alone the country or even the world. These earlier wars did,
though, provide twentieth-century Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs with a full-
blooded stock of superheroes, myths and stories, in which one righteous spiri-
tual community pitted itself against another, from which to draw during their
own struggles.20 The exclusionary politics of Partition, the scale of the killings
and the grouping along religious lines were new. Even non-believers or self-pro-
claimed atheists were labelled as members of a ‘community’ because of the
group that they happened to be born into – not what they believed. Such rigid
classifications were novel and completely different from any battles of the pre-
ceding centuries.21
Professor Mohammad Mujeeb would have meditated on this, and would un-
doubtedly have been familiar with the heroes and villains of the old stories of
Mughal rule and Indian dynasties before the British conquest of the eighteenth
century. He was an eminent scholar and educationalist, in his mid-forties at the
time of Partition and Vice-Chancellor at the influential Jamia Millia University in
Delhi. As a leading nationalist, from a family of staunch Congress supporters,
he had a rich social circle of friends and colleagues in the urban literati, which
crossed all religions. It was not untypical for Muslims such as Mujeeb to sup-
port the Congress and to oppose the League, and he was close to many promi-
nent national politicians. And yet, despite all this, and his great personal friend-
ship with Nehru, his account of shopping in Delhi's markets in the years leading
up to Partition is highly revealing. ‘For a few years under the influence of the
idea that the Muslim consumer should support the Muslim trader,’ he remem-
bered, ‘I made it a point to buy what I needed in Muslim shops in Old Delhi.’
Among educated nationalists during these years, a sense of separateness and
self-conscious awareness of difference had set in. Yet this was not the end of
the story. Making such straightforward connections between co-religionists was
not so easy. Whenever he went shopping, the harsh, practical realities of the
situation quickly came home to Mujeeb. ‘There were good and bad salesmen,’
irrespective of religion and the shops of the good salesmen – with their stacks
of sweets, silver pots and pans, or bundles of cloth – ‘were always crowded,
and Muslim customers were an insignificant part of the crowd’. When the pro-
fessor tried to get the women in his family to take up his scheme of ‘buying
Muslim’, he was rebuffed with undisguised scorn; practical housewives would
shop where the produce was good and where they were given courteous ser-
vice, they told him, not on the basis of some simplistic, abstract notion.22
Mohammad Mujeeb's tale is instructive. On the threshold of Partition, Hin-
dus, Muslims and Sikhs – especially those in the highest political circles – lived
with an awareness of difference. This was not grounded on how often someone
prayed or went to the temple; it transcended individual levels of piety. It was a
strongly felt kinship with others of the same faith that was preserved and pro-
moted through intermarrying (and the strict censure of those who dared to
marry outside the group), shared histories and myths, and the instillation of
customs, habits and superstitions from an early age. But it was pragmatic. It
was not easy to hook together co-religionists in political allegiances across
great expanses of territory; there was no such thing as one Muslim, Hindu or
Sikh community in South Asia, as numerous demagogues found to their peril.
For one thing, linguistic and cultural differences zigzagged across the country
and for another, there was little common ground between people with such di-
vergent incomes.
On the eve of Partition, even in the places where there was a heightened
sense of difference, there were many countervailing forces. Mercantile and
manufacturing communities from sari weavers to tea planters depended on
pragmatic co-operation for their livelihoods, while festivals and holidays were
flamboyantly celebrated across the board. Class, as ever, acted as a social gel
and rich Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of the same social standing partied to-
gether in gilded hotels, irrespective of religion; university friends of various
backgrounds attended the same classes; and poor agriculturalists relaxed to-
gether on charpois at the end of a day's work. Above all, it was a very long jump
from a sense of difference, or lack of social cohesion, to mass slaughter and
rape. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about Partition and nobody could have pre-
dicted, at the end of the Second World War, that half a million people or more
were going to die because of these differences.
 2
Changing Regime

On 14 June 1945, a little over a month after Germany surrendered to the

Allies, Nehru and the other leading members of the Congress stepped out of
jail. They were free men, released from prison for the final time.
In the absence of the Congress leadership from national political life, how-
ever, the political tableaux in which they acted had changed drastically. As the
party president at the time, A.K. Azad later claimed, in prison he had been
‘completely cut off from the outside world’, even denied his trusty portable
radio, ‘and did not know what was happening outside’. On their release, the
leadership was ‘thrown into a new world’.1 Indians ecstatically greeted their
pantheon of heroes but Nehru and the others had fallen out of step with the
popular politics of the moment. Gandhi had been freed earlier in 1944 but
seemed a figure from the past, removed from the mood of anti-European pop-
ulism with its roots in labour protest and peasant radicalism. Now, there was
little popular regard for the ideology of non-violence and Subhas Chandra Bose,
the Indian National Army chief was the hero of the hour. Even more impor-
tantly, the Muslim League had been able to exploit the gaps in public leader-
ship exposed by the removal of Congressmen from the limelight, building up a
vast groundswell of support that was fatally underestimated by the Congress
leadership when it returned to the negotiating table. The Congress message
had become more muted in the interim years. It was not clear that the Con-
gress leadership would be able to lead and control popular outbursts as it had
done in the past.
By this point, the Congress Party was a bulky organisation, much changed
since its heyday of mass public protest against British rule in the 1920s and
1930s. It was a victim of its own success, as it had become a gargantuan um-
brella party, housing all manner of political thinkers, politicians, idealists and
unscrupulous opportunists. Gandhi famously suggested that the Congress
should be disbanded after Independence, as it would have exhausted its stated
purpose since 1929 of delivering purna swaraj, or full independence, from
British rule, but his suggestion was conveniently overlooked as the Congress
transformed itself from liberation movement to ruling party. Even if desirable, it
was impossible to enforce one pure ideological line. Within the Congress broad
church jostled committed Gandhians, liberals, socialists, politicians with narrow
regional or local agendas and Hindu nationalists who drew on religious symbol-
ism and history to define their vision of a free united India. Defections took
place from smaller parties as the Congress's omnipotence became in-
escapable. ‘I have joined the Congress,’ said Maheshwar Dayal Seth, former
president of the United Provinces Provincial Hindu Sabha, in a statement. ‘I
have not joined the Congress for the loaves of office but for service through
sacrifice and suffering.’2 Despite the protestations, it seemed more likely that
many jumped on the Congress bandwagon because they knew it was hurtling
towards the finishing line; it was obvious the Congress would be the party of
power.
The Congress hierarchy was racked with anxiety both about these ideologi-
cal divisions and about the splinters surfacing in the organisational capacity of
the party. National leaders and rank-and-file supporters disagreed vehemently
among themselves on all sorts of matters: the basis on which nationalism
should be agreed, the ideological policy of the new state, in particular the place
that religious symbolism would play in it, and about the meanings of freedom
for ordinary South Asians. ‘The system of enrolling indiscriminately four anna
members,’ complained the General Secretaries of the party about the quarter
of a rupee subscription fee, ‘has led unfortunately to many forms of corruption
and malpractices disfiguring our political life.’3 The leadership, which had been
attracted by Gandhi's visionary call in their twenties, and drawn to his decep-
tively simple message of non-violence and self-rule, now approached old age.
Nehru was fifty-seven, Vallabhbhai Patel, second in command to Nehru and
soon to be Indian Deputy Prime Minister, was seventy-one, Gandhi himself was
seventy-seven. They were still engaged in the same protracted, wearisome tug-
of-war with the British rulers. Unsurprisingly, differences of opinion among the
hierarchy were also transparent by 1946. Gandhi's continued emphasis on
spiritual development, self-sufficiency and the foundation of village republics
was viewed with barely concealed scepticism by Nehru, despite his personal
love and profound respect for the Mahatma, while Nehru's own intellectual
spadework and prolific writings paved the way for a liberal, industrial and plural
state.
Without anchorage in Gandhian non-violence the nationalist movement was
a much more volatile and dangerous proposition, as the leaders themselves
were only too aware. To be sure, Gandhi's own concern about this may have
been controlling and innately conservative. ‘A great many things seem to be
slipping out of the hands of the Congress,’ he protested to Vallabhbhai Patel.
‘The [striking] postmen do not listen to it, nor does Ahmedabad [where a
Hindu–Muslim riot had occurred], nor do Harijans, nor Muslims. This is a
strange situation indeed.’ Gandhi was far too astute not to realise that the Con-
gress was only just managing to stay loosely in control of a much larger, more
volatile and diverse collection of political movements.4
It is little wonder, then, that the Congress tried uneasily to latch on to the
popular movements that were breaking out all over India at the end of the Sec-
ond World War. In particular, Congressmen teamed up with men returning from
the Indian National Army. After tedious waits for demobilisation, many soldiers
were recruited into military and civil police units and others became ideal re-
cruits for the new defence groups and volunteer bodies springing up across
North India. ‘Our boys cannot forget politics,’ Nehru boldly asserted, ‘and work
as mere mercenary automatons of a foreign government’ and many of the sol-
diers had indeed developed their own appraisal of the political situation, had
high hopes of the meaning of freedom and were passionately nationalistic. In
the emboldened words of a Pathan soldier who had fought in North Africa and
Italy to Malcolm Darling on his tour in the winter of 1946, ‘We suffered in the
war but you didn't … we bore with this that we might be free.’5 Disgruntled for-
mer soldiers were not going to sit by quietly and wait for concessions from the
British: they were armed with a new appreciation of the desperateness, and the
injustice, of colonial rule.
The political ‘isms’ of the post-war world – communism, socialism, fascism
and nationalism – could no longer be regarded as abstract philosophies but
were deeply felt as matters of life and death. Wartime had created new oppor-
tunities while exhausting older ways of doing political business, beefing up the
economic and social power of India's cities and, even more importantly, chang-
ing the ways in which people thought of politics. Conditions had irreversibly
changed. As 1945 drew to a close, India was rocked by rebellions and revolts
on an unprecedented scale.
The ending of an era
‘I am not very much looking forward to 1946,’ the British Viceroy, Wavell,
wrote sombrely in his diary on New Year's Day, ‘and shall be surprised and very
pleased if we get through without serious trouble.’6 His pessimism proved to be
well founded and soon ships in Bombay harbour, where fireworks for New
Year's Eve had boomed weeks earlier, turned their guns against British author-
ity, and trained them on those venerable institutions of imperial life: the Taj
Hotel, the Yacht Club and the other neo-Gothic buildings that lined the Bombay
shore. The naval mutiny was just one of numerous popular rebellions in the
early months of 1946. B.C. Dutt, a ringleader of the strike, later remembered
the scene on Bombay's shoreline during those tense but festival-like days,
when Indian sympathisers fearlessly came to deliver food and water to the mu-
tineers under the full gaze of British officials:
From every walk of life they came and crowded the seafront around the Gateway of India,
with packets of food and pails of water. The restaurant keepers were seen requesting people
to carry whatever food they could to the beleaguered ratings. Even some street beggars, it
was reported in the press, were seen carrying tiny food packets for the ratings. The harbour
front presented a strange spectacle. The whole area was patrolled by armed Indian soldiers.
British forces were kept ready at a distance. Indian soldiers with rifles slung across their
backs helped to load the food packets brought by the public on boats sent from the ships in
the harbour. The British officers were helpless spectators.7
It is difficult to exaggerate the turmoil that India was experiencing at the
close of the Second World War and the sense of entitlement and hope that had
fired the imagination of the people. This was in stark contrast to the situation
the average British colonial official found himself in: disliked, overburdened
and heavily constrained by a fiscally cautious regime.
 Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press
workers to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries and facto-
ries.8 In 1946 there were 1,629 industrial disputes involving almost two million
workers and a loss of over twelve million man-days.9 An All India railway strike,
which would, of course, have brought gridlock to the country, was threatened in
the summer of 1946 and was only narrowly avoided. In Bihar in March 1946 a
very serious police mutiny, during which policemen broke open a central ar-
moury, and rampaged through a handful of major towns, was brought under
control by the firing of the military. A copycat incident in Delhi involved the
mutiny of over 300 policemen.10 In addition to nationwide anti-British protest
movements in retaliation for the firings on the naval mutineers in Bombay,
Karachi and Madras, peasant movements, or kisan sabhas, attempted to seize
control of food committees, resist the control of richer food-hoarders and
protest against ration cuts.
The newest aspect of 1946 was the fusion of so many different move-
ments, some urban and some rural, some violent and some law-abiding, many
of which were explicitly directed against the British while others, led by rebels,
targeted exploitative Indian landlords, loan sharks, autocratic princes and exist-
ing social dynamics more broadly. The one thing in common was a feeling of re-
sistance to the status quo. Many of these movements sliced across the neat
chronological parameters of Independence and Partition. The armed clashes of
the colossal Telengana uprising spread to three to four thousand villages in the
Telugu-speaking regions of Hyderabad where peasants armed themselves and
seized land.11 This rebellion, stretching from July 1946 to October 1951 was
an interconnected series of armed reprisals for excessive rents, extortion, op-
pression and the pitiful living conditions in lands ruthlessly controlled by the
Nizam of Hyderabad and his landed oligarchy. Radicalised by communist lead-
ership, peasants attempted to liberate their village hinterlands, to redistribute
land, and to establish a more equitable society, and even after Independence,
once the Nizam had been removed from power by the violent intervention of In-
dian troops, rebels continued in their struggle against the Indian state itself
well into the earliest years of Independence.
Elite Indo-British relationships endured and for the select few the rounds of
tea parties, shoots and open houses, attended by rich Indians and Europeans
alike, continued unabated. On the streets of major cities, though, a definite
streak of anti-Europeanism started to mar relationships, with western ties and
hats forcibly removed from Europeans in Bombay, Calcutta and Karachi, the
Punjab Governor's car stoned by student demonstrators on the Mall in Lahore
and Europeans thrown from their bicycles, while some British tommies about to
be shipped home chalked ‘cheer, wogs, we are quitting India!’ on railway car-
riages.12 ‘I am bound to say that I cannot recollect any period,’ wrote the an-
guished British Governor of the Central Provinces and Berar to the Viceroy in
1945, reflecting on the charged political rhetoric of the times, ‘in which there
have been such venomous and unbridled attacks against Government and
Government officers.’13 The 1946 Victory Day parade, a grand spectacle that
would have been utilised, in the old order, to express imperial might and to cel-
ebrate Indian and British connections, was boycotted by nearly all the major po-
litical parties and accompanied by anti-imperial rioting in New Delhi. Mills,
schools, shops and colleges were closed, black protest flags were draped from
windows, and European-owned cars smouldered while police used fire and tear
gas to control crowds. As the procession passed through Connaught Circus,
Delhi's commercial hub, crowds cheered the men of the Royal Indian Navy,
which had recently mutinied in Bombay, but other units were jeered as they
passed through.14 The popular mood had changed to one where anti-imperial
feeling could be aired freely and without fear.
Ultimately, European civilians were not harmed during the violence of
1946, or in the Partition conflict that followed, and some even commented on
the ease with which they were able to move around afflicted cities: ‘the start of
a street fight was delayed to allow my wife to cross the road,’ one British news-
paper editor bemusedly recalled.15 Yet it was not self-evident that this would
be the outcome and there was mounting anxiety about the safety of Europeans
as the Raj went into terminal decline. As an alarmist intelligence report, for-
warded by Wavell to the Governor-General, recorded, ‘In Delhi, large handwrit-
ten posters in red ink recently appeared threatening death for “twenty English
dogs” for every INA man executed.’16 Ultimately, during the Partition that en-
sued, Indians turned against each other rather than against Europeans, but it
was not immediately apparent that this would be the case.
Power was slipping out of British hands and morale in the civil service, es-
pecially among European officers, reached its nadir. ‘Many of them are feeling
the reaction from the strain of the war years here, and see little prospect of
constructive or pleasant work,’ reported the Governor of Assam on the anxious
atmosphere among his civil service cadre. ‘Among subordinates there is an in-
creasing uneasiness and feeling that it might be wise to ally oneself with the
winning side’, while among British military officers there was an itchy impa-
tience to return home. From Bombay, by the beginning of the following year,
the assessment was that 70 per cent of the European civil service officers were
‘in a mood to go this year’.17 The anti-imperial rhetoric became ever more
grandiloquent and nationalist leaders deftly fused the post-war economic
strains, the memory of the Bengal famine and the suppression of the 1942
movement into a powerful invective against British rule.
The stout, mustachioed leader Pandit Pant, an influential Congressman and
linchpin of the party in the United Provinces, looked out at a packed crowd of
faces in a village in the district of Benaras, in the plains of the River Ganges.
Like many others, he had abandoned a promising legal career in the 1920s
and had dedicated his life to the Congress. He had been beaten and left disfig-
ured in lathi charges, and had spent years in prisons, sharing a cell with Nehru
who had become a close ally. On the raised platform, garlanded with heavy
strings of flowers, he saw around him villagers who eagerly anticipated free-
dom, or swaraj. Two members of this village had died in 1942 during clashes
with the British during the Quit India movement. Now Pandit Pant did not curb
his words. ‘These days poor women cannot afford to buy cloth to cover their
bodies,’ he told his listeners. ‘Bribery is so much rampant that nothing is avail-
able without greasing the palms of officers. In Bengal, lakhs of people died and
nobody knows even their names. But they all have become martyrs and their
matyrdom will be recorded in history in letters of gold. Now we can no longer
tolerate the misbehaviour of officials. We have to finish the present Govern-
ment and throw it away in the sea.’18
Congress politicians, trying to keep abreast of the popular mood, did not
rein in their words as they might have done in the past. The ruthlessness with
which the Quit India agitation had been suppressed was fresh in the memory of
Congress supporters, and British officials were starting to resort once again to
the degrading suppression of political agitation; the Whipping Act was being ap-
plied in cases of rioting in Bombay. As in so many other cases, authoritarian vi-
olence was a product of a government in a position of weakness rather than
flowing from a position of strength.
Things went from bad to worse for the imperial state when a dynamic out-
burst greeted the British attempt to prosecute three officers of the Indian Na-
tional Army at the end of the war. The officers were leaders of the break-away
force that had been recruited from Indian army prisoners of war, after the
Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore, and had, under the command of
Subhas Chandra Bose, fought with the Japanese in an attempt to dislodge
British imperialism from the subcontinent. Soldiers captured while fighting for
the INA had been court-martialled in 1943 and 1944 but the Indian public's
sympathy for the rebellious army was subdued until the British decided to hold
public trials of several hundred INA prisoners, seven thousand of whom had
been dismissed from service and detained without trial.19 Three officers, Prem
Kumar Seghal, Shahnawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Dillon, were tried for treason by
the colonial state in the ill-chosen and highly symbolic venue of Delhi's Red Fort
– Shah Jahan's sandstone fortress from which pre-colonial, Mughal power had
emanated. The INA case also became a flashpoint for a more generalised anti-
British and anti-imperial feeling, which was quickly outrunning the tempo set by
the Congress's political leadership.
Congressmen could not hope to monopolise the protests but rather rode a
wave of popular feeling, at times riding in front of it, at other times being wiped
aside by more radical leadership. ‘There has seldom been a matter that has at-
tracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy,’ wrote a
vexed British intelligence officer and it was reported that politicians were com-
pelled to talk about the INA in appreciative terms during the central assembly
election campaign in order to grab – and keep – the interest of their listen-
ers.20 INA men were garlanded with flowers wherever they went, invited to
speak at public meetings and lent the support of powerful backers, from barris-
ters to businessmen. The Viceroy, who found it personally trying to overlook
‘this hero worship of traitors’, nevertheless frankly admitted in private that the
INA trials were ‘embarrassing’ and although the trio were found guilty in 1946,
the sentences were ultimately quashed.21 This climb-down by the imperial
state marked another notch on the nationalist yardstick, as the ability of the
state to enforce law and order appeared distinctly weakened once again. The
last refuge and ultimate pillar of the colonial state, its army, was less reliable
than at any time since the 1857 uprising and this undoubtedly influenced the
British government's decision to hand back the Indian empire to Indians as
soon as they possibly could. This victory, and the celebration and drilling of a
well-armed military force, enhanced the sense that a revolutionary social up-
heaval was impending and helped to champion a cult of militarisation among
young men.
Voting for freedom
The removal of Churchill from Downing Street, and the Labour Party land-
slide of the summer of 1945, made British intentions to leave India more con-
crete and gave the negotiations a fresh injection of realism. ‘In accordance with
the promises already made to my Indian peoples,’ King George declared to the
assembled members of Parliament on the benches of Westminster in 1945,
‘my Government will do their utmost to promote, in conjunction with the lead-
ers of Indian opinion, the early realisation of full self-government in India.’22
Before anything else could be done, though, there was a more urgent im-
perative – to work out who the leaders of Indian opinion really were and the po-
litical persuasions of, in the words of the British monarch, his ‘Indian peoples’.
The history of imperial assessments of popular will is a troubled one: how best
to find out, at the end of empire, who to hand over power to? Colonial regimes
have been notoriously weak, or wilfully manipulative, when identifying and em-
powering representative leaders. For those engineering the transfer of power,
in keeping with the British ideal of democratic decolonisation, the answer was
an Indian general election. Some forty one million Indians were eligible to go to
the polls in the winter months of 1945–6 or 10 per cent of the general popula-
tion. The vast size of the country and the logistical difficulties of organising the
counts meant that elections were staggered from December 1945 to March
1946.23
The purpose of the election was twofold: to form provincial governments in
the Indian provinces, and so to draw Indian politicians into the business of run-
ning the everyday functions of government from which Congress had been ex-
cluded during the Second World War, and to create a central body that would
start designing the future constitutional form of a free India. The announce-
ment of the election caused shockwaves that pulsed through British India; this
was the first outlet for popular politics sanctioned by the British for almost a
decade. All parties accelerated their fund-raising and within days election
songs, poetry and campaign propaganda filled the newspapers and the city
streets.
While the Congress claimed to speak for all Indians, irrespective of religion,
the League claimed to be the mouthpiece of all Muslims. Neither would budge
on this fundamental issue. Only a few far-sighted individuals warned of the
dangers written on the wall, of the pressing need to address the fractured poli-
tics of Hindu and Muslim political communities. The Communist Party of India
had built a realistic acknowledgement of Pakistan's popularity into its policy-
making, by acknowledging the Muslim right to self-determination in 1942, but
the CPI was sidelined from mainstream Congress politics and left-leaning Con-
gressmen were marginalised from the inner workings of the Congress Party by
1945.24 None of the leading political thinkers in Congress were incorporating a
national division into their thinking. Instead, the parties embarked on a con-
certed bid to rally supporters across the country, by welding economic concerns
with religious and emotive symbols into a broad-based, popular appeal.
A flurry of marching songs and poems rang out throughout the country.
Printing presses worked overtime producing thin sheets of party information.
Party workers pasted up posters and flyers on city walls and telegraph poles.
‘The land and nation are our bread and butter,’ Muslim Leaguers sang out as
they paraded in North India with their distinctive green and white flags. ‘But
ploughing the nation yields the best crop/ Come to the league, overwhelm all
others/ Your people are in anguish/ It's voting day: let's march/ let's march in
step, Mukhiaji [chief]!’25
‘Red box for the Congress, cast your vote in the red box of the Congress!’
called out a Congress election flyer. ‘Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru are awak-
ening us/ Kisan! Be awake and know the condition of our country/ There is no
food, we can't get cloth/ No oil, it's dark in our house/ All things are controlled
[i.e. rationed]/ But sometimes we don't get cloth to put round the dead body/
Vote for the Congress and win our own rule/ Then our country will be happy,
Kisan!’26
These were remarkably similar appeals based on economic hardship and
brutal social realities. Before long, though, economic issues were supplanted
by a more trenchant issue. The campaigning focal point quickly emerged as
Pakistan. Swiftly it became the dominant election issue, and a deadly wedge
was driven between the Congress and the League as both parties dug their
heels in more defiantly and uncompromisingly. Pakistan was becoming a black
and white issue.
Indian leaders had demanded the election, although some criticised the ra-
pidity with which it was thrust upon them, and embraced the opportunity to dis-
play their popular power. It was most useful to the British government, which
needed to rubber-stamp any future constitutional settlement. This imperative –
the need to absolutely ascertain ‘Indian will’ – meant that the election result
had monumental implications that outlived the temporary formation of govern-
ments. It was a peculiar mixture of the lofty and the mundane; it was a nation-
making referendum with international and permanent implications about state
formation. Yet, it was also a vent for far more parochial concerns, at a time of
dire economic hardship. Under the diarchal system, which pared off provincial
governance, leaving the most critical aspects of the state – defence, budgets
and foreign affairs – firmly in British clutches, the provincial legislators elected
would be expected to take on jobs overseeing municipal water supply, the
school curriculum and road-building. The voters had a double duty: to elect
their local party man or woman who would fight their corner in the everyday
struggles over resources, but also to express a much more amorphous and
nebulous attachment to the idea of ‘Indian freedom’ or ‘Pakistan’. For would-be
politicians, appealing to Pakistan, or opposing it tooth and nail, seemed an at-
tractive short cut to winning votes.
The clear connection between the outcome of the election and the likely fu-
ture shape of the country gave the campaigns an intensely bitter flavour. A.K.
Azad observed that it was ‘hardly an election in the normally understood mean-
ing of the term’.27 The electorate was tiny, there was widespread malpractice
and fights broke out in constituencies as the election evolved into a plebiscite
in favour of, or against, the idea of Pakistan. The League was battling for its
life, determined to build a Muslim consensus around the Pakistan demand and
to win the strongest possible hand in the constitutional negotiations with the
British, which were sure to follow. Nor was the Congress manifesto, which un-
derlined its commitment to secularism, economic development and land re-
forms, uppermost in the minds of Congress workers whose first duty was to
prove that the Congress had universal support and that the population was,
therefore, anti-Pakistan.
The central committee of the League studiously avoided publishing a mani-
festo altogether, and pinned their whole campaign to the demand for Pakistan.
As Jinnah clarified to an audience in the North West Frontier Province, this was
a winner-takes-all game, a zero sum equation: every vote cast in favour of the
League was a vote in favour of Pakistan, every vote against would help create
Hindu Raj. ‘That is the only choice and the only issue before us.’28 If this was a
referendum, though, the meaning of the question being asked was obscure
and could be interpreted in dramatically different ways. With the stakes so high
and the number of voters so low, winning seats by fair means or foul was the
ultimate end of every party and those who could not vote still participated in
the street theatre of the electoral show.
Never before had Indian politicians needed to demonstrate and prove quite
so visibly that they had mass support and backing. Ends began to justify means
as internal consistency in speech and thought became dispensable. The words
‘Pakistan’ and ‘swaraj’, which were already barely defined, began to be used
with deliberate impreciseness. People did not just support a political party by
this stage – they felt its importance was integral to their sense of self. As the
battle to claim the future shape of the Indian state intensified in 1946, politi-
cians wilfully muddied the meanings of freedom and outdid each other in their
promises at mass election rallies as they attempted to secure proof of their
popularity, to demonstrate their status to the British government, to achieve
the right to represent the populace.
It is little wonder that the exaggerated and utopian strand in political
rhetoric might be taken at face value; Nehru gave one speech at Sukkur in Sind
to a crowd estimated to be 50,000 strong in which he said that, in the free
India, ‘everybody would be provided with sufficient food, education and all the
facilities including a house to live’ and that Pakistan was a ‘useless idea’ which
meant ‘slavery forever’.29 During the post-war Indian general election politi-
cians roused their followers with the vocabulary of wartime and articulated
their struggle in the global language of alliances and enemies, using the
metaphors of battle and blood. ‘To vote for the Congress is tantamount to bar-
ing one's chest before bullets,’ Pandit Pant loftily declared at a public meeting.
Jinnah made a direct comparison between his leadership and Churchill's, while
Congressmen drew parallels between the Muslim League and the activities of
the Nazis.30 Similarly, a League activist, Zawwar Zaidi, a student who can-
vassed for the party, later recalled the way in which the idea of Pakistan was
propagated during the elections.
We had a sort of training camp where we were trained … what sort of questions might be
asked of us, what sort of reply we should give; where and how to contact the voters … the
message was that we are working for the creation of a new state; sometimes they would not
fully understand it and we had to explain this, the idea of a Muslim state, and the slogans
that were raised … according to the audience that we had, if he was a villager we would say
that things would be different, he would have his own state … if it was an educated person,
and if it was a Congressman then we would adopt a different strategy …31
The vital importance of the elections as a means of deciding the nature of
free India, the speed with which the contests were called and the lack of clarifi-
cation over what freedom was going to deliver meant that a great many politi-
cians fell back on expedient populism.
The politicisation of religion became the order of the day. Islamic fatwas
were invoked by all political parties – from the Socialists to the most rabid
right-wing nationalists – as they attempted to inject their party image with a
quick shot of legitimacy. Put simply, it was not only the League which was ma-
nipulating religious feelings in order to gain votes. Congressmen reminded
crowds that the Gandhian preference for liquor prohibition was fully in keeping
with the Islamic injunction against alcohol. At a speech in support of a candi-
date it was claimed that at least two Congress measures, alcohol prohibition
and curbs on usury, ‘virtually translated into practice the commandments of
the Shariat’.32 Even the Anglophile Unionist Party leader in Punjab, Khizr Ti-
wana, stalwart of the privileged Punjabi landlord class and an optimistic advo-
cate of cross-community co-operation, ‘garnished his speeches with quotations
from the Quran’.33 The Congress camp too put the icons and networks of Hin-
duism to practical use to convey the Congress message, by distributing litera-
ture at religious melas and fairs, encouraging saffron-clad sadhus to support
the Congress and linking together repellent practices, such as the slaughter of
the holy cow, with anti-British and anti-League tirades.34 Further from the Hin-
dustani-speaking centre of party politics, especially in the Muslim majority
provinces, the language of Congress could become unrecognisably twisted by
its local allies; in the NWFP allies of the Congress – the Ahrars and Jamiat-ul-
Ulema – were endorsing Gandhi and Nehru at Congress meetings yet underpin-
ning this support with Qur'anic injunctions. Bigotry and bare-faced chauvinism
were used to attract voters on all sides and raked the ground for the violent en-
counters to follow.
For their part, the League played on the motif of exclusionary Islam, tapping
into pre-existing chauvinism towards kafirs or unbelievers. The language used
was prejudiced and bigoted. Little by little the League was able to claim a
bedrock of support in the NWFP, a province in which they had failed to win
even one seat in the elections of 1937. Flagrant propaganda was used to weld
Muslims together and to frighten them into supporting the Pakistani cause. At
polling booths the vote was sometimes reduced to a thoroughly misleading
question of religion; holding a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a book of
Hindu holy texts in the other, a representative would ask the voter which one
they would choose before hustling them inside the polling booth. Elsewhere a
respected religious leader, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Osmani, exhorted his fol-
lowers to support the League: ‘Any man, who gives his vote to the opponents of
the Muslim League, must think of the ultimate consequences of his action in
terms of the interest of his nation and the answers that he would be called
upon to produce on the Day of Judgement.’35 Even the word ‘Pakistan’, which
literally means ‘land of the pure’, had multiple resonances. Sayyid Muhammad
Ashrafi Jilani, one of the leading speakers at the All-India Sunni Conference in
April 1946, said to have been attended by over 200,000 people, gave an ad-
dress in which he played on the word: ‘when a community becomes pure in
knowledge, in deed, in disposition, it transforms whichever place it sets foot on
into a pure abode’.36 The emphasis was on restoring order in a world gone
awry and on re-establishing local sovereignty.
Not everyone was convinced, of course, by the Pakistan slogan. Different
Muslims hailed the League for their own localised, diverse and sometimes con-
tradictory reasons. Some of the most forthright and bloody opposition to the
League came from within Muslim communities themselves, especially in the
edgy build-up to the elections when some Leaguers and their ‘Nationalist Mus-
lim’ opponents fought over the same seats, while their supporters fought
openly in the streets. Arguments for and against Pakistan took place among
members of the same families and the reasons for the division of opinion
stretched across the spectrum from piety to agnosticism; some of the most
pious ulema, or Muslim divines, rejected Pakistan's call because they saw
within it the seeds of the delimitation of Islam: the scope and project of Islam
would, they felt, be boxed in within artificial national limits. Others were turned
off for other ideological reasons or by the upper-crust calibre of the League
leadership itself. The president of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema denounced Jinnah in a
fatwa of 1945 as the great heathen, Kafir-i-Azam, in a pun on the League
leader's popular title, Quaid-e-Azam, great leader.37
For many Muslims, Jinnah was most emphatically not their ‘Great Leader’.
For ‘Nationalist Muslims’ – as those who stayed loyal to the Congress were
called – it was a difficult balancing act. As their label flagged up, they were
seen as different from plain ‘Nationalists’.38 ‘Nationalist Muslim’ politicians
had to fight the election in Muslim constituencies and had to go head to head
with League candidates for seats. Right on the front line of anti-League politics,
these electoral contests became particularly fiery and divisive as they spilled
over into street fights and candidates were ostracised by their communities,
spat upon or garlanded with humiliating necklaces of shoes. One son com-
plained that his ‘Nationalist Muslim’ father had been sworn at and ‘not allowed
to take his prayer in the mosque’.39 In some cases fatwas were passed sug-
gesting that Muslims who opposed Pakistan could not be given a proper Is-
lamic burial. As these Muslims attempted a last ditch attempt to thwart the
League, they were ridiculed as traitors or poster boys for the Congress. In the
eyes of the League propagandists, these Muslim Congressmen were not real
Muslims at all and made good targets for songs and party propaganda. ‘Though
Muslims in name, in action they are Hindus, Call them half fish, half fowl – if
you choose!’40
Although money was poured into these constituencies by the Congress
Party during the elections (they had become ‘almost a bottomless pit’), the bat-
tle for popular support had been won long before. ‘Mass contact’ campaigns
initiated by the Congress in the late 1930s to rally Muslims to the Congress
side faded away and finally ended in the summer of 1939, unmissed by many
in Congress who were consumed by more pressing political and economic is-
sues or feared that the campaign would generate more problems than it
solved. ‘The Nationalist Muslim,’ observed the Socialist leader J.P. Narayan,
‘not only finds himself ostracised by his own community but also let down by
the Congress itself.’41 The truth was that the Congress had, ever since the end
of the First World War, been establishing an overwhelming base of support in
the country and also had some visible, prominent, Muslim supporters. This
seemed good enough; ensuring that the party had a soundly representative,
plural basis was less urgent in the late 1930s. By the time the Congress leader-
ship emerged from imprisonment at the end of the Second World War it was
too late to recover this lost ground and to rally Muslim support. It was even
more difficult for the Congress to attract Muslim supporters, especially in North
and West India because, for ordinary people, it could seem like a ‘Hindu’ organ-
isation despite its official open-door policy. Some Congressmen fused their poli-
tics with Hinduism and worked closely alongside sadhus, taking advantage of
religious holidays and religious iconography to appeal to supporters. Leaguers
made the most of this, declaring that Congress was really a cover for a Hindu
party and that Indian Islam was under attack or in danger. By the eve of Parti-
tion this was a real image problem for the Congress at the grassroots. In prac-
tice, if not in theory, the Congress looked as if it had long conceded the Muslim
vote.
On the election days, shops were firmly shut, clusters of people gathered on
street corners waiting for news and party workers travelled through the streets
in jeeps or on elephants strung with party flags. In Sind, brightly decorated
camels languished outside the polling stations and young children were em-
ployed to chant party slogans. Vitriol was poured on opposing parties in pam-
phlets and through loudspeakers. At the polling booths, people long dead were
frequently registered, boxes of ballot papers went missing and women electors
wearing veils impersonated other women in order to vote multiple times, in at
least one case by changing saris on every occasion.42
Despite the affrays, voter-bashing and ballot-rigging, and the Victorian ‘fran-
chise’, it could be claimed that this was the most democratic exercise ever un-
dertaken in the history of the subcontinent at the time, at least by comparison
with the even more tightly restricted franchise used during the elections of
1937. It may have been grossly unrepresentative of India as a whole, yet it was
electrifying for the urban middle and lower-middle classes, large segments of
which enjoyed their first taste of democratic representation. Millions of those
with a little land or a small stake in property could vote: clerks, teachers,
landed farmers and stallholders.
Women in particular grasped this opportunity to vote with both hands in
1946 and in countless constituencies the turn-out was high for women.
Women League and Congress campaigners explained how to use the ballot
paper, accompanied women voters to election meetings and manned the
polling stations. ‘They went house to house for canvassing, brought ladies to
the polling booths and have made a good awakening in women of Delhi.’43
Photographs show women in burqas casting their votes in the provinces. They
waited patiently in queues, up to half a mile long in places, and in Bombay, in
the midst of a heat wave, several women waiting to vote fainted from heat-
stroke. Among men, too, the enthusiasm for voting was palpable; in the Netaji
Park in Bombay, a sick voter was brought on a stretcher by volunteers, and at
least two blind men were assisted into the polling booth.44 Public fervour,
press reports and governmental analysis collided in a moment of collective ex-
pectation about the future of the country.
Official interpretations of the electoral results now took on momentous sig-
nificance. The results showed that the League had become a force to be reck-
oned with. Massive and polarised support for the League and Congress
shocked even those who had expected some degree of division, as it appeared
to reflect that Indian society had been pulled apart magnetically along religious
lines. The League, which had polled notoriously weakly in the previous elec-
tions of 1937, now walked away with a full hand. In the Central Assembly it
won every single Muslim seat, and a majority of seats in the provinces. As ex-
pected, the Congress swept up the bulk of non-Muslim seats in the provinces
and at the centre.45 It was certainly not a straight fight between the League
and the Congress; the revitalised political machinery of the two major players
was pitted against older, established regional parties and the Congress fended
off local challenges from communists, Hindu Mahasabhites and independent
candidates. In Punjab, most significantly of all, some of the landed Muslim stal-
warts of the Unionist Party stood their ground, despite growing rifts in the party
and the defection of older members to the League, and the Unionists won over
20 per cent of the vote polled. The trouble was that these parties, even if signif-
icant on their regional home turf, could not hope to cobble together India-wide
support, or to make a great claim to representation in a centralised assem-
bly.46
In the short-term, the reversal in the League's dismal electoral fortunes in
the North East and North West of undivided India by 1946, and Jinnah's new
popularity in these regions, were the indispensable trophy that allowed Jinnah
to press ahead confidently with the Pakistan demand. This may appear, at first
glance, to be deceptively straightforward: a Muslim party won lots of votes in
Muslim-dominated areas. But there was nothing at all inevitable about this and
the increase in the League's new popularity broke through the regional barriers
that had blocked the expansion of a centralised Muslim party in the past. On a
case-by-case basis Jinnah attempted to bring the League's imprimatur to re-
gional politics by making pacts with local politicians, enrolling well-revered pirs
and spiritual leaders and using the popularity of pre-existing local campaigns. It
was a feat of extraordinary political brokerage but also meant bringing together
tenuously linked interests and groups. Perhaps the most striking feature is the
great differences from place to place among League supporters and the di-
verse rationales for becoming a Leaguer.
The British watched the results with a view to forging a representative, cen-
tral body to which it could legitimately pass the baton. From the vantage point
of bureaucrats collating results in the imperial capital the results seemed obvi-
ous. Any future state would have to take account of the strength of support for
the League and Congress and these parties were anointed the legitimate heirs
to imperial power. The battle over the precise contours of a free India looked as
if it was going to be a two-horse race. As Penderel Moon, a senior government
secretary and one of the sharpest political insiders in Delhi at the time, wrote in
January 1946, ‘It is now abundantly clear that the Pakistan issue has got to be
faced fairly and squarely. There is no longer the slightest chance of dodging
it.’47 The League had won its seat at the negotiating table.
In all of this, though, there was a vital element missing: the ideas of free-
dom and the meanings that people attributed to the intense debates over a fu-
ture dedicated to swaraj or ‘Pakistan’ (in the most literal interpretation of the
word, as life in the land of the pure) had been lost. British administrators un-
questioningly accepted that the League and the Congress had become pugilis-
tic and polarised because Islam and Hinduism were such incompatible reli-
gious doctrines – and the vitally important reasons why these parties had be-
come so alienated from one another were left unexamined and disregarded as
fundamentally uninteresting. The British thought in terms of territory. The grey
margins between territorial nationalism and other forms of patriotic, emotive
expression – not so easily linked to land – remained imperial blind spots.
Fervent public displays of anti-colonial sentiment in post-war India help to
explain the frenzied British scramble to depart from the Indian subcontinent. As
the British government began to negotiate its withdrawal from South Asia in
late 1945 and the early months of 1946 the political parties – the Congress
and the League – that would replace the imperial rulers had been decided, but
far less thought had been given to the shape of the state or states that would
inherit the empire or to the meaning of the mass support for these parties.
Meanwhile, the narrow electorate in the general elections of 1945–6 blocked
the participation of millions of Indians from electoral politics and necessarily
pushed political demonstrations into the streets and marketplaces where the
disenfranchised were determined to have a hearing. The newly installed provin-
cial governments, if they intended to keep in control of this powder keg, evi-
dently would have to enact popular legislation and ensure that they protected
the rights – or even the safety – of their constituents. The conditions were ripe
for raised expectations of freedom, localised and community interpretations of
its meaning, and wildly improbable millenarian dreams. Absent from the official
British discussion, and from the League and Congress (which had an interest in
keeping their appeal as broad as possible) was any real thought regarding
these thousands of divergent expectations and how they might be met in one,
single constitutional settlement. This would prove a fateful oversight.
 3
The Unravelling Raj

Passing through the lanes of the North Indian city of Aligarh in the spring of
1946 nobody could have been in any doubt about the intensity of feeling over
the question of Pakistan. The word ‘Pakistan’ was daubed on front doors, pic-
tures of Jinnah could be seen pasted on walls, and green and white tinsel and
League banners were suspended across the narrow alleyways of the old city,
where metalworkers and artisans produced locks, scissors and tools for the
rest of the subcontinent in their workshops facing on to the streets. In local
mosques and on street corners Muslims heatedly debated the demand for Pak-
istan while vocal members of groups such as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema's loud rejec-
tion of the idea sometimes led to street fights with their co-religionists. The
small city, a few hours' drive to the east of Delhi, founded on the site of an old
Mughal qasbah would have been indistinguishable from many other small
cities in the Gangetic plains, sitting squarely in the Hindustani-speaking hinter-
land where the Pakistan demand was at its most intensely bitter, apart from
the fact that, across the railway tracks in the wide open spaces of the civil
lines, the soaring rooftops of Aligarh Muslim University could be seen.
Created by Syed Ahmed Khan in the nineteenth century, Aligarh Muslim Uni-
versity was intended as a place to blend Islamic instruction with the demands
of the encounter with the western world, an institution that would impart all the
manners and educational benefits that an English public school could offer to
well-heeled Muslims. Here, enthusiastic support for both the League and the
Pakistan demand had been a long-standing feature of university life, dating
back to the earliest years of the Second World War. As Jinnah's self-described
‘arsenal’ of Pakistan, Aligarh University students were at the cutting edge of
pro-Pakistan thinking, and they retrospectively claimed the credit for founding
the state. In early 1946, the League leadership was energetically courting their
support, and when leaders such as Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, a future Prime
Minister of Pakistan and university old boy, visited the college they were given
rapturous receptions. League leaders were carried aloft on the shoulders of
students, who set crackers on the railway lines to welcome them.
The university was well known for having a large Muslim League member-
ship but this was now spreading to the town, where enthusiasm for Pakistan
was steadily building. Women organised pro-League meetings and encouraged
donations of jewellery for the League's cause while their husbands and sons
used printed leaflets, persuasion, processions and placards to bring Pakistan
into existence. By the spring of 1946, with the League's victories in the elec-
tions confirmed, the whole campus was in a frenzy of Pakistani fever and acad-
emic work had been abandoned in favour of political activism. There was con-
sternation and outspoken opposition from some on the campus. At the same
time, non-Muslims in the town started to become nervous and looked to their
local politicians to protect them from this nebulous and repetitive Pakistan de-
mand.
In Aligarh, in the atmosphere of violent rhetoric, rumours of trouble and the
visible drilling of students, suspicion between communities increased. Could
Muslim administrators still be trusted? The president of the Aligarh City Con-
gress Committee asked for arrangements to be made for people to register
crimes at the local Congress office, rather than the local police station, be-
cause the latter was in a ‘Muslim part of town’. Political organisations that cam-
paigned for ‘Hindu’ rights started to attract large numbers, meeting in public
places and circulating petitions that called for protection from the university on
their doorstep. A retaliatory and accusatory tone crept in. The relationship be-
tween ‘town’ and ‘gown’ was stretched to breaking point in March 1946. A riot
erupted less than a week after noisy celebrations marked ‘Pakistan Day’ and
the League's electoral success in the province. A few Aligarh students buying
cloth from a local Hindu cloth merchant quibbled over the price of a bolt of fab-
ric. An altercation broke out, a crowd formed. In the arson attack that swiftly
followed at least four people burned to death and the thatched market area of
the town was left in ashes.
The Congress government, now in power in the provincial ministry based in
Lucknow, lashed back, passing punitive collective fines on numerous local
Muslim inhabitants – who said they knew nothing about the whole business –
and launching a party-political inquiry into what had taken place. Over time,
this became a bitter local dispute between the provincial League and the Con-
gress. Nehru was one of the few politicians who could see the dangers of the
alienation of the Congress ministers in the province from the local populace of
the city and, after receiving complaints from poor local ‘Nationalist Muslims’
about the levy, he urged the provincial government to deal with the situation
differently in case ‘they are driven against their will into the Muslim League’.1
The risk was, just as Nehru perceived, that Congress and League politicians
would start playing up to their core constituents even more, colour their
speeches with religious language and stop offering olive branches to the other
community. The fines were a direct parody of colonial thinking and simplistic re-
ligious assumptions were being made about the multifarious inhabitants of Ali-
garh. The danger was they could become self-fulfilling. This was, unfortunately,
exactly what happened. In the city of Aligarh, a frightening level of polarisation
was developing among some of the leading public figures and by the end of the
year, the Aligarh University Student Union leader was claiming publicly to have
killed Hindus with his own bare hands.
Aligarh had a particularly charged atmosphere in 1946, but some of the
changes taking place there, in one small town, offer a window on to the wider
breakdown of state power that was occurring that year all over North India. The
unexpectedly spectacular victory of the League in the elections had heightened
the call for Pakistan. ‘Ours is grim determination,’ swore Jinnah. ‘Nobody
should be under any delusion about our stand for the establishment of Pak-
istan at any cost, whatever the opposition.’2 The victory emboldened Jinnah's
supporters with a new confidence and amplified the demand. Hundreds of the
newly elected League legislators gathered together in April in the quadrangle of
the Anglo-Arabic hall in Delhi to cheer their success, under the carapace of a
green and white tent strung with banners, bunting and flags printed in swirling
Urdu and English scripts. One read: ‘The road to freedom lies through Pakistan’
and the other, ‘We are determined to fight till the last ditch for our rights in
spite of the British or the Congress.’ The world's press were starting to take
note and photographers packed the front row. Impassioned speeches followed
one after another. Begum Shah Nawaz called for Muslim women to encourage
their husbands and sons to take up arms for Pakistan if the British tried to es-
tablish a united Hindustan. Telling the story of a visit to a grieving mother in the
Punjab whose son had been stabbed to death by a militia group, she claimed
that the woman had told her that she was happy to have given her son to the
nation. ‘Muslim women were prepared for all sacrifices,’ the begum an-
nounced, ‘and were prepared to be put to the test.’3 The crescendo came with
Jinnah's own closing speech: ‘Is Britain going to decide the destiny of 100 mil-
lion Muslims? No. Nobody can. They can obstruct, they can delay for a little
while, but they cannot stop us from our goal. Let us, therefore, rise at the con-
clusion of this historic convention full of hope, courage and faith. Insha'Allah
we shall win.’ It was rousing stuff but the fine details – and the meanings of
this Pakistan for the Muslims of South Asia – had been deliberately and conve-
niently evaded and ignored.4
Nonetheless, League membership figures continued moving steadily up-
wards. Membership had rocketed from just 1,330 card-carrying Leaguers in
1927 to an official membership of two million claimed by 1944. During the
Congress leaders' time behind bars, the League had had the chance to swell
and as Jinnah himself admitted, ‘The war which nobody welcomed proved to be
a blessing in disguise.’5 The numbers alone do not tell the whole story. By
1946, even taking into account important exceptions, the League had the pop-
ular backing of South Asian Muslims in the urban centres and even in large
chunks of the countryside: some Punjabi Leaguers were so confident of their
support that they called for a universal franchise in 1946.
Jinnah became – as had Gandhi and Nehru – for many of his supporters an
ideal type and was hero-worshipped by millions who endowed him with the
characteristics of a saviour. Passionate supporters, both men and women, sent
him presents and adoring fan mail, including cards, telegrams and letters of
congratulation, cigar boxes and attar of roses, different maps of Pakistan
carved in wood, and donations ranging from significant lump sums to the
pocket money of young children. Stall-holders outside post offices sold post-
cards and postal envelopes stamped with Jinnah's portrait and League mot-
toes. Followers begged him to take the protection of bodyguards. ‘Pray let no
chance be taken in guarding your person, the greatest single asset of the Mus-
lim nation,’ wrote one.6 Jinnah fuelled this personal adoration and was unas-
sailably ‘the sole spokesman’ of the League, which was equipped with a re-
markably over-centralised and undemocratic internal structure, with budgetary
and decision-making powers firmly in Jinnah's own grip. For many of these Lea-
guers, Pakistan became much more than the sum of its parts or the territorial
outline of a nation state: it meant personal identification with a cause which
was increasingly expressed in black and white terms.
Crucially, though, anti-Congress feeling and heartfelt support for Jinnah and
the League did not necessarily translate into support for Pakistan as we know it
today with its current borders and boundaries. The Lahore Resolution, passed
at the annual Muslim League meeting on 23 March 1940 and identified by
Pakistanis as the foundation stone for their state, is not much of a guide. It pin-
pointed the Muslim desire for a more loosely federated state structure, calling
for a collection of independent states with autonomy and sovereignty. There
was a lack of knowledge or concern about Pakistan's actual territorial limits.
Jinnah himself seems to have prevaricated in his understanding of Pakistan as
a separate, sovereign nation state distinct from India. It seems more likely, in
the early days of the constitutional negotiations, at least, that he was rallying
his supporters in order to extract the best possible deal from the British for the
League, and would have settled for a federal solution if it guaranteed a firm el-
ement of decentralised power in the hands of Muslims.7 Among Jinnah's sup-
porters, what Pakistan meant was even more opaque. Many did not think pri-
marily of Pakistan as a territorial reality at all, and when they did, they wishfully
hoped that large tracts of India would be included in it. The talismanic word
‘Pakistan’ was used strategically to rally supporters and the League achieved
impressive and emphatic endorsement across India. Yet few knew what this
Pakistan would mean, and absolutely nobody knew what its construction would
really cost.
This ambiguity was convenient. Jinnah was facing the problem of welding
together diverse constituents, many of whom read into the Pakistan demands
their own local interpretations or seized upon the League as a vehicle for their
own regional campaigns. The issue of territory was repeatedly fudged. The town
of Aligarh could never have been included in the Pakistani state and today is
still a university town in India – many miles from the border with Pakistan.
Maps painted on pro-Pakistani propaganda reflect the lack of clarity concerning
territory in Pakistani nationalism. In one, the black silhouette of the whole of
the Indian subcontinent is marked uncompromisingly with the words ‘Pakistani
Empire’ – the bold typeface in a diagonal line branding the whole of India and
Afghanistan, from the Himalayas to its southern tip at Cape Comorin, as part of
this Pakistani realm. Another map, in contrast, shows a fragmented patchwork
subcontinent with different provinces marked off as regional ‘nations’, includ-
ing Dravidstan, Usmanistan, Rajistan, Pakistan, Balochistan and Bangsamis-
tan. A third map, created around the same time, shows a more easily recognis-
able outline of Pakistan as we know it today but with the southern Indian
princely state of Hyderabad included as part of the Muslim state's natural lim-
its.8 Pakistan was an imaginary, nationalistic dream as well as a cold territorial
reality.
Even Muslim Leaguers who believed Pakistan could be a territorial state –
distinct from India – had different ideas about where this land would be and
what its relationship would be with India. The final shape of the country came
as a shock to some of its most fervent supporters. Strolling through Delhi on a
sunny afternoon with her family after the elections, the Muslim League leader
Begum Ikramullah looked up at the domes of Humayan's tomb, the sixteenth-
century red sandstone and white marble masterpiece of Mughal architecture.
Her husband reassured her that Delhi would definitely be in Pakistan when the
country came into being. ‘The frontiers of Pakistan had not been defined and it
never entered our heads that Delhi would not be within it.’9 There were a small
handful of far-sighted individuals who saw the dangers of a two-state solution
to the constitutional problem. Two Congress workers from North India sug-
gested that the weakness in the League's strategy, and its failure to outline
Pakistan's proposed territory, should be exposed. They wrote asking the Con-
gress to paste up posters and flyers around the streets with a suggested map
of Pakistan under the caption ‘Are you ready to leave your house, land, property
and everything and go to Pakistan?’10 But this was a rare appeal. Nobody knew
what this map was – and nobody was contemplating migrating in 1946, let
alone the mass movement of twelve million people only one year later.
Getting ready to rule
On 28 March 1946, the provincial governors formally returned the election
results from their provinces. Ministry-making could begin in earnest. Congress
ministries started governing in Bombay, Madras, UP, Bihar, Central Provinces,
Orissa, Assam and North West Frontier Province, while a League government
ran Sind and, propped up by third parties, started to govern Bengal. There was
only one real coalition: in Punjab. Here, the League was kept in abeyance, wait-
ing at the door of power, and the Unionists, led by Khizr Tiwana, joined up with
Congress and the Panthic Sikhs. Soon the corridors of power in the regional
capital cities buzzed with politicians and their supporters. ‘The change which
came over the Secretariat was almost unbelievable,’ wrote an Oxford-educated
civil servant of the old guard, Rajeshwar Dayal, who was rather perturbed by
the new order and by the change in his secretariat. ‘The orderly and silent corri-
dors with officers and staff moving silently about their business were trans-
formed into babels of noise.’11 For others, this was the beginning of the transi-
tion to democracy and marked the start of real popular participation in political
institutions.
As Indian politicians and their staff took over the offices of British officials,
moving in crates of papers and sometimes surreptitiously taking down pictures
of the King-Emperor and the Union Jack, the power of the imperial state broke
down. All eyes were naturally fixed on Delhi. Talk on the streets and in the
press was about the main negotiations, and focused on when and how power
would be passed at the centre. Yet the drawn-out, painful process of decoloni-
sation in South Asia was already well under way. Provincial governments were
already setting the agenda. Their coming to power in early 1946 drew the sting
out of anti-British sentiment in India. Politicians made the difficult transition
from opposition to government. ‘The new government came in a rather belliger-
ent mood determined to stretch the constitution to the limit and beyond, and to
show the remaining British officials their place in the new order of things,’ re-
membered Rajeshwar Dayal.12 Struggles still endured in Delhi's political heart-
land over central powers, yet in the provinces the imperial endgame was over.
The problem was that Leaguers and Congressmen remained fundamentally un-
reconciled and nobody could see how their differences might be patched up.
While some blithely wished these differences away, others hardened their op-
position.
The new ministries were inaugurated with a fanfare. The ministers had to
swear their allegiance to the King-Emperor but many whispered hoarsely as
they did so. People clambered up to see the first day of the new assemblies,
packed viewing galleries, and press and photographers were out in force. For
those who were on the losing side, however, the feeling grew that these politi-
cians in power could act with impunity and that they were not representative of
all Indians. Dress became important. Congressmen sat on the benches in white
homespun dhotis, worn with sandals and Gandhi caps – the same outfit still
worn by many Indian politicians today. Jinnah's fur cap was becoming a style
icon and Muslims wore kurta pyjamas with a cap or fez while Sikhs retained
their distinctive turbans. This exuberant new order alienated those who felt on
the wrong side of it or left out from its culture and symbolism. Mohammad Mu-
jeeb later remembered the hubbub when he had watched the United Provinces
assembly from a viewing gallery for the first time a decade earlier:
It was, I believe, the inaugural session. There were crowds of people in the visitors' gal-
leries and the hall, but hardly a face that was known to me. I was simple-minded enough to
ask a man standing next to me where the chief minister was, and I got in reply a reproachful
look and the remark, ‘Can't you see he is sitting there?’ I felt extremely uncomfortable. I
could not spot anyone dressed like me, the language spoken around me was not the Urdu
which I thought was the language of Lucknow … I left the assembly building with a feeling of
mingled panic and disgust.13
Now League and Congress politicians roamed freely, devised and imposed
laws, spread propaganda and built up their political assets as never before.
‘We are inaugurating this regime of popular government after nearly six and a
half years of administration under section 93 of the Government of India Act.
Naturally people will expect all the hardships and evils they have been suffering
from to be removed immediately,’ declared the new Prime Minister of Bombay,
B.G. Kher, at his inauguration, urging patience while announcing a radical pro-
gramme of alcohol prohibition and the unconditional release of hundreds of po-
litical prisoners.14 Party workers had established networks of supporters but
had rarely been able to deliver much in the way of meaningful favours in the
past. The moment ministries were sworn in, these party workers and the politi-
cians they worked for were plugged into the main power source. The whole bal-
ance of power was reconfigured. In provinces where Congress or Muslim
League ministries were in power, these networks were skewed in favour of
those who were well connected to the provincial ruling party.
After years in limbo, local power was suddenly palpable. Ideological commit-
ments to the improved governance of India were muddled together with per-
sonal profiteering and local rivalries. Provincial governments assumed respon-
sibility for policing, public health, road-building, irrigation, education and food-li-
censing. In Madras, it was the local Congressman who could now help his sup-
porter to obtain a liquor permit, if he wished to establish a small kiosk. In Sind
it was the local Leaguers who might help someone who wanted to escape the
attention of the police because of a petty theft. In the North West Frontier
Province, where a Congress ministry had come to power, ‘all with an axe to
grind turn to the Ministers where in the old days they would have gone to the
Deputy Commissioner and, if necessary, waited hours to see him’. When one
Muslim revenue official was asked whether the people minded this sea change
in the nature of the administration on the frontier he pithily replied, ‘Whose the
stick, his the buffalo.’15
Acquiring a permit to sell food or other essential goods was a difficult busi-
ness, complicated by red tape, and competition for these permits became fero-
cious. The black market was thriving. Accusations of foul play chimed with the
grievances of small traders and stallholders. District food and supply commit-
tees – which had the right to distribute permits and supplies – often divided
along party-political, religious and caste lines, and competition for seats be-
came intense. Casually used phrases like ‘Hindu Raj’ or stories of Muslim op-
pression could start to resonate even when the material evidence was patchy
or scant. Now that Congress and League provincial ministries had come to
power, if people could not get hold of resources, it was all too easy to attribute
blame to the party in power. A culture of complaint emerged in Congress
provinces that ‘It is the followers of Congress who get the wheat and the sugar,
the paraffin and the matches’ whereas in League-run provinces it was the re-
verse story.16 The smallest things could become decisive. ‘Look at this,’ said a
Pathan interviewed by Malcolm Darling during his tour, drawing a box of
matches out of the folds of his garment, ‘yesterday I had to pay four annas for
this, and the controlled price is two pice.’ So many people were complaining
about the cost of matches to Malcolm Darling that he concluded: ‘Matches
have, indeed, become almost a battle-cry between the two parties.’17 Where
Congressmen presided over the system, the Muslim League made hay with the
idea that the Muslim public were being discriminated against and, as one Con-
gress supporter recalled, ‘accused us of theft, saying that we were misusing
our full access to the government machinery. They incited people saying that
we were depriving people of cloth for kafans [funeral shrouds].’18 Even in New
Delhi this vital question became sharply politicised and Wavell's efforts to set
up some form of food advisory committee buckled under the pressure of party
politics. Access to rations was not a marginal issue and dominated hungry peo-
ple's waking thoughts.
In effect, a great deal of power had already been transferred from the bot-
tom up; culturally, economically and politically, the provincial governments set
the tone. Those enjoying access to power, often for the first time, wanted to
push forward as much legislation as possible before it was stripped back by a
new constitution, and rushed to pass bills enforcing new school curricula or of-
ficial state languages. Wrongs committed by the imperialists were promptly
righted; political prisoners emerged from prison, bans on proscribed literature
were lifted and journalists wrote with a new sense of freedom. More problemat-
ically, the new ministries naturally started to try and influence the – highly un-
certain – vision of a future independent India.
The Indian politicians now controlled access to information, ministers au-
thored and edited reports from the provinces, the local presses wrote with vit-
riol about the remnants of the British administration still in situ, and attempts
by British provincial governors to direct or shape policy (which was constitution-
ally still their technical right) had lost all moral sanction. In regions where sup-
port for the wartime Quit India movement had been deep-seated, blatant fric-
tion between the British governors and their ministries now occurred. There
was little support from London for British administrators still dealing with the
intricacies of routine local politics, as Wavell tried to steer an uncertain course
between a British ‘scuttle’ and ‘repression’. As he wrote to the King-Emperor in
July, ‘We are in fact conducting a retreat, and in very difficult circumstances.’19
British control at the provincial level was both blunted by the South Asian lead-
ers-in-waiting and wilfully withdrawn by an imperilled British administration.
The British cut their losses. It was a classic imperial response. By mid-
1946, the British government was reluctant to invest a penny more in India's
administrative infrastructure. Intelligence units were run down and reports
reaching district officers, magistrates, policemen and Criminal Investigation De-
partments suffered in quality. This would become deadly in time. ‘Police intelli-
gence in Bombay City is said to be poor,’ the Governor reported, ‘with the result
that the Government are not in full possession of information as regards the
leaders of miscreants.’20 In 1946, the government disbanded Information
Films of India, which produced black and white newsreels and propaganda
films shown in cinema halls. The ailing colonial machinery could not even pro-
duce a figure when asked to say how many Europeans were living in India. The
figure of 97,000 was settled upon somewhat arbitrarily when an initial edu-
cated guess of 44,000 was considered to be too low. At exactly the time when
clear information was most in demand it became a scarce commodity. The last
British census in India was a slender volume compared to its decennial prede-
cessors and much of the information collected for the census still had not been
collated by the end of British rule. As W.H. Auden accurately pointed out in his
poem ‘Partition’, the census returns were ‘almost certainly incorrect’ and the
calculations of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ Muslim populations, which were so in-
dispensable to the political debates, were based on out-of-date information.
Access to information meant power. Recognising in which direction the
wind was blowing, some Indian civil servants and other government employees
started showing their political colours more openly now that the end of the Raj
appeared to be imminent, and forged relationships with the Indian politicians-
in-waiting. Sympathetic ICS officers were eased into key positions, such as
Govind Narain, who became Home Secretary in the United Provinces after Inde-
pendence, had close family links with the Congress, and had, he later admit-
ted, given the Chief Minister surreptitious assistance when he campaigned in
his district during the 1946 elections.21 The imperial institution in 1946 was a
very different-looking beast to its pre-war incarnation. After his release from
prison, the Congress President, A.K. Azad, albeit a distinctive figure with his
small round glasses and pointed beard, was astonished by his apparent
celebrity among policemen and officials – more often perceived as the lackeys
of British imperialism, who would have steered clear of openly celebrating a na-
tionalist leader in the past. One afternoon Azad was amazed to find police con-
stables saluting him and shouting political slogans in his favour as he stepped
out of his car outside Government House in Calcutta after he had been re-
leased from prison. On another occasion when his car was held up in traffic in
the city, ‘Some police constables recognised me and reported to their barracks
which were nearby. In a few minutes a large gathering of constables and head
constables surrounded my car. They saluted me and some touched my feet.
They all expressed their regard for Congress and said that they would act ac-
cording to our orders.’22 Clerks and policemen were making entirely rational
and sensible adjustments to the new order and many changed their alle-
giances long before any formal transfer from the incumbent British had been
properly planned. Similarly, supporters of the League inside the secretariats
were using office stationery and telephone lines and taking time off work in
order to help out with the Pakistan campaign.
Defending the nation
During this terminal breakdown of power in the spring of 1946, in the cities
of North India militia groups, extremist parties and armed groups rapidly bur-
geoned. Their members suddenly became more noticeable in crowded market-
places, marching in the streets, sometimes with long sticks or lathis under their
arms, or under banners with lurid slogans. Sometimes they noisily careered
around in the back of jeeps. They produced more heat than light, and their ac-
tivities were casually brushed aside by many as the over-enthusiasm of young
men. But students were skipping classes to attend rallies and meetings and
strident political opinions crept into their college work. The Ram Sena, a group
linked to the Hindu Mahasabha was typical: young students and boys could join
up once they had solemnly promised, in front of their fellow members, to ‘bear
all sacrifices involved cheerfully without any compensation for any kind of loss
or injury suffered in the discharge of my duties’.23 Decked in khaki shorts and
shirt, with an orange cap and spear, topped off with the society's flag, they
marched through the streets, helped out at political rallies, and in their free
time played sports and spent time together. It was both a youth club and a po-
litical party, providing an image and a social life into the bargain.
In towns across North India men were collecting together and arming.
Month on month, as the temperature climbed from spring to summer, officials
returned lines of neat statistics, which showed that membership figures for
these groups were moving upwards. In early 1946, it was being reported that a
large number of deserters from the United Provinces were still untraced, and
that many of them were likely to have firearms.24 Former soldiers, fired-up stu-
dents, party activists and opportunist criminals coalesced together in a rag-bag
of organisations. Some were entirely amateur. Pre-existing athletic associa-
tions, wrestling or football teams were given a political edge and started to par-
ticipate in patrolling the cities or collecting weapons after their matches.
Such self-defence groups were different in purpose, outlook and levels of
structure to more ideologically honed and well-organised armies. These armed
bands could be pre-emptive, provocative and defensive, and disentangling
which was which was difficult. The strategic picketing and well coordinated
drills could become overt aggression, and as one colonial official observed, ‘a
readiness for defence too easily passes into a desire to attack’.25 From a differ-
ent viewpoint, these militias could seem reactionary and threatening rather
than reassuring.
Other groups were larger, more professionalised and more closely resem-
bled private militias on the offensive, creating and forging ahead with their own
pernicious visions of the nation. Kewal Malkani, who was twenty-four years old
at the time, was a typical prize recruit for the RSS. Intelligent, well educated
and from a respectable Sindi family from the city of Hyderabad, he heard about
the RSS from his older brother and started to attend meetings in 1941. The
‘clean, uplifting atmosphere’ appealed and before long he was inducted as a
member into the local shakha or branch. Here, standing alongside his new
brothers-in-arms, he swore solemn promises to the nation, drilled in formation,
and listened to lectures on morality, duty and ‘history’ – in which exciting, epic
battles were waged against Muslim enemies and an inventive panorama of
Hindu gods and national heroes fought to save the Motherland. He later re-
membered the emphasis on ‘character, on discipline … a certain element of
Puritanism’. For Malkani, and thousands like him, the attraction was in the sim-
plicity of the organisation's call. It rode roughshod over India's linguistic, reli-
gious and regional melting-pot.26 Militant groups provided easy answers to
complex questions.
The dark underbelly of these organisations was their exclusive, rigid, right-
wing ideologies. These ‘nationalistic’ visions were flagrantly at odds with the
way in which Indian freedom was being envisaged in Delhi and London. Other
militia groups with clearly defined histories and ideologies included the Khak-
sars, the Ahrars, the Muslim League National Guards and the Akali Fauj. All
used a heady combination of bombastic rhetoric, militaristic boot-camps and
sexually charged appeals which often drew on religious imagery and stripped
down ideas of ‘religious identity’ to its barest essentials. The ‘shadows of the
swastika’ were not only cast by the RSS. Across North India other private
armies and militia movements blossomed on the student campuses and in the
comfortable living rooms of middle-class urban India.27 The Khaksars, founded
in Punjab in 1930, wore khaki uniforms, carried spades or trowels and were
preoccupied with an intoxicating creed of violent action. For the Khaksars, Is-
lamic ideas played a supporting role, but the core tenets were ‘unity’ and ‘disci-
pline’. Khaksars kept themselves busy with daily parades, between evening
and night prayers, compulsory tasks such as street-cleaning, roll calls and col-
lecting subscriptions. Lord Baden-Powell's Scouting movement had been an in-
spiration.
Prior to Partition, the similarities of these bodies – whether affiliated to the
‘Muslim’ or the ‘Hindu’ cause – far outweighed their differences. The imprint of
western fascism is clear and these armed groups had distinctly modern prece-
dents; the Khaksars' leader acknowledged the example of Hitler, reading Mein
Kampf and modelling his forces on the SA and the SS. ‘Freedom can be se-
cured only in the field of battle,’ the Khaksar leader commanded, ‘therefore for
the field of battle prepare only military strength …. Against one who uses vio-
lence, non-violence, civil disobedience, imprisonment, ahimsa, humbleness,
and the philosophy of getting freedom by begging is absolutely wrong.’28 M.S.
Golwalkar, leader of the RSS, wrote warmly of the Third Reich. ‘To keep the pu-
rity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the
country of the Semitic Races – the Jews,’ he wrote in We, or Our Nationhood
Defined, ‘Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has
also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differ-
ences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson
for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.’29 Similar batches of young men,
often bachelor students, the educated unemployed or those let loose from the
army, found that these ideas resonated with their own lives and concerns.
During the summer of 1946, at the same time, more people were enthusi-
astically signing up for membership of the Congress and League's own cadres.
Various groups of volunteers cleaned the gutters of dirty cities, offered first-aid
services or dug gardens, filling the vacuum in services that the skeletal colonial
state was not able to offer. Others stood guard as night-watchmen, or helped
control the crowds at Congress or League demonstrations. The novel Tamas,
set in Punjab in the months leading up to Partition, opens with the scene of a
band of Congressmen dressed in distinctive homespun cloth – some cheerfully,
some rather more grudgingly – sweeping and washing the narrow lanes in a
poor Muslim part of town.
Most of the houses in the locality were small single storeyed houses, built in two parallel
lines on either side of a spacious courtyard. Gunny-cloth curtains hung over the front doors
of most of them. The lanes were not paved. Only one of the lanes had a kachcha drain, the
other one had no drain at all. In some lanes, cattle were tied. From the houses, now and
then, women emerged with earthen pitchers on their heads to fetch water. A small boy was
collecting dung from under a buffalo … Mehtaji and Master Ram Das picked a tasla each and
went to work in the yard. Shankar and Kashmiri Lal, armed with shovels headed for the
drain, while Sher Khan, Des Raj and Bakhshiji began sweeping the courtyard with brooms.
The residents of the locality watched them, puzzled.’30
Volunteerism was an essential part of being an Indian nationalist, and had
longer antecedents in Gandhian spinning and swadeshi campaigns.
Many provincial politicians went further, rejecting conventional forms of
policing, and looked to their own volunteer bodies, nationalist training groups
and assorted gangs of volunteers and helpers who, they argued, were more im-
bued with the ‘nationalist’ spirit. The Muslim League National Guard was an in-
tegral part of the League's armoury. By March, F.K. Khan Durrani, a correspon-
dent living in Lahore, was seeing the writing on the wall. His warnings are even
more striking because he was a loyal Leaguer and friend of Jinnah. While
pledging his loyalty to the ‘Muslim Nation’ he was warning that the activities of
the Muslim Leaguers were getting out of hand. ‘At present one must shout with
the crowd or get lynched by the crowd, and the feeling has been created that
one who is not a Leaguer is worse than a kafir and should be hanged like a dog
forthwith.’31 There was a great danger, he correctly foresaw, of militias going
into battle against each other.
Congress politicians similarly continued broadening their vote-banks and
built up disciplined bands of followers. One of the first jobs carried out by the
newly installed Congress ministry in the Central Provinces was to hire a retired
army officer to recruit ‘young, well-built and able-bodied people’, to give them
‘basic military training’ and to coach them ‘in the art of self-defence’.32 ‘I want
every boy and girl to become a soldier in the cause of the independence of the
country. By soldier I mean a disciplined and honest worker who will serve the
country and maintain the honour and prestige of the motherland,’ Nehru told a
crowded audience of Congress volunteers in 1946 and, six weeks later, ‘There
is no doubt that our organisation has non violence as its creed yet unless the
discipline of the army and the spirit of the volunteer are blended together, we
cannot have a good organisation.’33 These workers, it was claimed, were com-
pletely different and were working towards a true, peaceful unsullied version of
nationalism. For some, the coming of Independence meant a total overhaul of
the old administration and displacing the police – the old stooges of imperial-
ism – with new forms of order and social control.
There was an obvious danger here. By the spring of 1946, Gandhian nonvi-
olence, or ahimsa, had become a weak currency among sections of the Con-
gress Party. During the long years of non-cooperation and civil disobedience of
the 1920s and 1930s, there had been numerous lapses and peaceful protests
against the British had been frequently punctured by violence, such as the
arson attack on a police station in Chauri Chaura in 1922. Notwithstanding
this, during these earlier years the moral high ground created by ahimsa was
held firmly by the Congress Party and there was a widespread belief in the effi-
cacy of non-violence among Congressmen from the cities to the smallest towns
and villages of India. By the end of the war Gandhi's ability to enforce this non-
negotiable pillar of his belief, even within his own organisation, was terminally
weakened. Fears of Muslim League assertiveness, uncertainty about the future
and, in many cases, the sheer size of the Congress Party which embraced so
many of the politically active across the country by 1947, irrespective of the nu-
ances of their thinking, undermined the policy of non-violence.
Gandhi's coherent ideology, which he regarded as timeless and universal,
had been utilised by many in a temporal and limited way to fight British imperi-
alism. By 1946, with freedom from the imperial masters already conceded,
however, the rules of the game had changed so that Gandhian non-violence
was eschewed by many as a spent force. By the spring of 1946 volunteer wings
and militarised groups could charm new recruits and justify their violence on
the grounds of self-defence. Their presence speaks of the lack of faith in the
traditional state apparatus and the grinding down of trust in the usual ways of
policing the towns. Even the epitome of Gandhian forbearance, the peaceful
Red Shirts of the North West Frontier Province who had used non-violence for
over two decades and swore heartfelt allegiance to peaceful means, splintered
in the political tension; in defiance of the leadership a popular youth wing, the
Young Pathans, or Zilme Pukhtun, renounced non-violence, and its members
added ominous black stripes to the collars and cuffs of their scarlet uni-
forms.34 As the Congress leader in the mountainous borderland with
Afghanistan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, ruefully admitted, ‘While I was away from my
frontier land for three and a half months in Bihar my people got much agitated
over the violent League movement and themselves began to harbour violence
in their hearts.’35 Sorrowfully, those who had faithfully followed Gandhi since
the agitations of the 1920s watched the belief in non-violence that they had
carefully nurtured break down.
In the prelude to Partition, therefore, the Congress Party itself might be-
come implicated in violent action, just like the League, even when this had not
been officially sanctioned by the upper echelons of the party. Nehru, although
an impeccable pluralist and desperate for peace (personally risking his own life
in order to break up fighting when he witnessed it in the streets of Delhi), wa-
vered on the issue of violence in the heightened tension of 1946; could and
should the Congress organise for self-defence if the Muslim League were the
aggressors? Nehru spoke out against violence and suggested that people col-
lect together in their mohallas for protection, and trust their local police force.
He gave a frank, and pained, assessment to one correspondent: ‘You ask me
about non-violence in these circumstances. I do not know what I would do if I
was there [in Calcutta, during the riots of 1946] but I imagine that I would react
violently. I have no doubt whatever that violence in self-defence is preferable to
cowardly non-violence.’36
In the polarised atmosphere of 1946, the words used by numerous politi-
cians became overtly incendiary and coasted perilously close to incitement to
violence. Some now talked openly of civil war. It was widely reported that one of
the foremost Congressmen, Vallabhbhai Patel, had declared, ‘Pakistan is not in
the hands of the British government. If Pakistan is to be achieved the Hindus
and Muslims will have to fight. There will be a civil war.’ A prominent Leaguer,
Liaquat Ali Khan, echoed this inflammatory tone: ‘the Muslims are not afraid of
a civil war,’ he told his listeners. Others invoked earthquakes, volcanoes, blood
and fire to describe the revolution that was approaching.37
Last push for peace
‘The triumvirate of Cabinet Ministers cannot realise with what hopes and
misgivings their coming is awaited in this country,’ wrote the Punjabi physicist
and chemist Ruchi Ram Sahni, in March 1946. Sahni was eighty-two years old
at the time and approaching his last days in Lahore. He had seen India trans-
formed since his birth in 1863 and had played his own part in this transforma-
tion by popularising science, setting up educational institutions and a library
and, in his youth, giving incredibly popular scientific lectures in Punjabi to ordi-
nary crowds of people gathered in parks, gurdwaras and in open stages, on
topics from electricity to soap-making. Now, though, his mind was firmly turned
to politics. ‘Attlee's own words inspire the hope that a heavy weight may soon
be lifted from India's breast and that we may at last have a chance to stand
erect like self-respecting men. For England no less than for other great nations
of today it is a time of serious searching of the heart.’ Sahni's appeal was to
three men, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford
Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and Mr A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the
Admiralty, collectively known as the Cabinet Mission, or, in Wavell's words, ‘the
three magi’. They had come to India to try and forge a compromise, to create a
constitutional package for one united India and to plan the British handover of
power.
The three British men had arrived in India on 25 March 1946, just as the
temperature was starting to climb, charged with the task of trying to resolve the
constitutional deadlock which India faced. This was, as everybody was aware,
the last push for peace and the best chance of achieving the agreement be-
tween the different parties that was vital if Britain were to relinquish its imper-
ial control. Under the arresting title, ‘Friends! This is for you,’ Ruchi Ram Sahni
sent his article to the head of the delegation by registered post. ‘I appeal to
you,’ he wrote, ‘to approach your great task in the spirit of ministering angels to
the good of India and to humanity at large.’ Over the preceding weeks, which
rolled into months, as the Cabinet Mission repeatedly extended the length of its
stay in India, Ruchi Ram Sahni wrote seven more open letters which he posted
one by one to the delegation. In them, it is possible to trace the steady deterio-
ration of hope and expectation which accompanied the mission's arrival and
the steady descent into gloom and pessimism about the future among the In-
dian populace. At the end of three months of negotiations between the political
parties, the mission went home empty handed, and the question of apportion-
ing power in a fair constitutional settlement remained unresolved. ‘I am pained
to bring to a close this long series of articles on a note of hopelessness sud-
denly turned into one of disappointment,’ Sahni was writing by June, although
not, he added, one ‘of helplessness’.38
Sahni was one of hundreds of correspondents, of a myriad political persua-
sions, to write addresses, memos and appeals; the Cabinet Mission was over-
whelmed by the weight of correspondence during its stay. In Britain and India
all eyes were turned to the delegation; in Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury
led prayers for the success of the negotiations. Administrators and soldiers in
the Indian provinces looked on, and gave portentous warnings of the risk of
failure. ‘If the situation arises in which the Muslim League are bypassed,’ re-
ported one army major, ‘I think they will be able to mobilise violent resistance
on a large scale. In the Punjab they are busy contacting and training demo-
bilised soldiers and are even training women to use arms.’39 Adding to the con-
fusion were reasonable doubts – based on past disappointments – about the
British intention finally to relinquish its Indian empire after two centuries. Back
in Britain, over a thousand Indians in Bradford, mostly seamen and industrial
workers, waited nervously and planned a mass fast. A sit-down demonstration
in front of the House of Commons was attended by Indian delegates from Lon-
don, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Wolverhampton and Coventry in sup-
port of the mission's success. ‘They doubt the sincerity of the Cabinet Mission
and are making preparations for demonstrations in case it fails.’ In early 1946,
doubts about whether the British were really genuine in their desire to relin-
quish their Indian empire were still heartfelt.40
Despite all this pressure from home and abroad, after weeks of initial wran-
gling in Delhi, attempts at negotiation between the parties failed to achieve any
concrete results. The Cabinet Mission persisted with its task of trying to
arrange an interim government and a smooth handover of power to a represen-
tative government and in early May the leading politicians of the League and
Congress were invited to Simla to resume talks. Over a hundred journalists ac-
companied them, crammed into the hotels and restaurants of the sleepy hill
station perched in the Himalayan foothills. The town was packed with politi-
cians, while the streets hummed with political conjecture about the shape of
the agreement. The Indian public, though, despite its intense interest in the ne-
gotiations, remained in the dark about what was happening behind the closed
doors of the viceregal summer lodge.
In contrast to previous negotiations, the politicians and administrators re-
mained tight-lipped, and leaks were studiously avoided. ‘We realise that the
public is entitled to a report of what has happened,’ announced the Congress
President, appealing on the steps outside to the press to avoid speculation,
‘but in view of all the circumstances we hope that for a brief period our reti-
cence will be understood and appreciated.’41 Outsiders were kept guessing
about developments inside this tightly knit, secretive inner circle. When it was
finally announced that these talks had also failed, politics spilled on to the
streets and Muslim League and Congress supporters paraded Simla's central
Mall shouting slogans at each other. Armed police were called to keep the
crowds apart.42 Politicians, who had been remarkably accessible and unpro-
tected in the past, were allocated bodyguards. The tension of the failure to
patch up an agreement at the centre had immediate resonances in the anxious
networks of supporters and crowds backing the parties.
The cabinet delegation had decided to try an entirely different approach.
Rather than persist with fruitless negotiations they opted to present a fait ac-
compli to the Indian population. On 16 May 1946 word circulated that there
would soon be an important radio announcement. People tuned in or gathered
in the streets to hear the clipped tones of Lord Pethick-Lawrence's broadcast at
8.45 in the evening. ‘The words which I shall speak to you are concerned with
the future of a great people – the people of India,’ he began. ‘There is a pas-
sionate desire in the hearts of Indians expressed by the leaders of all their po-
litical parties for independence. His Majesty's Government and the British peo-
ple as a whole are full ready to accord this independence whether within or
without the British Commonwealth and hope that out of it will spring a lasting
and friendly association between our two peoples on a footing of complete
equality …’ And so it went on, for over fifteen minutes, a long, complicated con-
stitutional proposal in English.43
In essence, the mission presented the parties with a complete proposal for
a future constitutional settlement. They could choose either to accept or to re-
ject the plan in its entirety. The plan was intended to circumvent the main ob-
jections and anxieties of all the leading players. It was designed to deliver Pak-
istan in spirit if not in letter by devolving power to Muslims within a united
India. India would be governed by a three-layered federation in which a central
government would take charge of portfolios such as defence and foreign af-
fairs. Provinces would have autonomy on some matters but, crucially, would be
grouped together to deal with other questions of their choosing collectively. If
agreed, large Muslim blocs would be able to act in concert within the Indian
Union, in order to preserve or defend their own welfare. As one newspaper
headline put it, this was a straightforward decision, a ‘Choice between peace
and civil strife’. Both parties did – at moments and with reservations – agree to
the Cabinet Mission plan and this has given it poignant fascination. There was
a moment of great optimism and relief, which was quickly dashed. If success-
ful, it would have meant that Pakistan as we know it today would never have
come into existence.
 Reactions to the plan in India's towns and cities were mixed and uncertain.
The elderly, maverick Urdu poet Hasrat Mohani, an old supporter of the
League, was on his summer holidays, visting Sufi pilgrimage sights in the his-
toric town of Rudauli. He had been taking part in the celebrations of a Sufi
saint when he returned to his lodgings and heard the Cabinet Mission propos-
als announced on the radio. Mohani was a latecomer to political office but had
recently secured a seat in the elections. He was delighted with the news of the
Cabinet Mission plan. The future looked bright; he was planning to perform the
hajj by air. For many Muslims living in the provinces where they were a minority,
this version of ‘Pakistan’ was good enough. There would be a form of devolu-
tion, Jinnah had extracted some major concessions from the talks and the Con-
gress and the League could move towards power-sharing at the centre. The in-
formation ‘from Muslim quarters’, among the elites of North India, was that
Muslim leaders were ‘pressing Jinnah to accept the scheme’.44 Depending on
political persuasion and regional location, there were lots of good reasons for
Muslims to accept the plan.
Interpretations of the plan mattered, though. As the press was itself already
polarised, and journalists were often party members, the interpretations of the
mission plan were frequently at odds with its ‘real’ meaning. In Sind, banner
headlines in League papers proclaimed ‘Pakistan rejected’ and many Muslims
felt dejected by the idea that Pakistan had somehow been ‘lost’, a feeling con-
firmed by the decisive rejection of a ‘sovereign Pakistan’ in the mission state-
ment's preamble. Among many Muslims the lack of clarity about the meaning
of Pakistan, and its double usage, both as shorthand for a millenarian aspira-
tion and as the title of a new country, muddied the waters. Was the mission
plan delivering Pakistan or not? Could it, or could it not, be celebrated as a vic-
tory by the League? Popular hype and expectations of freedom which had
taken on euphoric qualities in some places could barely be assuaged by the
complex and conciliatory Cabinet Mission plan.
Conversely, there were many on the lower rungs of the Congress Party who
felt aggrieved by the suggestion that there had been any concession to the
Pakistan demand at all, and fully exploited this in the post-war vocabulary of
‘Nazi appeasement’. In their eyes, the Cabinet Mission plan was as good as
granting Pakistan, and made a travesty of swaraj. In the solidly Congress
provinces, where Muslims made up a sliver of the population and the League
presence was weak, such as the Central Provinces, it seemed that the British
were bowing to League pressure and granting unnecessary concessions. The
agreement looked a step too far: it meant caving in to local opponents for no
apparently good reason. For these reasons, Gandhi, never a fan of the English
language in any case, told listeners at his prayer meetings to study the fine de-
tails of the plan in their own language, rather than in English, to make up their
own minds about its meaning and not to borrow their opinions from newspa-
pers.45
From their perspective, mill-owners and mighty Indian industrialists, men
such as G.D. Birla, saw in the plan all their dreams for a strong, centralised
India leaking away. Birla, like many, was hoping for a powerful central govern-
ment in free India, footing the bill for capital-intensive projects, paving the
roads and pumping the power and water supplies that India desperately
lacked. The Cabinet Mission plan seemed a cruel watering down of all these
plans.46 Similarly, some regional Congress politicians believed they had little to
gain by making sentimental or generous concessions to Muslim interests when
Independence, and their own power in a national parliament, was frustratingly
within reach. ‘The Congress premiers of Bombay, UP, Bihar, Central Provinces
and Orissa pressed for the establishment of a strong centre and said that the
Muslims had been given far more concessions than they were entitled to,’
recorded the Viceroy in his diary.47 Elsewhere, regional sensitivities took prece-
dence. In Assam, where local leaders feared being swamped by their arbitrary
grouping together with Bengalis in the proposed scheme, opposition was in-
stantaneous and vociferous.
To add to the complexities, many Sikhs felt that they had been entirely over-
looked. The proposed settlement threatened to put their own regional interests
in the hands of the Muslim League. The president of the Sikh Party, the Akali
Dal, said the plan was adding insult to injury and appealed for a united Panth
and for Sikhs to prepare to ‘stake their all’; the Sikh Panthic Conference re-
solved that the mission's recommendations ‘liquidated the position of the
Sikhs in their homeland’; while Sardar Sarmukh Singh Chamak told worship-
pers at the shimmering Golden Temple, the holiest place for the community,
that the British were ‘trying to atom bomb the Sikhs’.48
In short, there were doves and hawks in all communities. Needless to say,
in the end, the plan failed. It became obvious by June that both the plans for a
federal solution and even attempts to put into place some form of provisional,
interim government had come to nothing. The Cabinet Mission represents a
galling missed opportunity and exactly why the Cabinet Mission failed so spec-
tacularly has long been the stuff of nuanced debate about the intentions and
motives at the top level of negotiations. The bottom line was a failure of trust,
with both Congress and the League unwilling to take the leap into an unknown
future without cast-iron guarantees that the plan would be interpreted in pre-
cisely the same way by all parties once the British had departed.
Very many Indians across the social spectrum were deeply disappointed by
the failure. But it was a boon for the most vocal, well-organised nationalist
hardliners. The uncertainties and hesitancies in the politicised grassroots of
the League and Congress about the meanings of swaraj and Pakistan, and
about how these hopes were going to be fulfilled, played a supporting role.
‘There was absolutely nothing settled about what would be the shape of things
in India once Independence was achieved,’ reflected the writer Nasim Ansari,
still casting his mind back four decades later and trying to unravel what had
gone wrong in the build-up to Partition. ‘The urge for freedom was common to
both Hindus and Muslims but no one had any clear idea of what should follow
independence. So misunderstandings grew, and developed to such an extent
that such fraternal unity, as existed earlier, was never seen again.’49 It was an
onward march towards an uncertain destination. Old ways of life were crum-
bling, and the nervous anticipation of a settlement ratcheted up a sense of
both insecurity and exhilaration.
By the time the dejected Cabinet Mission boarded their aeroplane for their
return to Britain on 29 June the power that they thought they were trying to bro-
ker had already slipped out of British hands in the towns and cities of provincial
India. Partition was closely entwined with this slow, protracted passage of de-
colonisation, which has been masked by the pedantic language of the transfer
of power. Cumulative, minor cracks were building all over the Indian urban
landscape. Even more ominously, the loud, omnipresent calls for Pakistan or
for swaraj had been taken up by militias and strongmen, middle-class students
and their urban supporters. These calls were being made more urgently and re-
peatedly than ever, and were shattering the peace of the cities where smaller
groups were being pushed to the political margins. British responsibility for con-
trol, at the provincial level, already seemed to have been abandoned. As one
governor reported: ‘I spoke to Pant [the Congress premier of United Provinces]
sometime back about communal organisations, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak
Sangh [RSS] and the Muslim National Guard. I told him that there was a whirl-
wind coming which somebody would have to reap. It probably wouldn't be me,
for I would be gone.’50 In the logistical calculations of British withdrawal, armed
groups which posed no direct challenge to British interests proved neither es-
pecially interesting nor especially threatening to the government.
‘In Karachi the other day the accidental dropping of an onion from a veran-
dah by a child nearly started a communal fracas.’51 An exaggeration, perhaps.
But by the second half of 1946, the British administration knew, after the fail-
ure of the Cabinet Mission's attempt to forge a settlement, that the state was
cracking. Wavell's personal diary, in which the Viceroy scribbled his musings,
was verging on the apocalyptic. There had been tension in the past and this
had sometimes resulted in major riots between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
Small riots when they occurred had caused deaths in the tens, though rarely in
the hundreds and never in the thousands. They had tended to be set pieces,
predictably coinciding with religious festivals. Now the violence, when it broke
out, seemed stranger and less manageable. In July 1946 there was rioting in
the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad and random stabbing attacks started to occur
in the city. From the middle of the year, urban riots between bands of political
activists broke out in city streets, as processions clashed and men fought
pitched battles, throwing stones and brickbats. As soon as the Cabinet Mission
plan failed, urban scraps and stabbings intensified in frequency.
The big names at the top of the party hierarchies were finding it harder and
harder to intervene and to control events. Vallabhbhai Patel, second in com-
mand to Nehru in the Congress, didn't go and visit Ahmedabad, a city of fellow
Gujaratis, when riots and sporadic stabbings started there in July as his offer to
visit was rejected by local leaders. Party activists started snubbing leaders who
urged quiescence and calm. That month, two Gandhian workers who tried to in-
tervene to halt riots there succumbed to the knives of rioters. Near to the very
place where Gandhi had grown up and had started his experiments in non-vio-
lence, Gandhian workers were being murdered: the despair of peace workers
and faithful followers of Gandhi is visceral. They appealed to Gandhi for help:
‘Two of our Congress workers, Shri Vasant Rao and Shri Raja Bali, went out in
such a quest and fell a prey to the goonda's knife,’ wrote their co-workers.
‘They laid down their lives in pursuit of an ideal and they deserve all praise. But
no one else had the courage to follow in their footsteps. They have not the
same self-confidence. If they had it, there would be no riots, and even if riots
broke out, they would never assume the proportions and the form that the pre-
sent day riots do.’52 As old certainties broke down, Gandhian workers – and
even Gandhi himself – seemed to be losing moral authority.
The impartiality of Indian policemen, administrators and politicians was
also coming under public suspicion and intense scrutiny. Militias snowballed in
size as news of the rejection of the Cabinet Mission plan spread. This paved
the way for the breaking of trust which was already well under way, but reached
a crisis with the events which took place in Calcutta in August 1946. This would
be swiftly followed by devastating attacks in Noakhali in East Bengal and in
Bihar from October, followed by Garhmukhteshwar in the United Provinces in
November. All occurred outside Punjab, where worse was yet to come. In all
these places, the nature of the killing would become brutal, sadistic and grisly;
women and children were attacked, and rapists worked alongside the killers.
Everywhere, there was an element of planning and organisation involved and a
sense of immunity from the governing provincial party – whether League or
Congress. By the end of 1946, there was a collapse of faith between the par-
ties, largely because of the graphic news of these attacks. Most ominously of
all, when people asked for, or resisted, the idea of Pakistan, or clamoured for
swaraj, it was without any clear idea at all of what the real costs of this were
going to be for the Indian state and its people.
 4
The Collapse of Trust

The streets of Calcutta were eerily empty on the morning of 16 August

1946. The Muslim League provincial government had called a public holiday to
mark Direct Action day. Three days later at least 4,000 of Calcutta's residents
lay dead and over 10,000 were injured. The streets were deserted once again.
Now the scene was one of carnage, buildings reduced to rubble, rubbish uncol-
lected from the streets, telephone and power lines severed. Schools, courts,
mills and shops stayed closed. A British official groped for an analogy, describ-
ing the landscape as a cross between the worst of London air raids and the
Great Plague.1 In the intervening days, the worst riots between Hindus and
Muslims ever remembered in India broke out. What had once been violent, but
almost theatrical, encounters between politicised militias and activists, had
burst their limits and had become targeted attacks on innocent civilians, in-
cluding women, children and the elderly.
Although there had been riots in Calcutta in the past, the violence of August
1946 was distinctive in its scale and intensity. Vastly different social groups
and sections of the city amassed along religious lines. Jinnah's call for a day of
direct action on which a complete hartal would be utilised to demonstrate sup-
port for Pakistan undoubtedly triggered the violence. Jinnah ratcheted up the
oratory, speaking of Congress as a ‘Fascist Grand Council’. The day of direct ac-
tion was clearly a strategic manoeuvre. Jinnah needed to strengthen his own
hand of cards in the unfolding dispute over the membership of the interim gov-
ernment which was taking place in New Delhi, and to show just how ardent the
demand for Muslim representation really was. Jinnah called on his followers ‘to
conduct themselves peacefully and in a disciplined manner’ although his own
usually precise and legalistic prose was vague enough to allow for violent rein-
terpretation.2
A few days before Direct Action day, the Calcutta district League set out its
own plans; there would be a complete strike of Muslim workers in shops and
factories, then numerous processions accompanied by musical bands and
drums would converge from all over greater Calcutta – from Howrah, Hooghly,
Matiaburz and elsewhere – ending in a mass rally. Leaguers were told to go out
to the mosques, where they should tell people about the plans, hand out pam-
phlets and say special prayers for ‘the freedom of Muslim India, the Islamic
world and the peoples of India and the East in general’. Older networks of mul-
lahs, mosques and pirs were put to work, to spread the call for direct action in
Bengal.
On the morning of 16 August League supporters opened their newspapers
to find large printed advertisements inside them:
 Today is Direct Action Day
Today Muslims of India dedicate their lives and all they possess to the cause of free-
dom
Today let every Muslim swear in the name of Allah to resist aggression
Direct action is now their only course
Because they offered peace but peace was spurned
They honoured their word but they were betrayed
They claimed Liberty but were offered Thraldom
Now Might alone can secure their Right3
What ‘direct action’ meant, though, was wide open to speculation and dis-
tortion. During the build-up, handbills and fly posters using religious language
urged Muslims to act and linked the earliest Muslims with the contemporary
situation, announcing that, ‘In this holy month of Ramzan, Mecca was con-
quered from the infidels and in this month again a Jehad for the establishment
of Pakistan has been declared.’ 4 This kind of Islamic populism drew on older
myths and stories, reworking history and compressing time. The Mayor of Cal-
cutta himself commanded: ‘We Muslims have had the crown and have ruled.
Do not lose heart, be ready and take swords. Oh Kafir! Your doom is not far and
the greater massacre will come.’5
On the morning of the 16th, thousands of Muslims, many of them armed
with lathis and brickbats, processed to a mammoth meeting at the Ochterlony
Monument in Calcutta to hear speeches made by Husseyn Suhrawardy, the
Provincial League Chief Minister, who, if he did not explicitly incite violence, cer-
tainly gave the crowds the impression that they could act with impunity, that
neither the police nor the military would be called out and that the ministry
would turn a blind eye to any action that they unleashed in the city. Whether he
anticipated the carnage that followed is a different matter, and whether the
Calcutta riots were a product of questionable political naïvety or a calculated
pogrom is still a moot point.
Eyewitness accounts of what took place in the aftermath of the dispersal of
the mass meeting are chilling. Jugal Chandra Ghosh was running an akhara at
the time, a gymnasium which also served to drill squads of young men. He later
admitted his own role in organising retaliation on the streets of Calcutta, re-
membering ‘a place where four trucks were standing, all with dead bodies, at
least three feet high; like molasses in sacks, they were stacked on the trucks,
and blood and brain was oozing out … the whole sight of it, it had a tremen-
dous effect on me.’6 It was no longer warring political groups who were in-
volved in the battle over India's future. Ordinary people going about their daily
business were targeted, from tea-shop owners and rickshaw drivers to stall-
holders who had been dragged out, beaten and burned or had their property
looted. Hindu-owned shops and homes were looted and smashed by those in
cahoots with League activists. In Calcutta, people were outraged not just by the
events themselves, but also by the way in which political leaders, especially
Suhrawardy, failed to deploy the military and police quickly. A definite impres-
sion was gaining ground that the state's resources had been exploited by the
murderers with the League's blessing; rioters used state-owned trucks and had
mysteriously accessed extra petrol coupons.
‘People showed signs of being intoxicated, whether with alcohol or with en-
thusiasm,’ remembered Syed Nazimuddin Hashim, a student at Presidency Col-
lege at the time, and in this strange, nationalistic euphoria Leaguers went off
as if into battle. Huge portraits of Jinnah riding on a white horse and brandish-
ing a scimitar were carried through the city.7 The involvement of politicians
granted the violence legitimacy in the eyes of the rioters who believed that they
fought for ill-formed and simplistic notions of ‘freedom’ ‘space’ and ‘history’
which hardly tallied with demanding the territorial nation state that came into
being.
There were undoubtedly well-prepared Hindu militias ready for the moment,
too. On both sides, the violence was anticipated – at least a week prior to the
riot inhabitants of bustees were sharpening daggers and making weapons from
railings uprooted from public parks, and political leaders along with local hard
men instigated and carried out much of the violence. Members of Hindu militia
organisations – ranging from more professionalised volunteer bands such as
the Bharat Sevashram Sangha to local football and gymnasium club members
– were equally prepared to fight.
That autumn, Gopal ‘Patha’ Mukherjee – Gopal the goat – was stirred to ac-
tion. He had acquired his nickname because his family ran a meat shop in Cal-
cutta. Like several of the major gang leaders in Calcutta, he had a background
in the wrestling pits and gymnasiums of the city where he had built up a reputa-
tion for toughness and daring on the streets. Young men looked up to him and
they called him other nicknames too: ‘brave’ and ‘strongarm’. The local police
knew who he was, and probably kept a watchful eye on him. Once the riots
started, Gopal was more than ready for them. He could summon at least a few
hundred men, perhaps more. ‘It was a very critical time for the country,’ Gopal
remembered: ‘we thought if the whole area became Pakistan, there would be
more torture and repression. So I called all my boys together and said it was
time to retaliate.’ He considered it his patriotic duty. ‘Why should we kill an or-
dinary rickshawwallah or hawker, they were not part of the politics … basically
people who attacked us … we fought them and killed them … we prepared
some country bombs, we'd also secured some grenades from the army … to
camouflage myself … I grew a beard and long hair.’ This was preparation for
war in the name of nationalism.
The links between local strongmen and politicians were blatant and well re-
membered by one of the perpetrators. ‘I had a club, an akhara,’ he says. ‘I was
a wrestler, and I trained my boys, and they carried out my instructions. There
was this Congress Party leader. He took me round Calcutta in his jeep. I saw
many dead bodies, Hindu dead bodies. I told him, “Yes, there will be retalia-
tion”.’8 As one student at the time recalled on College Street there were lots of
small Muslim booksellers: ‘when we went there … we saw dead bodies piled up
on both sides, men, women, children, and all the books on the road, burnt, gut-
ted …’9 Rioters, as always, sought political legitimacy wherever they could find
it, imagining blessings from omniscient national leaders and seeking the green
light to kill from members of local party hierarchies.
The political purposes of the riots are not in doubt. The Calcutta killings re-
inforced, in a graphic way, the idea that Hindus and Muslims were incompati-
ble, and planted this seed in the minds of British and Indian policy-makers. Vio-
lence and injustice were not unfamiliar in the largest Indian city where unem-
ployed mill-hands suffered the stagnation of the post-war slump, and squalor
and overcrowding badly affected a city still reeling from devastating famine.
This level of violence was something entirely new, however, in a metropolis
which also had a strong tradition of regional patriotism and coalition gover-
nance and where robust trade unions and anti-imperial organisations cut
across religious lines.
Intense feelings had been aroused around the notions of freedom and op-
pression, independence and tyranny but nobody had come any closer to envis-
aging the final shape of a settlement, or spelt out emphatically what either
swaraj or Pakistan would mean to the Indian people in reality. At the grass-
roots, then, these ideas of Pakistan and swaraj could both be glossed with a
different set of dreams and priorities: euphoria, millenarianism, the idea of a
freedom, which would not only deliver a territorial state to govern but also open
the door to a new kind of world order. Many terms used by the imperialists and
the colonised were lost in translation; British ‘Raj’, used in Indian languages to
mean ‘rule’ or ‘kingdom’, was to be replaced, in the rendering of different Con-
gressmen with swaraj (self-rule), Hindu raj (the rule of Hindus), Ram-rajya (the
regime of the god Lord Ram), gram raj (village rule) or kisan mazdoor raj (peas-
ant and worker autonomy). The various terms available for ‘state’ in Hindustani
at the time – raj, sarkar, hukumat, riyasat, and mulk – carried different conno-
tations to the British reading of the word and similarly clouded the possibilities
of what form Independence could take.10 As one member of the public, identi-
fying himself only as ‘V.K.J.’, wrote to a leading newspaper, ‘The thinking public
have different visions of future India. The idea of Rama Rajya is one such vision
which is sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi. The other day one of your readers pro-
posed Dharma Rajya and I offer another conception of the future state of India
… Kalyana Raj … in which the future head of state will be an elected president
and not a hereditary king.’11 People inevitably filled in gaps in their understand-
ing with their own experiences of oppression, their own hopes and expecta-
tions.
Pakistan, then, meant myriad things to different people. The call for Pak-
istan could be equated with all manner of ambiguous hopes and dreams. Con-
versely, for many of those who supported the Congress, Pakistan was per-
ceived as a total and sweeping threat which risked shattering the whole of
Mother India, rather than as a question of territorial self-determination in a spe-
cific part of the subcontinent. It was feared that Pakistan, if granted, would
mean alien rule, even for those who resided in Hindu ‘majority’ provinces as
hard-hitting editorials in Hindi newspapers reflected. In one North Indian Hindi
newspaper during the late 1940s ‘Pakistan was understood as an all-encom-
passing catastrophe about to befall India’ and as a ‘death-wish’.12 Allowing
Pakistan to be created was akin to dismantling the promise of a free India alto-
gether, and risked opening the floodgates to further national disintegration and
secessionist movements. As a commentary in the paper Vartman put it during
the pre-Partition debate, Saumya Gupta notes, ‘Giving in to the Pakistan de-
mand would only lead to endless partitions. We will not be able to sit peace-
fully. … All minorities would ask for the right to self-determination. How would
we then stop them? Even women … would one day demand a separate
Jananistan [land for women].’13 By the late 1940s, ‘Partition’ and ‘Pakistan’
had meanings far in excess of paring off two rather small and poorly industri-
alised corners of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan had come to signify anti-
freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims, and po-
litical propaganda nourished such ideas.
The Calcutta killings marked – and continue to mark – a psychic break be-
tween many South Asians and the idea of Pakistan. Neutrality or political indif-
ference was fast becoming an unrealistic and untenable option in the face of
this activity and the killings hardened the nationalist lines as other, older and
overlapping ideas about identity were stripped back to more simplistic badges
of allegiance to either the ‘Hindu’ or the ‘Muslim’ cause. Whereas in the previ-
ous months these allegiances, when they had existed, had been along party
lines they now reworked themselves and became more sinisterly along reli-
gious lines.
Calcutta also marks a watershed. It was followed by the first major series of
Partition massacres that spanned the northern flank of the subcontinent and in
which, again, both Muslims and Hindus suffered. On 15 October 1946, only
weeks after the Calcutta riots, and as the city was still returning to normality,
workers in the Bengal Congress Office received a shocking telegram from their
colleagues in the East Bengali district of Noakhali nearly 200 miles away:
HOUSES BURNT ON MASS SCALE HUNDREDS BURNT TO DEATH HUNDREDS KILLED OTH-
ERWISE LARGE NUMBER HINDU GIRLS FORCIBLY MARRIED TO MOSLEMS AND ABDUCTED
ALL HINDU TEMPLES AND IMAGES DESECRATED HELPLESS REFUGEES COMING TO TIPPERA
DISTRICT GOLAM SARWAR LEADER INCITING MOSLEMS TO EXTERMINATE HINDUS FROM
NOAKHALI …14
The telegram was a call for help and the Congress workers dispatched a
delegation to investigate immediately. But by this time it was too late. A pro-
gramme of well-planned ethnic cleansing had been augmented in Noakhali and
its neighbouring district of Tippera and perhaps five thousand people had per-
ished. In addition there had been public conversion ceremonies to Islam where
Hindus were forced to consume beef, cows were sacrificed in public spaces,
shops were looted, temples and idols desecrated. As the historian Suranjan
Das has suggested, ‘The fact that 1800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 un-
armed police, and Royal Air Force Planes had to be mobilized indicates the
magnitude of the crisis.’15 Much of rural Noakhali, which is in present-day
Bangladesh, is a watery area of paddy fields intersected by lakes and canals
connected by bamboo bridges. It is a very different place to Calcutta and the
way in which violence occurred in this quiet and poor backwater was especially
frightening. There were old grievances among poor Muslim peasants against
the Hindus who tended to be more prosperous landowners and dominated
trade in the region but the main cause of the violence was a systematic and po-
litical pogrom organised by one man, Golam Sarwar, an elected politician and
his henchmen, some of whom came from outside the region and were former
military men or members of the Muslim League National Guard. They primed
local Muslims through incendiary speeches and deliberate provocation, telling
terrible tales of atrocities in Calcutta and meshing this with a millenarian com-
mand that the world was coming to an end and that all non-Muslims should be
converted.
The violence in Noakhali and Tippera was defined by clear strategic organi-
sation (roads in and out of the almost inaccessible region were cordoned off),
systematic destruction of Hindu-owned property, temples and homes, and
mass killings. This marks the terrible beginnings of an era when women be-
came the repositories of national identities and their bodies were used to de-
marcate possession of land and space. Religious ‘conversions’ which ranged
from perfunctory recitations of the Kalma to fully-fledged conversion processes
involving regular prayer, re-education programmes and ritualised beef-eating,
were frequently followed up by the rape of women. The bodies of ‘the other’
were to be completely controlled, both figuratively and literally, as in Punjab the
following year, when mass violence against women became commonplace. ‘All
our efforts in Noakhali came to naught,’ lamented one peace worker. ‘It broke
our hearts. If the land was to be divided, then who belonged to whom and
where? Who would listen to our words of unity and peaceful cohabitation?'16
Gandhi arrived in Noakhali on 6 November and remained in Bengal until
March the following year, far detached from the political machinations in Delhi.
His train was fitted with a special microphone; pulling up at small stations
along the way, he would preach peace to as many people as possible. Gandhi
had to practise negotiating the rickety bridges which linked together the district
and went walking for long days at a time, sometimes barefoot, with his band of
workers, holding prayer meetings in villages, consoling victims, trying to instil
the spirit of unity. Just to catch a glimpse of Gandhi was a privilege; children
and young men clambered on to the roofs of trains and women lined his route
with palms clasped together in respectful greeting. Others looked on silently
and inquisitively. ‘In the beginning there was some resistance,’ remembered a
journalist and peace worker, Sailen Chatterjee, who accompanied Gandhi dur-
ing his stay: ‘they were not coming to his prayer meeting, they [Muslims] were
not coming to meet him … slowly they began to realise here is a man who is not
that type of Hindu or anything, so they began to come …’ Indeed, it was the
most taxing and dispiriting mission Gandhi had ever undertaken. His own life
was at risk and he had an armed police guard at times, despite his resistance
to the idea. His frustration and unhappiness was clear. ‘Oldest friendships have
snapped,’ he wrote in one report. ‘Truth and ahimsa by which I swear and
which have, to my knowledge, sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to
show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’ A fellow companion, Nirmal
Kumar Bose, wrote later of hearing the Mahatma mutter to himself, ‘Main kya
karun?’ or ‘What can I do?’17
Gandhi was not walking alone. Other peace workers also spread his mes-
sage, often leaving their families in the face of incredulity, and travelling many
hundreds of miles to follow in the footsteps of their leader. Amtus Salaam was
one such woman, born into a landowning Muslim family in Patiala in the Pun-
jab. A slight young figure, with thick dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses, in the
winter of 1946 she arrived in Noakhali to play her part in the peace mission.
Amtus Salaam, dismayed by the scenes in Noakhali, fasted for twenty-four days
to try and convey the message of Hindu–Muslim unity. By the time that Gandhi
came to visit her, she was verging on starvation and was too weak to speak.
She sat up a little, cloaked in pale homespun blankets, and took some orange
juice to end the fast. There were still faithful groups of Gandhian believers in
India at the end of 1946, trying to counteract the spirit of the age and to carry
out his teachings. The waves of terror brought by the massacres, however,
meant that their work was more difficult than it had ever been.
A web of fear
In late October and November, the violence spread rapidly westward. On
Bihar's seemingly endless, flat Gangetic plains, the poor in villages and towns
suffered some of the worst poverty in India. Troubled by an inequitable land-
holding system and the domination of landlords, during the preceding years
more people had become increasingly poor and landless. Little by little those
with even a small plot of land had been forced in the post-war years to sell up,
much against their will. Congress had long built its Bihari support on the
bedrock of protests by farm labourers and left-wing activists. It was not really
considered a danger zone for Hindu–Muslim conflict. In October, though, the
same patterns of violence raged in Bihar; thousands of Muslims were killed
and perhaps 400,000 Muslims were affected – by mass migrations, upheaval
and brutality – in Patna, Chapra, Monghyr, Bhagalpur and Gaya in both the
towns and the countryside. National jubilation and expectations of freedom
had become muddled and entwined with the ‘othering’ of Muslims. Slogans,
symbols and songs were utilised to rally the rioters. Nehru was shocked to see
that ‘In the main bazaar as well as elsewhere every Hindu house and shop had
Jai Hind or some other slogans [including ‘Hindus, beware of Muslims’] written
in Hindi on the wall’ and was devastated by what he saw. ‘These two days here
[in Bihar] have been so full of horror for me that I find it difficult to believe in
the reality of things I must believe in.’ He upbraided the crowds who came to
see their future Prime Minister: ‘Is this a picture of Swaraj for which you have
been fighting?’ and ‘All of you are shouting Jai Hind and “Long Live Revolution”
but what kind of country do you want to build up?’ The Congress message of
freedom and liberty had been reworked and manipulated in new and frighten-
ing ways.18
Among the ministers and party workers in Bihar, as in Bengal, a deep streak
of party-political bias was apparent. In some villages in Monghyr, Congress
workers did not turn up to investigate for three or four days after the ‘riots’ had
taken place – signalling their lack of concern. Sultan Ahmed, a Congress Mus-
lim of Bihar complained to the leaders in Delhi about the lack of arrests and
the impunity of the attackers. ‘The house searches are also very few and stolen
jewellery and grains are being transferred from place to place and being sold
freely without fear of conviction.’19 Little news came out of Bihar about what
was taking place, and the Congress-controlled provincial papers kept the lid on
the story. League activists, for their part, rushed to the spot to protect and help
‘their’ people and Leaguers running camps for homeless Biharis manned the
doors and would not allow other people or government officials to enter.
In November, further west again in Meerut district, near the small market
town of Garhmukhteshwar, closer to Delhi, violence started during a local reli-
gious fair. The next day the killings continued in Garhmukhteshwar town itself,
three miles away, and the Muslim quarter was ruined. Perhaps some 350 peo-
ple were murdered. Property and livelihoods were destroyed, and several young
girls were abducted. The violence fanned out into other parts of the district.20
There was general agreement that this attack had been well planned and or-
ganised, and in the memory of one Congress minister who witnessed the
scene, ‘The RSS had carefully laid the plot, marked all Muslim shops which
after dusk were burnt according to a plan without doing the least injury to the
neighbouring Hindu shops.’21 During arson attacks in nearby Hapur, the local
Indian Superintendent of Police concluded that most of the gangs ‘are in the
pay of banias of Hapur’ and that the responsibility of rich Hindus ‘cannot be ig-
nored’.22
Violence was being carried out in the name of freedom. In some places,
such as the western coastline of Gujarat and Bombay, freedom appears to
have chimed with hopes of a new moral purity, and Gandhian-inspired attempts
to ban alcohol, foreign cloth, prostitution and salacious films were attempted
as Independence dawned.23 In the provinces of the south, with small minority
populations and very different political economies, the ‘Muslim problem’
seemed further away and the challenges of Independence were to direct and
shape the place of regional languages and caste within a free India. In other
places though, especially in the northern Hindi belt, popular expectations of
freedom had a pronounced Hindu colouring and the overlap between the con-
solidation of nationalism and the ‘othering’ of the Muslim could not be es-
caped; Hindu extremists – and Congressmen on the right of the party – mixed
their politics with support for religious mendicants, championed the abolition of
cow slaughter, the restoration of temples, and the purging of Arabic and Per-
sian words from the Hindi language. It was not irrational, then, that the Con-
gress should be seen as threatening to Muslim traditions and customs and this
boosted the League's polling power, giving the sheen of authenticity to the
crass cries of ‘Hindu Raj’.
Fear of or involvement in violence hastened this process and consolidated
new sorts of relationships; for instance, between rich and poor co-religionists.
People who may never have had much in common in the past were thrown to-
gether by virtue of their faith: Begum Ikramullah remembered how poor Mus-
lims from nearby slums shared their paltry rations of eggs and vegetables with
her household during the difficult days of the riots when the markets were
closed and food became scarce under curfew conditions.24 Businessmen took
sides by paying out to protection rackets, lending their vehicles to political par-
ties or making hefty donations. Unbidden, Punjabi League volunteers escorted
their distressed co-religionists in Bihar from their disturbed homeland to their
new ‘home’ in Punjab, hundreds of miles away. This evacuation, if infused with
humanitarian impulses, could not be anything except politically provocative (as
well as bewildering for the refugees themselves) in the context of the time, as
the refugees became living symbols of a generalised ‘Hindu’ brutality and use-
ful propaganda objects.
Fatima Begum, an Urdu journalist who had begun her career as a municipal
inspector of Urdu girls’ schools in Lahore, and became a faithful League ac-
tivist, travelled to Bihar in a medical relief party organised by members of the
Provincial Women's Subcommittee in 1946 and ushered at least two hundred
women back to Lahore.25 Similarly, a Pakistani politician, Abdul Qaiyum Khan,
later remembered that ‘Pathan volunteers who were sent as relief workers into
Bihar came back entirely disillusioned after witnessing the harrowing details of
the treatment meted out to the Muslims.’26 In the process new ideas about
who was inside and outside the community were established and activists
could invest in idealised, if short-lived, forms of pan-Islamic religious commu-
nity.
Many humanitarian activists said that relief work opened their eyes to the
ways in which their fellow Hindus or Muslims in faraway parts of South Asia or
in neighbouring, but previously unvisited, mohallas lived. Offended by the dire
poverty that they saw, relief workers became imbued with the philanthropic but
condescending urge to reform the poor, to improve them through education
and instil better hygiene. Participation in relief work often coloured the asser-
tion of ethno-religious identity with this improving mission: cosseted middle-
class women had never realised before how poor, or uneducated, some of
‘their people’ were. Involvement in relief work also energised groups by giving
them a sense of energy, direction and usefulness; in some ways it gave mean-
ing to existence altogether. Groups such as the Mahasabha, RSS, the League
and Jam ‘at-i Islami stepped into the shoes of the government and filled the
critical need for nursing, food handouts, shelter and rudimentary counselling
that the state was too overburdened to provide.
On the other side of the country, in Lahore, exaggerated accounts of events
in West Bengal were being circulated in the press and political leaders called
for ‘blood for blood’. A Noakhali day was marked in October and processions of
students and lecturers from local colleges drew attention to the brutal violence
that had occurred against poor Hindu peasants in rural Bengal.27 In Bombay
city, similarly, a sudden rise in tension, the closure of the stock market and the
hasty pulling down of shutters in the bazaar were attributed directly to news of
events in Noakhali combined with a trenchant rumour that Nehru had been
shot and injured on his visit to the frontier.28 (Nehru had in fact been pelted
with a rock but was not badly injured.) In the past it had been much more diffi-
cult for political provocateurs to persuade people that their religious identity
needed to be defended and that they had shared kinship with Hindus or Mus-
lims living elsewhere. Now, though, as people worried about distant relatives
and heard anxious rumours, the task of linking religion and politics became
easier.
For many of the Bengali elite, or bhadralok, the partition of Bengal began to
appear a solution and a way out – both to resolve the crisis and to protect their
own business interests – and a pro-partition movement gained momentum as
petitions and telegrams from landowners and merchants, tea planters and
white-collar workers flooded into Congress and government offices demanding
partition of the province.29 For the extremists of both communities, the mem-
ory of the Calcutta killings also became an important weapon in the propa-
ganda war fought across the country and retellings of the 16 August stories, in
lurid poems, newspapers and stories, were systematically disseminated (even
being used in a schoolchildren's poetry recital competition) and fully exploited
to provoke further violence in Noakhali and Bihar in the following weeks.30 In
this atmosphere, circles of allegiance rippled outwards, particularly in the cities
and towns.
Paranoia and intense fearfulness had become part of the fabric of everyday
life by 1946 in Punjab and larger parts of North India. Polarisation depended
upon a linear and totalising experience of complete isolation and faith only in a
one-dimensional form of political identity – ‘If you are not with us you are
against us’ – and a sense that retaliation and preparedness for aggressive as-
sault was all that any rational person could engage in.31 What is more, the
doomsayers and political voices controlling the press and the public discourse
at the time of Partition wilfully manipulated senses of space and time, moving
backwards and forwards across historical stories and future portents of Ar-
mageddon-like destruction to fill their listeners and readers with a sense of im-
mediate terror. Hindus would be subject to collective extermination, ushering in
an era akin to the centuries of supposed Mughal domination, while Muslims
were reminded of times of former glory and both the real and imaginary humili-
ations that had followed.
Explicit pamphlets on historical heroes, mythic figures and episodes from
history, including the rebellion of 1857 (and its brutal British backlash), were
printed, circulated and gossiped about so that history itself became a crucial
part of the tool kit of the most fascistic elements in the country.32 Fears of
domination and subjugation in the minds of Hindus and Sikhs, if Pakistan was
brought into existence, or in the minds of Muslims if Pakistan failed to materi-
alise, far outstripped the bounds of conventional politics as they had become
so closely tied to the ability of individuals to govern their own existence, to have
autonomy over their own bodies and families, to express their own religious
faith. In the British conceptualisation of politics, reliant on straightforward sta-
tistics and the routine calculations of democratic politics, these fears and para-
noia were entirely irrational and hence were grievously underestimated.
Disciplinary measures intended to punish and bring order to the situation
unfortunately exacerbated it. Collective fines were used to punish rioters in
many places. After a bout of serious rioting, the authorities would impose fines
on all the members of ‘the guilty’ religious group who lived within a certain ra-
dius of events. In Varanasi, local officials, in the manner of town criers, an-
nounced by beating a drum that locals would have to pay a fine whenever any-
body was stabbed.33 Extorting money from all adult males in an area en
masse, irrespective of whether or not they had been guilty of violence, created
resentment and forged a new coherence between co-religionists. ‘Why this anti-
Hindu policy?’ the pamphlets of the Hapur Hindu Defence Committee com-
plained after a collective fine of 200,000 rupees was obtained from a portion
of the town's community after a spate of bloody killings there.34 The state, yet
again, was treating Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as undifferentiated groups. In-
dian and Pakistani ministries continued this practice of imposing collective
fines in a way reminiscent of their colonial predecessors.
Extremists exploited loopholes and misunderstandings in this habitual use
of ‘fines’. Ideally, collective fines were meant to be used as compensation for
the victims of riots but this policy had inherent risks. In Noakhali, League ac-
tivists forcibly levied a ‘charity fund’ on Hindus in order to compensate Muslim
victims of the Calcutta riots who resided hundreds of miles away. Local officials
turned a blind eye as this money was extorted.35 This kind of illegal activity par-
roted the logic of the colonial state as co-religionists were assumed to have a
natural affinity with one another that stretched across time and space. In the
turbulent Kolaba district of Bombay, a group of Muslims was compelled by ac-
tivists to sign written denunciations of events in Noakhali, to denounce the idea
of Pakistan and to put on Gandhi caps.36 It was not too much of a stretch from
this to using violence to ‘avenge’ riots in one part of the country in another
completely different place. The vast differences between Hindus and Muslims
– in class, language and local culture – were conveniently overlooked and polit-
ical provocateurs set out deliberately to link together chains of riots in different
parts of the country, by defending their actions in the language of revenge, ret-
ribution and compensation.
Even in peaceful, undisturbed areas with much stronger regional cohesion
and little tendency to inter-religious conflict, the presence of refugees from out-
side the limits of the province, political rhetoric and deliberate provocation
combined with a dearth of reliable information could act to poison the relations
between harmonious communities. By the end of 1946, approximately 25,000
refugees from Noakhali had taken shelter in the mountainous region of Assam
and there were recurrent bouts of false alarms and rumours of violence in the
province. Government reports were replete with trivial, yet momentous, detail:
‘Some families left Sukchar for Dhubri but are being persuaded to return. The
movement of a lorry load of tea garden labourers on the way home from a fes-
tive event in Karimganj subdivision led to newspaper reports about secret jour-
neys of lorry loads of Pathans. On occurrence of a rumour in Kamrup that poi-
soned biris [cigarettes] were in circulation stocks of biris are reported to have
been burnt …’37 In Assam, as elsewhere, the chastity and protection of women
was a touchpaper for anxiety; there was a lot of talk of abducted women being
brought into the area from Bengal, under the cover of burqas.
People started to move in with their relatives, or considered selling up and
shifting to a different part of town. It was not unusual for one community to pre-
dominate in a city quarter, but this was not a clear divide and the outer edges
of enclaves shaded together. Now in affected towns, co-religionists moved
closer together, advised to do so by local leaders, and numerous alleyways lost
their rich ethnic complexity. Sometimes these moves were temporary but
sometimes they were the first stop in a longer chain of unsettling moves and
homelessness. Crossing the lines became increasingly difficult and the as-
sumption was that the enemy lurked in ‘other’ settlements even in times of
calm; it was not right, an upper-caste Hindi newspaper in Kanpur complained in
its editorial, that ‘the Hindus of the ward Patkapur have to cross three Muslim
bastis in order to reach the ration shop and are greatly inconvenienced’.38
The economy was also starting to suffer. Influential business magnates
such as G.D. Birla – who bankrolled the Congress – felt frustrated and worried.
Birla was impatient to get on with building the India of his dreams, and com-
plained about the mayhem that was affecting production at his own factories.
‘It is hardly necessary for me to draw your attention to the economic conse-
quences of the disturbed conditions,’ he told the Congress leaders.
If I do so it is only to emphasize the danger and I hope that our Government may be able
to take timely steps to prevent the catastrophe which is hanging on our head … in provinces
like Bengal, Bihar UP, production is seriously affected. Today you can't even build a house …
serious labour shortages, coal shortages, no bricks, Muslim mistries [workmen] don't come
in Hindu areas and Hindu labour don't [sic] enter Muslim areas.39
In the minds of some influential individuals such as Birla, the seed of an
idea had been growing for a long time: that a rapid and decisive solution to
India's constitutional stalemate had to be found.
 Populist governments were not expected to take action against their ‘own’
people. When the party in power did pursue the perpetrators and strove to dis-
sociate itself from the violence, and when the administrative scramble to halt
and restrain rioters began, in late 1946 and early 1947, as the devastating
risks of the violence spreading became evident, nonplussed supporters grew
angry, having thought they would be shrouded in protection by their political
connection to the governing party. These massacres were not just the random,
violent background noise to the constitutional decision-making process but
were designed purposefully to influence and shape its outcome by enforcing a
mono-religious state and purging the land of ‘the other’ – whether Hindu or
Muslim. By the autumn of 1946, fear for personal safety was spreading in
much of North India and cleavages between previously amicable communities
had widened. Towards the end of December, Penderel Moon found a member
of the Amritsar municipality busily repairing the municipal hose-pipes. ‘The city
will soon be in flames,’ he reportedly explained with exceptional prescience.
‘I'm making such preparations as I can.’40
In the autumn months of 1946, whenever the potential for a compromise
between the different parties seemed likely, it was knocked off the front pages
by news of the atrocities occurring in the provinces. In Delhi, League politicians
finally decided to join the interim government and were sworn in on 26 Octo-
ber. They would work alongside their Congress colleagues at least in the day-to-
day running of India, if not in the formulation of a constitution. But news of this
positive move barely caused a stir in Bombay where it was ‘swamped com-
pletely’ by the impact of tales of atrocities from Noakhali.41
Placing the blame
In late 1946, A.P. Hume, a British district magistrate stationed in Varanasi
– India's most holy city for Hindus where the dead are cremated on ghats lining
the banks of the Ganges – surveyed the scene around him with mounting trepi-
dation. A forty-two-year-old Methodist and conservative, Hume felt morose
about relinquishing Britain's hold on the empire. ‘]It is] most painful and de-
pressing,’ he wrote to his parents, wife and young children back in England, ‘to
assist in the passing of a great empire.’ Derogatory about Muslims and Hindus,
convinced of western moral superiority and condescending in the extreme
about India's readiness for democracy, Hume bore all the hallmarks of an unre-
constructed imperialist at the high noon of empire. He kept a copy of the New
Testament open on his desk in the hope of inspiring his Indian visitors. The
scene unfolding in India, was, in his eyes, predestined because of the depravity
of Islam and Hinduism.
‘I ask myself whether it is worth the while even trying to stem the onrush of
decadence and decay,’ he wrote, anticipating the prospect of violence between
the local communities in Varanasi, and weeks later, ‘No matter what Wavell,
Nehru and Jinnah may patch up temporarily Hindu and Muslims will fly at each
other's throats sooner or later.’ This fatalism and expectation of disorder
cloaked all his attempts to carry out his duties in the district with a dark pes-
simism and fatalistic despair, ‘I should think it quite likely,’ he was soon saying,
‘that Benaras eventually will be burnt down.’ As refugees arrived in Varanasi
from Bihar, Hindu Mahasabha representatives toured the city with loudspeak-
ers spreading news of killings – both real and imagined – and in November
sporadic stabbings started to occur almost nightly in the city's poorly lit streets.
Hume was active in trying to bring a semblance of order to the city but was
even more concerned with getting out of India. He began making inquiries with
the United Nations about possible positions and sharing his feelings with other
British district magistrates who felt similarly moribund; a neighbouring Collector
and friend he described as ‘thoroughly disgusted’ and thinking ‘only of getting
out of India for good’.42
Hume was an extreme case and represents the worst of the British in India.
Others were doubtless more astute and more liberal. Some stayed on. Some
worked hard to stem the violence. Yet Hume's letters open a vista on the state
of North India and the collapse of the administration as the British withdrew
both their manpower and the moral will to continue the Raj. At the chalk face of
empire, as 1946 drew to a close, men such as Hume were disgruntled by the
orders of their superiors – he had been rebuffed when he asked the British
Governor about the possibility of retirement and was told it was his ‘moral duty
to stay on’. Hume was also cynical about the Governor's fine words: ‘he talked
with what was intended to be reassurance of the steps being taken promptly to
prepare for disturbances which might arise in the near future’. As India ap-
proached the moment of freedom, British officials such as Hume looked on
with a detached and diluted sense of responsibility – ‘I observe all that is going
on around me as if from a distant safe place’ – and eyed their Indian succes-
sors with suspicion. Those who had become accustomed to ruling by personal
fiat in their districts disliked consulting the Indian politicians who motored in
from the provincial capital when riots took place. Right until his final days in
India, against the backdrop of the mayhem that was unfolding, Hume went on
camps, shooting parties and summer holidays in the Himalayan hills. His clos-
est encounter with violence was when telephone reports came into the magis-
trate's bungalow of stabbings, interrupting his dinner and causing him to carry
out late night tours of the city. The pressures of an imperial ending meant that
some British colonial officials absolved themselves of responsibility for the cri-
sis on their watch. In the New Year of 1947, with relief, Hume filed his own ap-
plication to leave India.
The Indian political classes were in a state of shock by the closing weeks of
1946. Trust had been broken between the major parties and the violence was
directly affecting the decisions and attitude of politicians. ‘You would realise
how difficult it is for an Indian Home Member,’ Patel told the British negotiator,
Stafford Cripps, ‘to sit in his office quietly day by day, when innumerable
piteous appeals and complaints are received for some kind of help which could
give these unfortunate and helpless victims some protection.’ Official inquiries
into the riots became saturated with political posturing. Older procedures now
went to the wall. In the aftermath of the Garhmukhteshwar massacre an official
inquiry was announced, but it was indefinitely postponed and the Governor ad-
mitted feeling ‘lukewarm on the subject’. Similarly, the Muslim League was
asked to drop their demand for an inquiry into violence in Bihar by Mountbat-
ten because of the risk of embitterment.43 An inquiry into Calcutta's distur-
bances was set up but, once it became obvious that it would never reach a con-
clusion, it was quietly dropped six months later. Impartial adjudication, or even
the semblance of impartial adjudication, was impossible.
Nobody could see a way out. ‘We are not yet in the midst of a civil war. But
we are nearing it,’ Gandhi warned simply in his paper, Harijan, and analysing
the Indian scene at the end of 1946, the distinguished Canadian writer and
critic of empire Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote, ‘Of late the situation in the coun-
try has deteriorated menacingly … Instead of an India with freedom for all,
united in friendly communal partnership, there have been signs pointing to, at
best, a stagnant India of intense mutual bickering, on problems of constitutions
and of problems of daily bread, within an atmosphere of moral degradation and
of riots; and at worst, an India of civil war.’44 Others – of many political persua-
sions – started advocating a partition, and the separation of territory, as the
best solution. They erroneously believed it would bring an end to the problem,
not foreseeing that it would, in fact, mark the beginning of new calamities.
 5
From Breakdown to Breakdown

The wheat-growing tracts of the Punjab – the land of the five rivers – had
long been a special, and specially treated, part of India. A vast military recruit-
ing ground for the British army, it was also renowned as a prosperous, culti-
vated land, studded with trading towns. It had its own distinctive culture and its
own strategic importance, and was both the birthplace of Sikhism and home to
a closely knitted Punjabi-speaking population of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
The Punjab had been a valuable jewel in the Raj's crown ever since its con-
quest in 1849 and the imperial rulers had bent over backwards to please and
sustain the landlords and army families who propped up this vital backbone of
empire. If it was a divided society in 1947, this was most dramatically apparent
in terms of class. A core of elite Indian administrators, businessmen and senior
military men and their wives patronised the renowned artists, writers and musi-
cians in the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore, sometimes described as the
‘Paris of the East’. Memories of Lahore before 1947 sparkle with nostalgia and
a good dose of idealisation, of its courtesan quarter which ‘came to life at night
with reverberating sounds and glittering sights, when fun-loving Lahorias would
flock to it for entertainment’ and of its food, architecture and poetry. Around
the major cities lay hundreds of miles of countryside cultivated by peasants
and yeoman farmers, raising wheat, rice and pulses with ox-driven ploughs.1
By the New Year of 1947, though, the frivolities and pleasures of life in the
Punjabi cities were already fading from memory. Drawing immense strength
from the large student population, the Muslim League National Guard and the
RSS had been recruiting and arming for months. This was the eye of the storm;
the ready availability of weapons (a British policeman remembered ‘continually
finding dumps of live grenades’ in the countryside left by soldiers who had
brought back ‘souvenirs’ from the Second World War),2 the large highly politi-
cised middle class and the complicated religious make-up of the state made
for a combustible mixture. All sorts of smaller armed gangs and bands prolifer-
ated.
The League, bypassed by coalition-building in the Punjabi assembly, waged
an insistent, daily street campaign against the ministry of Khizr Tiwana, at-
tempting to bring it to the point of collapse. Well-off Muslim women and stu-
dents found a new liberation from the constraints of domesticity, marching in
huge demonstrations against the ministry, fighting their way up buildings and
hoisting flags made from their green scarves, courting arrest and putting up re-
sistance to police when they came to arrest their husbands and sons. When
the Punjabi government dared to try and restrict the activities of these militias
and banned them on 24 January 1947 there was uproar. The circle of protest-
ers widened, as shopkeepers, artisans and butchers pulled down their shutters
and joined the crowds with placards and ready slogans against the ban. The
ban on the RSS and Muslim League National Guard was lifted before the end
of the week. The government had signalled its weakness. A League newspaper
headline was printed within hours, telling the activists to ‘Smash the Ministry’.
All this deeply affected daily life in the cities. Specific political contests be-
tween elite members of the League and the Congress were transmuted into a
more amorphous sense of Muslim versus Hindu. This was plain to see. Some
Hindu women took to wearing the tilak on their foreheads. Sales of the Jinnah
cap boomed. Hindus who may have casually wished their neighbours hello or
goodbye with a Persianised ‘adab’ or ‘Khuda Hafiz’ abandoned these greetings
while Muslims jealously guarded ‘their’ phrases. It was suggested in a Punjabi
newspaper that Anglo-Indians and Christians in Punjab should wear a cross as
a marker of their identity, presumably to ward off the risk of accidental involve-
ment in riots. The newspaper Dawn, mouthpiece of the League, started printing
quotations from the Qur'an on its front page. More than in the past, household
servants were recruited by their co-religionists and job advertisements started
to specify communities: ‘Wanted Muslim or Christian steno-typist and an ac-
countant.’ Gentlemanly League leaders, who were usually more likely to be
found in the clubhouse or on the croquet lawn than in the mosque, started to
pray ostentatiously. Even the rulers of princely states, generally better known
for their profane, secular excesses and their eclectic admixture of pomp and
ceremony, did not escape these pressures to display religious affiliation pub-
licly; the ruler of Jind declared in 1947 that his pious New Year's resolution was
to grow his beard and hair.3 People bought arms and kept them in their houses
for ‘selfdefence’. All the dangerous signs that had preceded violence in other
parts of India were here in full force in the Punjab – weak and partial govern-
ment machinery, armed gangs and militias and an anxious population with
heightened expectations of freedom and terror of domination by the ‘other’.
In Delhi, meanwhile, the constitutional negotiations were pushed forward by
priorities and deadlines set far away from India. In London, daily life in Punjab
was far from the mind of the policy-makers. Concerns were about the frosty
Cold War climate, the health of British balance sheets, the safety of British civil-
ians in India, Britain's international reputation in the global press and the risk
of British involvement in civil strife in Palestine and Greece which could end up
badly overstretching the capabilities of the British army.4 These priorities were
evidently now quite at odds with domestic considerations about the safety or
security of Indians: London's aim was to cut British losses, by leaving a united
India if possible, a divided India if not, a view far detached from the intricate
community politics of the subcontinent. At every turn the British government
now accelerated the speed of events, and the Indian public was stunned by At-
tlee's statement on 20 February 1947 that the British intended to pull out from
the subcontinent no later than June 1948. ‘This announcement meant Parti-
tion,’ remembered Penderel Moon, ‘and Partition within the next seventeen
months. Whatever London might think, everyone in Delhi knew that the Cabinet
Mission's proposals were as dead as mutton.’5 This, of course, only intensified
the bombastic rhetoric in Punjab, added to the size of the crowds, and boosted
the exaggerations and outright lies printed in the papers. The resignation of
Khizr as premier of Punjab on 2 March and the collapse of his fated ministry
was the final straw and marked the Punjab's descent into civil war.
Punjab on fire
By the end of the first week of March, within days of the collapse of the min-
istry, quarters of most of the major cities in Punjab were burning: Lahore, Amrit-
sar, Jullundur, Rawalpindi, Multan and Sialkot all had sections gutted. Gangs
roamed the streets, some wearing steel or tin helmets, setting shops and
houses on fire (the government quickly restricted the sale of diesel and petrol),
firing weapons and throwing heavy rocks and glass soda bottles. ‘I was living in
an area that was predominantly Muslim but every night we were afraid that
there'd be an attack on us; so we used to be on house tops all night, watching
whether an attack was coming or not, that was a perpetual feeling … we
thought an attack could come at any time,’ later recalled the journalist Amjad
Husain who was a young man in Lahore at the time.6 On 20 March Standard
General, a major Punjabi insurance company, placed a large advertisement
cancelling all its new riot protection policies, of which it had been doing brisk
sales. Throughout March and April markets and shops could only open for brief
intervals and essential services fell into a state of decay. These riots went on
for weeks. In April, H.K. Basu, the postmaster of Amritsar, dismayed at the
mountains of undelivered mail at the central sorting office, personally went
around the city in a van from house to house, trying to entice his postmen back
to work. Some did go with him to the GPO to sort the mail but not one could be
persuaded to deliver the letters on the streets of the city. It was simply too dan-
gerous. Municipal revenues suffered too; in Amritsar the municipality claimed it
had lost 70,000 rupees from tax receipts. No electricity or water rates had
been paid for months, not least because it was impossible to send out the
bills.7
Depressing features of Partition in other parts of the subcontinent were
taken to new extremes in Punjab. In Bombay in March 1947, even during lulls
between episodic stabbings, people were nervous about crossing into each
other's ‘zones’. League National Guards escorted Muslims back from cinemas.
Visitors to Calcutta reported that residential streets were being divided up
along ‘communal’ lines.8 In Punjab, this was occurring on a new level. Barri-
cades and gates were erected while protection racketeers and vigilantes
stalked the streets, and in the worst affected areas the religion of all those en-
tering the mohalla would be solemnly checked. It was easy to cloister off the
dense overhanging mohallas in the old parts of cities such as Lahore but this
practice spread to the more open and wide-avenued middle-class colonies.
‘May I bring to the notice of the Amritsar local authorities,’ wrote one anxious
Punjabi, ‘that the people belonging to the various communities are losing confi-
dence in each other because, among other things, of the big iron gates by
which the people are blocking their streets.’9 As the evocative novel Tamas re-
flects, ‘Overnight dividing lines had been drawn among the residential colonies
and at the entrance to the lanes and at road crossings, small groups of people
sat hidden from view, their faces half-covered, holding lances, knives and lathis
in their hands.’10
Security was the paramount need of the hour. Anxious families acquired
basic arms or barricaded in their allies but this had an escalating effect as it
made other neighbouring communities feel more insecure. Crucially, local
politicians, who often had far more authority in their own districts than Gandhi
or Jinnah, made the call to arms. Master Tara Singh who had already warned
that Sikhs must be prepared to die for their cause, called for the formation of
an Akali Fauj, or Sikh army, and stood defiantly brandishing his unsheathed kir-
pan on 3 March 1947 on the steps of the Lahore legislative building, vowing,
‘We may be cut to pieces but we will never concede Pakistan.’ Extremist groups
swelled as moderates who used to belong to the Congress, or Unionist parties,
lost their political influence. As one former Punjabi Congressman says to his
colleague in the novel, Tamas, ‘will you come to save my life when a riot breaks
out? … The entire area on the other side of the ditch is inhabited by Muslims,
and my house is on the edge of it. In the event of a riot, will you come to save
my life? Will Bapu [Gandhi] come to save my life? In a situation like this I can
only rely on the Hindus of the locality. The fellow who comes with a big knife to
attack me will not ask me whether I was a member of the Congress or of the
Hindu sabha …’11 Politicised elites stoked stereotypes and the delay during the
implementation of the Partition plan gave armed brigades exactly the time they
needed to circulate rumours, stockpile weapons and prepare ambush plans.
Lulls in the episodic violence were frequently illusory as at these precise mo-
ments plans were being laid while defensive organisations honed their tech-
niques.12
The decision to Partition
As a desperate response to the disaster unfolding, Congressmen in the
highest echelons started to use the vocabulary of ‘Partition’. Some Sikhs called
loudly and provocatively for the division of the Punjab. Nehru himself started to
imagine Partition as a possible way out. As Jinnah continually vetoed the vision
of one strong united India, it emerged that the price of a strong central govern-
ment was the division of the country. ‘The truth’, Nehru admitted in an inter-
view in 1960, ‘is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years … The
plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.’13 If these quarrels contin-
ued unabated in one bitterly divided Constituent Assembly, the whole economic
future of the country could be undermined. Freedom was being painfully post-
poned. ‘It is better to pass onto freedom even through chaotic transition than
to be under the foreign yoke. Even a parrot would prefer to live half-starved but
free rather than to remain in a golden cage, getting all the time raisins and dry
fruits,’ mused the quixotic industrialist Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia.14 On paper,
the division of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab looked like a solution, of
sorts. The Congress Working Committee – the party's innermost circle – ac-
cepted the division of the Punjab as a possible solution on 8 March 1947.
‘These tragic events have demonstrated that there can be no settlement of the
problem by violence and coercion, and that no arrangement based on coercion
can last,’ the leaders regretfully acknowledged. ‘Therefore it is necessary to
find a way out which involves the least amount of compulsion … This would ne-
cessitate a division of the two provinces so that the predominantly Muslim part
may be separated from the predominantly non-Muslim part.’15 The heinous
crimes of the preceding year forced the politicians to rush forward the decision
to partition. Few were thinking about the line as a real or permanent fixture and
the precise meanings of a partition were still inconsistent and unclear. It
seemed to offer a way of attaining freedom and a compromise.
For other politicians who dreamed of infusing national iconography and poli-
cies with a more ostentatiously explicit ‘Hindu’ flavour, and remained less con-
vinced by Nehru's insistence on pluralism, Partition might also relieve them of
accommodating Muslim opinion altogether. They rejected Partition in the loud-
est voices, yet, in private, could also see its benefits. In July 1947, within weeks
of Partition's acceptance, the Education Minister of United Provinces, a former
schoolteacher named Dr Sampurnanand met with the sectarian Hindu Ma-
hasabha and was told that, ‘for the first time since the age of Prithwiraj [a
twelfth century Rajput ruler], we had received the opportunity to develop the
country according to what could broadly be called Hindu ideals. Whatever our
choice of words, the culture of this part of India could not be otherwise than
predominantly Hindu.’16 Partition, for politicians of different ideological hues,
was a painful blow to their original conceptions of freedom, but also had some
practical utility. Partition would clear the decks for nation-building by the Con-
gress, in whatever form that might take, and in the final analysis a Balkanised
or fragmentary Indian state with extensive regional autonomy was of little value
to the Congress Party.
The words on most of the Indian public's lips, though, remained swaraj and
Pakistan. The word ‘Partition’ came a very poor third. What people most
wanted was freedom and sovereignty over their own communities. The colonial
leadership and its heirs were at a remove from the intensity of these patriotic
and non-territorial demands. The idea of partitioning ancient homelands was
barely contemplated or understood. As the power of the state to deliver law
and order visibly collapsed, other regional aspirations came bubbling to the sur-
face and all sorts of groups made violent bids for their own portion of land,
their own community's sovereignty. There was still no inevitable or pre-ordained
final shape to the subcontinental settlement and with the euphoria of an imper-
ial ending surged the hope for self-rule and the will to power among princes,
caste leaders, spiritual pirs and clusters of ethnic minorities. In short, the plan
itself had far too little popular legitimacy and few had asked for it or even fully
debated its consequences.
A few weeks later Mountbatten flew in with his own posse of hand-picked
private staff to take up his post as the last Viceroy of India. The new viceroyalty,
which started on 24 March 1947, two days after the Mountbattens landed in
India, was strikingly different to any earlier regime in New Delhi. Mountbatten
had visited India several times and had been the Supreme Allied Commander
for South East Asia during the war. Mountbatten and his colleagues, though,
had not loyally worked their way up through the pecking order of the British Raj,
from district to imperial capital, and his enthusiastic band of advisers and
press secretaries had little insight into the machinations of local Indian politics,
or the implications of severe rioting. His predecessor, Wavell, who had spent
his childhood in India and also served as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian
army, appears to have been more hamstrung by sensitivity to the problematic
political scene that was unfolding in India and aware of the interconnected dif-
ficulties that any kind of settlement could fuel, rather than ease. This left him
struggling to take concrete steps whereas Mountbatten was less plagued by
worries about regional, and bloody, repercussions. When a group of British
provincial governors, exhausted and deeply anxious about the likelihood of vio-
lence in their provinces, arrived in Delhi for a meeting shortly after Mountbat-
ten's arrival they were greeted by a buoyant and optimistic new regime.17
Once halving the contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal was accepted
by the careworn Nehru and other Congress leaders as a viable option, as a
pathway out of the interminable political morass, it was only a matter of time
before the creation of two separate states took on momentum in the thinking
of the Viceroy and his advisers. Mountbatten denied having arrived in India
with any prepared plan, although he was rapidly reconciled to the idea of Parti-
tion once he was exposed to the political intransigence of the different parties.
Within a month, and before he had even toured outside Delhi, he was starting
to think that Pakistan was inevitable and that he had arrived on the scene too
late to alter the course of events fundamentally. As K.M. Panikkar, the historian
and diplomat who was advising the princely state of Bikaner, put it, ‘Hindustan
is the elephant … and Pakistan the two ears. The elephant can live without the
ears.’18 Mountbatten liked to describe the Viceroy's vast house as a small
town, in which he presided as mayor. From this highly insulated perspective he
was perfectly suited to his remit, which was to chart the making of nation
states and the settlement of a constitutional solution. He achieved a much-cov-
eted agreement between the League and the Congress by refusing to dwell on
the implications of his actions, instead emphasising the practical aspects and
stressing the expediency of finding a constitutional settlement.
On 18 May, less than two months after being sworn in as Viceroy, Mount-
batten departed for London clutching the papers which sketched the Partition
plan, ready to persuade the Cabinet that it was a workable scheme and hopeful
of finishing the job on his return to the subcontinent. Only the fine-tuning re-
mained: Punjabi and Bengali legislators would have the opportunity to vote on
a potential split of the provinces, and a plebiscite for or against joining Pakistan
would be necessary in the NWFP, where a Congress ministry, territorially far de-
tached from the rest of India but strongly in favour of a united India, posed a
particularly delicate problem. The paper plan, however, based on territorial and
statistical maps, was entirely dislocated from the regional nuances of political
life in India, and a top-down conceptualisation of state-centred politics would
be imposed directly from London on the subcontinent. Furthermore, the plan
was tragically unconcerned with human safety and popular protection. It did
not even begin to examine the fear and apprehension of Indians, or to build in
suitable safeguards to assuage these fears of domination.
The elite bartering and the final decision to partition was in the hands of a
small cabal of British and Indian politicians and was staged theatrically in the
classical buildings of Lutyens's New Delhi. By the spring months of 1947 nego-
tiations had left provincial politicians and their followers far behind. The final
settlement outran popular will in these localities, and the diverse political strug-
gles taking place nationwide were scarcely factored into the simplistic plan to
cut the Raj in two. It is this dislocation between New Delhi and its vast hinter-
land which has made Partition seem such an unwanted, alien imposition. In
some ways, the final settlement was a true compromise, splitting land, re-
sources and people between two entities, yet it satisfied no one. The League
was handed a scarcely viable, ‘moth-eaten’ state to run, the Punjab and Bengal
(ironically perhaps the two Indian provinces with the most distinctive regional
cultures and interwoven populations) would be wrenched apart, and even Jin-
nah, who had at least achieved his Pakistan, admitted to a journalist in a letter,
‘It is very difficult for me to understand what led His Majesty's Government to
come to the conclusion of partitioning Punjab and Bengal. In my opinion it is a
mistake and I quite agree with you. But now we have accepted the plan as a
whole and I feel confident that we shall make a good job of it.’19 His optimism,
despite all the flaws in the plan, seemed justified. In the eyes of the politicians
a conclusive settlement had finally been reached; freedom would arrive and al-
most one year earlier than anybody had ever expected. Perhaps this was the
path to a peaceful settlement?
Stepping into the unknown
On 3 June, the plan was broadcast to a nervous and expectant population.
In the lush green hills of Assam, in the north-eastern corner of India, the local
Congress politicians heard of the plan to divide up the country in the British
Governor's own living room, where there was, at least, a working radio. The
paper copies of the 3 June plan did not arrive, as the post had been hampered
by strikes and heavy sheets of monsoon rain. The Governor himself, Andrew
Clow, was emotional at the momentousness of the occasion and the announce-
ment that power was now going to be transferred. ‘Leaving India is a big
wrench,’ he wrote to Mountbatten, ‘particularly as I shall, in my own country, be
rather a stranger in a strange land.’ For many of empire's repatriated adminis-
trators, returning to the British ‘homeland’ would not be straightforward and
Clow had been in India since 1914. For all his experience of the Raj, though,
Clow's reading of the 3 June plan was that it was not permanent. ‘I am very
sorry that … the unity of India has at least for some time to come been broken,’
he wrote. Like very many others his impression was of an expedient settlement
rather than a permanent border. Imagining the transition from empire to free
nations was complex and uncertain even for those in the imperial inner circle.
The Muslim League had won its Pakistan. But there was no firm line be-
tween winners and losers. Endemic confusion and disorientation followed the
announcement, which sliced horizontally through all communities. One does
not have to look far to find signs of the utter confusion which greeted the 3
June plan. The plan, which was such a relief to the British government, was
foisted on a population entirely uninformed about its details and implications.
Local understandings of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’, inspired by millenarianism,
fear and heightened anticipation of revolutionary change, suddenly had to be
squared with the creation of full-blown modern nation states. The country was
to be divided – that much was clear – but would populations be expected to
move? Where would the boundaries lie? What would be incorporated in Pak-
istan and what would not? None of these questions were satisfactorily an-
swered by either the British or Indian political leadership. In the Indian army, on
Mountbatten's own admission, ‘Many of the troops had not, ten days after the
announcement, yet realised the full implications of the plan.’20 On the question
of the princely states, a day after the announcement of the plan a government
source suggested the British would ‘begin to think’ about entering into new re-
lationships with over five hundred Indian states, home to 24 per cent of undi-
vided India's population.21
Some Pakistan supporters ecstatically celebrated the victory that they had
longed for and, for those in the vanguard of promoting a modern territorial
state for Muslims, the news was an irreproachable triumph. ‘When a few years
ago, some of us, students at Cambridge, began to dream of an independent
Muslim State in India and called it “Pakistan”,’ wrote I.H. Qureshi, a well-known
historian at Delhi University in an emotional letter to Jinnah, ‘even in our
wildest dreams we were not so hopeful as to think that our cherished goal was
so near at hand.’22 For those who had consciously fought for a Pakistani terri-
torial nation state it was a day of jubilation: sweets were distributed, songs
sung, flags paraded. Leaguers celebrated the achievement of bringing a new
country into being as a homeland for Indian Muslims; one thousand Muslim
women gathered at Jinnah's house in Bombay to give him a standing ovation;
and after saying their prayers in Agra's central mosque, Muslims celebrated the
creation of Pakistan and collected donations for the new state.23
Jinnah made an appeal for funds in mid-June with which to build up the
nascent Pakistan. He was inundated with donations and letters which came, in
the main, from Delhi, Lahore and the North Indian urban areas where the
League had always gained most vocal backing. The receipts for donations offer
a fleeting insight into the enthusiastic support for Pakistan, especially from
landlords, small businessmen and officials. The Railway Board Employees' As-
sociation in Delhi collected 250 rupees, and the Muslim employees of the
Press Information Bureau in Delhi proffered a cheque for 80. ‘Decent Leather
Works’ in Kanpur gave 25 rupees and twenty-three divisional sepoys from
Madras offered 337 rupees from their wages. Women gave as well as men,
and supposedly ‘neutral’ civil servants and officials dug into their pockets. The
wealthy tenants of Razia Begum, who lived in her haveli, or traditional white-
washed house around an open courtyard in Delhi, gave the princely sum of 500
rupees in their landlady's name. ‘I venture to send a very petty amount I have
saved out of my monthly pocket money received from my parents and pray you,
respected Sir, to very kindly accept this humble offer,’ implored Athar Shafi
Alavi, a young student living in the old quarter of the railway junction town of
Bareilly in the United Provinces, who wrote directly to the League leader. Pak-
istan was still managing, as an ideal, to capture the imagination of a segment
of South Asian Muslim society.
The Partition plan, however, was a ‘bitter pill’ for Jinnah. For his supporters
who now found themselves marooned, sometimes hundreds of miles from the
real Pakistan, it was even tougher medicine.24 In the midst of the celebrations
nagging doubts emerged about the nature of the prize. As Begum Ikramullah
put it, ‘even though we may have wished for it and I, in a small way had worked
for it, it was a bit frightening now that it was actually going to take place’.25
What would happen to the leadership of the Muslims left in India? Should they
migrate to the new country? In the provinces where Muslims were in a minority,
the shock was for those who had constructed Pakistan as a fictive, imaginary
counter-nationalism to the Congress, or had dreamed of a more capacious Pak-
istan, who were left with the cold realisation that Pakistan was not going to in-
clude their home areas. This affected leadership and masses alike. Z.H. Lari, a
lawyer, had campaigned energetically for the League. When the final form of
Pakistan was announced, however, he was bitterly disappointed with the result,
and gave an emotional speech in which he said that if the plan was accepted it
would be ‘a major catastrophe’ as ‘the Pakistan which is being offered to us
will be from every point of view so weak that we will find ourselves in serious
difficulties’.26
The crushing fact, from the League's viewpoint, was that Pakistan's limits
would be marked by two half-provinces, not the whole of Punjab and Bengal,
and more expansive dreams of Pakistan's future had to be promptly reined in.
Professor I.H. Qureshi, who had lavished praise on Jinnah's successful estab-
lishment of Pakistan just six days earlier, now wrote to him again. He had had
time to examine the terms and conditions of Partition, the reality of the settle-
ment had sunk in and he urged his leader to create a committee, ‘to study and
prepare the Muslim case for increased territories in Eastern Punjab and West-
ern Bengal’.27 He pressed the urgency of the situation on Jinnah. ‘You have
perhaps read a news item in today's paper saying that the Hindus and Sikhs
will advance considerations other than population for demanding certain areas.
I think that we should also prepare a case on the basis of history, strategic con-
siderations, irrigation and a feasible customs barrier.’ Minds turned to squeez-
ing the settlement for the best possible deal. In Jinnah's own words the plan
was ‘titanic, unknown, unparalleled’.28
Among those who had vocally supported the Pakistan demand without giv-
ing much detailed thought to its potential territorial implications at all, and who
had pinned their hopes and dreams on religious revival or revitalised power,
there was more unhappiness. In the United Provinces, elation about achieving
Pakistan ‘got moderated by the realization among the more sober elements …
of its logical implications for Muslims outside Pakistan’.29 Some members of
the League continued to hope that the boundaries of the new Pakistani state
would include the Mughal heartlands of North India, in the face of all the demo-
graphic evidence to the contrary, and even after the declaration that the Pun-
jab and Bengal were to be divided, a circular was issued by some members of
the provincial League trying to popularise the idea of ‘Pakistan pockets’ in the
province.30 A hastily convened provincial League committee in Bombay de-
manded the establishment of a ‘homeland or homelands for the Muslims in
Bombay province’.31 Firoz Khan Noon, a Punjabi League leader and later Prime
Minister of Pakistan, responded to the 3 June plan by suggesting that the Sikhs
should be incorporated as members of the new Pakistani Constituent Assem-
bly, or that the Punjab's boundaries should be redrawn on a linguistic basis,
while in Amritsar a former newspaper editor started a campaign for a united
Punjab.32
Other Muslim groups, with different political attachments, felt aghast at the
prospect of the new state. On the Afghan frontier, the Muslim Congress sup-
porters felt an immediate sense of betrayal and Abdul Ghaffar Khan said, ‘the
idea that we could be dominated by outsiders is beyond my comprehension’.33
The militant Muslim Khaksars violently rejected the plan, demanded the whole
of Punjab and Bengal and ransacked the stately Imperial Hotel in Delhi, smash-
ing glass and wreaking havoc, as nearly five hundred League legislators met to
ratify the plan. One hundred or more were arrested as they tried to storm the
hotel's staircase and the police fired tear gas to quell them.
Accompanying the shocked reactions to the Partition plan, there was also
the new date to be contemplated; freedom had been advanced from a vague
time in 1948 to the definitive date of 15 August 1947. ‘Necessity for Speed’
was, in case anyone was in any doubt, one of the subheadings of the 3 June
plan. The diary of Shahid Hamid, private secretary to Auchinleck at the time
and later a major-general of the Pakistan army, reveals little ambivalence
about the idea of Pakistan but total outrage at the manner with which the 3
June plan was delivered and the urgency with which freedom was granted: ‘It
was a bombshell! I wonder what brought this last minute change? Does he
[Mountbatten] realize its consequences? Why this hurry? Why this shock treat-
ment? … Why is he bulldozing everything and leaving no time for an organized
handover …’34 He also acknowledged that there was confusion about the plan
in the army, even among commanding officers, and that some suspected that
‘the plan is some sort of trap’.35 Haji Moula Bux, a member of the Sindi Legisla-
tive Assembly who had stood against the League, reassured his followers in
Karachi that a reunion of the two countries was absolutely inevitable within two
years, ‘as sure as day follows night’.36
Muslim Leaguers' thoughts now turned to what sort of country they wanted
to build up. One Abul Quasem, a junior judge or munsif from Bengal, sent Jin-
nah his ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’. ‘To my mind it appears that we have not only
not achieved Pakistan but our journey to the achievement of Pakistan has only
begun and the way is full of dangers and pitfalls …’ he wrote.
If Pakistan means majority rule of the Muslims, I would not much care or labour to have it
as it was almost in our grip if we accepted the A.B.C. plan [i.e. the Cabinet Mission plan] with
right of succession from the Centre … Thus let us not mistake what we are for. If Pakistan
means a homeland for the Muslims to develop their manhood to the fullest stature according
to Islamic ideals, traditions and cultures, I must give my all to achieve it and here would
come the question of my vision, sacrifice and labour.37
In not so many words, he was asking, what role will Islam play in the new
state? Immediately Pakistan was declared a reality, the convenient ambiguities
which had been used to glue the League together – hazy idealism and imagina-
tive aspiration towards Islamic statehood – started to haunt the new country's
leadership.
Among non-Muslims, too, the same questions were in circulation. Was this
a temporary or a lasting settlement? Even as it reluctantly accepted the parti-
tion, the All India Congress Committee simultaneously kept alive the older idea
of the indivisible Mother India. ‘Geography and the mountains and the seas
fashioned India as she is and no human agency can change that shape or
come in the way of her final destiny,’ resolved the Congress at an emotional
meeting where it accepted the Partition plan in June 1947. ‘The picture of India
we have learnt to cherish will remain in our minds and hearts.’38 From the
standpoint of many Congress-supporting Indians it was unthinkable that those
parts of the country in the north-east and the north-west which became Pak-
istan should be cut away, and the nationalistic imaginings of India, as part reli-
gious goddess, part mother figure, meant this was a debate about more than
territory.
‘I have lived and worked for freedom of India as a whole for the last 40
years,’ declared Dr Chothi Ram Gidwani, president of the Sind Provincial Con-
gress Committee, ‘and today when [a] great many portions of India are as good
as liberated, apart from other harmful effects of partition which need not be
enumerated here, I cannot reconcile myself to the very conception of a divided
India in which I become an alien in a great part of my own beloved motherland,
and a citizen of a new Muslim theocratic state created overnight.’39 His speech
in reaction to news of the 3 June plan typifies the horrified reaction among
many Indian nationalists.
All of this involved psychological adjustment. The nationalist map of ‘India’
– with territory reaching as far north as Afghanistan and as far south as Sri
Lanka – was lodged firmly in the middle-class mind. This was a vast, sweeping
picture of India as a continent rather than a country. Companies advertised by
picturing their products against the silhouettes of Indian maps: they featured
on everything ranging from lamps and tobacco to wristwatches. The black out-
line of India's shape was printed on letterheads and books. Furthermore, the
idea of India had become, for many, personified in the shape of Bharat Mata or
Mother India, who was both a goddess and geographical entity. Not just cold
cartography, she embodied a real, warm, all-embracing mother figure. Her dis-
tinctive figure, in red flowing sari and often holding a flag, had many incarna-
tions, ranging from ferocious Goddess Kali to demure housewife.40 The god-
dess, Mother India, and the map were entwined together. A temple to Bharat
Mata in Varanasi had been opened by Gandhi himself in the 1930s where wor-
shippers could gaze on a vast marble depiction of the subcontinent. It was diffi-
cult to give up this idea and this dream. For this reason, Partition was (and is)
often described in India using medical imagery, such as the severing of limbs,
the hacking off of body parts.
It was a stirring, potential assault on the psyche of Indian nationalism. So
there was vociferous denunciation of Mountbatten's Partition plan by the vari-
ous parties gathered under the Hindu nationalist umbrella. The Hindu Ma-
hasabha attempted to organise black flag days and passed indignant resolu-
tions that Mother India's body could never be ripped asunder. On 3 July an anti-
Pakistan day was marked with considerable success in Bombay, especially in
Marathi-speaking districts, where almost all factories, shops and schools re-
mained closed in protest and several effigies of Jinnah toured in funereal pro-
cessions, one garlanded with a degrading necklace of shoes.41
Away from such certitudes, the predominant feeling was one of intense con-
fusion, angst and anxiety about the future from all sections of society. Days
after the plan had been formally announced, it was reported from Bengal by an
American diplomat that ‘The significance of the British decision substantially to
complete transference of power by August 15, 1947 still seems not to be fully
comprehended by most of the provincial politicians. A number with whom I
have talked during recent days continue to feel that they will have the protec-
tion of British authority and military power at least until June 1948.’42 The con-
fusion and fear is palpable in the archives, diaries and letters of the time. If this
plan brought an end to violence and delivered the long-awaited freedom might
it not in reality be a positive development? The optimists were pitted against
the pessimists, who perceived the logistical nightmare which lay ahead. Social-
ist Party members expressed ‘disapproval and grief’, generally seeing in the
plan the seeds of British neo-colonialism and denouncing it as an international
conspiracy to weaken Asia and prolong British economic and military might in
India. As the Socialist Party leader confidently asserted, ‘It should be realized
that the plan is a stop-gap arrangement of a defined duration.’43
Others called for the separation of major South Asian cities as city states:
just a fortnight prior to Independence Day, Sardar Sardul Singh Caveeshar, a
Punjabi politician and president of the All India Forward Bloc, suggested that
Calcutta, Delhi, Karachi and Lahore be singled out as city states, ruled inde-
pendently by elected governors.44 Countless politicians announced that there
was every chance that the subcontinent would be reunited within a decade. ‘I
have not lost faith in an undivided India. I believe no man can divide what God
has created as one,’ declared the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad, on
the day the plan was made public.45 New and belated schemes were rushed
out to try and change the fate of the subcontinent. In Bengal, as the historian
Joya Chatterji has depicted, a last-ditch campaign was launched to try and
keep Bengal united by regional politicians, including Sarat Chandra Bose and
Suhrawardy, for which, Gandhi lamented, ‘money (was) being spent like water’
although of course this was to no avail in the face of the finalised plan which
was being hurriedly rolled out from the Indian capital.46
‘I am being flooded with telegrams,’ Gandhi told his followers at his prayer
meeting in June. ‘I cannot say I am the only one to receive telegrams.’ Just as
some of Jinnah's supporters turned to thinking about the role of Islam in Pak-
istan, thousands of Congress supporters made appeals for the banning of cow
slaughter which, for them, was integral to the meaning of true freedom; local
understandings of what nationalism meant could be quite different to the con-
ception of national political leaders. As the Bareilly Goshala Society put it, ‘the
British regime in which cows were slaughtered has ended and self-government
has been set up’. Wasn't banning the killing of the sacred cow an essential part
of real freedom? ‘Rajendra Babu tells me,’ Gandhi said, referring to his fellow
Congressman, ‘that he has received some 50,000 postcards, between 25,000
and 30,000 letters and many thousands of telegrams demanding a ban on cow
slaughter … why this flood of telegrams and letters?’ He was continually telling
people to stop the tide of telegrams; it was ‘not proper to spend money on
them’.47
Today we are accustomed to the fixed boundaries of the Indian and Pak-
istani states and their ideological orientation. In 1947, however, very different
outcomes were contemplated with seriousness by the leading politicians of the
day. The existence of such ideas, and their support among supposedly well-in-
formed regional politicians and intellectuals, suggests the dislocation that had
occurred between centralised constitution-making and provincial politics in
India in 1947. Profound confusion, both about the precise boundaries, and
about the meaning of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’, was part of the cause of the
mass movement of people and stoked the ethnic violence that followed. Among
poor agriculturalists there was little clarity about what Pakistan would be and
where it would lie, even if there was an understanding about the manner in
which the empire had been brought to its end. As one peasant farmer told a
friend of Malcolm Darling, ‘The English have flung away their Raj like a bundle
of old straw and we have been chopped in pieces like butcher's meat.’48
The division of the Indian army was surrounded by so much uncertainty and
lack of clarity that the Daily Telegraph headline in Britain only hesitatingly pro-
claimed on 4 June 1947 that ‘Army may be split into two parts.’ As with so
many aspects of the Partition plan, national leaders publicly countenanced this
part of the scheme only after the decision to partition had been announced.
Even the highest ranks displayed bemusement about the real implications of
Partition and the Indian army's division came as ‘a great surprise to all’ (except
Field Marshal Auchinleck, who had been part of the confidential inner circle)
when the top brass of the military establishment dined at the Viceroy's house
the evening before the plan was announced to the world. In Bombay public
opinion was aghast at the prospect of the army's division, ‘as it seemed to de-
stroy even the remote hope of India and Pakistan uniting again in the future’.49
The complicated untangling of soldiers reduced the strength of the army just as
it was needed more than ever to ward off militants. The sudden cracking in two
of the army – and the creation of a new rival – coexisted with a broader feeling
of disbelief about the reality of Partition and opposition to change within the
military ranks. The deliberately vague wording of the Partition documents which
spoke of ‘reconstituting’ rather than ‘partitioning’ the massive and intricately
organised army into two parts further obscured the real meaning and perma-
nence of the initiative.
There was some fierce resistance within the institution itself to breaking up
the army and those Sandhurst-educated Indian officers, including some who
would come to play decisive roles in Pakistan's future after 1947, pointed to
the military's aloofness from local political control, and to distinguished regi-
mental histories and military fraternity as they tried to avoid the inevitable divi-
sion. The British Commander-in-Chief, Auchinleck, stubbornly refused to coun-
tenance division of his hallowed army into two halves when the idea was first
tentatively raised by the League in a Defence Committee meeting in April 1947
and his attachment to the unity of the Indian army complicated the situation
further as the terms of reference for the division were only placed on the table
in July. Beneath this high-level wrangling, day by day the situation in Punjab
was becoming more anarchic and bloody.
The most stunned and frightened reactions to the plan naturally came from
Punjab. People living alongside the proposed Punjabi borderline, settled for
generations on the fertile farmlands, could not, and would not, accept that they
might become aliens, minorities or subjects in a state ruled by another religious
group. The guesswork of newspaper artists who sketchily traced the provisional
border on hastily constructed maps did not help. The border itself would not be
finalised until mid-August and, preposterously, would remain a secret in the
hands of an elite cabal headed by the Viceroy until Independence Day had
passed. Caught in a horrible double bind, those Sikh leaders who had miscalcu-
lated and urged Mountbatten to divide the Punjab, in order to limit Pakistan's
extent and to save the whole province from Pakistani domination, now faced
the unimaginable prospect of a severed community, with one half in India and
the other half in Pakistan. The regions around Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi
were dominated numerically by Muslims but home to over half a million Sikhs,
and the holiest Sikh pilgrimage sites, including Guru Nanak's birthplace, fell
squarely in territory which was now labelled Pakistani. Any farmer worth his salt
knew that the prosperity of the region rested on a complex interlocking set of
canals which now risked separation under the terms of the plan. Fissiparous
arguments broke out among Sikhs about the best course of action and for
many the emerging consensus was that the best tactic was to force the bound-
ary westwards, either by appeals to the boundary commission or through vio-
lent tactics, pushing the limits of Pakistan back beyond Sikh heartlands to the
Chenab River.
Adding to these conceptual confusions about what the newly independent
India and Pakistan would look like was the entirely precarious position of the
princely states. The future of the princes was relegated to a secondary problem
by Mountbatten, to be picked up again in June only after the League–Congress
deadlock had been broken and the Partition plan agreed. Some princes had
taken up the offer of seats in the Constituent Assembly, while others resisted
participating, but the absorption of the states by the Indian and Pakistani terri-
tories and their democratisation still seemed unlikely in mid–1947. Some Euro-
pean states, including France, reassured the princes of their status by sig-
nalling that they would open diplomatic ties with independent princely states.
The rulers of extensive lands such as Bhopal and Hyderabad, which had poten-
tial as viable states, manoeuvred themselves towards an independent fu-
ture.50
In the weeks before Independence, the majority of the princely states
yielded to Indian pressure, granting the right to the new national government to
intervene in matters of defence, foreign affairs and communications. At this
moment, though, the continuation of local princely power was not a pipe
dream. Patel told the princes in July 1947 that it was ‘not the desire of Con-
gress to interfere in any manner whatever in the domestic affairs of the
states’.51 When pressure to accede and merge was ratcheted up by the new
governments in the summer, it caused explosive situations and armed resis-
tance in the princely states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, where national alle-
giances were not clear-cut and were complicated by diverse populations. Hy-
derabad was only resolved in 1948 when Nehru resorted to force and ordered
the annexation of the state. Up to the present day, Kashmir has not been de-
cided to the satisfaction of all parties and remains one of the longest running
disputes in the world. But aside from these more infamous cases, numerous
smaller states faced troubled internal strife and determined popular and
princely resistance to being subsumed into the all-encompassing Indo-Pak-
istani framework. There was a popular revolt in the tiny isolated North Indian
state of Rampur in August 1947, an Indo-Pakistani scuffle over the accession
of Junagadh perched on the tip of the Kathiawar peninsula (a state still claimed
on Pakistani maps today) and, further north, the princely states of Bahawalpur
and Kalat made overt bids for freedom from Pakistani control; the New York
Times printed a map of Kalat as an independent state two days before Inde-
pendence Day in August 1947.52
The extensive territories of the princely states alone, covering well over a
third of India's total territory, meant that these territories, their wealth and pop-
ulations, mattered to the future of the subcontinent even if the leaders of the
Congress and the League only came to recognise their real importance late in
the day. The lack of resolution of the princely state question by the time that
the Partition plan was decided added immensely to the confused interpreta-
tions of Indian and Pakistani statehood and, ultimately, to the scale of Partition
violence. Some decided to hold out and retain their old borders and try for inde-
pendence while others hoped to reconfigure, merge and link up with kinsmen
to create new states. In present-day Rajasthan, the Maharaja of Alwar had
hopes of expanding his territory and creating a kingdom infused with the imag-
ined warrior spirit of the Kshatriya caste, while the ruler of Bharatpur believed
in the possibility of an independent land for his fellow Jat caste members. In
Punjab, it seems that the Sikh princes of Patiala and Faridkot had set their
hearts on the possibility of carving out a separate, independent Sikh kingdom
under their own leadership. In their eyes, there was still everything to play
for.53 Seeing the confusion around them, the princes rallied their own body-
guards and small armies which were capable of serious military manoeuvres.
These armies proved more than just royal playthings – the Maharaja of Ba-
hawalpur kept three infantry battalions and some other units, including a few
platoons of Gurkhas, and his force included local men as well as soldiers re-
cruited in the frontier.54 Kings harked back to the days of their family's former
glory before the British arrived in India. Some imagined defending or even ex-
panding their own territories.
Even the descendants of the erstwhile and long-disbanded princely state of
Oudh, which was merged into Indian territory before the 1857 uprising, threw
their hats into the ring and claimed their pre-treaty rights as heirs to the land.
Some, with a view to the future, realised the likely territorial outcomes and
quickly acceded to India while others believed that independence, continued
autonomy or alternative federal arrangements could be arranged. Given the
treaty history of these states – which had been created or ruined at the whim
of British officials in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and the long
memories of these princely families, their suspicions about the final shape of
independent India are not as bizarre as they sound. War was not an idle threat,
as princes with personal treasuries, armed guards and significant power to
marshal their local populations prepared for violent clashes. In some cases, the
delusions of grandeur of the princely rulers meant that they decided to fight out
an alternative scheme, use the force of arms and secure their own slice of In-
dian territory. Elsewhere, popular revolts ensued. The most notorious cases,
Hyderabad and Kashmir, resulted in violent showdowns but, arguably, they
were no more than symptoms of the broader malaise caused by the imperial
breakdown.
Of course, nobody, as yet, had properly defined Pakistan's territory and
some League leaders clung to the prospect of linking up with Muslim-ruled
states such as Bhopal and Hyderabad, although they sat squarely in India, or
even achieving the accession of the tiny states lacing the deserts along the
Rann of Cutch on India's western flank. Well-tended myths and histories in
these states reminded people that their communities had prospered through
war. If well-educated Indian princes and maharajas, who had the ear of Mount-
batten and open invitations to Delhi's political drawing rooms, genuinely, if
quixotically, aspired to radically different visions of South Asia's future, then it
is little wonder that the ordinary people living within these princely states were
confused about Independence and regarded preparations for self-defence as a
rational proposition.
On the precipice of Partition
Journalists bombarded Mountbatten with questions in press conferences in
the days after the 3 June plan was announced and pressed him for information
about procedural details, India's membership of the Commonwealth and the
timing of the British departure, but only one thought to ask what would, in retro-
spect, turn out to be the most vital question of all. ‘Do you foresee any mass
transfer of population?’ ‘Personally I don't see it,’ the Viceroy replied. ‘There are
many physical and practical difficulties involved. Some measure of transfer will
come about in a natural way … perhaps Governments will transfer populations.
Once more, this is a matter not so much for the main parties as for the local
authorities living in the border areas to decide.’55 The fuzzy thinking on this
critical question was the fatal flaw in the Partition plan. Nobody had foreseen
the risks of unprecedented population movements as a result of the plan and
only feeble mechanisms had been put in place to reassure, protect or secure
the position of the petrified communities living in the border regions of Bengal
and Punjab. In the event, the resulting movement of people was so large that it
changed the very nature of the newly independent states of Pakistan and India
and altered the entire meaning of Partition.
Even as the plan was being agreed, the slow trickle of refugees had started
and the decision to flee was weighed up. Those who could afford to travel left
their keys with their neighbours or moved away from the Punjab to be with rela-
tives. Anxious and confused students, businessmen and government employ-
ees penned tense and sometimes furious letters to the government or to their
political heroes. The choices before them were limited. The very existence of
the new state meant that those Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan or Muslims in
India immediately fell under the label ‘minority’. It no longer mattered at all
what their political inclinations were as, by the logic of the state, by a twist of
fate decided at birth people were classified as members either of majorities or
of minorities. Reports from the Central Provinces suggested that the ministry
regarded ‘every Muslim as a Pakistani’ and that Muslim policemen were being
encouraged to leave.56 The Chief Minister of the province, as he reviewed the
smart ranks of the Hindustani Seva Dal cadets a few days after the Partition
plan was announced, suggested jokily that the Muslim minister sitting next to
him on the platform would now have to find a new home in Pakistan. Rather
less jocularly, he added that, ‘even though religious and cultural freedom may
be conceded to the Muslims living in Hindustan they will have no representa-
tion in the legislatures or in the services’.57 The fundamentals of ethnic identity
now looked as if they trumped everything else.
Masood Hussain, a twenty-three-year-old bachelor from the North Indian
district of Moradabad, turned to Jinnah for help. Educated at Aligarh, with a
Master's and a law degree, he was deeply worried about supporting his family.
He had no capital, no business prospects and was worried about discrimination
from local Congressmen as he had fought on the side of the League during the
1946 elections. As an unemployed student, his first concern was making a liv-
ing and finding a modicum of economic security. ‘Most Respected Quaid-i-
Azam,’ he wrote,
I am ready to serve anywhere you order me – Sindh, Punjab, Sarhad, Baluchistan, Bengal
or overseas … I assure you that I am passing very anxious days and nights. My father is dead
and I have no property which can yield any income for the maintenance of my family. The
capital left by my father, he having been a railway official, has gradually dwindled and has
now come to Rs. 5,000 only. How long will it help, as our monthly expenditure is no less than
Rs. 275 per month? I am in suspense and the future is uncertain. The last thing I could do
was to approach you for help and sustenance.
Like many others, his attraction to Pakistan was framed in the language of
economic and personal safety and security: ‘It is my earnest desire that I
should serve Pakistan and thus my family and myself.’58
The wealthy, far-sighted and well-connected made sure that their assets
were safe. It is no surprise that the great industrial magnate G.D. Birla who had
long been advocating Partition managed to extricate 80 per cent of his liquid
assets from Punjab and Sind months before Partition. By May 1947 the capital
shifting out of Punjabi banks to Delhi was being estimated at 250 crores, or
250 million pounds, and a banking magnate announced ‘we are leaving the
“Pakistan” an economic desert’.59 Penderel Moon advised his ‘unduly san-
guine’ Hindu friends in West Punjab to get out. ‘One of them took the hint and
expressed gratitude to me afterwards. The rest clung obstinately to their ances-
tral homes and in the end escaped with little more than their lives.’60 Nobody
leaves their home without a good reason, though, and the poor lacked the
means to pack up and go, even if they wanted to. There was an urgent neces-
sity to give rock-solid reassurances to these groups and to guarantee citizen-
ship, property and security rights for all Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, irrespective
of where they lived. Catastrophically, this was not done in time and petrified
communities threaded throughout India and Pakistan thought that they would
suddenly be reduced to the status of ‘minorities’. The corollary, they believed,
was second-class citizenship, persecution and even death. In this light, waging
a violent sectarian battle to preserve the land from intruders or outsiders be-
came a perversely logical option.
Some leaders heard the 3 June plan as the starting gun for a de facto civil
war; the demagogue Purushottam Das Tandon declared it would be the duty of
the youth to take back the parts of the country that had been sliced away and
appealed to the young, especially students, to train in arms even at the ex-
pense of their studies. ‘It is the crying need of the hour. We are being subjected
to onslaughts from every direction and enemies are waiting like hungry wolves
to pounce upon us.’ In Karachi, a packed crowd gathered to hear the provincial
League president swear to ‘fight to the last ditch for the honour and prestige of
the Muslims of these two provinces’, that the Muslims would ‘never part with
an inch of the Punjab’ and that Pakistan might have to be claimed with ‘the
might of the Muslim sword’.61
Deluded and earnest attempts were made to bypass the plan and to re-
shape Pakistan along alternative lines. In the United Provinces, politicians in
the west of the province set up committees to patch up a Pakistan corridor
which would branch across from east to west, linking up the two wings of the
new state. The secret Indo-Pakistan League campaigned doggedly for the ‘origi-
nal Pakistan’ right into the earliest days of Independence, claiming that the
British had ignored cultural and social considerations in their division of the
country, that the separation of the two wings of Pakistan was illogical and that
the remaining portions of the ‘original Pakistan’, such as Delhi, UP and Kash-
mir, should be released immediately.62 These moves were entirely unrealistic
by this date and reflect how detached many Leaguers had become from the
politics of decolonisation and nation state formation being played out in New
Delhi.
Numerous unambiguous warnings arrived daily in New Delhi and London of
the turbulent state of affairs in the countryside, particularly the increasingly ur-
gent and insistent warnings of the British Governor, Evan Jenkins, in Punjab. In
London, politicians washed their hands of responsibility and showed vague, but
uncommitted, concern. In a private conversation Attlee sombrely said that ‘he
was hopeful that there would be no bloodshed but feared that there would be’.
The onus was on the South Asian leadership to take control and in the de-
tached official colonial mind, Partition violence was perceived as their problem,
a highly dubious perception considering the fact that the nascent governments
had not yet begun to function and that, when they did, they would be under-
staffed, under-resourced and sometimes operating from under canvas. In a
frank and astonishing exchange between Sir Paul Patrick of the India Office
and American diplomats, the British official admitted that ‘widespread violence
and bloodshed’ was likely from the first week of June and that ‘legally there
was no way of avoiding full British responsibility for public security in India until
after the passage of the act and power transfer’.63 It had taken six years to
piece together the last major parliamentary act regarding India in 1935. Now,
in less than six weeks, the final act of Parliament which unhooked India from
its imperial master, ‘a nice tidy little bill’, in the words of the Secretary of State,
was hurried through Westminster.64 It is difficult to avoid the damning conclu-
sion that, in the minds of British policy-makers, the duty to protect the lives of
South Asians had already ended.
 6
Untangling Two Nations

At the end of June, the Muslim League held a meeting at a large, private
house in Lahore to decide the collective reaction to the boundary commissions.
All the parties now scrambled to present their viewpoint to the commissions, to
justify and explain why certain parts of territory should be destined to fall inside
Pakistan. Penderel Moon attended the meeting and entered the house where a
crowd of prominent Leaguers had gathered to deliberate over Pakistan's pro-
posed boundaries, to decide what claims they should stake to the Punjab: ‘On
the floor and on a big table a number of maps of the Punjab were strewn
about, variously coloured and chequered so as to show the distribution of the
population by communities. We all fell to poring over these maps,’ he later re-
membered. ‘It became plain in a very few minutes that no-one had any definite
idea of where we should claim that the dividing line should run – indeed, ex-
cept for Gurmani [his colleague] and myself, no-one seemed to have given
much thought to the matter or even to know the basic facts about the distribu-
tion of the population.’1
The open-ended, conveniently ambiguous Pakistan demand now came
crashing into territorial realities of population ratios and land usage. Between 3
June and 15 August the imaginary, but deeply felt, attachment to Indian and
Pakistani nationalism was to metamorphose into two, real sovereign nation
states. Land, assets and armies were to be severed in seventy-three days. As
Gandhi put it, intuiting the chasm between conflicting understandings of na-
tionalism, ‘Pakistan is not something imaginary. India is not something imagi-
nary … No poison must be spread.’2 Regrettably, however, the poison had al-
ready seeped deep into the arteries of the nationalist firebrands. Like a dis-
torted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped, frightening, oppo-
sitional images of one another.
The political decisions could no longer be made in a sealed bubble away
from prying eyes. Penderel Moon was taken aback to see a young, junior offi-
cial present at the League meeting in Lahore, one Mohammad Ali, with whom
he had worked four years earlier in Amritsar. Mohammad Ali, a subordinate rev-
enue official, was standing in a group of people near the window. Moon was
surprised that someone so junior should have found his way into the inner cir-
cle of decision-making about depositions to the boundary commissions. He
crossed the room and asked, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ to which
came the reply, ‘My friend brought me along and we just walked in. Nobody
stopped us.’ Information was leaking profusely from the party strongholds, giv-
ing ample opportunity for rumours and misinformation to take hold. The centre
of political gravity was shifting from New Delhi to the offices and front rooms of
clerks, petty officials, policemen and administrators. Friends and relations
passed news to one another as the political classes tried to extract information
and to steer the boundary award in their own favour.3 Simultaneously, deci-
sions and statements were couched in so much uncertainty that ordinary Pun-
jabis were left completely in the dark about whether their homes were soon
going to be in India or Pakistan.
The border had to be decided against the clock. The Bengal Boundary Com-
mission and the Punjab Boundary Commission, both under the chairmanship of
Cyril Radcliffe, were formed on 30 June. Radcliffe was a respected judge, well
known for his piercing intellect, but had none of the requisite technical skills for
drawing a border, and had, infamously, never been to India before. The British
government considered this an asset lending itself to impartiality rather than
the self-evident drawback which it proved. Until he arrived in India, on 8 July,
Radcliffe did not realise quite what he had bitten off: there were eventually
3,800 miles of border between the two countries. The terms of the commis-
sions' briefs included not only the statistical proportions of Hindus, Muslims
and Sikhs by district but also a woolly and much-debated reference to ‘other
factors’ – cultural, geographical and historical – which left the boundaries open
to repeated challenges. In the long run this undermined the moral authority of
the final settlement. In Punjab, over half of the districts were contested, mak-
ing the provisional boundary line a sham. For Radcliffe it was, quite simply, a
thankless task.
The census the commissions worked with was six years out of date and of
dubious veracity in the first place; the trickle of refugees which had already
started and the bunching of communities together for safety during the ongo-
ing violence meant that the population ratio of the land which was being di-
vided was shifting beneath both boundary commissions' feet on a daily basis.
Pakistan itself had never been fully defined in a territorial way by the League,
which had laid claim to the whole of Punjab, while the imagery of Indian nation-
alists staked a claim to the whole of the subcontinent. Now the precise land-
mass of Pakistan had to be carved out. ‘The Assam government invited the
commission to come to Shillong but they have refused on the score of short-
ness of time,’ the disappointed Governor of the province remarked.4 The com-
missions declined all the other polite invitations to come and visit affected
areas. In the end, they retreated behind closed doors, working from maps using
pen and paper, rather than walking the land and grasping for themselves the
ways in which vast rivers, forests and administrative districts interlocked and
could best be separated.
Faced with the impending reality of this arbitrary borderline, Indian groups
and parties were bitterly torn among themselves about what to claim and what
to relinquish and on what basis. The land question now seized centre stage.
Rather than ameliorate and assuage, the 3 June plan was sparking unknown
consequences. There was a ‘very mixed’ reception to the Partition plan in La-
hore and Amritsar – and the imposition of the sudden division froze people to-
gether, making superficial association with one group or another more difficult
to avoid. ‘The belief that the Punjab will be partitioned has intensified the com-
munal split and most officials are wondering who their new masters will be and
how best they can secure their own future,’ warned the Governor, foreseeing
the complete fissure which would soon tear through the administrative offices
and the police forces in the troubled province.5 Again, the implosion of the old
colonial regime meant that there was very little reliable organisational infra-
structure to prop up the transitional state: ‘so far as the services are concerned
we are going through a very difficult time with some men yearning to leave
India, others trying to please new masters, and others again upset and appre-
hensive. The old administrative machinery is rapidly falling to pieces.’6
He was right; the old machinery was disintegrating. Punjab was now held
hostage by volatile militias. In fear of a political backlash, the government of
Punjab allowed well-known ringleaders to go free and British officials and In-
dian politicians wavered over the banning of weapons, including guns and the
unsheathed kirpans of the Sikhs. ‘There was nothing abnormal en route …’
Moon commented, on his way into Lahore, except that on roads leading
through the district of Multan, ‘individual Sikhs walking or cycling were all wear-
ing very large kirpans’.7 Bombs, often left over from the Second World War, be-
came a new feature of the attacks in Punjab in June. On the morning of 10
June a Sikh on a bicycle hurled a bomb into a horse-drawn cart carrying pas-
sengers in Lahore. The street exploded into confusion, leaving two dead and
ten injured. Ten days later, on Brandreth road, a party of labourers heading off
early in the morning for their day's work, perhaps as bricklayers or rock-break-
ers, were attacked by a bomb thrown from a neighbouring rooftop. One of the
men died. In the vegetable market in Lahore, the next day, two bombs timed to
go off one after the other caused havoc; splitting apart the stalls of piled-up
pyramids of vegetables, killing nine shoppers and traders and injuring at least
thirty-eight more. The Sikh leaders openly threatened an uprising to the British
officials and one spokesman, Giani Kartar Singh, wept as he told the Governor
of the Punjab that a fight was inevitable if no heed was paid to Sikh solidarity.
Terrified by their loss of control and shocked by the chaos and the mess
which they would inherit on Independence Day, national leaders pleaded for
order. ‘Amritsar is already a city of ruins, and Lahore is likely to be in a much
worse state very soon,’ Nehru told Mountbatten in the last week of June. ‘You
gave an assurance even before 3rd June and subsequently that any kind of dis-
order will be put down with vigour. I am afraid we are not honouring that assur-
ance in some places at least, notably Lahore and Amritsar.’ Jinnah, more
bluntly, begged, ‘I don't care whether you shoot Moslems or not, it has got to be
stopped.’8
Claiming the land
At the same time, Pakistan was becoming a real, earthy reality. Rapidly, the
greatest minds in law, statistics and administration turned to the maps in order
to construct their case. ‘I understand that a band of workers under Mr Abdur
Rahim, I.C.S., has been working on the ethnological aspect of the problem. I
venture to send a few figures in this connection,’ wrote Professor Qureshi to
Jinnah. He enclosed lists of numerical musings on tehsils, or small administra-
tive areas ‘contiguous to tentative districts of Pakistan where Muslims are in
absolute majority’. These raw statistics make terrifying reading when we know,
with hindsight, where this reduction of human beings to simple numbers was
leading. Qureshi was just one of many who sent lists and he had scribbled in
the margins whether the League had a case to make on the grounds of popula-
tion. In tehsil Muktsar, he noted, ‘Muslims in simple majority.’ Moga was ‘Pre-
dominantly Hindu’, in Amritsar tehsil, ‘Muslims are less than combined popula-
tion of Hindus and Sikhs’, but in Anjala there would be an ‘Absolute majority of
Muslims’. In Dasuya, ‘Muslims are less than combined Hindus and Sikhs. But if
Indian Christians are combined with Muslims, we get bare majority.’ And so it
went on.9
In this frenzied rush to calculate population ratios the reality of ancient and
intricately woven homelands – and sensitivity to violent repercussions – was
lost. Ominously, another League supporter in North India, A.R. Khan, was call-
ing for limited movement of the population to strengthen the Muslim position,
which he predicted would not be difficult in the rural areas ‘where people have
no stakes’.10 The logic of this was to reduce individuals and communities to
crass ratios and statistics which stripped bare the inner complexities of friend-
ship, community and life itself. Gandhi distilled this beautifully into five words:
‘today religion has become fossilised,’ he told a gathering of saffron-clad sad-
hus and Hindu ascetics in early June.11 Few talked about, or even contem-
plated, what this border would mean for the ordinary people who lived on either
side of it. ‘My anxiety now was to work day and night and get the case ready by
Friday noon,’ remembered the Muslim League's chief legal representative,
Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, many years later. ‘Even now, looking back, I can-
not explain how it was possible for us to produce a case which we did by the
Friday noon.’ Immediately after submitting the documents to the Punjab
Boundary Commission in Lahore, he went straight to a local mosque, where he
led the Friday evening prayers and warned the anxious congregation to be ‘vigi-
lant’ as he feared that the Muslims faced ‘suppression’.12
There would be one chance for the parties to present a case to the bound-
ary commissions at their public hearings held in the High Courts of Lahore and
Calcutta in late July. The chattering classes could acquire permits and some
went to watch the show, packing the press and public galleries. But it was not
light entertainment. The Punjab Boundary Commission received fifty-one offi-
cial memorandums from political parties and organisations, the Sikhs' memo-
randum alone was nearly 75 pages long and the star Bombay lawyer, M.C. Se-
talvad, who made the case for the Congress, with the Hindu Mahasabha's
backing, spoke for over three hours. Ultimately, all this fevered activity only
heightened expectations.
As Independence Day drew nearer, the response to the threat of an un-
known borderline was, quite simply, frantic. The telephone at the Governor of
Punjab's house was ringing incessantly around the clock with callers desperate
to convey their position. Depositions and appeals came in the form of
telegraphs and petitions, letters and phone calls, to the commissions them-
selves as well as, hopelessly, to those who were not allowed to intervene in
their work in any case: Mountbatten, Attlee and even the King of England.
There were so many memoranda and representations to the Bengal commis-
sion that the commissioners said it would be impossible for them to finish their
hearings by the set date of 26 July (to which Radcliffe could only reply, ‘I must
beg you to complete by 26’). Journalists at the offices of the pro-League news-
paper Dawn claimed that they had received hundreds of telegrams on the sub-
ject and warned uncompromisingly in front-page articles that local Muslim
leagues were readying themselves for action against an unfavourable award.
‘Muslims of Ambala,’ the paper reported of one district which, objectively, had
no chance of inclusion in Pakistan, ‘demand demarcation of boundary lines on
population basis. Any departure from this fundamental rule will be fought tooth
and nail.’ ‘From start to finish,’ in the words of the historian Joya Chatterji, ‘the
making of the borderline was shot through with politics.’13
‘To Sikh solidarity the Mountbatten scheme will be what a knife is to a
cheese piece,’ warned a Lahore newspaper: ‘it will cut through it easily and def-
initely.’ The Sikhs, a community of only six million, in an all-India population of
almost four hundred million, became desperate. The Sikh population was al-
most evenly spread across the Punjab. What were the Sikhs to do now, with ‘no
homeland in the whole world except in the land of the five rivers’?14 They had
lost their influence on the colonial state and felt the interests of their commu-
nity were being sacrificed on the altar of a broader constitutional settlement.
Many had called for Partition as a way of saving at least some of the Punjab
from being swallowed up by Pakistan but now they appealed to the commission
to consider the ‘other factors’ – the rich regional Sikh heritage, their extensive
landholdings and architectural birthright. On this basis, it was not improbable
that Lahore, home to six hundred gurdwaras, might fall to the Sikhs despite the
population ratios which narrowly favoured Muslims in the city. There was a con-
fused and divided response, with some appealing for a Sikh homeland, Sikhis-
tan, and others pushing for reconciliation to broker a deal with the Muslim
League. But for many, fighting to push back the boundary line was the only op-
tion if Radcliffe presented them with a raw deal.
Allegiances were swiftly sealed with Sikh princes whose own lands abutted
these tracts and who had no intention of sinking their kingdoms in a wider sea
of Pakistan if they could help it. As a collection of seventeen wealthy Sikh land-
lords spelt out in a searing appeal to the Viceroy, nothing short of a line along
the Chenab River would satisfy:
We must now rise as one man and proclaim that we shall refuse to be put in a helpless
position. We have fought and defended the country for over a century with our blood out of
all proportion to our numbers. Our contribution in the economic field both in industry and
agriculture and development of the canal colonies of the Punjab bears the deep impression
of our sweat and toil. Our religion has given India a beautiful culture which if correctly under-
stood would banish all communal strife and bitterness from our land. We have not done all
this to earn slavery and domination.
Dawn bitterly retorted that it was unthinkable that ‘the tiny little community
of scattered Sikhs who have split themselves into two by their own scatter-
brained policy may be awarded predominantly Muslim territories merely be-
cause there may be located in them a Sikh shrine here, or a Sikh shrine
there’.15 This was a gross and disingenuous reduction of the importance of
Nankana Sahib, the fifteenth-century birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of
Sikhism. As the Maharaja of Patiala told Mountbatten directly, ‘The Sikh senti-
ment about this place is so strong that it would be most dangerous to minimise
it, as under no circumstances they can be persuaded [sic] to allow this to go
into foreign territory.’16 Couched in royal niceties, this was a very thinly veiled
threat. The Maharaja had already been roundly sacking his Muslim employees
and openly supporting the idea of a revitalised Sikh state.
Princes and big parties could at least get a hearing with Mountbatten.
Smaller groups such as ‘untouchables’, Christians and Anglo-Indians were sim-
ply pushed aside by the sweeping plan. Beyond the neat textbook polarisations
of League and Congress were countless fragmented groups with their own wor-
ries and interests. Their voices could not be completely drowned out. Yet now
these smaller groups looked as if they were up for grabs, only really able to
make their voice heard through alliances with the larger parties. Chaudhri Sun-
der Singh was a member of the Legislative Assembly for Punjab, elected on a
ticket as an ‘untouchable’. He was so worried about the fate of his community
two weeks after the 3 June plan was revealed that he forced staff in the Gover-
nor's office to send a letter to Mountbatten on his behalf. This met with a curt
rebuff. Politicians of the Pakistan Achhut Federation, P.S. Ramdasia and
Choudhry Sukh Lal, travelled to Delhi in order to try and confront the Viceroy in
person and to push forward their viewpoint, ‘in the hope that even at this
eleventh hour [a] sense of justice may create an urge to minimise the wrong
done to our unfortunate community at least in the province of Punjab’. Their
community would prefer to be in Pakistan, they argued, rather than subsumed
under the broader Hindu label. ‘It is no longer a secret that the Hindus aim at
re-establishing Vedic Raj – the so-called Ram-Raj – and the untouchables do
not realise that they shall have to remain chandals [untouchables] for ever
under Hindu domination.’17 There was neither the time, nor the will, however,
to nuance sweeping understandings of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Sikh’. And no-
body was clearly spelling out the guiding political principles behind the new
India and the new Pakistan.
The basic building blocks of the new states, their economic policies and
their attitude towards minorities, remained uncertain. Without this knowledge,
those who feared that their land was on the verge of becoming Pakistan or Hin-
dustan felt deeply troubled. People associated the idea of belonging to the
hazy, unknown ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ with negative and upsetting connotations.
Some feared infringement of their personal lives, the ruination of their religion,
perhaps even the destruction of daily life as they knew it.
Portentous news began arriving in New Delhi: of the possibility of ‘active re-
sistance’ to an unfavourable boundary and of people distributing posters in
Punjabi villages summoning crowds to emergency meetings in mosques, tem-
ples and gurdwaras. On 8 July a massive hartal, as Sikh businesses, shops and
markets closed all over Punjab, stretched into the cities of North India. Over
half a million Sikhs wore black armbands to signal their depth of feeling. They
collected together in gurdwaras to pray for the continued unity of their commu-
nity. Abundant warnings stressed that violent protests were being organised in
order to shape and influence directly the places where the borderline would
snake through the land. Violence was the last tool of the desperate.
In this light, constitutional means were rapidly starting to seem an irrele-
vance. As a self-described ‘common man’ from Lahore expressed it to his Con-
gress committee, ‘Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless.’18 It was im-
possible to square the heightened sense of expectations which had been
stirred by Independence with the bruising reality of a borderline penned hastily
across a piece of paper. Uncertainty about the precise location of the new bor-
derline collided with the intensely negative attributes ascribed to ‘Pakistan’ and
‘India’. Among those who had been on the front line of nationalist campaigns,
membership of ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ was reviled as potentially life-threatening
and all-engulfing. If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was
finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a mod-
ern, democratic nation state. Instead you would suffer oppression, exploitation,
the dishonouring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death.
Fears of British foul play were also festering. ‘A nation that has regained a
homeland that belongs to it never gives it up without a fight,’ spat out editorials
in Dawn, inciting its readers to action if the British reneged on their agree-
ments. ‘If that is what these last minute double-crossers want so that they may
secure [a]renewed imperialist foothold under fresh excuses, they will get it.’19
The plan was condemned as ‘eyewash’ and ‘a sham’ by others. Sikhs com-
plained that their sons had died on the battlefields of Europe during two world
wars and that this was how the British repaid them.
Collections were made for a Sikh war chest and Sikh jathas assembled,
dressed in red and orange bandannas and distinctive turbans, armed, and
stirred to action. Two private armies, the Akali Sena and Shahidi Jatha, went
from village to village recruiting men. This was preparation for civil war by any
other name. By July, Evan Jenkins, the Governor of Punjab, was sending unam-
biguous warnings, citing depth of anger about the division and proposed bor-
derline as the major grievance. The boundary had become a live wire, or even
‘a casus belli between the two dominions’.20 The claims of the two sides were
incompatible: the Sikhs could not forgo their principal gurdwaras, which lie in
present-day Pakistan, just as Muslims claimed historical and cultural rights in
Lahore, the home of the formidable Badshahi mosque, while it was feared that
militants on both sides might destroy cities rather than relinquish them.
As Independence Day approached, life became nightmarish for people
caught between the opposing sides. ‘My head was about to burst. To me it
seemed as if I was not in my senses,’ the writer Fikr Taunsvi recorded in his
daily diary after another difficult day in the war-torn city of Lahore, which had
now been under siege for almost six months. ‘I felt a hammering on my brain.
My nerves were on edge, as if they would explode and destroy my body. The
continuous sharp chain of the morning's turmoil enveloped me in its tight em-
brace.’21 Fear was the predominant emotion in the middle months of 1947,
particularly in those districts of Punjab where inclusion in Pakistan or India
was, as yet, unknown. Here, policemen and magistrates had become com-
pletely unreliable and untrustworthy, slinking away from their posts or becom-
ing openly partisan. Sleep was disturbed by unusual, threatening noises as
riots broke out in distant parts of the city or militias made their rounds in the
streets: there were the beating of drums and tom-toms, the striking of cooking
vessels, bells and gongs, the wail of horns, trumpets, loudspeakers, whistles
and sirens.22
Curfews and closed markets caused dire hardship. Taunsvi's local street
was in turmoil: ‘the washerman who lived on the ground floor … had become
the father of a tiny baby at three in the morning and … was worried that the
bazaars were shut. The sweet-seller who sold milk had locked his shop from in-
side and was hiding there. He had received no supply today because all milk-
vendors are Muslim, and this being a Hindu locality, they couldn't step into it.
Hospitals were not functioning, neither were doctors, nurses and medicines,
and both the mother and the infant were crying. The children were asking, “Will
the curfew never be lifted? Shall we never get milk?” ’ As he helplessly watched
the washerman's newborn child become more sick, Taunsvi's feelings turned to
anger against the politicians who had created the situation, ‘I wish you had the
strength to ask great brains like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah and other statesmen
and maulvis to wear the guise of this unlettered washerman for a moment.
Then you may go and request the British to give you freedom. Then demand
Pakistan and Hindustan.’23 The brutality and daily privations of the time
seemed far from the dreams of the long-awaited independence.
People experienced gradations of anxiety; some Punjabis felt paralysing
and life-changing terror. In the worst-afflicted centres, in the hardest hit parts
of Lahore and Amritsar, Rawalpindi and Sheikhupura, the most anxious took
desperate measures – growing or cutting off their beards and learning the
Kalma or Vedic phrases so that they could fake their religious identities if nec-
essary. If possible, families sent their unmarried daughters away with
guardians or relations, and decided upon hiding places in the roof spaces of
barns or the small back rooms of temples or mosques. The optimists refused to
take basic precautions but many minds turned to self-defence and the stockpil-
ing of bags of sand and cooking fuel, and the collection of extra drinking water.
Newly recruited watchmen patrolled villages and towns, and missiles and am-
munition piled up. The family of Shanti Seghal, a young woman aged twenty at
the time, made various attempts to find safety, moving from Gujranwala to
Sheikhupura in 1946 because the family thought the city would probably end
up in India. ‘My father had a soda water shop; we put all the soda water bottles
on the roof, lined them up, thinking that when they come we will attack them
with bottles,’ she later recalled, ‘but they were no use because they came with
machine guns.’24
Creating a believable border was impossible without the agreement of the
people who would have to abide with it. The 3 June plan had exacerbated anxi-
eties and accelerated the preparations for war. It was becoming more difficult
to stay neutral and the formation of two new nations was forcing people to de-
clare simple allegiances from much richer and more complicated pasts.
Making two armies
Fortifying the Punjab with a highly disciplined force of impartial, profes-
sional soldiers would have been one way of providing security and reassurance
to people in the weeks between the announcement of the plan and its imple-
mentation. In the troubled district of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, ‘the sight of
tanks careering round the countryside, often with the local police officer stand-
ing in the turret, had some temporary effect’.25 In Bengal, there had been
‘some ugly incidents’ but, an American diplomat reported, ‘the city is so
bristling with armed troops and police that forays against public order have
been discouraged and minimized’.26 Troops did have a presence in city centres
in Punjab, North India and Delhi – on Independence Day in Lahore Penderel
Moon found the Lawrence Gardens ‘full of troops’ while ‘the railway station was
in the hands of the military and barricaded off by barbed wire’.27 There was, in
addition, a special boundary force constituted to deal with the prospect of a
contested borderline.
But just as land was being divided, so were soldiers. Nearly half a million In-
dian soldiers commanded by a predominantly white British officer corps had to
be cut and pasted into the new national formations. The division of the army
along religious lines, which Auchinleck had reckoned would take ‘between five
and ten years’, in March 1947, was hurried through in months, although it was
only completed in full in March 1948.28 In the midst of the most appalling
killings which were ripping through North India and just at a time when a
united, neutral army was needed to suppress militias – which were often com-
posed of ex-soldiers themselves and hence not averse to engaging the authen-
tic army in battle – the regiments of the Indian army were dismembered. Sol-
diers were combed out and mechanically divided according to their religious
hue; blocs of Muslim soldiers were hastily packed off to Pakistan while non-
Muslim soldiers were dispatched in the opposite direction.
Of the twenty-three infantry regiments in pre-Partition India, only seven con-
sisted exclusively of Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. Now, no Muslim who was resi-
dent in the Pakistan areas could choose to serve in India, and vice versa for
non-Muslims living in India. Much effort had been expended by the British dur-
ing the Second World War trying to keep the military immunised from the cross-
currents of Indian nationalism. Before Independence, fervent nationalists were
unlikely to sign up for careers in the imperial army. Now, though, more narrowly
defined allegiances to the League and the Congress became irrelevant. The re-
ligion into which a soldier was born became the sine qua non of his new na-
tional identity. Now all Muslims were fundamentally equated by the state appa-
ratus with Pakistan and all non-Muslims were assumed to have a natural alle-
giance to India, whether they had expressed support for the creation of the new
states or not. Given this stark choice it was unusual for soldiers deliberately to
choose to serve in a country where they would be part of a ‘minority’. The
chances of a quick promotion, family persuasion, marital prospects or judge-
ments about personal safety rapidly took precedence.
Men of various castes and communities lived intimately alongside each
other in the Indian army. Some companies remained immune from jingoistic
outbursts, whereas others became more highly politicised. News of army indis-
cipline was suppressed and the army appeared to remain more ‘reliable’ and
less polarised along ethnic lines than the severed and pugilistic local police
forces. Nevertheless, the cart followed the horse as soldiers were encouraged
to display patriotic feeling. Now, labelled Indian or Pakistani, many soldiers
started to identify openly with one side or the other. ‘Mussalman officers are
Jubilant and talking openly of being generals in the Pakistan army, and that
Pakistan will eventually be greater than the previous Moghul Empire,’ wrote
one British colonel.29 Many sepoys came from the Punjabi and North Indian
heartlands where violence was raging and felt extremely anxious about the fate
of their families. Nervous and irritable soldiers waited for information of their
new postings in the maelstrom of misinformation and rumour.
As rail and road networks remained vulnerable to attack, the precise mo-
ment at which units of Muslim soldiers would be evacuated to Pakistan from
India – and vice versa on the Pakistani side – was kept a closely guarded se-
cret and usually announced at very short notice. A group of Pakistani cadets
stationed in the northern hill station of Dehra Dun had just four hours’ notice to
pack for their new homeland, and their superiors bundled them out of their
base in a heavily guarded convoy at 5.30 in the morning. The British medical
officer Anthony Epstein, who was looking on, wrote home to his family about
the sudden departure of the Muslim cadets. ‘It was all very dramatic and tense,
with a farewell parade in the dim lights of lorries and everyone cheering and
very excited. This incident only heightens the sense of foreboding there is here
as everywhere.’30 Soldiers who had forged friendships over many years of
shared daily routine were suddenly separated and there was genuine sadness
about the division; glasses were raised in heartfelt toasts, addresses were ex-
changed and pledges made. Every company of the 3rd Rajputana Rifles hosted
a leaving party for their Muslim co-soldiers before they took their leave for Pak-
istan. As a senior officer in 1947, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, later a Pakistani
Foreign Minister, remembered in discussion with the journalist Andrew White-
head,
Many of the men I commanded, Punjabi Muslims, they had homes in what would become
Pakistan, but in the villages there had been many cases of abduction of women, and some
of the men were affected, their families and so on had been abducted … but I must say this
also, their Sikh comrades made many efforts to go down to those villages and to try and se-
cure release of abducted women, not always successfully; but you can imagine that events
of that kind, which touched so deeply … were bound to prey on the minds of the people con-
cerned; these events were a strong indication that the fabric would not be able to hold to-
gether.31
In the shadow of the continuing Punjabi violence, the fragmentation of
mixed regiments was a constant concern despite the strong thread of comrade-
ship running through the armed forces. Whole squadrons of Sikhs and Muslims
waited cheek by jowl for movement to their permanent units in Jhansi and as
rumours of their impending transportation came and went, alongside new sto-
ries of calamities in Punjab, there was a risk of the soldiers turning on each
other. As they nervously waited for news of loved ones the strain could become
too much. In Gujranwala there was a mutiny in one Pakistan battalion and the
non-Muslim soldiers had to be urgently removed to safety, while in Ambala an
inquiry found Pakistani troops guilty of firing at civilians from the carriage win-
dows of their passing train, killing or wounding sixty people. A Sikh captain was
charged after a shooting incident in an unspecified Punjabi suburb in which
eighteen people died.32 On board a ship sailing from Bombay to Karachi after
Independence, General Tuker, who was no stranger to the extent of Partition's
damage, was astonished to find just how many soldiers on board had had rela-
tives killed in the violence or had not heard from their families for months.
Some soldiers, once they had been segregated for dispatch to their new
homeland, passionately adopted the slogans of their new state and fired their
rifles into the night sky as they passed through train stations en route, yelling
‘Pakistan Zindabad’ or ‘Jai Hind’.33 Food and water were handed through car-
riage windows to troops as they crossed into either India or Pakistan at the
Wagah border crossing, and the air was filled with morale-boosting cheers and
flags. In the later weeks of 1947, with increasing regularity, soldiers – on hear-
ing of villages wiped out or sisters abducted – deserted to join militias to assist
in the ethnic cleansing of Punjab.
As a result, the reliable manpower available to cover the vast tracts of land
that were already up in flames, or likely to descend into the clutches of vio-
lence, was shockingly thin. At the same time, preparation for the departure of
the British army was in full swing. Only a few hours’ travel from the Indian capi-
tal itself, in the flat expanses of Gurgaon, guerrilla warfare against a rural popu-
lation known as the Meos was decimating whole villages. The state was unpre-
pared and there was a botched attempt to send troops. A ‘British’ policeman,
William Chaning Pearce, who was actually Canadian-born and educated in
Switzerland, was in his late thirties at the time and responsible for policing the
neighbouring district of Mathura. ‘Our resources for this task were pitifully mea-
gre,’ he recalled. Ingenious arming was taking place in the countryside. ‘Al-
though open violence ceased for the time being the extreme tension remained
and both sides realised that the major storm was yet to come.’ There was a lull
in the Gurgaon massacres, during which time Chaning Pearce remembered the
bustling activity that took place:
The whole countryside therefore started at top speed to arm themselves for the supreme
test. Practically every village started a gunpowder factory and village blacksmiths did a roar-
ing trade converting any old piece of gas pipe into a so-called gun. Some surprisingly effec-
tive weapons started to appear. There were swords and spears by the thousand and even
some home made sten guns and mortars. The latter, often made from the back-axle casing
of a car, were usually mounted on strategic rooftops in villages to repel invaders.
There was only one jeep available in Chaning Pearce's district. For a while
he and his men had the assistance of the Poona Horse, the Indian cavalry regi-
ment, but soon, to their frustration, this was posted elsewhere. ‘We could not
spare more than twenty or so armed men in static pickets.’34 In many places,
policemen and soldiers were no match for the creative enterprise of amateur
forces. Parties of volunteers could be seen marching along the major roads
from the frontier and gathering along the Grand Trunk Road, reaching into Pun-
jab, on their way to join the battle armed with swords, spears, lathis and muz-
zle-loading guns. One gang intercepted on their return from fighting in Gurgaon
even had an elephant with an armoured howdah. The militias were also work-
ing hand in glove with the local leaders of princely states who acted as con-
duits for arms and transport.
During these fraught days, the state was trying to do two contradictory
things at once: split the army in half, and prevent civil war. The chances of
maintaining the peace looked increasingly slender.
Crisis in the capitals
‘In Delhi I found everyone extremely tired.’ Less than 50 miles away, a
young American journalist Phillips Talbot recorded the frenetic activity in the
capital in July 1947. ‘A viceregal adviser who is the essence of politeness
yawned in my face. Jinnah looked haggard and drawn. Nehru's always explo-
sive temperament had according to people working with him got the best of
him more frequently than usual. Some feared he was nearing a nervous break-
down. Everywhere weary worn men were struggling with problems that were too
vast and too complex for them to comprehend fully in the available time.’35
Partitioning the states in such a short time required immense physical and
mental stamina. A photograph published in Life magazine in 1947 shows a
frowning young official with his head in one hand, a pen in the other and a bal-
ance sheet spread open on the desk before him. All around him, piles of
leather-bound books tower in great heaps. One pile of the books is labelled
with a large white sign that says INDIA, while the tottering stack on the other
side of the table is marked PAKISTAN. The official is dividing up a library be-
tween the two new nations. The division of library books was an especially con-
tentious matter. Alternate volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were metic-
ulously allocated to each country.
New Delhi's offices had spun into overdrive. Partition had become a policy
decision to be implemented and the loosely defined nationalistic aspirations of
Indian and Pakistani people were now moulded into modern countries. Nation-
alist ambitions had to be squeezed into the prosaic boundaries of sovereign
states. A literal interpretation of the words ‘Partition’ and ‘Pakistan’ now came
to the fore, as the future shape of the subcontinent pivoted on delicate extrica-
tion of the resources needed to form a new Pakistani state from the old admin-
istrative husk of the Raj. Government staff separated all the physical and paper
belongings of the former British Indian government. The task was left in the
hands of civil servants and a Partition Council was established on 1 July,
steered by two civil service officers, a Hindu, H.M. Patel and a Muslim (later a
Prime Minister of Pakistan), Chaudhuri Mohammad Ali. This had the power to
decide on the division of the spoils between India and Pakistan, and ten sub-
committees dealt with splitting every arm of the government, from the most
trivial to the most essential. Decisions that could not be made by the Partition
Council were referred on to an arbitral tribunal. A general rule of thumb was
agreed by which the division of physical, or movable, goods would be made
along statistical lines, with 80 per cent of all goods going to India and 20 per
cent to Pakistan. Every item of government property was counted and clerks
drew up itemised lists. The goods to be counted and divided in the Indian
Health Department included the following:
1. Durries 2. Table Lamps 3. Iron Safes 4. Cash Boxes 5. Cycles 6. Typewriters 7. Electric
Heaters 8. Steel Trays 9. Stirrup Pumps 10. Time pieces 11. Clocks 12. Calculating ma-
chines 13. Locks 14. Magnifying glasses 15. Steel Racks 16. Steel Cupboard 17. Inkpots
with stands 18. Curtains 19. Waste Paper Baskets 20. Paper Weights 21. Stationery 22. Offi-
cers’ Tables 23. Other Tables 24. Chairs 25. Almirahs 26. Screens 27. Arm Chairs 28.
Wooden Racks 29. Wooden Trays36
The pathos of such a doctrinaire division carried out against the backdrop
of the carnage unfolding nearby is not difficult to imagine.
Political tension, despite the optimistic and self-congratulatory assess-
ments in the Viceroy's camp, did not abate. ‘There is no let-up in the negotia-
tions with the parties,’ Mountbatten wrote to the Governor of Bombay, ‘and
every day something fresh occurs which threatens to break down our slender
basis of agreement.’ The speed with which so many small but cumulatively im-
portant decisions had to be made placed a nervous strain on the administra-
tive elite. ‘An air of breathless haste seems to hang over the city,’ observed an
American diplomat on the other side of the country. ‘Harassed government offi-
cials and politicians scamper around Calcutta as if pursued by the avenging
angel.’37
In June 1947, every Muslim who worked for the government and resided in
an Indian, rather than a Pakistani, area received a letter or was asked to make
the choice of serving India or Pakistan. A propaganda war between the Indian
and Pakistani governments started over the potential opportunities that would
be on offer to young officers in the new states. Some hoped to gain promotion
by plugging the gaps left by the departure of British officers. Frantic calcula-
tions about salaries, pensions, pay scales and promotions ensued. One cynic
commented that ‘All senior Muslim officers, with or without substance, are busy
planning and manoeuvring for their own uplift in Government employment.’38
Officers made tortuous decisions, based on a combination of political and per-
sonal reasons.
For Muslims in the more junior services, though, there was concern that
promotion would become difficult because of suspicions about political loyalty
if they stayed in India. It is an exaggeration to imagine that the members of the
services who departed for Pakistan, as is sometimes suggested, were purely
the elite. The majority of government employees who were given the chance of
opting for Pakistan came from more humble jobs, on the railways or in the
postal service. The decision whether or not to leave for Pakistan was most diffi-
cult for these low-ranking, low-earning workers: ‘An average man is in a great
fix,’ confided a Muslim lawyer from the Central Provinces to Jinnah, ‘and every
day railway and postal men are coming to me to consult.’ Visitors came to the
lawyer's door asking for advice on the question of migration. ‘I feel I am unable
to give them proper directions without first consulting you.’39 The decision was
momentous – more momentous than many of them realised. When some of
them wavered, changed their minds or tried to return to their old jobs they
would find it difficult or impossible to resume their old lives.
Manzoor Alam Quraishi, a Muslim staunchly in favour of a united India, had
just celebrated his thirtieth birthday and had taken up the position of District
Magistrate in Pauri in the idyllic foothills of the Himalayas. He had no intention
of opting for Pakistan, although his brother, Badre Alam, was a keen League
supporter, and was making his way to the new state. ‘Even I got some threaten-
ing letters that I should migrate to Pakistan, otherwise I and my family would be
wiped out by my own Hindu police guard,’ he later wrote. Quraishi stood his
ground, although he took the precaution of carrying a loaded pistol while tour-
ing the district, and he had a long and distinguished career in India.40 For many
others, though, even if they had never been keen on the League, Pakistan
could seem like a safe haven.
As thousands of officials, railwaymen and clerks did make the choice to
leave for Pakistan the logistics of the division became preposterous: 25,000
government employees relocated from one side to the other with 60,000
tonnes of baggage. From late July special trains set off across Punjab and Ben-
gal carrying government workers to their new locations. Crates of belongings
trailed behind civil servants who did not have clean clothes to wear to work
when they finally arrived. Entire government departments operated from tents
and barracks in the new Pakistani capital and those officials who had come
from India remained intensely worried about the families they had left behind,
many of whom could not accompany them immediately. ‘We were not allowed
to take files, typewriters, or anything,’ recalled one administrative official, ‘we
used to work in tents, and I remember using thorns instead of paper clips. Only
one goods train of our office equipment ever reached Pakistan.’41 A national
myth was being forged and the solidarity and camaraderie of the situation dis-
solved class differences and pulled new compatriots together, if only momen-
tarily. As the nationalist newspaper Dawn patriotically reported, ‘Cabinet minis-
ters of Pakistan use packing cases as desks and crack jokes with painters who
drip whitewash on them.’42
The reality was more gritty. The problems facing the Pakistani machinery
and the confusions of the time were such that the new ‘Pakistanis’ – the word
itself was still strange – requested that the first sittings of the Pakistani Con-
stituent Assembly be held in Delhi. This request, which would have meant the
two new constituent assemblies working in the same city at exactly the same
time, was, not surprisingly, met with rapid refusal by the Indian ministers. So a
new capital had to be built almost from scratch and quickly made ready for the
tide of people coming from India.
The beleaguered new capital city of Karachi, a port city of around 600,000
people, was suddenly home to a new army of administrators and officials who
were mostly Urdu speaking, from Delhi and the United Provinces, and quite at
sea among the local Sindis, with their distinctive culture and language. The city
became a building site. Big hoardings declared ‘Central Pakistani administra-
tive buildings: under construction’. Immediately, these newcomers or Muhajirs
as they liked to be called, started to make Pakistan in their own image. They
hoped to be welcomed with open arms and wanted to play a leading role in
shaping the future direction of Pakistan. ‘I continued to be idealistic and felt
that a migration of such magnitude ought to have a meaning,’ recalled the nov-
elist Intizar Husain, looking back at those times.43 It seemed only natural to the
Muhajirs that Urdu, which was the old administrative language of British India
and which had been the first language of many of the leading members of the
Muslim League, should be the new state language. In deciding this, the Muha-
jirs began to trample on the rights and culture of the local Muslims in Sind –
who might, of course, have had very different dreams of Pakistan and for whom
Urdu was alien. This was storing up trouble for the future.
While this gradual division was being carried out in the summer months,
clerks and officials had to continue working side by side, as they disentangled
files and paperwork. In numerous offices, relations between officials deterio-
rated rather than improved. The sudden division of material goods – and
human beings – brought out the worst pettiness and pedantry within the bu-
reaucracy, as people reconstituted themselves as new national citizens, in op-
position to one another. Clerks and junior officers played their part by accusing
each other of hiding goods to prevent their reallocation and of substituting
poorer quality furniture and stationery for better goods. This was the starting
point for new imaginings of India and Pakistan and the perception of ‘the other’
within their most senior national institutions.
Even those who had attempted to stay aloof from the nationalist struggles
were now pulled into the oppositional foundation of the two nation states. Polit-
ical interference added to the difficulties. Liaquat Ali Khan told Mountbatten
that the situation had become so tense between Pakistani and Indian officials
that he did not know how much longer they could continue working together.44
The situation was even more fractious in the provincial Partition committees,
which had the task of splitting the nuts and bolts of the Punjabi and Bengali
Legislative Assemblies, and the Governor of Punjab complained of receiving
‘poor political essays’ from the civil servants responsible for the job, rather
than ‘objective reports’. Magistrates in Punjab, he added, were now ‘completely
unreliable’.45 In the extraordinary conditions of the time many urban office-
workers had their everyday life – and their own ideas – profoundly affected by
the partitioning process.
Revealing the borderline
Still, few, if any, were contemplating a mass migration of any description.
Some leaders mooted the idea of moving people long before 1947. ‘Quite a
number of people, especially educated people, might be expected to migrate,’
a leading Muslim Leaguer, Choudhry Khaliquzzaman had breezily told the Cabi-
net Mission delegation in 1946.46 And others had advised that co-religionists
cluster together in ‘pockets’ for safety in the towns and cities afflicted by riot-
ing. Some Sikh leaders had talked up the exchange of population as a solution
to their own community's anxiety. Tara Singh told his Sikh followers in a press
statement that they faced ‘extinction’ and that they should start shifting east-
wards in Punjab.47 This could all be written off too easily as bravado and pos-
turing.
The thought that the intermingled populations of towns such as Amritsar,
Lahore, Calcutta or Dacca would be systematically weeded out and completely
shorn of minorities was simply too far-fetched and preposterous for most peo-
ple to contemplate. One Sayyid ‘Abd al Latif of Uthmaniyah University had put
forward a strategy involving the mass exchanges of population of tens of mil-
lions of people in the late 1940s as a possible solution to the constitutional
gridlock. ‘This was so utterly impracticable that even its author subsequently
rescinded the suggestion and favoured a federal constitution,’ commented Wil-
fred Cantwell Smith in 1946, similarly agreeing that any exchange of popula-
tion was simply too unfeasible and too undesirable to bear thinking about.
‘Some people hoped Pakistan would be formed but no one thought that they
would have to migrate,’ was how Intizar Husain remembered those days.48 This
myopia about the risk of mass upheavals was still very much present as the
Partition plan was being put into operation in June and July.
Yet, by the summer of 1947, before Independence, the first trickle of
refugees had already started. Soon it would turn into a torrent. ‘There is some
movement of bank balances to “Hindustan” and a certain fall in the value of
real property in Hindu areas. There is also vague talk of emigration to Hindus-
tan,’ said a government report from Sind. Phillips Talbot, an American journal-
ist, took things more seriously: ‘trains and planes are loaded, according to local
stories with gold bullion, jewelry and local currency. Bank accounts are being
transferred in large numbers. Houses which sold six months ago for 60,000 $
are being offered for 20,000 $ if their owners are Hindu and anxious to get out
of Pakistan.’ He concluded that ‘the amount can safely be estimated at tens of
millions of dollars’.49 In the early days of Partition, the well-informed put
arrangements in place to transfer precious objects and savings. People often
regarded this as a precaution rather than as permanent evacuation.
G.D. Khosla, a judge of the Lahore High Court, and later author of several
well-known books about Partition, described how he received a letter from his
wife who was staying with their children in the cooler hill station of Musoorie, in
the summer of 1947; in it she insisted ‘that I must withdraw all her jewellery
from the bank locker in Lahore, take it to Delhi and deposit it there in a locker
without fail’. He complied with his wife's demand and safely removed the jew-
ellery to Delhi.50 Others were not so fortunate as they hid or buried gold in their
own locality with the intention of returning to recover it at some later stage,
such as the ‘rich Muslim woman from Amritsar’ witnessed by Margaret Bourke-
White, later in the year, who ‘had thrown her jewels in the bottom of the well,
when her home fell on the Indian side of the line. She had run across the bor-
der to Pakistan, and when I saw her there she was trying hysterically to hire a
driver to go back and retrieve the jewels from the well.’51
These were danger signs which the politicians failed to pick up on. If fami-
lies did move, it was still regarded as something transitory and reversible.
Those who packed up a few bags and left their homes to find a place of greater
safety with relatives or friends did so with the full expectation of returning when
things returned to normal. Most politicians impressed on people the need to
stay put. The super-rich could make their own insurance policies, by keeping a
foot in both camps. The Nawab of Bhopal bought two houses in Karachi in July,
planning an escape route if things became really awkward for his family in
India. ‘I may have to be in Karachi quite often and I must have a place in Pak-
istan where my womenfolk may take shelter should things begin to get really
hot here.’52 But underneath the surface of these grand gestures was a quieter,
more dangerous, story of fearful people, weighing up their position and leaving
their homes. The violence of the first six months of the year in Punjab had al-
ready seriously shaken communities. Over 100,000 people had already started
to move internally within the Punjab, to be with relatives, to find safety in num-
bers, hopelessly trying to predict the borderline between India and Pakistan.
‘The decision about the creation of Pakistan had just been announced and
people were indulging in all kinds of surmises about the pattern of life that
would emerge. But no one's imagination could go very far …’ The novelist
Bhisham Sahni captured the essence of public uncertainty as India stood on
the brink of the unknown. ‘The Sardarji [Sikh fellow] sitting in front of me re-
peatedly asked me whether I thought Mr Jinnah would continue to live in Bom-
bay after the creation of Pakistan or whether he would resettle in Pakistan.
Each time my answer would be the same, “Why should he leave Bombay? I
think he'll continue to live in Bombay and continue visiting Pakistan.” ’ Indeed,
Jinnah continued to own a large white mansion house in Bombay and Liaquat
Ali Khan had extensive farmlands in North India; such guesses were not so far-
fetched. ‘Similar guesses were being made about the towns of Lahore and Gur-
daspur too, and no one knew which town would fall to the share of India and
which to Pakistan.’53
It made good business sense at first to try and sit astride both new states.
Initially, some businessmen with outlets and branches across South Asia re-
acted pragmatically to the situation. Lilaram and Sons, a silk merchant's and
tailor's, placed an advertisement in the 15 August special Independence Day
supplement of several national papers, illustrated with the black silhouette of
the whole of undivided India. ‘To all our patrons we offer our very best wishes
on this auspicious occasion,’ it boldly proclaimed. Similarly, the Punjab Na-
tional Bank tried to continue straddling the border, wishing ‘Greetings to all our
countrymen of both Hindustan and Pakistan on this auspicious day.’ Behind
the scenes, though, industrialists and businessmen were trying to calculate
where their businesses would be most secure and were withdrawing from Pak-
istani or Indian interests as conditions deteriorated. Mr B.T. Thakur, Managing
Director of the United Commercial Bank told American diplomats that he
wanted to keep some of his branches in Pakistan open but would close down
those ‘in areas where he fears police protection may be inadequate’.54
Meanwhile the two boundary commissions sweated over the highly secre-
tive plans for the new national boundaries. These were ready on 12 August but
were deliberately held back for five days, despite the requests of administra-
tors coping with panicked border regions who implored the government for ad-
vance warning of where the boundary lines would fall ('even a few hours would
be better than none,’ pleaded Evan Jenkins to Mountbatten).55 Nobody in India
knew where the borders would lie on Independence Day itself; rumours, hints
and suggestions flew around. Staff at the Viceroy's house leaked information.
Newspapers published provisional maps with erroneous indications of where
the boundary was likely to be drawn. Administrators complained about the
manner in which the boundary was being sketched, and in Assam the Governor
told the Viceroy ‘… the lack of an authoritative interpretation here is going to
give us a lot of trouble’.56 His feelings might have been echoed by every other
governor in the country. Preserving good Indo-British relations, especially dur-
ing the lavish ceremonial display of 15 August, was the unjustifiable excuse for
holding back the award. The Radcliffe line was finally revealed to the public on
17 August – exactly the same day that the first regiment of British troops de-
parted from Bombay.
Communicating the reality of the line and making it meaningful to the peo-
ple affected was another matter altogether. The artist Satish Gujral, whose
swirling, evocative paintings of mourning faces later depicted the horrors of
1947, remembered how he learned that his home city of Lahore would be in
Pakistan: ‘Curiously, the news of such magnitude was conveyed to us not by
newspapers (which had ceased publication) but by posters pasted on the walls
of our camp. These posters proclaimed: “Do not burn now. It is Pakistan's prop-
erty.” ’57 Others heard through the grapevine of rumour and news or through
hurriedly distributed maps. Yet what did such maps and news about territory
mean to those who had never known any place but their own home? Others
found out because of the celebrations of football-like jubilant crowds on the
‘winning’ side, while others heard mixed and erroneous news. Nobody bothered
to think about how to communicate the strange reality of this new world to
peasants and villagers. ‘One day I ran into a Muslim villager who had come to
Lahore all the way from Sargodha looking for my grandfather, a well-known
criminal lawyer,’ Kuldip Nayar recalled. ‘Poor chap he didn't realise that Parti-
tion had taken place and that the Hindus had left. It just shows how long it took
for the implications of Partition to sink in.’58 For many outside the grip of mid-
dle-class, nationalist mentalities, the line was irrelevant to their daily hardships.
In the novel Tamas, one coolie describes to another how he had been carrying
a heavy load on his head for a customer, when the man said to him, ‘ “Azadi is
coming. India will soon be free.” I laughed and said, “Babuji what is that to me?
I am carrying loads now and shall continue carrying them then.” ’59
For those who were caught up in the nationalist campaigns, though, the line
meant everything. Radcliffe was aware of the contentiousness and unsatisfac-
tory nature of the award and admitted as much in the final text itself, saying, ‘I
am conscious too that the award cannot go far towards satisfying sentiment
and aspirations deeply held on either side.’60 He waived the right to the gener-
ous salary he had initially accepted for the work. The final line, when it was re-
vealed, came as a shock. ‘With the announcement of boundary commission
award our last hope of remaining in Amritsar disappeared,’ a former tax inspec-
tor, Choudhary Mohammad Said, recorded. ‘The morale of the Muslims was
completely shattered causing great panic.’61 This was something of an under-
statement as the result was uproar.
The line zigzagged precariously across agricultural land, cut off communi-
ties from their sacred pilgrimage sites, paid no heed to railway lines or the in-
tegrity of forests, divorced industrial plants from the agricultural hinterlands
where raw materials, such as jute, were grown. Penderel Moon was urgently
called to the scene of an irrigation plant on the Punjabi borderline shortly after
Independence. He found a standoff and administrative chaos. There had al-
ready been a clash at the site between Indian troops and Pakistani police. It
turned out that the line ran directly across the plant's headworks and protec-
tive embankments. ‘It seemed extraordinary that there had been no-one to im-
press upon Lord Radcliffe the importance of including the principal protective
works in the same territory as the headworks,’ he later mused. ‘This could very
easily have been done, as the area involved was uninhabited and, for the most
part, uncultivated. I fondly imagined that this absurd error would quickly be rec-
tified. But it never was.’62 There were many other jumbled parts of the line. The
award bestowed a variety of eccentric features on the subcon-tinent's political
geography. East and West Pakistan were separated by over a thousand miles,
and travelling by sea between the country's two major ports of Karachi and
Chittagong took approximately five days. The shaping of new borderlines left a
complex and inflammatory legacy in the north-east, now only joined precari-
ously to India by a 21-kilometre sliver of land. It was a very long, intricate bor-
der through Himalayas, dense jungle and river valleys. In sum, Radcliffe's line
created a geographical settlement which would have been difficult to manage
at the best of times, even if all parties were in agreement.
The inevitable result, particularly in the most contested districts in Punjab–
Lahore, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur and Jullundur – and in parts of Ben-
gal, was dire confusion about which places were in Pakistan and which places
were not. In Malda district, the Pakistani flag brazenly flew from the administra-
tive headquarters until 14 August, but then the area fell to India, inevitably
leaving the local population in turmoil.63 One woman, Maya, who had been a
child in a Punjabi village that straddled the contested area, remembered sto-
ries flying about whether the place would ultimately go to India or Pakistan.
‘Each time one of these rumours became rife,’ Urvashi Butalia, who recorded
her story explains, ‘people of the other community would abandon their homes
and run, leaving everything behind. Maya and her friends watched this helter-
skelter flight almost as if it was a game.’64 Radcliffe's judgement – which was
meant to be fixed and incontestable – instead appeared soft and malleable
and had little real or imagined authority behind it. People could not see the
line, nor did it seem that there were enough troops available to demarcate it
even if it did exist. Even the national leaders, solemnly bound to the terms of
the border, discussed some horse-trading about districts when the new maps
were first revealed at a ‘sombre and sullen gathering’.65 Jinnah reflected the
disappointment of the Pakistani people in an evening radio broadcast to the
population when he described it as ‘an unjust, incomprehensible and even per-
verse award,’ although urging people to abide by it.66 The repudiation of the
line or ambivalence about it from the highest tiers of government exacerbated
the potential for violence.
 Bitterly disappointed groups who found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of
the boundary would now fight to purify and cleanse their home areas, to re-
verse the line or to rob it of meaning. The unforgiving calculus of Partition,
which depended on head counts and the percentages of people living in dis-
tricts, now came into full effect. From 15 August the violence would be utilised
to achieve new ends: to drive out the other and stake a claim to land, while
killers attempted to mark out the limits of the two new countries’ ‘rightful’ bor-
ders with different sorts of macabre signposts: dead bodies floated up irriga-
tion canals, or were left in visible spots, on display. ‘The dead,’ as Shail Ma-
yaram has graphically expressed it in a powerful study of Partition violence,
‘thereby became signals to the living of the construction of ethnic bound-
aries.’67 The violence was designed to eliminate and drive out the opposing
ethnic group while forging a new moral community. For all the superhuman ef-
fort which had been invested in untangling the two nations – their land, pos-
sessions and military stores – few had turned their minds to the new nations’
most precious asset: their people. Emphatic clarification about who was a bona
fide citizen of India or Pakistan was urgently needed. Yet, it was still unthink-
able that elaborately embroidered communities would be permanently un-
picked.
 7
Blood on the Tracks

By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in
Punjab: a feeble and polarised police force, the steady withdrawal of British
troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Bound-
ary Force, and a petrified, well-armed population. The violence which preceded
Partition was grave, widespread and lethal. After 15 August 1947, it took on a
new ferocity, intensity and callousness. Now militias trawled the countryside for
poorly protected villages to raid and raze to the ground, gangs deliberately de-
railed trains, massacring their passengers one by one or setting the carriages
ablaze with petrol. Women and children were carried away like looted chattels.
The British evacuation was in full swing by this stage. Far away in Bombay,
British soldiers were parading through the monumental Gateway of India and
boarding their troopships, kitbags slung over their shoulders, guns still in hand
as crowds cheered from the shore. They were waved on by nationalist leaders
and the imperial withdrawal meshed conveniently with the nationalistic stance
of the Congress and League leaderships. ‘Foreign armies are the most obvious
symbol of foreign rule,’ Nehru allegedly told the first contingent of British troops
before they sailed away from the Indian coastline just two days after Indepen-
dence Day in 1947. ‘They are essentially armies of occupation and, as such,
their presence must inevitably be resented.’1 His viewpoint neatly overlapped
with the interests of the British establishment which was eager to bring its war-
weary and homesick soldiers back to Britain.
The terrorised public in the polarised atmosphere of Punjab might not have
agreed. Instead of using these troops to quell the trouble, the British command
confined them to barracks and evacuated the men as quickly as they possibly
could. Mountbatten's instructions confidentially stated that British army units
had no operational functions whatsoever, could not be used for internal secu-
rity purposes and would not be used on the frontier or in the states. There was
only one exception: they could be used in an emergency to save British lives.2
The Punjabi Boundary Force – a toothless and dreadfully inadequate response
to Partition's violence – was the alternative British initiative to protect life and
limb in Punjab.3 It was in existence for just thirty-two days. At its peak, the Pun-
jab Boundary Force, in which Delhi's administrators had ‘remarkable faith’, cov-
ered only the twelve most ‘disturbed’ districts of Punjab and included, at most,
25,000 men. This meant that there were fewer than two men to a square mile.
Sharing a train compartment from Delhi to Bahawalpur at the end of July with a
young Sikh army major who was about to join the Boundary Force, Penderel
Moon recalled that, ‘He was himself about to join it, but was utterly sceptical of
its capacity to maintain order.’4 As a cartoon at the time expressed it, showing
a goat sliced in two by a knife, ‘You asked for it.’ The message from London
seemed to be that this was the price of freedom.
Violence must sit at the core of any history of Partition. It is the phenomenal
extent of the killing during Partition which distinguishes it as an event. It af-
fected women, children and the elderly as well as well-armed young men.5
Grisly scenes of violence in Punjab have been better described in fiction, poetry
and film. Children watched as their parents were dismembered or burned alive,
women were brutally raped and had their breasts and genitals mutilated and
the entire populations of villages were summarily executed. Eyewitnesses in
Punjab reported the putrid stench of corpses and the crimson bloodstains on
walls, station concourses and roads. After an atrocity in Hasilpur in Bahawalpur
state, in August, when approximately 350 people were gunned down by rifle
fire by a gang of Pathans, Penderel Moon groped for an analogy. ‘Men, women
and children, there they were all 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. I was forcibly reminded of pic-
tures that I had seen as a child of Napoleonic battlefields…’6
Broken bodies lay along roadsides and on train platforms, while charred
wood and rubble were all that remained of large quarters of Amritsar and La-
hore. The two cities were de facto war zones: barbed wire had to be coiled
along the length of station platforms in Lahore to keep people apart, looted ob-
jects lay abandoned in deserted streets, vultures perched on walls, broken and
grotesquely splayed carriages and rickshaws lay at jarred angles, large subur-
ban areas of bustling jewellers, bakeries and bookshops were now reduced to
voluminous debris which took many years to be bulldozed away. Human figures
in photographs of the time look pitifully small against the mountains of rubble
left behind.
All this has been written about in lurid technicolour and from jarring per-
spectives. Partition stories of Punjab in 1947 are marked by specific details
and are layered in unique and entirely individual family memories. Yet these
descriptions are also shot through with generic imagery and the haunting mo-
tifs that have entered the popular imagination of South Asia: the corpse-laden
refugee train passing silently through the province, the penniless rows of
refugees streaming across new international borders, which submerge individ-
ual tragedies in wider community histories. Generalisations do not do justice to
the multiple atrocities. Poets and novelists offer more carefully calibrated, frag-
mentary insights into personal agonies and ruinous dilemmas of the time. The
best have turned the emptiness of this moment into poetry, and grown new cre-
ative life into the hollow abyss of Partition's worst moments. The sound of si-
lence in Punjab remains resounding, however. Partition is both ever-present in
South Asia's public, political realm and continually evaded.
How to record these acts and disentangle rationality from madness, politi-
cal intent from momentary insanity? In the sheer diversity and density of the vi-
olence, killers acted out of fear or in self-defence, were swept away on a buoy-
ant tide of killing-induced euphoria, felt the intolerable pressure of their peers
or found themselves conditioned by the conformity and regulations of institu-
tions such as the police or by the inducements of their friends and colleagues
in armed militias. One devout Khaksar, Mujahid Tajdin, who later stormed the
gurdwara on Temple Road, Lahore, remembered being trained for the task for
four days by a local police sub-inspector. The men in his gang were promised
martyrdom or heroism, depending on whether they lived or died, and he re-
membered how they were told tawdry stories about the massacres of Muslims
elsewhere in the country. They set up defence posts and stormed the walls of
the gurdwara in the middle of the night, with cries of ‘Pakistan Zindabad.’
Someone took a petrol canister along. At least twenty to thirty Sikh men and
women burned to death in the inferno that followed. Today the former Khaksar
bakes naan bread on a street in Lahore and prays for forgiveness for his part in
the murders.7 Sometimes such actions are inexplicable, even by the perpetra-
tors.
At the time, testosterone-fuelled ideals of martyrdom, bravery, honour and
heroism sanctioned the killings. The spoils of looting attracted others who
mopped up after the murderers, acquiring land, jewels and houses from the de-
tritus of massacres. Even those untouched by ideological concerns were able
to seek opportunities in the aftermath. Maya Rani, a young sweeper at the
time, was not involved in the fighting but accrued valuable dowry goods in the
wave of looting which followed, almost as if it was a game. ‘From one shop we
stole pure ghee and almonds; at other places we found cloth, we collected so
many utensils that we filled up a room as large as this one.’8 Harcharan Singh
Nirman who was a child of just six at the time recalled people looting and carry-
ing things from houses, in heaving gunny bags and on their heads. ‘I also
brought out a small chair … I could lift only this thing because it was very light
… the impression in my mind was people are taking things, I should also take
something.’9 Explaining actions long after the event is sometimes impossible.
Many memories become shrouded with the overcoat of regret and cold reason.
Others killed members of their own family and community, or committed
suicide, preferring an ‘honourable’ death to the shame of rape or conversion of
their loved ones, while it is impossible to know how many people eliminated ro-
mantic rivals or murdered long-standing adversaries with impunity while dis-
guising their actions behind the façade of Partition's carnage.
This was war by any other name, and the principal aggressors were paramil-
itaries composed of former soldiers and well-trained young men working hand
in glove with the armed forces of the princely states. Young men stood on the
front lines. Political interpretations of freedom, self-rule and power gave these
men credibility and a sense of legitimacy. As Ram Dev, a young man working at
a university in Lahore in the spring of 1947, who was arrested and detained for
rioting, later recalled in an evasive, implicit acknowledgement of his own per-
sonal role, ‘there was no tradition of fighting or killing in my family, but I wanted
to keep Punjab together at all costs’. He claimed he acted to give a ‘warning
signal’ to the ‘other’ side but also remembered ‘a lot of milkmen and wooden
sheds, and a lot of haystacks, there were thousands of tons of wood; someone
threw kerosene, someone threw a bomb, it was set on fire and for twenty miles
you could see the smoke; there were thousands of thousands of buffalo there,
the entire milk supply of Lahore came from there; it was a milkmen's colony –
all Muslims.’10
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. It is no coincidence that it is a
war veteran who organises the defensive preparations of the village depicted in
the novel Tamas: ‘he had taken part in the Second World War on the Burmese
front and he was now hell-bent on trying the tactics of the Burmese front on the
Muslims of his village’.11 In Punjab these gangs used military tactics, mortars,
bombs, traps and automatic rifles. They covered large distances in formation
and cut off supply routes and exit points for the fleeing refugees.
The result was terror. Krishna Baldev Vaid, a youth at the time, later a dis-
tinguished writer, lived through a prolonged, and life-threatening ordeal, and
had to wait over a day and night for rescue with his family after they escaped
from Dinga, a small town near Amritsar which fell under siege:
we were numb … we were six of our family … and three more people … it's an awful feel-
ing … we could hear the gunshots, we could guess from the shouting that people were being
killed, that several houses were on fire … and we were numb with terror … my father was
quiet, but my mother was constantly mumbling something, prayers … everyone was tense
and short-tempered … this man he wanted to smoke … and he was very curious as to what
was happening … and peeped out … partly out of idiocy, and everyone would snap at him.
After Krishna Baldev Vaid was rescued, one of his most graphic memories
was of arriving at a makeshift camp in an office compound in the early light of
dawn and the horrible sight of the survivors, bandaged in every way imagin-
able, and the traumatic process of counting the victims. It was here that he dis-
covered who was alive, dead, raped or injured.12
The poet Louis MacNeice witnessed similar scenes. He was part of a British
BBC features and news team sent to the subcontinent to record the imperial
transition. The team drove out from Delhi on 26 August in a BBC van, heading
for Peshawar. En route they passed overspilling kafilas making their treacher-
ous journey across the Punjab. Somehow, the BBC team found their way to
Sheikhupura, a satellite town of Lahore, which had been badly devastated by
violence during the preceding weeks. The hospital held eighty seriously injured
Sikhs and Hindus, covered with flies and attended by one doctor, with little or
no equipment. A further 1,500 were packed into a nearby schoolhouse. The
scene carved itself deeply into the minds of the helpless onlookers. ‘A v. large
number of these had been wounded with swords or spears & their white
clothes were covered with rusty-brown blood. Some with their hands cut off etc.
& again the hordes of flies. But hardly any moaning – just abstracted, even
smiling in a horrible unreal way.’13
Breaking bodies
Of all the horrors of 1947, the experience of the women who were raped is
the most difficult to write about. It is a history of broken bodies and broken
lives. Rape was used as a weapon, as a sport and as a punishment. Armed
gangs had started to use rape as a tool of violence in Bengal and Bihar in 1946
but this now took on a new ubiquity and savagery in Punjab. It sparked the
deepest feelings of revenge, dishonour and shame. Many women were silent
about what had happened to them: ‘in most households the woman said no,
no, I was hiding in the jungle or I was hiding in the pond, or I was hiding in a
neighbour's house,’ recalled Ashoka Gupta, a volunteer who worked with dis-
traught women in the aftermath of attacks in Noakhali; ‘they will not declare, or
they will not confess, that they have been raped or molested … because it will
be a confession of shame, and once confessed there will be quite a possibility
that they will not be taken back in their own homes.’14
Rape was the unspoken fear at the back of many minds by the summer of
1947. News had been circulating of the atrocities committed against women –
indeed, these were the most powerful and graphic rumours reaching the vil-
lages. Women feared for themselves and their own bodies. Their brothers, fa-
thers and husbands feared for the shame and honour of their family and the
wider community. The women themselves now became mere shell-like reposi-
tories of the new national identities when attacks on them – or threat of at-
tacks – were used to prise families from their homes, to punish, mark out and
terrify. The voluntary and enforced suicides of women and the murder of rela-
tives by shooting, poisoning or drowning was not uncommon as it was, in some
cases, regarded as preferable to the life worse than death which, it was be-
lieved, was certain to follow after rape. Other families faced with the choice of
life or death traded their young daughters in return for the safe transit of the
rest of the family. A Sikh woman, Taran, told her story to the writers Ritu Menon
and Kamla Bhasin:
One night suddenly we heard drums and our house was encircled. A mob gathered out-
side. I was 16, brimming with vitality. My two sisters were 17 and 14, and my mother was
sick with worry. She trembled with fear. She took out all her gold, tied it up in handkerchiefs
and distributed it among different family members for safekeeping. She made us wear sev-
eral sets of clothes each, one on top of the other, shoes, socks everything and she asked us
to hide the gold. We did not know where each of us would end up – this gold was our secu-
rity. She kept crying and kept giving us instructions.15
Taran escaped. But many others in Punjab were snatched from their homes
and villages by marauding gangs or literally carried away from the slow and un-
der-protected kafilas that made their way on foot towards the border: ‘when we
were travelling in a caravan we had some people who had guns, four or five
guns among us … but women or children would trail behind, after all, travelling
150 miles some people would get tired, they never rejoined us so we believe
somebody kidnapped them and took them away’. As another young woman at
the time, Durga Rani, recalled, ‘The Muslims used to announce that they would
take away our daughters. They would force their way into homes and pick up
young girls and women. Ten or twenty of them would enter, tie up the men folk
and take the women. We saw many who had been raped and disfigured, their
faces and breasts scarred, and then abandoned. They had tooth-marks all over
them. Their families said, “How can we keep them now? Better that they are
dead.” Many of them were so young – 18, 15, 14 years old – what remained of
them now? Their “character” was now spoilt.’16 As vessels of the honour of the
whole community, the shame and horror fell on everybody associated with the
girls: these were not individual tragedies.
Women's bodies were marked and branded with the slogans of freedom,
‘Pakistan Zindabad’ and ‘Jai Hind’, inscribed on their faces and breasts. Those
who survived were often humiliated and grossly scarred. They had become
symbols of terror. Even worse, many of these victims were not really ‘women’ at
all. Girls under the age of twelve made up at least one third of the women re-
covered in the state-sponsored recovery operation that followed. The rest of the
women tended to be under the age of thirty-five and from villages. They were
not then, most tellingly, members of the political classes who had fought for, or
who had rejected, Partition. Instead they were victims of political debates that
had, up until now, barely impinged on their lives. At the worst extreme women
were traded on a flesh market, ‘in the same way that baskets of oranges or
grapes are sold or gifted’, in the words of Kamlaben Patel, an Indian social
worker who was stationed in Lahore as part of the recovery operation for five
years after 1947 and saw the bleak and complex aftermath of these attacks
and abductions.17 Policemen and soldiers, as well as men of their own commu-
nity, sometimes colluded.
After their ordeals, the women suffered the fears of unwanted pregnancies,
tried to induce miscarriages or sought out illegal abortions. But above all, many
women feared that their families or husbands would not be able to accept
them or welcome them again. These fears were not unfounded. The old taboos
and rigid social customs of marriage and purity had been shattered. For those
who had never been married there was the fear that they were ruined and now
placed beyond the social pale. They believed that their families might be better
able to rebuild their lives without them. Prostitution, life on the street or in a
state-run home became the grim options if women were rejected by their fami-
lies, and many preferred to convert or melt into the society of their abductor,
becoming a new ‘wife’ or a family servant, rather than openly admitting the
shame of rape. Ironically, the misogyny and patriarchal values that cut across
North Indian society at the time meant that Indian and Pakistani men had
much more in common in their attitudes and actions than they ever would have
admitted. Women became, as Gandhi later described them, ‘the chief suffer-
ers’ of 1947.
Rather than being raped and abandoned, tens of thousands of women were
kept in the ‘other’ country, as permanent hostages, captives or forced wives;
they became generically known simply as ‘the abducted women’. Official gov-
ernment figures spoke of 83,000 women kept back, taken away from their
families, on both sides of the border.18 Why did men keep the women they had
attacked? Some became servants, forced into unpaid labour, and converted
and were assimilated into a new family; others replaced sisters and wives, who
had themselves been taken away. Others became ‘wives’ and started a new
life with their abductor or captor, with the full knowledge of others, who were
complicit or who at least turned a blind eye to the new arrivals in the family. In
all these different ways, the driving force was the impulse to consume, trans-
form or eradicate the remnants of the other community.
Complicity and compassion
These waves of killing were not neatly bound by the provincial boundaries
of Punjab but spilled into other places. In present-day Rajasthan, in the states
of Alwar and Bharatpur, as the historian Ian Copland has unflinchingly de-
scribed, ethnic cleansing killed tens of thousands while the mass killing in
Jammu and Kashmir in 1947–8, which is usually forgotten or incorporated into
the history of Kashmiri wars, shared far more characteristics with other Parti-
tion slaughters. The princely rulers of the states of Bharatpur and Alwar com-
plied with targeted violence against the ethnic Muslim group, the Meos, who
formed large minorities in their royal fiefdoms. Perhaps 30,000 Muslims were
killed in these areas and 100,000 were forced to flee.19 The princes used their
state forces to kill the Meos or to run them out of the region.20 There were sto-
ries of state police escorts killing Meos as they left the state, and the Maharaja
of Bharatpur's younger brother was even reported to have boasted of how he
had led an attack from his jeep and had used his sporting rifle on fleeing
Meos.21
The methodical attempt to wipe out whole populations depended on a well-
prepared, trained, uniformed and efficient body of former soldiers, policemen
and students who took the shame, honour and protection of their communities
into their own hands. Gangs armed with machine-guns in jeeps were able to in-
flict far more harm in one or two hours than villagers using lathis and pitch-
forks, were less alarmed by military patrols, on which they even launched un-
provoked attacks, and could cover large distances. Communities gave succour
and support to these militias in return for protection. To take just one example,
B.L. Dutt, a government employee living in the suburbs of Lahore recalled pro-
viding a safe house for RSS meetings in the midst of the riots and hid killers in
his home in the aftermath of an attack on part of the city: ‘in my own house I
had lodged two men … RSS men, who had attacked the Muslims and whatnot
… they remained two or three days; … government servants' houses were not
searched at all’.22 The perpetrators were cushioned by sympathisers who fed
or housed them in return for protection or even paid out blood money.
 Neighbours sometimes looked the other way or gave tacit support from the
sidelines. One of the nastiest and least discussed features of Partition was the
active or passive social connivance in Punjab which radiated out beyond the
province. During Partition social complicity was routine, even when those in-
volved absolved themselves of blame and passed the responsibility for vio-
lence on to madmen, thugs and strangers. Although the timetables were sup-
posed to be secret, it was common knowledge when trains specially arranged
for refugees would run because the information was leaked by office staff, en-
abling the organisation of attacks along the route long before the trains had
reached their destinations. On one occasion the confidential departure time of
a train carrying refugees into Pakistan was even broadcast on All India Radio.
Similarly, on goods trains the parcels of items belonging to refugees were se-
lectively ransacked, suggesting that detailed information about the cargo had
been passed on. Elsewhere slogans, marks on doors, census information and
graffiti were employed in order to isolate and select victims. Staff on the rail-
ways were busily hoisting the new national flags on the railway stations and
painting the engines with patriotic slogans. After another outrage when train
passengers were robbed and slaughtered outside Macleodganj, ‘the complicity
of the railway staff in the outrage was quite manifest’.23 Committed national-
ists could become complicit killers.
Sometimes this complicity was motivated by fear or by the pack mentality
that emerges at times of acute danger. During one attack on the Upper India
Express train, when seventy or more people were killed just outside the pottery-
making town of Khurja, the stationmaster refused to assist the investigating of-
ficer, denied that he would recognise any of the assailants, and said that he
had been warned to stay in his office on pain of death. On a different occasion,
when a man was stabbed and thrown out of a moving train, despite an immedi-
ate carriage-to-carriage search, ‘Not a soul in the train admitted to have seen
anything [sic], or heard anything.’24
Sometimes passengers directly defended the culprits. One train at Hapur
was held up for nearly four hours while passengers protested about the arrest
of some murder suspects and elsewhere desperately thirsty refugees found
that the water taps on stations had been cut off.25 The social status of those
who looked the other way, or who tacitly sanctioned Partition violence, varied
from prince to peasant, although the very poorest or the lowest castes rarely
seem to have been the agitators. At one extreme, fabulously wealthy princes
from states such as Bahawalpur, Patiala and Faridkot allowed the gangs to
work freely on their lands, did precious little to disarm or suppress them and
then suspiciously disappeared to summer capitals and on foreign vacations.26
At the other end of the scale, rations dealers were accused of copying their lists
and helping rioters to identify the occupants of houses, and some housewives
and urban craftsmen boycotted markets, ruining local traders and shopkeepers
and forcing them to leave for India or Pakistan. Sometimes the joy of indepen-
dence or freedom itself would spill over into euphoric bloodlust: ‘Hooligans loot-
ing in New Delhi yesterday … mob killed Muslims in shopping center while citi-
zens hung out of windows and a sort of carnival spirit prevailed.’27
Expectations of justice plummeted. Magistrates and judges were not averse
to siding with ‘their’ own community in the cases which were brought before
them and acquittals were widespread on the rare occasions when Partition riot-
ers were brought to book. Vallabhbhai Patel complained that the major prob-
lem in stemming an RSS revival after Gandhi's death in 1948 was the provin-
cial High Courts’ acquittal of large numbers of RSS men: ‘In UP there have
been several acquittals; in Bombay the acquittals have been of an almost
wholesale nature and the Government has been asked to pay costs.’28 Of
course, distinguishing real from imagined partiality was difficult as people lost
faith in the system itself. In some cases the lack of prosecution gave rioters a
sense of immunity to punishment. Frustrated and overstretched administrators
or policemen were forced to release people who, in any other circumstances,
they would have charged. The complete turmoil of the state made even the
most meagre efforts at justice difficult but it was often well known exactly who
the ringleaders were. It was difficult enough to prosecute in the first place,
though, when jails were bursting at the seams. Disarming people became the
next-best thing when it was impossible to put them behind bars.
The illiterate depended on others for news. In Punjab some entrepreneurial
unemployed made a few rupees by cycling to the nearest town to harvest the
latest stories about events and then selling them on. Rumours were not neces-
sarily the innocent by-product of violence but played a part in creating it in the
first place. Exaggeration and hyperbole paid: with limited protection from police
and troops it was essential to grab the attention of the authorities, to bring help
to a potential riot scene. Telegrams and appeals for help were necessarily
couched in the most extreme language. But there were more calculated uses of
propaganda in addition to spontaneous gossip and snatches of newsprint. This
had already started in 1946, when, for instance, a delegation of Pathans from
the frontier visited the cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, inquiring into re-
ported atrocities and carrying with them photographs of damaged mosques
and half-burnt copies of the Qur'an.29
Now, in August and September 1947, professionally produced pamphlets
that had an air of governmental legitimacy circulated widely. The Rape of
Rawalpindi was one: a forty-page palm-sized brochure full of gruesome black
and white photographs, showing burnt skulls, orphaned refugee children and
ruined temples accompanied by one-sided and inflammatory captions: ‘All this
is the result of the aggressive ideology of Pakistan. This is a foretaste of Pak-
istan.’30 Partition was a modern event: the technology of the printing press was
fully utilised to promote killing and pressmen and propagandists played their
role in Partition violence behind typewriters as bureaucratic killers in word if
not in deed. These propaganda networks stretched tautly across the subconti-
nent. Such propaganda was part of a strategic plan to polarise the communi-
ties and helped embolden those at the forefront of gangs. Some journalists and
rumour-mongers in South Asia, then and now, are not detached commentators
on the clashes between communities but are deeply involved in stoking the
fires to which their partial stories give legitimacy, and sometimes spur on the ri-
oters by creating tableaux against which they believe that they can act with im-
punity.
Against this bleak backdrop, many people carried out unusually brave,
heroic and humanitarian acts. Some individuals saved the lives of neighbours,
friends and strangers of different communities, even by risking their own lives.
Others gave word of impending attacks to their neighbours, sheltered large
numbers of people, smuggled food to the stranded and helped secretly move
them from danger in the dead of night by lending transport or arranging dis-
guises or armed protection. ‘In the end I feel honour-bound to record that the
lives of my children and those of about six hundred educated Hindus and
Sikhs, male and female, of the Civil Lines, were saved by the efforts of some
God-fearing Muslims who gave them shelter in their houses, even at the risk of
their lives,’ noted the Civil Surgeon of Sheikhupura, a survivor of the atrocities
in the district which became a byword for terror in the weeks that followed.31
Many of the acts were anonymous but abundant stories from all parts of India
and Pakistan provide compelling evidence of a counter-flow to the polarisation
of society in 1947. Even a future President of India, Zakir Hussain, owed his life
to the intervention of a Sikh captain and Hindu railway employee who saved
him from a gang at Ambala railway station. The Punjabi president of the Gujran-
wala City Congress Committee, Narinjan Das Bagga, was killed when he went
to try and pacify an angry mob and rescue an injured Muslim.32 An unknown
policeman labelled as a ‘South Asian Schindler’ used a stick to fend off a ma-
rauding gang and saved two hundred Sikh lives.33 Individuals built Hindu–Mus-
lim unity leagues and peace brigades, and British observers, who had little rea-
son to emphasise artificially the fraternity between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs,
frequently noted the extraordinary acts of heroism and generosity that occurred
in the midst of Partition's worst atrocities. Groups ran ambulances and extri-
cated the injured, ensuring that they got to hospital. Sometimes peace commit-
tees were well organised and sometimes individuals acted with spontaneous
charity.
‘No words can express the innermost feelings of gratitude and thankfulness
which sprout from my grateful heart every moment when I cast a look upon my
children and wife who have escaped from the very brink of the other world,’
wrote one survivor to Dr Khushdeva Singh: ‘you are doubtless an angel doing
humanitarian work which befits a true doctor.’34 Singh was the superintendent
of a sanatorium and tuberculosis adviser to the government of Patiala in 1947.
He also acted as a rationing officer for the area. Once the scale of the crisis be-
came apparent he poured his energies into humanitarian work, collecting hun-
dreds of rupees from local people to send to the Indian Red Cross society and
urging peace. He worked with the wounded and the suffering at his clinic.
Soon, he caught wind of the fact that truck drivers were leaking news of the
planned evacuation of a large group of local Muslims. Avenging refugees had
blocked their route out of the town and planned an ambush. Kushdeva Singh
hatched a plan to evacuate the refugees secretly and to send them in an alter-
native direction. The doctor received 317 letters of gratitude from Muslims
whose lives he had saved or from their family members.
Friends and neighbours relied upon each other. ‘I still have more non-Mus-
lim friends than Muslim and I have reasons to be proud of them,’ wrote one
Muslim author, Mahmud Brelvi to the Congress.35 Others felt guilt for not doing
more to save their neighbours or lamented the destruction of life as they had
known it. Joginder, a small shop owner, who was a child in 1947 recalled, ‘as
soon as the Muslims left the others started coming … they took away every-
thing, loaded them on bullock carts, and even took away the cattle … we felt
very sad, we were completely heart broken, we'd been with them for genera-
tions, the elder people in our community were extremely sad, we still talk about
them … we used to cry after they left…’36
Acts of mercy and charity were very common. Violence was not all encom-
passing. The complexities of these emotions cannot be easily stereotyped. Na-
tionalism was entirely compatible with love for an individual neighbour, mem-
ber of staff or colleague. In other ways, the passage of time makes it incredibly
challenging to disentangle slivers of memory and fragmented stories. ‘On the
one hand individuals like Amiruddin could save the lives of members of other
communities at considerable personal risk,’ the historian Ian Talbot writes of
the city's mayor, who conveyed Hindu and Sikh friends to safety under showers
of bullets but also later glorified the ‘marvellous’ way that the Muslims in Amrit-
sar ‘put up a fight’ in 1947. ‘Simultaneously they could gloat at the removal of
their “enemies” symbolic and physical presence.’37
The compulsions of violence forced many to look the other way, or made
them too fearful to intervene. In mixed mohallas and villages, acute anxiety
about the safety of neighbours could sit flush with nationalistic feeling and fear
for one's own family. At its worst, this became a Judas-like denial or incrimina-
tion. Shanti Seghal was a young woman of twenty in 1947 and lost two sisters,
their children and a sister-in-law. She was caught up in an attack outside
Shiekhupura in which troops lined people up against trees and mowed them
down with guns. She tried to convince the attackers that her family were Mus-
lims but believed it was a neighbour who revealed their true identity as Hin-
dus.38
Partition was accompanied by an acidic paper trail of pamphlets, letters
and newsprint that created a sphere of paranoid and partial knowledge. Abun-
dant rumours and their magnifying, generalising tendencies made it impossible
to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from apprehension. Rumours and panic
spread to areas such as Sind, which remained mercifully free from violence
until January 1948 as well as to those where it was becoming endemic. The
shortage of sound information, among political elites as well as villagers, was a
two-way process and official actions – from sending out troops to ordering
mass evacuations – were based on hearsay and rehashed stories just as much
as localised violence depended on distorted stories from a distant Delhi. Lead-
ers were overwhelmed by painful stories and inundated with tales of horror.
Leaders and ministers, especially in Punjab, became conduits for news be-
tween members of their rank-and-file. Mumtaz Daultana, a senior Pakistani
minister, was to be found sitting near a petrol pump in August 1947 in the Pun-
jabi countryside, on the outskirts of Okara, ‘surrounded by a group of men’.
Often, the political imperative was to believe the worst about the other, a ten-
dency still apparent in the contemporary national press of both countries: that
it was the other side that was really the chief aggressor and the other side that
was really responsible for the horrors of 1947.39
News was shaped so that it became entirely partial and was chiselled in
such a way that people often only heard about the crimes against their own
community: in the North West Frontier Province, the Muslim Pathan knew all
about the terrible atrocities committed against fellow Muslims in Bihar but little
of events in Bengal, where Hindus had been the victims. The public news
sphere was sophisticated enough for news to travel rapidly, and between differ-
ent parts of the country, connecting people together in imaginary religious com-
munities across time and space.
Translation from English to vernaculars also offered scope for creative in-
ventiveness. Crude tales of violence proved the most problematic obstacle to
peace. Sometimes news was inverted, so that news of riots was turned entirely
upside down and the real victims were painted as the culprits. After the vio-
lence in Garhmukhteshwar, ‘the propaganda was so blatantly false that in the
beginning it only caused amusement’.40 Rumours of various kinds included de-
tails of major atrocities that sometimes had not actually taken place, in particu-
lar of grotesque acts against women, which intersected and overlapped with ru-
mours about the actual course of political events – whether or not Pakistan
was or was not being made, and where it was going to come into existence,
what it would be like when it did.
Outside Punjab people started to worry about what was happening there,
‘Events in the Punjab and NWFP are occasioning concern,’ wrote the Governor
of Bombay. ‘It is difficult to follow what is happening here as information is con-
fusing.’41 Subsidiary rumours fed like tributaries into the wider stream: about
where relief could be found, who was responsible for the trouble, preparations
for attacks and stories of impending disasters. Slogans warned soldiers of the
danger of rumour in watchwords reminiscent of the Blitz spirit: ‘Careless talk
costs lives. Keep a 24 hour guard on your tongue. Do not listen to Rumour’,
‘Rumour-mongers are public enemies’, and ‘Do not spread bazaar talk and gos-
sip’. The potency of rumour should not be underestimated, and more recent
calamities in South Asia have continued to spark lethal rumours across the
country long after events have receded from the media's purview: after the
tsunami disaster in South India in 2004, news of another giant wave sparked
mass evacuations along several parts of the Indian coastline, and in 2005, in
Bombay, eighteen people were killed and over forty injured when a stampede
broke out after word spread that a tsunami was approaching. During Partition
the circulation of false information – whether intentional or accidental – fright-
ened people in a parallel way and caused stampeding and panicked evacua-
tions. To try and counter false propaganda the Indian government air-dropped
over 20,000 newspapers to refugees in the distressed districts of Jullundur,
Amritsar, Lahore and Ferozepore. Even a year later, rumour of impending riots
was still a powerful weapon and a ‘whispering campaign’ among refugees in
Delhi put all the law and order authorities on red alert in May 1948.42
India and Pakistan emerged shattered, but intact, as two separate nation
states at the end of the summer of 1947. Nobody had imagined that the Parti-
tion plan or Pakistan's creation would lead to this scenario of death and de-
struction. Nobody had thought that freedom would come in this guise. Newly
anointed Indian and Pakistani leaders now had to juggle the ceaseless flow of
distressed and penniless refugees, to set up a feasible and functioning state,
and to integrate princes and provincial interests in the shadow of Partition. Al-
though no one could be naïve enough to suggest that only one side was re-
sponsible for the terrors of 1947, it is little wonder that nationalism was given
a new edge. The two states necessarily saw each other through the prism of
the violence that had taken place and eyed each other warily across the ex-
panses of the ruptured Punjab.
 8
Leprous Daybreak

By Independence Day, the national leaders of both countries were badly

shaken by their personal experiences of witnessing the violence at first hand or
by hearing the stories of the survivors and distressed refugees flooding into the
national capitals. Daily, anguished crowds queued at the residences of political
leaders, asking for recompense, help with finding lost ones or for vengeance.
Maniben Patel, the Indian Deputy Prime Minister's daughter and secretary,
records in her diary for late August and September how these early morning
callers became part of the Deputy Prime Minister's regular routine. On 1 Sep-
tember 1947, typically, ‘Large crowd from Punjab waiting in early morning in
the compound. Whole day passed in seeing visitors.’1
A national crisis
New Delhi was in chaos, with constant murdering and rioting in August and
September, throngs of refugees arriving, local people living under the daily
threat of death, armed gangs roaming the streets and thousands waiting in the
camps at Purana Qila and Humayan's Tomb to be taken to Pakistan. The orna-
mental fountains at the picturesque sixteenth-century monument Humayan's
Tomb became so fouled with human dirt that they had to be filled in with sand.
The Quaker aid worker and author Richard Symonds witnessed Kafkaesque
scenes in the Delhi camps:
I joined Horace [Alexander]in the largest camp, the Purana Qila, which was sheltering
60,000 refugees in tents, in corners of battlements and in the open, together with their
camels and tongas and ponies, battered old taxis and luxury limousines. There were orderly
rows of tents which organized bodies of college students had put up. You might meet anyone
from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered you thousands of rupees if you could hire
them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to the hawkers'
boxes of matches, which were now the only ones available in Delhi. From time to time Euro-
peans hurried through looking for their bearers who had fled from their houses.2
Ordinary life had been turned upside down.
Knitted together in a collective feeling of crisis, the Congress – now the
party of government – turned to the citizens of Delhi. Military reinforcements
were meagre. ‘Only a small number of Gurkhas and Madras paratroopers could
be made available quickly. Madhya Pradesh contributed a contingent of armed
police.’ So instead of using more conventional troops and police, ‘every possi-
ble source of trained and disciplined manpower was tapped’. The government
gathered together under its wing all manner of groups from Boy Scouts to
members of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema. Congress corps and Home Guards were
armed by the Central Emergency Committee with shotguns. The government
seized hold of private vehicles owned by the public and asked people to donate
spare parts for vehicles, while ‘trained mechanics were literally rounded up
from their homes’.3 This was the first national crisis for the free India and the
free Pakistan.
Administrators and politicians hovered on the brink of nervous exhaustion;
Dr Zakir Hussain, a future President of India, reporting on the state of the
refugee camps in the city to his colleagues, suggested ‘that these places could
not properly be called camps, but rather areas in which humanity was
dumped’.4 In the imperial capital in mid-August food and milk were scarce, rub-
bish rotted uncollected in the streets and in the heat of summer all car win-
dows were firmly sealed, or vehicles were mounted with guns. Many politicians
personally suffered, nor were they personally immune from the terror sweeping
the country; the daughter of Ghulam Mohammad, later Governor-General of
Pakistan, was abducted and the brother of Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, a leading Con-
gress politician, was stabbed to death on his way to work in a government of-
fice one morning. Dr Zakir Hussain himself was narrowly saved from death
when he was attacked at Ambala train station. Leading political figures waited
frantically for news of loved ones or tried their best to use their political clout in
order to obtain information, to secure the safety of a specific train or to get ac-
cess to a telephone line.
Guilt, shock and profound sadness had to be reconciled with the wider ideal
of freedom for which the country had been striving. Indian leaders grieved for
the bloody mess that they saw around them. Nehru was shattered and de-
pressed, looking ‘inexpressibly sad’ at the first Emergency Committee meet-
ing.5 The Prime Minister reportedly jumped out of his car when driving through
the streets of Delhi one day when he saw a Hindu pushing a handcart full of
goods looted from a Muslim neighbourhood, grabbing the man by the throat
when he refused to take them back.6 The military general Ayub Khan, who was
serving with the Boundary Force at the time of Partition, later wrote that ‘this
was the unhappiest period of my life’.7 Even the optimistic and pragmatic in-
dustrialist G.D. Birla reflected sombrely that ‘Unless we can cope with the situa-
tion India is doomed.’8 There was a feeling that the new states might be on the
brink of falling, irretrievably, into an abyss. ‘Most prominent and persistent was
our absolute uncertainty whether we should succeed in restoring and maintain-
ing order,’ remembered Penderel Moon who was trying to piece back together
the princely state of Bahawalpur after murderers and looters had ransacked
the city. ‘This gnawing anxiety amounted sometimes to the fear that not only
Bahawalpur, but the whole of northern India and with it Pakistan, might sink
into utter and irretrievable chaos …’9 Other administrators and officials shared
this concern.
Politicians felt the full force of the refugees' grief – and anger. When Nehru
went to meet refugees clustered in the pilgrimage town of Haridwar, he tried to
be conciliatory and to talk to them of human losses on both sides of the border.
A moving if hagiographic account by the Urdu journalist Shorish Kashmiri cap-
tures the tension at the camp:
Some young people, whose parents had been butchered and whose sisters and daugh-
ters had been left in Pakistan surrounded Panditji [Nehru] … One young man lost his temper
and gave Panditji a resounding slap; a slap on the face of the Prime Minister of India. But
Panditji said nothing to him. He just placed his hand on the young man's shoulder. The young
man shouted: ‘Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters to me!’ Panditji's eyes filled with
tears. He said, ‘Your anger is justified, but, be it Pakistan or India, the calamity that has over-
taken us all is the same. We have both to pass through it.10
Nevertheless, elite leaders, often the product of imperial schools and col-
leges, were as likely as the British that they had replaced to cite the madness
of the masses, and apply the vocabulary of craziness, insanity and of a fever
gripping the people, blaming ‘crooks, cranks and … mad people’ to try to ex-
plain the inexplicable devastation that had taken place.11 The language of
class could be a convenient way for the leadership to wash their hands of their
own explicit or inadvertent culpability. The poor and the uneducated must, of
course, it was naturally assumed, have been mostly culpable. The information
that militant, and often middle-class, organised cadres, sometimes fully an-
swerable to Congress and League politicians, were at the forefront of events
was known but glanced over. Nehru called for the rounding up of leaders caus-
ing trouble and demanded to know who was issuing orders, but the general
tendency by the dramatis personae of politics was to patronise those caught up
in violence and to dissociate their own actions and decisions from riots.
This intense anxiety and fear clutched hold of a broad sweep of North India.
Even in places where violence hadn't occurred, communities became nervous
and tense. Suhasini Das, an East Bengali Gandhian and social worker, who was
in her early thirties at the time, and an indefatigable peace worker, covered
miles of territory in the district of Sylhet, which joined Pakistan, persuading her
fellow Hindus to stay in their homes, trying to assuage their fear and confusion.
Her diary, written at the end of long days and evenings crossing the East Pak-
istani countryside attempting to spread reassurance and calm, conveys the
tensions of the moment and the ubiquity of angst. In Sylhet, from July to Sep-
tember, she found people ‘tense’, ‘worried’, suffering ‘mental agony’, con-
sumed with ‘panic’ and ‘troubled’. ‘Although no major mishap had befallen peo-
ple here, they were still tense and anxious,’ she wrote in her diary, and a few
weeks later, in Sunamganj, ‘People plied us with anxious queries as we went
from house to house.’12 Work in government offices ground to a halt and all
the talk was now of Partition and Pakistan. The daily grind of petty incidents
and random stabbings kept affected populations suspended in a state of anxi-
ety.
Far from the major sites of devastation, people were caught up in Partition's
ramifications. Some had migrated far away to find work or to marry but re-
mained worried about news from home. ‘The day before I left Ranchi [the sum-
mer capital of Bihar] for good, Inayat Khan, one of my staff-car drivers came to
me to say goodbye as he was going off to Pakistan,’ recalled General Tuker.
‘His home was in Jullundur in the Indian Union. It had been destroyed with all
his property. His father had died some years before. His grandfather tried to get
his mother and sister away to Pakistan but the old man was waylaid by Sikhs
and disappeared. His mother escaped and wrote to say that his fifteen-year-old
sister had been taken as a concubine by a Sikh. To leave the Indian Army with
this as the last sight of my own soldiers and friends was deeply painful.’13 In
Mathura in western UP corpses floated to the surface of irrigation canals for at
least four months after the first wave of massacres in nearby Gurgaon as
ghostly reminders of Partition and part of its invisible but important psychologi-
cal rupture.
Families negotiated a semblance of ordinary life around the edges of vio-
lence, curfews and travel restrictions. The Urdu writer Masud Hasan Shahab
Dehlvi, who was living in Delhi at the time, was married in the weeks preceding
Partition and had to procure curfew passes for his wedding guests, some of
whom faced difficulties returning home after the celebrations. ‘These joyous
moments were completely overshadowed by the atmosphere of violence and
suffering,’ he later remembered.14 Gathering with relatives was preferable to
being alone. Signalmen on the railways deserted their posts, afraid of spending
lonely nights in their huts dotted along the tracks. In one hospital, in the north-
ern city of Bareilly, a British army doctor found a loaded revolver under the pil-
low of a patient. ‘He claimed he must keep it in case anyone came in during
the night.’15 In the later months of 1947 people walking unaccompanied in the
afflicted parts of the country could be knifed from behind, even in broad day-
light. Living through 1947 was an ordeal for many Indians and Pakistanis, even
for those who escaped physically unscathed.
Partition was, then, a national crisis for India and Pakistan, notwithstanding
unanswered questions about national belonging. Partition penetrated, and dis-
rupted, normal life beyond Punjab and Bengal as people began their new lives
as Indians and Pakistanis. Militias and gangs, especially the Muslim League
National Guard and the RSS, were still operating with impunity on train lines in
September and October 1947. Random stabbings, bombs and hate-crimes
continued to pierce the social fabric far beyond Punjab. ‘The frequency, callous-
ness and darings of these killings on trains and at stations has made staff very
panicky,’ reported an East India Railway official on the line that stretched from
Delhi across to Bihar, ‘and on occasions it was with difficulty that we could
keep them at their posts and keep trains going.’ People travelling on passenger
trains ran the risk of murder at night or could be thrown unsuspecting from the
train. On this line alone, the daily reports make grim reading: on 8 September,
an unidentified dead body was found in a luggage van at Ghaziabad. On 9 Sep-
tember a Muslim passenger who alighted from the train to drink water was
dragged away and stabbed, but found alive. On 10 September, an ‘upper class’
passenger reported his two servants missing. The servants' compartment was
full of blood and the two corpses were found later that day further along the
tracks.16
Limited services were achieved by pushing trains through the landscape at
almost any cost. Railwaymen often worked for little or no pay, while in East Pak-
istan they were housed in railway wagons, huts and tents up and down the East
Bengal line. Here, there were no passenger services at all and the ‘refugee spe-
cials’ were the only functioning services – trains carrying refugees covered
some 200,000 miles in 1947 on the North Western line alone. Train services
were still abnormal at the end of 1947. Ticketless travel had become rampant
across the subcontinent (Gandhi complained that ‘people evidently thought
that under independence travelling by trains or buses was free for all’ – an-
other echo of the pervasive nature of social dislocation, opportunism and con-
fusion of 1947) and to add to the disorder, after Independence, several of Pak-
istan's services were brought to a complete standstill because of shortages of
Indian-supplied coal.17
‘The Delhi in which I arrived on 11 September appeared physically and ner-
vously shattered,’ Richard Symonds later remembered. ‘Stabbing and looting
had spread from the narrow streets of Old Delhi to the broad boulevards of Lu-
tyens' New Delhi. Those shops which had not been plundered in the commer-
cial centre of Connaught Circus were boarded up. There was a rigid curfew
after 6 p.m. There was no bread for ten days in the Imperial Hotel where we
lived off tinned food.’18 Nehru later questioned if the public ever realised how
close India had come to complete internal implosion. ‘If the disturbances had
not been halted in western UP,’ he wrote to his chief ministers while reflecting
on the gravity of events, ‘they would eventually have spread eastwards right up
to Bihar and west Bengal and the whole of northern India would have been in
chaos.’19 The situation was grave enough in September 1947 to lead some to
consider ‘a compulsory evacuation’ of Delhi and the removal of the national
capital to another location.20 Dealing with Partition's aftermath bled the state's
income and inhibited essential economic and governmental reforms. ‘Since we
assumed office my Government and myself have been spending the best part
of our time and energy in dealing with this grave crisis which continues to as-
sume greater proportions as one disaster follows another,’ admitted Jinnah.21
Post offices and airfreight offices degenerated into chaos, the floors were
stacked with unclaimed parcels, letters and hessian-wrapped packages with
‘sacks of unsorted messages lying in the telegraph office’. In the Indian capital,
all public holidays for bureaucrats, including Sundays, were cancelled. Profi-
teering was rife. Tonga and rickshawallahs charged inflated prices for those
desperate to travel and precious seats on outgoing trains could be secured for
the right bribe, while coolies ratcheted up the cost of carrying heavy packages.
A photograph taken at Ambala station in Punjab shows a man with a rickety
bamboo ladder charging two annas per trip for people to clamber up from the
platform to the roof of a departing goods wagon.22 People trying to contact rel-
atives jammed telephone exchanges and the Partition crisis disrupted the lines
for several weeks but when an unidentified woman, named only as ‘Kamila’,
tried to get through to find out news of her husband's whereabouts even the
telephone operators were consumed with nationalistic loathing, neglecting
their jobs and shouting down the telephone lines ‘Jawaharlal Nehru Murdabad’
or ‘Jinnah Murdabad’ [death to Nehru or death to Jinnah] so that it was impos-
sible to hear anything on the line. ‘They'd be fighting among themselves and
we'd be left saying, “Hello? Hello?” We just couldn't talk. We booked so many
urgent calls, but nothing. So we couldn't consult each other.’23
Both administrations had to untie other logistical knots. Food was still des-
perately scarce. In one district of Punjab, in ‘dismal camps’, the ration was a
chittack (two ounces) of flour a day, enough to make one chapatti, and nothing
else. Far beyond Punjab, in the north-east, the food crisis was exacerbated by
Partition and in the Chittagong Hill tracts thousands wearing rags were begging
for food while ‘reports of deaths from starvation were constantly dribbling in
from the villages’.24 Rumours were still rife and could bring towns to a stand-
still. A British officer living in the imperial summer capital, Simla, reported. ‘The
other day a rumour was spread that the water supply had been poisoned. Every
person on the road was talking about it. After several hours' anxiety, we man-
aged to contact, by phone, the Health Officer who informed us that the water
had been tested and that it was quite all right.’25 The transition of power in
South Asia was overcast by a cloud of fear.
The wider South Asian public could not avoid the drama of Partition: news
about the suffering of the refugees was everywhere. Anybody listening to All
India Radio would have been struck by the poignant litany of names read out
on air as people tried to ascertain the whereabouts and safety of their rela-
tives. This started off as a five-minute bulletin but by the first week of Novem-
ber up to 1,400 messages were being broadcast daily using three hours of air-
time.26 Similarly, newspapers ran adverts placed by people attempting to lo-
cate their missing relatives. ‘Mr Abdul Waheed, Traffic Inspector, Ferozepore
city, wants to know the whereabouts of his son, Abdul Fahmid, who lost contact
with him at Kasur station. Mr Waheed is now staying at a hotel in Lahore near
the Taj company on Macleod Road.’27 By reading these advertisements, listen-
ing to the radio and producing and circulating the news, the wider public be-
came caught up in Partition's cold war and, inevitably, in the shaping of ideas
about the neighbouring country.
Whose freedom?
‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake
to life and freedom.’ Jawaharlal Nehru's haunting words filled the night air of
the midnight session of the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi's Council House
on 15 August 1947. The remarkable speech was broadcast throughout the
country and reproduced in special newspaper editions. Huge jostling crowds
thronged Lutyens's commanding sandstone buildings in New Delhi to take part
in the tryst with destiny. They had done so in Karachi just twenty-four hours pre-
viously, where, in parallel, Jinnah had addressed the Pakistani Constituent As-
sembly meeting and spoken to the people over the airwaves of a ‘supreme mo-
ment’ and of ‘the fulfilment of the destiny of the Muslim nation’. In Karachi, the
celebrations were ‘carried off with very scanty means and not in as perfect a
manner as at Delhi’, recalled one member of the audience, ‘… but that never
struck one as incongruous … it was improvised, Pakistan itself was being im-
provised’.28 Euphoria, an unprecedented collective feeling, marks many of the
recollections of those who stood in the vast crowds, dazzled by the fireworks
and illuminated buildings, not only in New Delhi, but in the major cities through-
out South Asia. ‘We have to celebrate 15 August in such a way that people's
psychology is metamorphosed into that befitting the citizens of an independent
nation,’29 instructed a Congress secretary, and every effort was made to make
it a memorable occasion. There was a profound sense of catharsis; a feeling of
order up-ended and old constraints removed.
Popular expectations meshed with political generosity. The moment
promised new power, new potentialities and a sense of release. Provincial and
district governments flung open the jailhouse doors and prisoners were re-
leased early at the moment of Independence. In Bombay on Independence Day
every prisoner who had been behind bars for ten years or more was allowed to
walk free, alongside those who had served two-thirds of their sentences. Death
sentences were commuted to prison terms. Some of the recently arrested pris-
oners charged with violence in the Hindu–Muslim riots of the preceding weeks
were also allowed to walk free or promised early release. More than 3,000 pris-
oners in Bombay City gained their freedom on the evening before Indepen-
dence Day and, astonishingly, some 13,000 prisoners were released on 15 Au-
gust in the Central Provinces.30 In Pakistan, prisoners might have preferred to
stay within their cells; mobs reportedly lynched those who could not prove they
were Muslims outside the prison doors.
There was a darker side to freedom, though. The particular irony of Inde-
pendence, and its interlocking with Partition, was the way in which it forced a
new moment of national identification. Where there had been myriad localised
groups, patriotic allegiance to either India or Pakistan was now mandatory. No
Muslim was immune from the charge of disloyalty and many had to bend over
backwards to try and prove themselves. ‘Half of my life I had to suffer such hu-
miliation as a Congressman at the hands of the British Government in India,’
protested the Muslim Congressman from Bihar, Syed Mahmud, after his house
and car were searched by police. ‘Now it seems for the remaining period of my
life I have to suffer all these indignities and insults at the hand of the Congress
Government. Am I wrong in this conclusion?’31
Employees in intelligence branches intercepted letters to Pakistan and
prosecuted anti-national behaviour – the familiar actions of governments that
start to suspect the fidelity of their own citizens during a time of terror. Some
Muslims, especially those with families living across the border in Pakistan, wa-
vered, and did not express their allegiance to either India or Pakistan as they
continued to reside in a grey netherworld in which these new borders remained
porous. Others used subterfuge in order to explore the possibilities of making a
new life elsewhere. One police sub-inspector in the northern industrial city of
Kanpur, Mohammad Rizvi, caught corresponding with relations in Pakistan
under a fictitious name while attempting to secure a permanent settlement
permit in Pakistan, was arrested on discovery of the correspondence and dis-
missed. Considerations about whether to depart for Pakistan, often driven by
mundane economic motives, were always interpreted by the government in the
paradigm of loyalty or disloyalty to the nation state.32 This was a complex emo-
tional and political process for all those people living in the former Raj but par-
ticularly difficult for millions of people who felt themselves to be in the ‘wrong’
country, were financially or physically ruined by Partition or had other, deeply
felt, sub-nationalist identities. Was it right to celebrate in the middle of vio-
lence? Who was an Indian or Pakistani citizen now? Should you celebrate the
creation of one state, both states or none? How could people's ‘psychology’ be
‘metamorphosed’ so that they became loyal citizens?
There was ambivalence about whether Independence should be a day of ju-
bilation at all, given the contingencies and trauma of the ongoing violence. V.D.
Savarkar, the Hindu nationalist supremo, and others in the Hindu Mahasabha
and RSS who staunchly opposed Partition boycotted the celebrations. Gandhi
was also conspicuously absent, praying and fasting in Calcutta and promoting
peace: ‘This much I certainly believe – that [the] coming August 15 should be
no day for rejoicing whilst the minorities contemplate the day with a heavy
heart.’ He urged a day of fasting, praying and spinning instead. ‘It must be a
day for prayer and deep heart-searching.’33 In his refusal to endorse the festivi-
ties, Gandhi was sensitive to the perversity of holding firework displays, dances
and feasting as massacres continued elsewhere, but this also placed another
question mark over the legitimacy of Pakistan and the new Partition settle-
ment.
In public places the line between religious rituals, holy institutions and the
national cause was blurred. Both India and Pakistan included a significant reli-
gious component in their official state rituals of celebration. Listeners to Pak-
istan Radio at one minute past midnight on 14 August heard the announce-
ment of Pakistan's birth followed by readings from the Qur'an. In New Delhi, at
a private residence, Nehru and his ministerial colleagues sat cross-legged
around a holy fire as Hindu priests from Tanjore chanted hymns and sprinkled
holy water on them. N.A. Sherwani, a Congress minister and a Muslim, unfurled
the striped gold, green and white national flag over the Bharat Mata, or Mother
India, temple in the sacred city of Varanasi.34 Elsewhere, diverse and impulsive
ceremonies centred on historic sites associated with the heroes who had
fought the British in the uprising of 1857, or the Quit India movement of 1942.
Others organised ecumenical, multi-faith ceremonies with readings and prayers
from all religions.
In the Punjabi cities where massacres were still taking place, there were far
fewer signs of celebration. When Penderel Moon arrived in the imperial centre
of Lahore on 15 August he recalled a deathly stillness. ‘The Mall empty, every
shop shut and as silent as the grave. I made for the railway station to find out
about trains to Simla. As I passed down Empress Road a fire station was coping
with a burning house, and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense
columns of smoke were rising from the air.’35 At the ‘festivities’, later that day,
only one Hindu and no Sikhs attended the Governor's inauguration for which
only one-fifth of the invitations could be delivered. For many who had not yet
escaped the risk of violence, the memories of Independence Day were over-
shadowed by fear and this fuelled the resentment of refugees who felt aban-
doned by their compatriots. ‘The evening was drawing to a close. I turned the
radio to Delhi,’ recalled a refugee from Lahore.
The babble of tongues, the excitement of the vast assembled crowd near the Red Fort
could be clearly heard. The announcer was giving a running commentary on the whole show;
the Independence of India was being inaugurated … Just then a bullet was fired in the Sanda
Road Chowk, hardly fifty yards from my kothi [bungalow] … Of course the Delhiwalas must
have had a gala night. Stuffing themselves with fruit, sweets and drinks, soft or strong, they
must have gone to sleep dreaming of pleasant dreams … Of course, a few of them had seen
but many of them had only heard that there was ‘some trouble' in the Punjab. But what was
Punjab's trouble as compared to the Azadi of the other parts of the country?’36
Meanwhile, in private homes some people fused the secular and the pro-
fane, improvising ceremonies, distributing coloured sweets or hoisting flags.
Families and individuals found their own way to negotiate rocky questions of
national loyalty and allegiance to one state or the other. ‘On Independence day,
when the announcement came on the radio,’ remembered the Punjabi journal-
ist Amjad Husain, who was in Lahore in 1947, ‘father took the Holy Qur'an in
hand and made all family members take an oath of loyalty to Pakistan. I still re-
member that every family member took an oath.’37 In much the same way,
elsewhere, people were busy designing and improvising their own ceremonies
to mark the occasion. A Sikh, Saroj Pachauri, a child at the time, recalled paint-
ing Pakistani flags and watching her father participate on the dais in the Pun-
jabi town of Rawalpindi during the Independence Day celebrations, only weeks
before the whole family fled to safety in India.38 Many people celebrated Inde-
pendence Day in the ‘wrong’ country, as they later moved as refugees from
India to Pakistan or vice versa. Some even celebrated it twice, once in each
state. For some, participating itself was a kind of insurance against violence
and ‘proof’ of loyalty to the new nation, and for the terrified, newly converted
Muslims, seen along the roadside near a hamlet in Bahawalpur, it must have
been a strange kind of ‘freedom’. They were jigging desperately around ‘a mis-
erable bit of green cloth’ which was ‘a stick with a little green flag tied to the
end’ and protesting ‘this is our flag. We now have Pakistan and Muslim Raj.’39
In fact, the group had been forcibly made to convert to Islam and had gathered
under the flag for safety, to try and prove their Pakistaniness.
As the 3 June plan had been so rushed and inadequately thought out, there
had been little meditation on who was a rightful Indian and who was a rightful
Pakistani. At the heart of these uncertainties and dilemmas was the undefined
question of citizenship. Did this just depend on religious identity? As each new
government tried to earmark its own citizens, a diplomatic quarrel erupted
about who should be celebrating Independence and which country they should
be endorsing. The Congressman Acharya Kripalani suffered his own family's
displacement from Sind. He was personally badly shaken by Partition's events.
Now he issued a directive to provincial Congressmen living in areas that were
soon to become Pakistan: ‘The hearts of all Congressmen and Congress sym-
pathisers in Sind, East Bengal, West Punjab and the North-West Frontier
Province are lacerated at the division of the country,’ he wrote; ‘they are, there-
fore, in no mood to rejoice with the rest of India. Under these circumstances
there is no need of celebrating August 15, in these areas which have been sep-
arated from India.’40 A bad-tempered row broke out immediately with Pakistani
politicians who saw things in a different light; weren't these Hindus and Sikhs
now Pakistani citizens and, if so, why should they not take pride in Pakistan's
green and white crescent moon flag?
Flags had become powerful, sometimes lethal, symbols. The Pakistani flag
had unmissable Islamic connotations. This provoked anger and confusion
among Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan as they contemplated staying in the coun-
try. The Pakistani Prime Minister tried to fudge the issue, rebuffing a com-
plainant with the claim that it is ‘not a religious flag’ and arguing that the ‘Moon
and stars are as common to my Honourable friend and they are as much his
property as mine’. Such disingenuous claims hardly washed with a community
already shattered by violence and frightened about the protection of its reli-
gious freedoms.41 Similarly in India, Krishna Sobti recollected the fuzzy sense
of belonging among different people, depending on their status, religion and
outlook: ‘Our entire family was gathered around the radio. Our servants, many
of whom were Muslims, were also present. When Nehru spoke our reaction
was very different from theirs. After tea, sweets were passed round (green and
orange ones known as ashrafian). None of the Muslim servants touched them.
But when the national anthem was sung and we stood up, they did too. They re-
alized that they too, had paid a price for freedom.’42 We do not know what was
going through the minds of these particular servants. But as loyalty to the Con-
gress party and allegiance to an Indian state got rolled up together, this could
cause confusion and panic.
Emphasis on loyalty to Congress symbols, such as khadi, the Gandhi cap,
and the spinning wheel, alienated many people who had been political oppo-
nents of the Congress but now felt pressure to submit to the emblems of the
party as well as to those of the nation state in order to gain acceptance as loyal
and law-abiding citizens. The Congress Chief Minister of the United Provinces
made all the police in his province wear a Congress armband on Independence
Day in August 1947. As the departing British Governor noted, ‘Pant would have
his pound of flesh out of the police in the UP.’43 The Congress flag and the na-
tional flag – which were very similar in any case – were used interchangeably
on Independence Day. People who had been involved in the intense electoral
campaign in 1946 in opposition to the Congress or policemen and officials who
had worked in the service of the colonial state strongly associated these sym-
bols with an old adversary. In the past, they had rallied against these flags and
ripped them down. These changes could be hard to bear, and the insistence
upon these old symbols could be regarded as a show of Congress triumphal-
ism.44
Now formally labelled as ‘minorities’ in the official mindset, groups of Hin-
dus and Sikhs in Pakistan, and Muslims in India, felt thoroughly compromised.
‘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,’ Jinnah told
Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan in an acclaimed speech at the time of Indepen-
dence, even as arson attacks on these religious buildings and the murder of
their worshippers continued unabated.45 Jinnah's commitment to a plural state
was both principled and economically pragmatic, given Pakistan's position on
an economic precipice. As the Chief Minister of the North West Frontier
Province put it bluntly six months later, ‘We had more than one reason for wish-
ing the Hindus and Sikhs to stay on. They controlled all the banking, trade and
industry in this Province and their sudden departure has hit us very hard.’46
Some Pakistani leaders realised that the state had much to gain from stem-
ming the flow of migration.
It was also possible for non-Muslims to be, at least in the early days of the
state, enthusiastic Pakistanis. J.N. Mandal, an ‘untouchable’ from Bengal, was
elected chairman of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly. The other members
cheered as he signed the roll book in Karachi on Independence Day and he
called on other Pakistani ‘minorities’ to be ‘responsible, loyal and faithful to the
state’. Soon afterwards he was promoted to a coveted ministerial position.
Mandal's experience was hardly typical, though. Everywhere minorities were
feeling deeply insecure about their physical safety and their citizenship rights. It
was these fears that drove people from their homes and started one of the
greatest mass migrations in history.
As well as marking the end of a nationalist struggle against colonialism,
then, 15 August underscored the moment at which a new project began. Peo-
ple felt compelled to decide upon unalloyed national attachments, demarcate
clearly their patriotism and express unwavering belief in the power of one na-
tion state or another. This was all vastly different from the mélange of commu-
nities and national beliefs that had been in coexistence at the end of the Sec-
ond World War in India.
Unforeseen exodus
 It had been unthinkable that twelve million people would move, absolutely
impossible to conceive, even if anyone had believed it to be desirable. The
mass migrations were the sting in the scorpion's tail, the unknown face of the
Partition plan. The tides of people flowing out of Pakistan and India were so
fantastical, so vast and so thorough, that they unbalanced the entire substruc-
ture on which Pakistan had been built. As Danial Latifi recalled years later, the
plan had backfired: ‘I was in favour of self-determination … and to the extent
that the Muslim League stood for self-determination I was with the Muslim
League, but self-determination did not involve transfer of large groups of peo-
ple.’47 The movement of millions across the new international border meant
that the plan did not work as originally envisaged and this massive upheaval
changed the entire composition of India and Pakistan.
Once the Radcliffe line became clear, the numbers of refugees crossing
Punjab and moving out of the state intensified frighteningly quickly. In 42 days
from 18 September to 29 October, 849,000 refugees entered India in formally
organised foot convoys alone. Between August and November an additional
2.3 million crossed the borders by train. Thirty-two thousand, mostly the rich,
the privileged or essential administrative staff, arrived by air in both directions.
In East Punjab in one month alone over a million gallons of petrol were con-
sumed carrying people across the border and 1,200 vehicles moved back and
forth carrying the stranded and vulnerable. In addition, there was a much
slower, more protracted movement by sea and rail from all corners of the sub-
continent, from Sind to Bombay, from Dhaka to Calcutta, from Lucknow to La-
hore. Numbers involved in this were impossible to count. In November alone,
133,000 people arrived into Bombay's docks by steamer from Sind. By Novem-
ber 1947 perhaps eight million refugees had crossed the borders in both direc-
tions.48 These figures are almost beyond belief. One in ten people in Pakistan
was a refugee. Each country had to resettle, feed and house a group as large
as the total population of Australia.
Overspilling trains have provided the most enduring images of Partition. In
the opening scenes of Khushwant Singh's influential novel, Train to Pakistan, a
train inhumanly crammed with refugees passes through Punjabi countryside
near the Indo-Pakistan border. ‘Like all the trains it was full. From the roof, legs
dangled down the sides on to the doors and windows. The doors and windows
were jammed with heads and arms. There were people on buffers between the
bogies.’49 Partition refugees did move in other ways, on foot, mostly in great
columns or kafilas, but also by car and boat. Yet it is the trains piled high with
people and hastily assembled goods that have provided the totemic image of
Partition.
This was not simply an ‘exchange’ of population or a straightforward swap.
In the months following Independence, Pakistan lost its bankers, merchants,
shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and clerks – the wheels came off the machinery
of the state. Jinnah became increasingly panicked, saying that knifing Sikhs
and Hindus was equivalent to ‘stabbing Pakistan’.50 In India, similarly, the sud-
den disappearance of Muslim railwaymen, weavers and craftsmen, agricultural-
ists and administrators, brought gridlock to production and trade and crippled
the state's ability to function. Large numbers of the incoming refugees arrived
with quite different occupational histories and could not or were not qualified
to plug the gaps left by those who departed. In the autumn months of 1947 the
refugee movement was a tragedy for the refugees themselves and also a
tragedy for the two new states.
In September 1947 Jinnah ordered a park packed with people in Lahore to
‘make it a matter of our prestige and honour to safeguard the lives of the mi-
nority communities and to create a sense of security among them’. Nehru had
long been stressing India as the land for all Indians. As he wrote to his chief
ministers, ‘we have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they
cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else’ and he urged that they must be
given the same rights as other citizens and treated in a civilised manner, if the
nature of the body politic itself was to be preserved.51 Political safeguards for
minorities proved paper tigers, however, in the face of the Punjabi tragedy and
they offered too little and too late to those who had lost faith in the state's abil-
ity to protect them; the speed of events on the ground outstripped delibera-
tions about the rights of citizenship in the constitutional arenas of India and
Pakistan. Across Punjab, coexistent communities fragmented as the entire non-
Muslim population was exchanged for the Punjabi Muslim population of India.
Elsewhere, across the whole of Pakistan, and in Bengal, Rajasthan, Bombay
and North India, people started to leave their homes at a dizzying speed and a
mass and unanticipated movement of people began to occur.
There was a big difference in the way that people left. For the majority, es-
pecially in Punjab and the other heartlands of ethnic cleansing such as Gur-
gaon, it was part and parcel of the terror of violence, as they literally ran for
their lives or were hurriedly formed into kafilas and made to march without as
much as a few hours' notice. They did not know where they were heading or
what their final destination would be. Rajinder Singh, who finally found his way
to Delhi from Punjab, described to Urvashi Butalia how his family left in the
middle of the night: ‘Whatever people could pick up, big things and small, they
put clothes on top of those they were wearing, and threw a khes or sheet over
their shoulders. They picked up whatever they could and then they joined the
kafila. Who could take along heavy things? And the kafila began to move.’52
Others adopted disguises or masqueraded as Hindus or Muslims to try and
protect themselves. For others, with more forewarning, or further from the epi-
centres of violence, there were more tortuous and prolonged decisions about
whether to stay or go, which sometimes divided families, as Damyanti Sahgal,
living in a village 30 miles from Lahore, recalled. She tried to persuade her fa-
ther to leave, but ‘Father didn't agree … the workers in his factory were mixed:
Jats, Hindus, but on the whole it was a Muslim village so most of the workers
were Musalmaans … at the time they were respectful and humble. They
seemed safe … When I tried to persuade my father he said, well if you feel
scared you go. I said but bhauji, he said no bibi, if you feel scared you go.’53
She left and made her way to Lahore, leaving her father behind. Further away
from violence, the choices were different again. People could opt for one state
or the other for ideological reasons, for business purposes or because they
feared discrimination or job losses.
At first the new governments tried to stop these movements of people. The
Partition plan envisaged that groups of religious minorities would remain in
both states. If anything, these pockets of minorities formed part of the intended
plan as it was believed that they would be ‘hostages’ or guarantors against any
discrimination or harassment of minorities across the border. Both states
showed rhetorical commitment to plurality and both countries started hammer-
ing out in their Constituent Assemblies the legal and administrative frameworks
that would be put in place to secure these minority rights. The plan had not
made allowances for any potential mass population exchanges and the ensu-
ing two-way movement of people caught both national leaderships unawares,
pulling the rug out from under their feet and invalidating the safeguards that
had been notionally built into the plan.
At the end of August both governments reversed their initial strategy and
admitted that, if the groundswell of refugees was beyond their control, they
should be aiding rather than inhibiting it. On 7 September it was announced
that the evacuation – at least across Punjab – was the ‘first priority’ and that
Punjabi refugees would be given military and political support by both govern-
ments.54
What had begun as a spontaneous exodus was rapidly merged into an or-
ganised evacuation operation. In the first week of September a Military Evacua-
tion Organisation was formed and by late October 1,200 military and civilian
vehicles were being used to transport refugees across Punjab.55 Twelve RAF
Dakotas airlifted stranded officials. Gandhi disagreed with the policy at first
and stood firmly in favour of replanting uprooted populations and continuously
made the case for returning and resettling the refugees in their original homes.
Others, with an eye on the fratricide and daily mortality figures and the grave
dangers of unorganised and unsupported refugee columns, wanted the ex-
change to be as organised and rapid as possible.
More controversially still, this policy could be exploited to ‘clean out’ an
area and purify it of minorities. Local administrators now had the chance – ei-
ther accidentally or explicitly – to help with the ethnic cleansing agenda. Admin-
istrators and police forcibly shifted whole communities as the priority became
dispersal rather than violence: ‘there were certain people in plain clothes who
were asking people to leave that place and go to Pakistan … but people were
resisting this, people said: we won't go to Pakistan … then another military
truck came, and on the top of it was some leader. He brought out a pistol and
said you must leave, as soon as he said that immediately a caravan was
formed, and everybody cooperated,’ recalled one Punjabi eyewitness, Harcha-
ran Singh Nirman.56 In swathes of central and western India, Muslim communi-
ties were drummed out of India, just as Hindus and Sikhs were hounded out of
many parts of Pakistan. Although some pleaded desperately for evacuation,
others resisted the suggestion that they should migrate and felt angered by the
confused message of the governments.
Elsewhere people wanted to leave but were being dissuaded by politicians
and local magistrates, and in October, in the Punjabi district of Jhelum, a Gand-
hian envoy, Pandit Sundralal, called for the suspension of the evacuation in the
local press. ‘The Jhelum Hindus seemed perturbed by all this,’ noted the aid
worker Richard Symonds, who was co-ordinating local relief activities. ‘They
wanted to leave, not to be pawns in a political game.’57 Politicians were ac-
cused of meddling in the internal affairs of the other state when they inter-
vened and once again the political and the social were closely entwined;
Acharya Kripalani raised objections to the obstacles preventing people's evacu-
ation from Sind when he visited his former home in September.58 Penderel
Moon remembered asking the blue-turbaned leader of a group of Jat Sikhs,
who had halted by the roadside with their bullock carts for the night, why they
had left their villages. ‘He replied, “Hukum Hai” (It is an order.) I asked him,
“Whose order?” But to this he would give no clear reply, but just went on re-
peating, “It is an order. We have received an order. We have to go to Hindus-
tan.”’ A little later in the month, Moon was shocked to hear that government of-
ficials were pushing Muslims out of East Punjab – ‘If the Sub-Divisional Officer
was acting under orders, where was this all going to end? We might have the
whole Muslim population of India thrust upon us’ – only to have the double
shock of finding out that this transfer of people in Punjab, had, overnight, be-
come official policy.59 Such confusion only exacerbated the voluminous prob-
lems faced by ordinary people.
Whether the state encouraged them to leave or not, the greatest numbers
of people on the long march across the border had no access to transport. Cir-
cumstances compelled them to travel by foot. Foot columns sometimes 30–
40,000 strong, created human caravans 45 miles long in places. It was 150
miles for those Punjabis coming to India from Lyallpur or Montgomery districts,
and Muslim Meos from the Gurgaon region of India took three weeks to reach
Pakistan. ‘According to our latest reports they are now without food and their
cattle are rapidly dying for lack of fodder, or are being slaughtered by them for
eating; their bullock carts (wherever they had any) are being used as fuel-wood
and other difficulties are aggravated by the onset of winter which with their
physical debility will make them an easy prey to diseases like pneumonia and
influenza.’60 The journey itself proved a cruel physical punishment for many.
Luggage was very often confiscated or looted along the way or simply aban-
doned as people became too weak to carry it; sores developed on bare feet;
women gave birth to babies en route; and people died of starvation, exhaus-
tion, cholera and grief. It must have seemed as if all the fates were conspiring
against the refugees; to make matters worse the infernal temperatures on the
Punjabi plains in June were followed by dust storms. A thick pall of dust caked
the refugees and flies were omnipresent. ‘We went on with the convoys week
after week’, later wrote the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White,
‘until our hair became stiff and grey with dust, our clothes felt like emery
boards, my cameras became clogged with grit …’61 These were followed by un-
usually heavy storms and torrential rains in Punjab at the end of September.
The countryside was suddenly awash with mud. These rains burst the banks of
the Beas River, destroying railway bridges and roads, washing away camps and
belongings, soaking and drowning some of the refugees who became caught in
the currents. Fear of the descent into a bitter winter followed, and there were
concerns that families would freeze or succumb to disease if living out in the
open, badly dressed in thin cotton clothes or rags.
Both states snidely criticised the facilities provided for ‘their’ refugees and
the treatment they received in transit camps and en route. Hanging over all this
was the question of national belonging. This difficult question was grossly com-
plicated by the influx of refugees. Who should have priority access to housing
and accommodation? Should refugees or the remaining minority populations
be given the same rights and protection as other citizens in India and Pak-
istan? This issue urgently needed to be clarified by the central leaderships.
Some did speak out for liberal, plural, secular, multi-ethnic states but they were
not the loudest voices. At the crucial moment, numerous leading politicians
and their parties hesitated and dodged the question of citizenship – or actively
promoted the idea of India for Hindus-Sikhs and Pakistan for Muslims. This
bullishness of the top branches of the political networks intersected with, and
was influenced by, the gravity of violence. Confusion about who was a legiti-
mate citizen of each state was endemic. Disagreement sliced vertically through
society from cabinet-level indecision, especially in conflict between Nehru and
his Deputy Prime Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, to uncertainty about who was a
compatriot among ordinary people in the smallest villages and towns.
Crossing over
What of the experiences of the refugees themselves? Many refugees did
feel, superficially at least, patriotic on reaching the new states simply because
of their relief on reaching a place of safety. Crossing the border was a momen-
tous act. Breaching the border became a spur, and something to aim towards
for those who had lost all motivation, and is remembered in a remarkably simi-
lar way in refugee accounts. One convoy pitched camp ‘with much more cheer
than usual’ on an evening when they knew that the border of Pakistan was only
50 kilometres away.62 On crossing into India at the Wagah border post another
convoy was momentarily united in relief as people called out, ‘Bharat Mata Ki
Jai’ (Long Live Mother India). In 1947, Kuldip Nayar, who later became a distin-
guished Indian journalist and parliamentarian, crossed at the Wagah border
post on foot, on his long and painful journey from Sialkot to India, and remem-
bered that there was nothing there on the windswept Punjabi plain, just a soli-
tary Indian flag flying on a wooden pole and some overturned drums, partly
painted white, partly black. ‘And I just crossed. Nobody checked to see if I had
any documents, nothing.’63
Ironically, those who had been living with ambiguous and multivalent ideas
of ‘Pakistan’ ‘India’ and ‘Freedom’ were being remade into loyal citizens. Pas-
sengers arriving by boat at the port of Karachi cried ‘Allah-O-Akbar’ when they
first sighted the unfamiliar Pakistani coastline. ‘The engine driver started blow-
ing the whistle,’ Khushwant Singh writes in his fictional but evocative novel of
the time, as a train steams through the Punjabi farmland, ‘and continued blow-
ing till he had passed Mano Majra station. It was an expression of relief that
they were out of Pakistan and into India.’64 Nasreen Azhar, a Pakistani femi-
nist, was a child when she crossed the border into Pakistan on her journey
from the imperial hill station of Simla, and similarly remembered ‘we felt very
safe because we arrived in Multan and it was the day after Bakr Id … and peo-
ple were sacrificing goats openly … people were being Muslim openly, so that
was a very wonderful feeling.’65 Crossing into the new country was marked with
its own symbolic significance.
Certainly, some of the new arrivals, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, were
met with hospitality. Arrangements were made along the tracks and at stations
to greet Pakistani clerical staff passing through their new home – at Ba-
hawalpur, ‘to cheer them on their way and offer them refreshments’.66 The
Mayor of Lahore later claimed that the inhabitants of the city baked naan
bread for the displaced and gave ‘a right royal reception to the newcomers.
Cauldrons of rice could be seen cooking all over the place for distribution
among the refugees.’ Radio appeals were broadcast for donations for the hun-
gry and shopkeepers, housewives and bakers delivered food parcels to the
refugee camps.67 In Delhi, the local population baked 280 maunds of chapat-
tis when news spread of two stranded and starving foot convoys, one of
30,000 people and one of 60,000, moving southwards from Punjab, and the
Indian Air Force airlifted the food parcels to the refugees the following morn-
ing.68 Newspapers in Punjab demanded charity from the prosperous and, in
the language of the London Blitz, asked, ‘Have you done your bit?’ In all these
ways, the refugees were being encouraged to see themselves as welcome citi-
zens of either India or Pakistan, to submerge their other identities and to em-
brace their new nationality unreservedly.
It is doubly ironic then, that, taken as a whole, the refugees themselves
completely rejected any simplistic affinity with their new national governments.
They were experiencing unimaginable hardships and daily difficulties; their ex-
periences were entirely at odds with the lip-service and promises of the politi-
cians; and there were manifold political problems caused by the difficulties of
assimilating new refugees at the crux of Independence. In reality, a definite
tension was already emerging between the new national characteristics that
were being imposed from on high, and the sub-identities of region, caste, class
and community. Fleeting moments of imagined unity and camaraderie were al-
most immediately undercut by the real experience of the refugees and mi-
grants.
The ordeal of the refugees on the trains did not end when they reached the
inhumanly packed platforms of their new homelands in Delhi, Calcutta, Lahore
or Amritsar, and their experiences clashed with the language of national soli-
darity. Greeted by scenes of misery, they had to pick their way through the
crowds camped on the railway station concourse, cramped with their ragged
belongings, lying or sitting in every available space. Pimps and brothel owners,
gang leaders and paedophiles were not easily distinguishable from legitimate
refugee camp workers who came to collect the new arrivals, and women and
children were bewildered by offers of adoption, marriage or positions as do-
mestic servants. ‘All these brothel people used to stand at the platform trying
to grab them, and we had to make sure that they are not taken away,’ remem-
bered Khorshed Mehta, a voluntary worker who looked after distraught women
arriving at New Delhi's main railway terminus in 1947.69 Able-bodied young
men and united families were at a distinct advantage, as they could elbow their
way to the front of queues, find information and watch each other's luggage
while the frail, single women and the orphaned young were the most vulnera-
ble. The weakest ended up in camps.
Refugee camps were ubiquitous and the crisis rippled out across the rest of
the subcontinent. It could not possibly be contained in two corners of the for-
mer British India. The Indian government constructed more than half its camps
outside Punjab, including thirty-two in the Bombay Presidency and even three
in the most southern state, Madras. The largest and most notorious camp in
India, Kurukshetra, was a proto-city, built over nine square miles in East Punjab
and housing over a quarter of a million refugees. Hospitals and kitchens were
established, cholera inoculations and cooked food were distributed. And yet,
despite the war footing of the operation and the organised dispersal of quilts
and tents, lentils, rice and flour, the camp buckled under the weight of the
sheer numbers of people still moving across the border. Kurukshetra grew ten
times in size in just six weeks from mid-October to the end of November 1947.
Sometimes as many as 25,000 people would arrive, unanticipated, in the mid-
dle of the night – and even receiving them and guiding them to a suitable
space was a difficult task because of the shortage of electric lighting. The In-
dian government resettled some as far away as the remote Andaman and Nico-
bar archipelago.
By the end of 1947 in South Asia there were perhaps three million refugees
in refugee camps; over a million in the Pakistani camps of West Punjab
alone.70 The camps ranged from small temporarily improvised shelters near
the refugees’ own homes where people collected together for safety – in
schools, temples, gurdwaras, mosques and municipal buildings – to vast state-
run establishments which, in some cases, have not been dismantled to the pre-
sent day. Some camps continued to exist in new incarnations in the 1950s. In
Punjab many camps were wound up and dispersed within several years of Par-
tition or deliberately transformed into more substantial housing colonies. In the
western provinces, canvas was gradually replaced by bricks and mortar and
refugee colonies emerged from the ashes of the camps. But in West Bengal,
the phraseology of ‘camps’ does not do justice to the enormity of social disloca-
tion and the scale of change instigated by the arrival of Bengalis from the east.
The refugees were frequently exposed to bullying, extortion and profiteering
by each other and by opportunists in their new homelands. Although organised
refugee camps may have provided shelter and protection from sectarian war-
fare, other dangers lurked within them. The sanitary conditions beggared belief
and cholera broke out in numerous Punjabi districts, with particularly bad epi-
demics in Sheikhupura, Ferozepore and Lahore districts, while dysentery and
smallpox also killed hundreds. Intimidating figures established themselves as
camp leaders and preyed on the vulnerable by extorting money or running pro-
tection rackets. In Jullundur, people calling themselves ‘Barrack Comman-
dants’ were organising the seizure of food from others. ‘I was pained to find
that a certain section of evacuees grab the share of other less resourceful
evacuees and sell it at exorbitant prices,’ reported one eyewit-ness.71 Unsur-
prisingly, people tended to try and re-establish their own caste and community
networks and bunched together – ideally with members of their old villages or,
if this was not possible, at least with people of their own caste. There was
safety in numbers. Families strung up ragged sheets and bits of cloth to sepa-
rate themselves from those around them. Preserving old hierarchies and ideas
of ritual purity was a struggle and it was impossible to avoid sharing space with
other, less desirable, castes. Sanitation was poor, old customs went unob-
served and taboos were broken.
In particular, Partition made the long-maintained seclusion of daughters un-
sustainable, and young people – especially those who stayed in the camps for
months or years – struck up liaisons and affairs. Social workers arranged abor-
tions for women, some of whom had been assaulted during the Partition vio-
lence or molested in the camps, but some of whom had illicit affairs and con-
sensual relationships facilitated by the extreme and unusual conditions of the
time. Despite all this, refugees started the long journey to recovery and ad-
justed to their new lives – that would never be the same again.
***
Begum Anis Kidwai was forty-five years old in 1947 and had, until that year,
lived the genteel life of a woman born into a privileged and political North In-
dian family. The family staunchly backed the Congress, and her brother-in-law
was a leading Congress politician. They moved in a broad social circle, were
friendly with the Nehrus, and the extended family lived in a rambling house
around a courtyard in the heart of the city of Lucknow. Kidwai opposed the
Muslim League and she had worked for the Congress in the 1946 elections. In
the autumn months of 1947 her life changed for ever as the violence of Parti-
tion started to surround her. Stuck in Lucknow, in September she started to
worry intensely about her husband, Shafi, who was working in another part of
the country, in the hills of Mussoorie, several hours away. As a civil servant he
was charged with running the local municipal board, a run-of-the-mill post in
the civil service which would normally have involved dealing with problems of
sanitation and food supply. But conditions in Mussoorie were deteriorating and
his letters, which were still arriving in the post, were beginning to show the
signs of strain in the town. He was due back in Lucknow towards the end of
September but postponed his return. He had started working with the Punjabi
refugees who poured into the hill station, needing relief and shelter.
Before long, attacks on the local Muslim population in Mussoorie started.
‘While I am writing to you,’ Shafi wrote to his wife, a few days later, ‘I hear the
din of the populace down below, the sounds of firing and the shrieks and wails
of the victims. Houses and shops are on fire, shops are being looted and the
police is watching the spectacle. This is happening in broad daylight.’ Soon he
was informing her that the telegraph lines had been cut. ‘Both the telephone
and telegraph are useless.’ In Lucknow, meanwhile, Anis Kidwai fretted about
her husband's security, and agonised about whether to try and catch a train to
go and join him.
As he was a Muslim, albeit one who had worked against the League, it was
an unspoken fear that Shafi was in great danger now as he was living and
working in a town where the Muslims were a small community, and there was a
risk that he might be targeted. ‘You should not worry about me,’ he instructed
his wife sanguinely. ‘Despite the rain, I am attending the office except for one
day a week.’ But within a few days, anxiety had entered his letters again. ‘I
used to listen to the news on the radio. But for three days, the radio has also
stopped. I do not know why I cannot telephone Pantji [the Chief Minister] nor
talk to my brother on the phone.’ There were stories of hate-mail and threats;
he acquired police protection. Anis was in a paroxysm of anxiety by this time,
and tried to encourage him to leave and return to the family. In one of his last
letters to her, he wrote, ‘Anis, do not weaken me. Let the riots be over then I
will tell the truth to everybody. Otherwise, whatever be my fate, only pray to God
that I may remain firm of step.’ On 18 October, between nine and ten in the
morning he was stabbed to death on his way to work at the municipal office.72
Anis Kidwai's life now took a new turn, as with great moral courage she plunged
herself into social work; she moved to Delhi and began, at the behest of
Gandhi, to work in the refugee camps, where she dedicated herself to the ser-
vice of destitute women. Anis Kidwai's story is unique, more especially because
she kept a lyrical and convincing account of her difficult days in 1947. It does
provide a sense of how couples, families and individuals, far from the Punjabi
centres of the worst devastation, became entangled in Partition's miseries. It
also suggests how social norms had collapsed and how far the primacy of reli-
gious labelling had spread.
The 3 June plan had evidently gone catastrophically wrong. As people made
the tortuous transition from subjects of the British Raj to citizens of two free
states, countless communities got swept up in the chaos and panic. The vio-
lence, and its aftermath, glued people together, temporarily at least, in a new
spirit of nationalism. But this was crisscrossed with deeper confusions and
anger about the place of class, caste, language and religion in public life. There
was no simple blueprint for becoming an Indian or a Pakistani. One thing peo-
ple could agree on, though, was that the ‘other’ state was rapidly looking like
an adversary, or even an enemy. Nationalist politics had collapsed into two na-
tional tragedies.
 9
Bitter Legacies

On the evening of 3 January 1948 Delhi's Superintendent of Police was

making security arrangements for Gandhi's imminent arrival when he was sum-
moned by another superintendent and they both rushed to Phatak Habash
Khan, a Muslim district of the city. He was astonished by the intensity of the
scene that greeted him. Refugees had illegally taken possession of houses that
had previously been owned by Muslims and were refusing to vacate them.
Most striking of all was the sight of hundreds of women standing at the front of
the crowd who steadfastly refused to budge. ‘Police had to face great difficulty
in getting the houses vacated,’ the police chief wrote, ‘as they were the target
of sallies from women’. The police turned to tear gas to disperse the crowd. De-
spite this, the following morning the men and women had reassembled. Once
again the refugees picketed the main gate to the colony and continued to try
and force their way into the houses for five hours or so. ‘The number of women
was about one hundred, and thousands of men refugees were backing them …
Police applied all sorts of tactics to disperse the crowd but in vain.’ Eventually
they once again resorted to tear gas and the anxious superintendent appealed
to the government, saying that the men and women were determined to occupy
the houses and that there would be no peace in the city until a solution was
found to the situation.1
The angry resolve of refugee women to take possession of homes for them-
selves and their families provides a rare glimpse not only of the frustration of
refugees – male and female – and their determination to remake their lives but
also of the political risks of the situation. As their demands went unmet and
ambivalent feelings about their new national status arose, in some cases
refugees turned away from central government towards other political groups
who championed their cause.
Picking up the pieces
In the three years after Independence, India and Pakistan both faced re-
lentless and protracted difficulties because of the refugee crisis. The South
Asian political leadership did not yet have power firmly in its grip. Nether state
had, as yet, a fully functioning military, clearly consolidated territory or smoothly
functioning parliament. In this grey transition zone between regimes, the move-
ment by so many people began to threaten the very existence of Pakistan and
menaced the development aspirations of the Indian state, as government
agencies struggled to cope with the incessant, desperate demands that they
provide shelter, sustenance and protection for the displaced.
To make matters worse, in Calcutta, and Bengal more generally, the crisis
was only just beginning. Bengalis from East Pakistan started to arrive in small
groups as they pulled into train stations in Calcutta or made their way across in
precarious, packed boats: this movement was slower and, superficially, less
dramatically violent. Nonetheless it marked the emergence of a refugee culture
that has never ceased to be a feature of the city's life. Twelve thousand people
shifted to West Bengal every day in 1948 from East Pakistan, and the camps
themselves could only accommodate a fraction of the numbers so that hun-
dreds of thousands poured on to the streets, railway platforms and into squat-
ters’ colonies instead.
On the two sides of the subcontinent – in the east and the west – the com-
plications of the refugee movements were distinctive and there was no catch-
all solution to ‘refugee rehabilitation’, a new and unrefined government respon-
sibility, which had to be managed locally and through a process of trial and
error. The problem was daunting. The two nation states consolidated them-
selves in the shadow of Partition. ‘This matter of refugees continues to be prac-
tically the only topic of discussion here. Newspapers are full with statements
and counter-statements,’ the exasperated Governor of West Bengal told the In-
dian government in 1948.2 In the early 1950s, numerous political controver-
sies turned on the vexed question of ‘refugee rehabilitation’ and news about
refugees peppered the newspapers well into the post-Independence era. Parti-
tion was not a discrete event, rapidly dispensed with in 1947, but had, and
has, ongoing repercussions in South Asia.
To add to their difficulties, the two new governments had to solve the crisis
almost entirely alone, with the international community barely involved. The In-
ternational Committee of the Red Cross stood on the brink of insolvency and
had actually closed its delegation in India in February 1947. Europe turned in-
ward as it attempted to heal its war wounds and to solve its own post-war
refugee crisis. In December 1947 the Red Cross sent a fact-finding mission to
India and Pakistan, which pessimistically reported back that the Partition crisis
was ‘so enormous’ that it was beyond the scope of the international Red
Cross's capability.3
Christian missionaries and small foreign organisations already operating in
the subcontinent, such as the Quakers and the National Christian Council of
India, ran relief operations alongside local volunteers from at least fifteen dif-
ferent organisations, from the Scouts and Guides to the YMCA and St John's
Ambulance. This was only a drop in the ocean. There were no tried and tested
responses to a mammoth disaster like this. Partition happened too early in the
century to benefit from any of the post-war global institutions such as the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which was established in 1950.
The international tensions emerging between India and Pakistan meant they
preferred to act independently; both states shied away from the United Nations
Refugee Convention which was passed in 1951 and, to date, neither has rati-
fied it. Through choice and circumstance, both states had to deal with their cri-
sis alone.
 Nor were regional governments much help. Overstretched provincial min-
istries across India and Pakistan dug in their heels and tried to resist taking re-
sponsibility for refugees. Across South Asia the provincial governments pan-
icked at the prospect of absorbing trainloads of refugees, especially at a time
of endemic food shortages and fragile social peace. They had to be cajoled,
bribed and ordered to take responsibility for quotas of displaced. The UP state
government steadfastly resisted the arrival of refugees in 1947 and attempted
to seal the state borders. In Gujarat, the government announced that it would
not be giving any aid to itinerant Gujarati traders coming ‘home’ from areas
that now lay in Pakistan, although many of them had been away from Gujarat
for generations. After Independence, non-Muslim Sindis continued to land in
Bombay harbour after crossing the Arabian Sea by boat, but when the Bombay
government lobbied against this, Nehru dejectedly concluded that ‘there is no
help for it’ and instructed the ministry to prepare to receive more boatloads of
displaced people.4 On the other side of the country the Chief Minister of
Assam, less than a year after Partition, was reporting such tensions in local
towns – where Bengali refugees were camped out – that he was already play-
ing his most serious trump card against the centre: provincial separatism.5
These conflicts reached fever pitch in Sind where dislocation to the local
economy caused by Partition and conflicts between old local Sindi stalwarts
and patriotic Pakistani refugees became controversial from the earliest days of
Independence. Pro-refugee papers such as Dawn waged a campaign of resis-
tance to what was regarded as the Sind government's parochial or ‘antina-
tional’ stance while, jealous of their city's autonomy and culture, Sindis resisted
Karachi's transformation into a national capital under centralised control. This
tension has existed to the present day.6
Regardless, the Indian and Pakistani governments overcame the resistance
put up by their regional ministries to receiving refugees. They imposed their
own formulation of the crisis as a ‘national problem’, boosting political centrali-
sation and enhancing their own executive powers in the process. In their des-
perate desire to wind up the camps, ministers turned a blind eye to refugee
preferences and regional jingoism, and whole groups of refugee peasants were
arbitrarily selected for dispersal to regions where they could not speak the local
language and had no familiarity with crop patterns, cultural practices or
weather conditions.
At first, relief efforts were completely improvised; operating from their old
party headquarters Congress Party workers, Muslim League volunteers and
others handed out blankets and food, built temporary shelters, and adminis-
tered medicines and emergency relief to people in camps and on the streets.
By the end of 1947, refugees were dying of cold on the roadside in Lahore,
where the mercury dropped to almost freezing point in mid-December; a jour-
nalist of the Pakistan Times reported the scenes:
After midnight on Wednesday I accompanied the Bait-ul-Mal workers on their ‘mercy
round’ in the city in a truck loaded with razais [quilted blankets] and other woollen stuff. We
rattled through the wide, empty streets and halted near the Braganza Hotel, outside the rail-
way station, where one can generally find hundreds of homeless people huddled up together
for the night. We debussed, carrying bundles of razais, and fanned out into different direc-
tions for their distribution.
As we approached the place we heard subdued groans that escaped hundreds of lips as
the slashing, icy cold wind cut into their limbs. They were lying huddled together with their
legs drawn up to their bellies to have some warmth. As we approached them we saw that a
fairly large number had only one cotton khais [shawl] to cover them and the rest had a thin
razai or a blanket to warm them up. Many mothers were leaning over their children to protect
them against the biting cold. Many others blew at the dying embers of a chilam [hashish
pipe] and toasted their hands at the glow. Men, women and children were coughing and
sneezing and suckling babes were crying with cold. That night we visited many places and
distributed about 250 razais and some 100 blankets, a number which is hopelessly inade-
quate to meet the present requirements.7
As the sheer magnitude of the crisis sank in, in the autumn of 1947 India
and Pakistan launched vast and unprecedented relief operations. Both states
set up full-blown ministries in September to deal exclusively with the refugee
crisis. They had to respond to the whole spectrum of human needs. Refugees
badly needed basic essentials as well as everything with which to start a new
life, from clothing, food rations and manufacturing materials to loans, accom-
modation and bank accounts. Some needed proof of identity or qualifications.
Both governments had already lost millions of rupees because of unharvested,
rotten crops, the closure of banks and shops and disruption to national and in-
ternational trade. The Indian central government estimated that it spent
940,078 million rupees between 1947 and 1951 on the relief effort. This stag-
gering amount was surely equalled in Pakistan, where the Walton refugee
camps in Lahore alone cost 30,000 rupees per day to keep running. A special
refugee tax, which stayed in place until the 1950s, was surcharged to existing
taxes; Pakistani train travellers even paid a refugee supplement that was
added to the standard cost of their railway ticket. In short, there was a major
and prolonged wrench to the economy. Centralised planning was seen as one
way of reasserting control over the crisis.
The refugees inundated the government with their demands: the illiterate
employed letter-writers or a caste or community association to write for them,
and signed with poignant indigo thumbprints; these became paper records of
personal suffering as people described precisely what had happened to them,
listed the possessions and land they had lost, as well as, not infrequently, pro-
viding the names and addresses of the attackers when they were known to the
victims. One refugee from the NWFP who had worked for the Congress Party
but now found himself in North India, penniless and unrecognised by the local
politicians, wrote, ‘I am of 56 [years] and forcibly exiled from my home I am
wandering disappointed. Will you kindly advise me what to do and where to [go]
in this critical moment of my life.’8 Others were in desperate need of medica-
tion or wanted to find their children or other family members. State banks
loaned former businessmen and entrepreneurs money to found factories so
they could tentatively resume business. Special quotas were set aside to en-
sure that refugees had priority access to government jobs and university
places.
These state-sponsored efforts compared well with the apathetic approach
of the British colonial state in the face of disaster, as seen during the Bengal
famine of 1943, and meshed with the general swing towards state-centred
policies favoured by many in both countries at the time. It was the age of the
expert bureaucrat and economic specialist, as India and Pakistan stood on the
cusp of a new age. In this light, men such as the Indian Planning Commission
supremo, P.C. Mahalanobis, argued that Partition could even be regarded as
an opportunity if refugees who were part of the old, unmodernised, agricultural
order could become industrial workers, working on large public works projects
and in the giant factories of the future envisioned in the five-year plans. ‘The
expansion of the national economy initiated under the two Five Year Plans by it-
self,’ one government pamphlet commented reassuringly, ‘provides numerous
opportunities for rehabilitation of displaced persons possessing initiative and
enterprise.’9 Partition had to be integrated, in government eyes, into the bigger
story of nation-building.
Beginning a new life
Extensive government intervention touched the lives of large numbers of
refugees who benefited from state-backed plans, schemes and novel initia-
tives. In both countries, the state paid for the construction of schools, dispen-
saries, houses and workshops. The government created job centres, employed
refugees in public works, cleared land in forested areas to make space for dis-
placed accommodation, built training centres to teach women skills such as
soap-making and embroidery, re-trained men as mechanics, carpenters, spin-
ners, paper-makers, shoemakers and printers. Orphans and widows were
housed in welfare homes and young girls with no families to provide for them
even had their marriages arranged by the state, which literally assumed a
parental role: ‘A Marriage Bureau has been organized to put displaced men
and women in touch with each other,’ reported another of the many govern-
ment-produced pamphlets outlining the state's diverse attempts to help the
refugees. ‘As soon as news about its establishment was published, applica-
tions from eligible men began to pour in.’ In some cases the state stepped into
parental shoes, providing small gifts, clothes and money as dowry.10
Nevertheless, the actual experiences of the refugees stood at odds with
grand public rhetoric about refugee rehabilitation. The best schemes favoured
the ‘hard-working’, the middle class and the literate.11 These were the people
who were allocated the best new accommodation or received the biggest loans.
Middle-class refugees did not act as one undifferentiated, victimised mass but
looked after their own kith and kin and organised quickly along these lines. The
Frontier and Punjab Riot Sufferer Committee requested housing colonies near
business centres for ‘the deserving and the middle class men from the NWFP’,
while the Pakistan Sufferers Cooperative Housing Society was open only to
Hindu and Sikh government servants and businessmen, and membership was
restricted to refugees of ‘good character and sound mind’.12
Certainly, Partition was indiscriminate in its cruelty at times; all kinds of
people could find themselves in wretched conditions. But there is no doubt
that, rather then starting completely from scratch, those who already had edu-
cation, contacts and status were, on the whole, eventually able to ease them-
selves into a new, and sometimes more profitable, lifestyle by lobbying for jobs,
gaining access to the most desirable vacated properties and extracting govern-
ment loans, while the poor were the ones who suffered forced resettlement, or
who languished forgotten for decades in displaced person homes, camps and
squatters' colonies. Professional networks, deference to one's status and ac-
cent or simply the ability to understand and act upon news on the information
grapevine gave elites a head start in recovering from Partition. In the scramble
for access to compensation, as Ravinder Kaur has shown, the richer refugees
already had inbuilt advantages, as they could read the lengthy paperwork, and
knew how to ‘break the codes that the state had invented’ while those who had
managed to transfer at least a few of their savings could use this to smooth
their path. Partition did not completely shatter the social pecking order.13
The refugees lobbied for improved food and accommodation and used the
tools of Gandhian satyagraha, or non violent resistance, to their own advantage
long after 1947. Sit-ins, strikes and peaceful protest methods, acquired and
honed during the nationalist struggle, were now turned against the new post-
colonial governments. In Durgapur near Jaipur, part of the refugee camp was
burned by fire in 1949 and seven hundred refugees started to protest at their
conditions. A group attempted to travel to the provincial government ministry to
stage a protest but when these plans were thwarted, after initially refusing to
alight from the train, they sat down on the railway tracks, causing delays up
and down the line. Government impatience could be lethal, however: in this in-
stance, the Ministry for Refugee Rehabilitation itself sanctioned police firing on
the group.14
Other refugee groups besieged the homes of national leaders and rejected
the housing that was offered to them. Sukh Ram, a refugee from the NWFP liv-
ing in the nascent city of Faridabad, led a hunger strike against the proposal to
house his community in mud huts. ‘The displaced persons thought mud huts
was a mad idea … they argued, “Look, after all, the mud-huts are for our conve-
nience … we do not want them. Do not waste precious rupees. Please stop.”’15
Handouts and gifts, sanctimoniously celebrated in the official literature of the
Indian and Pakistani governments, were not always received with unalloyed de-
light and a rare window on to the feelings of a group of poor Punjabi women,
who were being taught new crafts at a women's ‘industrial home’, suggests
that they could see the potential flaws in rehabilitation schemes. ‘These hardy
woman [sic] of West Punjab are ready to take up any sort of job from needles
to spade without any grudge,’ wrote the principal of the institution, ‘but there
are occasions for them to feel down hearted when they forecast their future
covered with gloom and blackness. They sometimes come and ask me “Do tell
us how are we to settle up by learning Weaving or Sports Goods Making?
Where are we to get so much equipment from so as to start this trade? Is it not
wastage of Government money and woman power to teach us a craft which we
can not take up in future?”’16 The despondency and common sense of these
faceless women is palpable in this report.
Refugees who had lived in towns before Partition wanted to stay in city cen-
tres – even if this meant living in slum-like conditions – because it was here
that they could hope to make a reasonable living, and ambitious but naïve gov-
ernment schemes to house refugees on bleak suburban outskirts or in the
rural wilderness of cleared jungle areas resulted in expensive losses to the
treasury. When twenty-one families were ordered to move to Kashipur in Uttar
Pradesh in 1951, they elected two nominees of the families to go and inspect
the land first. ‘These refugees are not inclined to accept the offer of land in vil-
lage Kesri-Ganeshpur,’ the District Magistrate tactfully informed the Ministry of
Relief and Rehabilitation, after the refugees had visited the spot. ‘It shall be
much appreciated if they are given some other land in Kashipur area where
there is no threat of wild animals so that they may be asked to shift from Gand-
hinagar.’17
Others protested when the state reneged on promises, or started asking for
rent. A group of refugees in a housing scheme at Netaji Nagar in Agra were or-
dered to start paying rent on huts which they had been allocated. The refugees
reacted with fury, calling it a ‘hoax played on refugees’ and ‘nothing short of
high handedness’. The president of their colony wrote to the government, de-
scribing the huts in which the refugees were living:
…bamboo walls with hardly half an inch coat of mud and with roof of galvanised sheets …
Mostly this mud coat has also vanished away and one can see inside the room from bamboo
walls … In summer this tin roof becomes very hot to such an extent that none can live in the
said alleged house and due to this heat, many suffer from eyes trouble and many other dis-
eases and income earned by the occupants is wholly spent on medicines. In winter hard and
fast winds enter these rooms from pores and there is extreme cold. Not only this, but there is
no privacy for night sleeping … There is neither kitchen nor bath room.18
Wantonly sacrificed to the demands of making two new nations in 1947,
the refugees often felt disgusted and abandoned by a callous state, which had
promised them the moon and given them, in the words of the Urdu poet Faiz
Ahmed Faiz, a ‘leprous daybreak’ instead.
Paying the price
Nonetheless, as refugees arrived in India and Pakistan they were encour-
aged to see themselves in a new light – to set aside their hardships momentar-
ily and to appreciate that they were now, after all, independent citizens of free
countries. Refugees were repeatedly told that they were now ‘Indian’ or ‘Pak-
istani’ and that they should rejoice in spite of their shattered lives. Pakistan
was promoted as a safe homeland from violence and Jinnah was depicted as
the refugees' saviour. The victims of Partition violence were called shahids and
bathed in the language of martyrdom. Partition quickly became repackaged as
a war of liberation. The West Punjab government lost no time in engraving a
stone plaque and dedicating it, ‘To every Mussalman man woman and child
who fought suffered and won the first battle for Pakistan through the Punjab
Muslim League 1947.’19
When Jinnah visited camps in Lahore in November 1947, refugees lined
the route and shouted League slogans enthusiastically. An old man ap-
proached Jinnah and, at least according to newspaper reports, ‘thanked him
for establishing Pakistan where they could live safely and prosper’.20 Officials
used every opportunity they could to boost national morale in the camps. On
Jinnah's birthday in December 1947, after the Friday prayers, the refugees
were entertained with a programme of poetry recitals, volunteers handed out
sweets, games were organised for the children and the camp was lit up with
bright lights. When the Lahore camps were disbanded the following year, and
some of these same refugees were forcibly resettled in other Pakistani
provinces, often against their wishes, the trains taking them to their new desti-
nations pulled out of Lahore station to the sound of brass bands playing the na-
tional anthem, while hired hands waved Pakistani flags along the platforms.
These efforts could not paper over the sheer desperation of the refugees,
however. A visitor to the Walton camps in Lahore found that ‘a major portion’ of
the refugees were ‘complaining about the mismanagement in respect of food,
supplies, sanitation and medical aid’.21 There were, as in India, fears of anti-
government insurrection, bread riots and fighting between local people and
refugees who had moved into their space. Jinnah made a surprise visit to the
camps in Karachi in a stage-managed attempt to boost national feeling in Sep-
tember 1947. Even the patriotic journalist of the Pakistan Times could not dis-
guise the contradictions of the situation: ‘The refugees were greatly cheered by
the visit but there were two poignant moments when a former wealthy mer-
chant now destitute broke down in relating the hardships he and his family had
undergone, and a villager whose family had been wiped out, sobbed uncontrol-
lably.’22
In India, the propaganda may have been more nuanced but the Congress
was similarly anxious about the loyalty of the refugees and the wider public to
the Congress government. In northern India, the Hindu Right, particularly the
RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, which had played such a provocative role in
the months leading up to Partition, and had been hand in glove with violent ri-
oters all along, now swung firmly behind the refugee cause. Working with
refugees was a direct way in which members of the Mahasabha and the RSS
could challenge the power of the government, and these groups swiftly stepped
in to fulfil social service functions that the state was woefully unable to provide.
The Mahasabha established an All-India Hindu Refugees Committee immedi-
ately after Partition. In Delhi the RSS operated four large refugee camps and
RSS members later recalled the time with nostalgia: ‘they had a sense of ac-
tively participating in a great event in which their services were both demanded
and appreciated,’23 while they could simultaneously spread their political ideol-
ogy. In Bengal, on the other side of the country, and in stark ideological con-
trast, the CPI and leftist groups gradually took the lead in organising the
refugees, triggering mass protests and land occupations in the 1950s. This
provided the building blocks for the communists' electoral success in the re-
gion into the late twentieth century. In Pakistan, similarly, the Jam ‘at-i Islami
was running a major refugee camp in Islamiyah Park in Lahore, and their
leader, Maulana Mawdudi, who was himself living under canvas in the park at
the time, having arrived from Delhi in July by truck, made a powerful public call
for volunteers ‘gifted with fellow-feeling, diligence, sincerity of purpose and
honesty of work’.24 The Jam ‘at-i Islami quickly responded to the crisis, by bury-
ing unclaimed dead bodies, collecting funds and operating camps, doling out
food and medicine and cleaning refuse, and is estimated to have helped over
one-and-a-half million Muhajirs over the subsequent weeks and months. A
small but vociferous core of grateful refugees became rank-and-file supporters
and these efforts paid political dividends in future decades.
Domestically, the overwhelming concern for both the League and Congress
leaders after 1947 was the internal threat posed by the refugee crisis to their
political leadership. There was a serious risk that their own parties might be
ripped apart by differences of opinion over refugee rehabilitation. In Pakistan,
the League's treatment of refugees was soon causing headaches for the lead-
ing national party, which feared for its electoral future in the face of such a
human catastrophe. The Governor of West Punjab was before long reporting on
refugee demonstrations against the government in which the treacherous slo-
gan ‘Pakistan Murdabad’, Death to Pakistan, was shouted, and he told Jinnah
that ‘I am told that Shaukat [Shaukat Hyat Khan, Minister for Revenue] is
afraid to show his face in the Muslim refugee camp here.’25 In the context of
increasingly vocal refugee restlessness, showing sensitivity to the refugees was
a vote-winner, as well as a moral responsibility. The Refugee Minister of West
Punjab, Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din, demanded land redistribution as a solution to
land shortages for the displaced. When his plan was roundly rejected by the
landowning political elite in his own province, he resigned, exposing deep fis-
sures between the organisational and cabinet-level wings of the provincial
League. Another dominant Punjabi politician, the Khan of Mamdot, the largest
landowner in undivided Punjab, was shorn of constituents after Partition as he
had lost his extensive farmlands that lay on the Indian side. Pragmatically, he
tried to rebuild his power base and cultivated refugees as his new followers
while the euphemistically named Allotment Revising Committee was his per-
sonal creation; it lacked official sanction but was used to siphon off abandoned
properties and cars in Lahore for his followers and former tenants.26
Dealing with the refugee crisis opened up all sorts of avenues for corruption
and profiteering, while also exposing deep cracks in the party-political ideologi-
cal outlook – cracks which had been pasted over while the demand to create
Pakistan was foremost in the leadership's mind. It is little surprise in the face of
such extensive difficulties that one year after Independence Jinnah announced
that ‘a grave emergency has arisen and exists in Pakistan’ and declared a state
of emergency that gave the centre heightened powers over the provinces, en-
abling bureaucrats and administrators to rein in the politicians. In Pakistan,
then, the Partition refugee crisis undermined the development of democratic
politics and shook the unsteady foundations of the state.
In India, the crisis was just as acute, especially as there was, of course, still
a large Muslim population living throughout the country. Controversy about how
best to respond to the refugee crisis rocked the inner workings of the Congress
Party. Nehru and Gandhi persistently reiterated the need to protect Muslims, to
retain them in the country and to prevent their mass ejection from India. As
Nehru told a group of Muslim labourers in Delhi, ‘As long as I am at the helm of
affairs India will not become a Hindu state.’27 Barbed wire was fixed up in Mus-
lim Sufi shrines and mosques, at Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and Dargah
Hazrat Qutbuddin Chisti among others, and guards shooed away looters.
Gandhi imperilled his life by fasting for peace and reconciliation in 1948. Dur-
ing Gandhi's fast, the government swung behind the peace effort, even frank-
ing envelopes sent by post with slogans urging social reconciliation. ‘Communal
Harmony will save Gandhiji’, the messages declared and, ‘It is only through
communal unity that Gandhiji can survive’. The crux of the matter was keeping
the minorities' faith in the state's ability to protect them.
Yet support for the refugee cause was strident within sections of Congress
and was a touchpaper for broader ideas about the ideological tilt of the Indian
state. It was a struggle between Nehru's secular ideal and a brand of Hindu-in-
fused nationalism. The refugee cause, along with the stoppage of cow slaugh-
ter and the reconversion of mosques to Hindu temples, became a subject of
mass protest. Many walls in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh were covered with graffiti
demanding immediate abolition of cow slaughter, and these protests inter-
locked with deep anger about the creation of Pakistan, and the Congress's ac-
quiescence to Partition. After Partition, any Muslim could be charged with being
a ‘Pakistani’ and suspicions fell in a McCarthyite manner on fifth columnists,
spies and those who displayed dubious commitment to the national interest.
Speeches called for proof of loyalty. Large workshops of Muslim smiths or
craftsmen were disbanded as their Hindu suppliers stopped advancing indis-
pensable credit or materials, worried, they claimed, that the Muslim artisans
would abscond to Pakistan without paying. By January 1948 the atmosphere
had deteriorated alarmingly, and India's future as a secular state, and as a
place with equal rights for all, looked uncertain.
Both the Indian and Pakistani governments worried about the damage
caused to their international image by the crisis, especially as the relationship
between the two new nations deteriorated. This was part of the crude process
of making the two nation states. Effective rehabilitation was a moral duty but
also a point of pride and nationalistic validation. Nehru, for instance, was anx-
ious about international press coverage of the refugee camps in Delhi, and Dr
Mookerjee, a leading Mahasabha politician, suggested that foreign press corre-
spondents should be banned from photographing the camps.28 ‘You might
have seen Chandni Chowk is hardly passable because all the pavements and
part of the roads are blocked by refugee stores,’ Nehru complained, of one of
Delhi's main thoroughfares a year after Partition.29 The overspill of refugees on
to the streets of the national capitals marred the leader's long-envisaged
dreams of freedom, and soiled the international image of the new nation states
in the eyes of the rest of the world. But it was the coverage of abducted and
traumatised women about which both governments were hypersensitive. As so
often happens, debate over the status of women became the focal point of
much deeper anxieties.
During an Iranian dignitary's tour of Pakistan, a group of recovered ab-
ducted women arrived in a truck from a camp in East Punjab and were wel-
comed by villagers who wept and created a major scene. ‘The whole show was
so staged as to create an impression of Pakistan having recovered these
women at great risk and cost,’ complained the Indian Deputy High Commis-
sioner who was stationed in Lahore, claiming that the entire situation had been
faked: ‘Villagers had been hired to act as fathers and relatives of the recovered
women and immediately on arrival of the women very touching scenes of re-
union were staged before the Alama [an Iranian scholar], which brought tears
to his eyes.’ It was feared that ‘the Alama is carrying back with him deep im-
pressions of Pakistani Muslims having suffered untold horrors at the hands of
Hindus and Sikhs’.30 In this international war of words and deeds, the Indian
government lashed back, and Iran was notified about the stunt, while Patel
suggested that pamphlets were compiled of the most ‘glaring, barefaced and
shameful pieces of propaganda by Pakistan’ to be circulated to the foreign
press under titles such as ‘How Pakistan lies’ or ‘How Pakistan vilifies’.31 Other
tactics were for both sides to play down news of local Hindu–Muslim–Sikh vio-
lence, to limit news of fresh bouts of refugee departures (and to attribute these
to economic causes alone), to criticise the provision made in exit camps for de-
parting refugees and to emphasise state complicity in any poor treatment of
the other country's minorities.
This was particularly the case with the restoration of abducted women initi-
ated by both governments and nationalistic point-scoring trumped any consid-
eration of refugee sensibility. The needs and rights of the refugees were over-
ridden by nationalistic self-righteousness. Some women had reconciled them-
selves to a new life with their abductor. They were able, little by little, to piece
together some form of normality, to find happiness in the arrival of children or
to adjust and bury their memories of life before 1947. The fortunate ones may
even have found love. Women whose lives to date had already been severely
controlled by social values found that any small freedoms and hard-won con-
tentment that they had forged over the years – through family life, routine and
security – could be rebuilt. For some poor women, who had never known con-
trol over their own lives and had always gone hungry, a life in a more prosper-
ous home or away from a violent or abusive husband could bring some conso-
lation. But now, to add to their miseries, the state intervened and forcibly col-
lected them by truck to repatriate them.
India and Pakistan now looked to each other as an inverted mirror image. In
India, the visible presence of mutilated and suffering refugees was viewed as a
manifestation of Partition's callousness, which was conflated with Pakistan's
creation, while in Pakistan, the incoming refugees and those who died in Parti-
tion violence were represented as sacrificial martyrs to the Pakistani national
cause. So refugees were important citizens in the eyes of the brand new post-
colonial states which needed, after Independence, to account for and justify
the refugees' presence, assimilate and assuage them. Their suffering and expe-
riences were woven into the fabric of national history that was constructed
around the events that had occurred. ‘We crossed a river of blood to achieve in-
dependence …’ wrote one future President of Pakistan. ‘People were uprooted
and driven like millions of dry leaves by a turbulent gust of fanaticism and blind
passion.’32 Indian prose could be equally florid and a government-produced
pamphlet told how ‘The people were afflicted with sufferings and agony more
terrible than has ever fallen to the lot of human beings … This has been a
legacy of insensate outburst of communal frenzy, generated by the pernicious
Two-Nation theory and its attendant cult of hate.’33
Murder of the Mahatma
Circumstances suddenly changed in India because of one climactic event.
Gandhi was shot in the chest on 30 January 1948. He died shortly afterwards.
The murder was carried out by a Hindu nationalist who, although clearly a fa-
natic, was also an articulate and well-connected member of the Hindu extrem-
ist parties. The shock of the assassination (perhaps, as Ashis Nandy has ar-
gued, almost a product of a ‘death-wish’ by Gandhi, who knew better than any-
one how his own death might help to pull together Indian society) immediately
helped to stabilise and enforce national feeling and undoubtedly gave ascen-
dancy to secular policy.34 The assassin had opposed Gandhi's powerful fasts
for peace, his conciliatory policy towards Muslims and peace overtures to Pak-
istan.
Gandhi's assassination was carried out in the national capital itself and the
ensuing funeral processions spread out like radial arteries from New Delhi,
drawing people together in their shared grief and solidifying national feeling.
Dazed and shocked crowds began to assemble outside the gates of Birla
House to catch a glimpse of the Mahatma's body laid out on a simple bier sur-
rounded by flowers as the news of the tragedy spread. The following day, the
funeral cortège loaded with sandalwood logs, flowers and incense moved
slowly through the dense crowds in Delhi, slowly winding its way through the
streets to the ghat on the banks of the River Yamuna where the cremation took
place. Thirteen days of official state mourning followed the cremation. In Febru-
ary, two weeks later, a special night train carried Gandhi's ashes for immersion
in the Ganges at Allahabad. Along the train tracks from Delhi to Allahabad,
mourners looked on with grim and curious faces and crowds collected as the
copper urn was carried on a flower-bedecked trailer to the riverside. At the sa-
cred meeting place of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers, swathes of people
waded into the water as Gandhi's youngest son scattered his ashes.
The assassination proved a cathartic experience which enabled and em-
bodied the beginning of the new nation. Beyond North India, the country was
echoing and mirroring the ceremonies, united in observance of Gandhi's pass-
ing. Shops shut, public services were suspended and places of amusement
closed. People collected by rivers and seafronts such as Bombay's Chowpatty
beach, where vast crowds gathered to perform rituals of mourning and to hold
religious services. In Karachi, too, many shopkeepers closed their shops as a
mark of respect and Pakistani newspapers spoke warmly of Gandhi and sadly
of his death. It was a moment for re-evaluation across the subcontinent.
Gandhi's death and its attendant rituals forged a new sense of unity and
community in North India where these had been sorely lacking in previous
months and Nehru spoke on the theme of unity in a radio broadcast to mark
the end of the fortnight of mourning, raising a whole string of divisive issues on
which the country now needed to unite. He appealed to the press to avoid criti-
cism of the Congress Party, for his Congress colleagues to patch up their own
factional differences, spoke out against provincialism and even made public
his personal efforts at unity, by extending olive branches to his estranged col-
leagues Vallabhbhai Patel and Jayaprakash Narayan. Nehru, always alive to the
importance of history and adept at writing Congress's history even as it was
made, was quick to ensure that the tragedy of Gandhi's death was redeemed
and put to a practical purpose by remodelling the nation along united lines.
‘Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry,’ the premier
himself wrote of Gandhi's assassination.35 The institutionalisation of Gandhi's
memory was a persistent feature of post-Independence politics and it was
telling that the All India Congress Committee met for the first time in Indepen-
dent India exactly eleven months to the day after Gandhi's death, in Gandhina-
gar, a newly built township for refugees displaced by Partition.36
Yet it would be misleading to see Gandhi's death, as is sometimes sug-
gested, as the full stop to India's internal Partition crisis. Gandhi's death
strengthened Nehru's ascendancy and, temporarily, facilitated an effective
backlash against the extremists. The Government of India did at least attempt
to imprison the culprits, compensate some of the affected and acted to quash
the most brutal assaults. Nevertheless, despite these initiatives, numerous
communities continued to live in fear in the years following Partition, discrimi-
nated against or economically boycotted. Nehru was surrounded by cabinet col-
leagues who had equivocal feelings about Indian Muslims' rights. Rajendra
Prasad, the first President of India, opposed state intervention in reform of
Hindu personal laws, wanted cow slaughter banned and in October 1949, while
Nehru was abroad, the All India Congress Working Committee passed a vote al-
lowing RSS members to become primary members of the Congress Party, al-
though this decision was rapidly revoked. Partition boosted the strength of the
Hindu Right and relegated Indian Muslims to a difficult and precarious position
in the early years of Independence.
From Partition to war
A culture of high defence spending and militarisation in South Asia dates
from 1947, and the roots of the ongoing Kashmiri conflict are deeply entwined
with the moment of Partition. In October 1947, the pressurised Maharaja's hes-
itant accession to India overlapped with a rebellion in Poonch, in the south-
western corner of the princely state. This was led by Hazaras, Punjabis and
some militias under the command of former INA officers. Simultaneously, In-
dian troops airlifted into the Kashmir valley faced a tribal incursion of men from
the frontier who fought with some covert support from the Pakistani army. The
psychological ruptures of Partition undermined a peaceful solution to the Kash-
miri conflict, and the war escalated in intensity until an official UN-sponsored
ceasefire was announced on New Year's Day, 1949.
The vulnerability of both new nations was nakedly exposed by the disloca-
tions of Partition: the refugee crisis, economic uncertainties and contestations
over borders, twinned with the violent events in Kashmir, explain the intense
paranoia that set in instantaneously regarding the relative strengths and mo-
tives of the other country. The Pakistani leadership – owing to the inherent limi-
tations caused by their country's position as the seceding state and its smaller
size – felt exposed to the risk of collapse or invasion. Indian intelligence written
in purple prose warned that the Pakistani government was training ordinary
people with arms and encouraging the ‘war-minded’, while in Pakistan, the offi-
cial talk was of enemies attempting to paralyse the new nation. The Prime Min-
ister spoke freely in broadcasts of ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ who ‘indulged in
their black hatred to the full’.37
Both national governments remained acutely aware of their shortcomings:
their poor balance sheets, the loss of senior officers, the shortfalls in available
bureaucratic talent and the urgent imperative of securing hundreds of miles of
newly acquired borderland. Lack of supplies hampered Indian forces in Kash-
mir while troops airlifted from low-lying areas were exosed to the altitude and
icy conditions. Pakistan turned to militias and vigilantes while its weak army
was still being consolidated in the midst of the first war over Kashmir. Army
ranks had been seriously depleted by the departure of British senior officers;
before Partition 13,500 of 22,000 officers in the army were British. A few hun-
dred, at the request of the undermanned Pakistani army, stayed on to train
Pakistani soldiers but the majority swapped their uniforms for civilian positions
in Britain or hunted down roles in other parts of the British empire. To the newly
independent governments the solution to this strategic vulnerability, particu-
larly the apparent weakness of the new armies, appeared to lie in spending
money. The origins of habitually stratospheric defence spending can be found
in these early days of Independence and such spending was a product of de-
fensive weakness rather than hubristic swagger.
Only Gandhi had anticipated this. In July 1947, he said ‘he visualised a defi-
nite increase in military expenditure’ which would be ‘all for fighting among our-
selves’.38 It was a prophetic statement. Within a year Indian and Pakistani sol-
diers would be fighting the first war over Kashmir and soon scientists in both
countries would be racing to develop nuclear missiles, with their noses pointing
towards the foreign border. But all this was in the future. Needless to say, little
of it was in the original Partition plan.
Acute anxieties have beleaguered Pakistan's military establishment ever
since. The ability to defend the new nation was in serious doubt, and there was
a constant fear that it would be swallowed up by its larger neighbour. The army
lacked arms, equipment, training centres and basic supplies and as Liaquat Ali
Khan told the Joint Defence Council, ‘an Army without equipment was as much
use as tin soldiers’.39 The army, the League leadership presumed, was essen-
tial for uniting the nation and cementing the component parts into one viable
whole, whether by suppressing Sikh incursions on the Punjabi border, dealing
with the reception of refugees or managing the violent domestic insurrections
breaking out in the North West Frontier Province. Pakistani leaders blamed the
weakness of the state and its problems on a deliberate Indian conspiracy to un-
dermine the state's viability from the moment of its inception – a seam which
ran deeply through the national psyche – and the dominant trope of 1947 was
one of defiance and the will to exist in the face of hostility. ‘Pakistan has come
to stay’ became a catchy political slogan during the early years of Indepen-
dence.
The evocation of an external enemy waiting on the borders to subsume Pak-
istan was a useful bond between Pakistani people, some of whom had little
conviction in the state's viability. A group of upper-class Muslims in Lahore felt
so concerned that Pakistan could be attacked that they kept their cars filled
with petrol and luggage, ready to flee from an Indian invasion at a moment's
notice.40 Luggage-carrying coolies at Karachi's airport talked of ‘war with the
Hindus’.41 This was also a product of the overwhelming, almost revolutionary,
calamities into which the state had been born and which it had faced from its
inception. The Pakistani leadership tried to overcome these anxieties with over-
compensation. Uncertainty about Pakistan's borders and the question marks
over its creation before August 1947 were now replaced by a blatant form of
pride in the nation state.
 In India there was considerable defensive posturing and attempts to boost
military capability – through the use of both conventional and less conventional
methods. Both governments granted some official sanction to the armed mili-
tias that had helped to bring about Partition in the first place and absorbed
them into the nation-making projects. Provincial governments assembled spe-
cial armed constabularies, essentially upgraded policemen armed with
weapons, and endowed them with new responsibilities and powers. The forma-
tion of such defence groups was explicitly tied to the protection of ‘our people’
from Partition violence, which at its worst was becoming indistinguishable from
war.
They also had a local law and order purpose; ongoing student strikes, work-
ers' protests and agricultural upheaval troubled numerous provincial govern-
ments across the subcontinent in these months, but preparations for war used
up the scanty resources of both India and Pakistan. Governments bolstered
home guards and strengthened their security apparatus. Policemen belonging
to the minority religious communities were forced out of work in several states,
and in India the Home Minister euphemistically called for the correction of
‘communal maladjustments’ in the police.
Meanwhile Punjab had a new status as a fragile border state and along
both sides there was deep uneasiness. ‘The West Punjab Government is freely
arming its people,’ the Indian Home Minister wrote to the defence ministry,
‘and we must encourage the East Punjab Government to do likewise.’42 In Pak-
istan, the frantic and overstretched government aimed to establish a Pakistan
National Guard of 75,000 men only weeks after Independence. A remarkable
photograph taken in 1948 in the highly contested Indian district of Ferozepore,
lying flush alongside the Punjabi border, shows young women in crisp white sal-
war kameez, intently marching in formation with rifles at their sides. Members
of the National Volunteer Corps of Ferozepore, these women are being trained
in military tactics in case of trouble on the border. How far did this anxiety and
paranoia exist in the minds of the leadership and how much did it reflect grass-
roots realities? This is difficult to say as both governments escalated their real
militarisation in response to the perceived aggression of the other. What is cer-
tain, though, is that new groups of individuals, often former Indian National
Army members, policemen or students, increasingly took part in a web of na-
tionalistic activity which promoted India or Pakistan as ‘the other’ and created
new jobs founded on these new ideologies in armed institutions such as the
East Bengali Ansars, the Indian Provincial Armed Constabularies and the Pak-
istan National Guard.
By the time that the Pakistani and Indian governments concluded their first
ceasefire in Kashmir at the start of 1949, the leaders could look back at eigh-
teen months which approximated a revolution. Two new states, different in
shape and social composition to anything they had ever anticipated, had come
into existence, born in the cauldron of a traumatic transition. Old battles be-
tween Congress and League supporters looked outdated and parochial in this
new environment. At the same time, a sense of the other state and of its innate
violence had begun to grow. This would fuel a conflict which has lasted for the
lifetime of all the Partition's survivors.
 10
Divided Families

The north-western corner of the Indian subcontinent suffered the bloodiest

violence and the most severe dislocation in 1947–8 but after just a few years
visitors were surprised by the speed of change and the ways in which these
events had faded from view. The energies and expenditure of the governments,
the imperative quickly to begin farming again in the Punjabi breadbasket states
that supplied vital food to the rest of India and Pakistan, and the rapid, total ex-
change of Punjab's population meant that, publicly at least, a line was drawn
under events by the time of the first Indian general elections in 1950. Chiselled
Victorian luminaries on plinths were removed and the names of streets and
parks changed overnight. The landscape became increasingly alien to old in-
habitants as shop names were removed and freshly painted signs hoisted up in
their place. Marketplaces and segments of the old walled parts of cities were
reinvented. As the new order began, and the old order fizzled out, cultural, lin-
guistic and economic changes followed in the slipstream of Partition. Refugees
made up almost half of the population of Lahore, almost a third of the popula-
tion of Delhi.
Communities of refugee squatters could still be seen, camped on the out-
skirts of towns, and rubble still marked the sites of riots. New cities rose from
the ashes, though, such as Le Corbusier's angular, uncompromisingly mod-
ernist Chandigarh, the new capital of East Punjab. The resourceful Punjabi
refugee became a national stereotype and an actor on the nation-building
stage. Inevitably, many of the residents who had stayed in the same place dur-
ing Partition and witnessed these transformations felt nostalgic for the old
cities where there had been less traffic, business had been done face to face,
prices were at least remembered as cheaper, and it was possible to cross cities
such as Delhi in minutes rather than hours; and they mourned the emergence
of the ‘vast sprawling multicoloured soulless monster of today which we con-
tinue to call by the same name’.1 The public memory of Partition in the north-
west of South Asia was gradually put to rest. Grave and invisible legacies lived
on in less tangible ways, in emotional scarring and sporadic political friction,
but observers were happy enough to buy into the story of regenerative enter-
prise told by both national governments.
Beneath the glossy factories and the meteoric rise and endless expansion
of new cities, though, Partition left deep and ragged fault lines. These ran
through individual lives, families and whole regions, pitching Indians and Pak-
istanis into new conflicts and paving the way for the troubled bilateral relation-
ship which blights South Asia to the present day.
In the 1940s and 1950s people were not well equipped with the language
of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; it was too much to hope for any systematic
understanding of the collective trauma which a generation had experienced.
Partition had a widespread psychological impact which may never be fully
recognised or traced. This afflicted not only refugees but also eyewitnesses,
perpetrators of violence, aid workers, politicians and policemen; arguably hun-
dreds of thousands of people living in the northern and eastern parts of South
Asia. The immediate trauma of the refugees was well testified in their frozen
and fixed faces, uncontrollable tears and shocked inertia. More invasive men-
tal health problems may have plagued some people for the rest of their lives.
People who had managed to get away or who had been strong enough to se-
cure themselves a place in a train compartment, or who had remained hidden
while other members of their community were killed, felt guilt. Others experi-
enced culturally specific shame and humiliation related to violations of reli-
gious or community rights that inverted the normal social order. ‘One woman
wept hysterically,’ recounted Margaret Bourke-White, ‘as she told me how her
home was polluted by Muslim goondas who placed raw meat on the window
sills.’ For others, fear of starvation had left a deep mark – ‘they started stealing
food,’ remembered Krishna Thapar who worked at an ashram in Punjab with
rescued women: ‘we would find chapatis under their pillows, under their quilts,
and their beds … Some of them had become psychological cases.’2 Some peo-
ple went, quite literally, mad.
For women the trauma of rape, molestation and abduction was so grave,
and made even worse in many cases because of the cultural taboos surround-
ing it, that it is unclear how recovery was possible at all. Relief workers were
under enormous strain. ‘None of us had the ability to understand the psychol-
ogy of these women nor did we try,’ admitted the social worker Anis Kidwai.
‘The few sentences that are spouted at such occasions proved totally ineffec-
tive, and often we ended up saying very unpleasant things to them.’3 Social
workers often tried to steer the conversation away from memories of trauma,
encouraged their charges to look to the future, and had a limited grasp of their
psychological needs. They can only be judged against the standards and prac-
tices of the time. For those who saw scenes of devastation or lost loved ones,
life was punctured by panic attacks and ugly nightmares for many years.
Some twenty years later, Begum Ikramullah wrote, ‘I somehow have never
been able to get over the shocked impact the Calcutta riots had on me’ and
Manzoor Quraishi's otherwise prosaic account of life in the Indian Civil Service
is suddenly interrupted by the memory of a brother who lost his life on a train to
Pakistan: ‘I loved my younger brother and could not get over the brutal and
tragic end of a brilliant career at the young age of 24 years. For months I could
not sleep properly and insomnia that I got from this horrible and traumatic ex-
perience has haunted me now and then throughout my life thereafter. My
mother whose youngest child [had died] was completely heartbroken and
cursed “Pakistan” till she died in 1978 …’4 Urvashi Butalia has pointed to the
ongoing trauma of those who had been children in 1947, ‘his wife told us that
he still had nightmares, that he woke in the night feeling an intense heat rising
up around him, the flames which surrounded him as he lay by his father's body
in 1947’, while in one instance a perpetrator of violence is also haunted by the
events of the time: ‘Another Sikh living in Bhogal in Delhi who had actually
been part of a killing spree as a child, would often wake in the night screaming.
His wife said he could not forget the screams of the Muslims he had helped to
kill.’5 These could have been exceptional cases but it seems more likely that
Partition continued to echo, unrecorded, in anonymous stories of breakdowns,
alcoholism and suicide.
A prolonged Partition
There were other invisible trails left by Partition. By late 1948, politicians
were relieved that violence had subsided, and Nehru in particular was de-
lighted that the annexation of the troublesome state of Hyderabad passed with-
out trouble elsewhere in India. He saw this as a sign that the corner had been
turned and was elated that ‘not a single communal incident occurred in the
whole length and breadth of this great country’.6 Sadly though, questions of cit-
izenship and belonging still hung in the balance and there were numerous peo-
ple and communities who had grey, uncertain allegiances to India or Pakistan
and had slipped between the cracks formed by these neat parameters of na-
tionhood.
In Bengal, in contrast to the north-west, the physical reality of the refugee
crisis was only just beginning to take shape in the 1950s. By 1951, there were
at least three million refugees squeezed into every nook and cranny of Cal-
cutta. They slept on pavements and in Nissen huts, made their homes on rail-
way platforms and along riverbanks. The consequences could not be easily ig-
nored and the unceasing flow of refugees brought India and Pakistan to the
brink of war in early 1950. As Nehru wrote to the British Prime Minister, Attlee,
in 1950 the treatment of minorities in both countries was ‘far more important
for the maintenance of peace than the settlement of the Kashmir dispute’.7 A
proclamation of emergency was kept ready to be used at a moment's notice in
West Bengal and the Governor suggested declaring a state of martial law. The
prolonged, tortuous Partition of Bengal would prove a whole chapter in the Par-
tition story. It was a political and social drama which stretched well into the
twentieth century. The war of 1971, and the secession of Bangladesh from
Pakistan, exacerbated the human crisis in the region and, by 1973, West Ben-
gal was coping with a refugee population of around six million.
After 1947 East Pakistan's ability to survive hung in the balance and the
province's continued viability as a part of Pakistan was already in doubt. The
desperately poor, waterlogged province, economically dependent on the unreli-
able jute crop and physically distanced from the Pakistani capital one thousand
miles away, had to struggle with two dominant issues from the moment of its
independence: on its borders it faced a refugee crisis of epic proportions and a
brewing conflict with India, while East Bengalis also began a long battle with
their compatriots in Karachi, who began trying to stamp their cultural and politi-
cal imprint on the province. Jinnah declared Urdu the Pakistani national lan-
guage in 1948, deaf to the passion of Bengali linguistic patriotism and the
complaints of the majority of Pakistanis who could not speak the language.
After Independence, East Pakistan suffered from inflation and shortages of
basic goods as it was cut off from Calcutta, but the Chittagong port, which was
critical for East Pakistan's industrial development and imports, was developed
too slowly. All this was underlined by bigotry shown towards the rural Bengali
peasantry and a barely concealed implication that the province was a poor
cousin to the ‘real’ Pakistan: Jinnah took seven months to make his first brief
visit to Dacca and although Liaquat Ali Khan announced that he would aim at
two visits a year, he never managed to reach his own target. The fissures which
would eventually result in civil war, the bloody cracking apart of the country and
the creation of Bangladesh in 1970–1 were already visible in 1947.
Meanwhile, massive communities of Hindus who remained in East Bengal
found little to commend in their poorly administered new country, and clung
tenaciously to their older political affiliations. Many had ties to Calcutta and re-
mained unreconciled to Partition, which was seen as an arbitrary imposition
from outside. ‘Their temple bells can be heard in the evening and in their shops
in the bazaar are exhibited portraits of Nehru, Patel and other Indian leaders,’
noted one foreign visitor to Dacca.8 Hindus had overwhelmingly been the za-
mindars, or landlords, in undivided Bengal, while Muslims had been the ten-
ants, and Hindus remained the wealthy gatekeepers of Bengali bhadralok cul-
ture; even in 1950 they still dominated the Dacca bar and held one third of the
university's places.9 Simultaneously, the promises of Pakistani nationalism had
fired the imagination of Muslim tenants who hoped to improve their lot at the
expense of their erstwhile masters. In this light, well-meaning Pakistani guaran-
tees of a plural state decreed from the capital, and the promise of a 30 per
cent reservation for the minority, looked hollow and capricious from the per-
spective of the East Bengali Hindu who, although represented in the provincial
Legislative Assembly, had no figurehead in the cabinet and little reason to be-
lieve that his children or grandchildren would benefit from the same access to
educational opportunities and legal rights as himself.
Fears of outright persecution were strengthened by real assaults and mur-
ders of East Bengalis in the grievous riots in Khulna, Chittagong, Barishal and
Sylhet in 1950 and the ruthless requisitioning of Hindu property by a partisan
and unaccountable state administration. Disentangling the truth from fiction
about the persecution of East Bengali minorities is still immensely problematic,
but as news of rapes, murders and massacres gained currency, fears of war
between the two countries over Kashmir and the worried intercessions from
family members and political groups on the Indian side of the border all added
to the maelstrom. Rich and poor Bengali Hindus became fused in a new collec-
tive consciousness of their vulnerable minority status. The full ambiguities of
Pakistan's territorial creation came to light as many Bengalis on both sides of
the border lamented its creation and echoed Vallabhbhai Patel's declaration
that Partition was a tragedy.
Ultimately, although some minorities held out in East Pakistan and tried to
preserve their community rights, there was an alternative option for those who
decided that they could not remain in East Bengal: migration to India. Many did
not think this would be permanent, while some remained in East Pakistan for
as long as possible and tried to claim their political rights, waiting for the storm
to pass. Migration decimated ever more communities, leaving small isolated
families targets for criminals and creating a vicious circle. By early 1950 some
of the Congress regarded war as possibly the only solution that would stop the
tide of refugees, push back Pakistan's borders and create a safe zone for non-
Muslims in East Bengal which could be subsumed within Indian territory. Daily
border clashes and riots in East Bengal started to threaten the security of Mus-
lims in North India, in Calcutta and West Bengal and in March 1950 riots in
East Bengal had ‘repercussions’ hundreds of miles way. The reflex action of
many Indian Muslim communities was to pack up their belongings and to con-
sider the possibility of migration to Pakistan. ‘The common folks are concerned
– peasants, artisans, metal workers, domestic servants and the like,’ Nehru
lamented. ‘Their panchayats decide and whole groups pack up and want to
go.’10
Independence had not delivered on its promises. J.N. Mandal, the leader of
the local dalits who had vigorously backed the Pakistan demand and had been
sworn in as a minister in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, was racked with
regret and dashed expectations. In 1950 he resigned from his post and mi-
grated to India. It was the result of a long personal tussle with his own emo-
tions and responsibilities. ‘It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustra-
tion at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses
of East Bengal,’ he wrote sadly in his resignation letter, ‘that I feel compelled to
tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet.’ The daily persecution
and harassment of peasants whom Mandal was elected to represent had be-
come too much as ‘untouchables’ found themselves discriminated against, at-
tacked and persecuted in East Pakistan, lumped together in popular thinking
with ‘Hindus’ and exploited by unaccountable administrators who, Mandal was
convinced, were determined to squeeze out all the minorities from the land.
The riots in East Bengal 1950 proved the final straw for Mandal like many
others. ‘The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on rail-
way lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave
me the rudest shock,’ he wrote. ‘I was really overwhelmed with grief.’ Shortly af-
terwards, Mandal made his way to India. The final part of the sorry tale came
afterwards in a twist which reflects both the ironies and the complications of
defining citizenship in the partitioned subcontinent. Mandal's departure was
rewritten as treachery and anti-nationalism. The Pakistani Prime Minister,
standing on an airfield in Karachi, when asked about his minister's departure
declared that he hoped Mandal would come back to Pakistan. ‘A number of na-
tionals betray their country and run away,’ Liaquat Ali Khan declared imperi-
ously to the assembled journalists, ‘but by doing that they do not cease to be
the nationals of that country.’11
Once again the murky lack of clarification about citizenship entangled the
two states. The bitterness engendered by Partition was still palpable and in
1950 the prime ministers bickered in personal letters to each other about re-
sponsibility for the violence in 1947.12 ‘The disturbances which led to mass mi-
grations covered three hundred thousand square miles in Pakistan,’ argued an
Indian government pamphlet, ‘while the area affected in India was only eighty-
seven thousand square miles.’13 The real cost of Partition was lost in this
scramble to attribute blame.
Both governments became blind to the real human misery of the refugees
as the ‘refugee question’ became another focal point for Indo-Pakistani con-
flict. In provocative rhetoric the governments fixated on their own righteous-
ness, undermined the journalism and reportage emanating from the other na-
tion's press and denied their own culpability for what had happened in 1947.
‘Wielding administrative power and having at their command the police and the
military as engines of oppression, these [Pakistani] officials committed the
worst savagery in human history. The riots in West Punjab had their natural
repercussions in East Punjab, of which exaggerated reports were published in
the Pakistan press and broadcast by the Pakistan radio,’14 claimed the Indian
government publications division while Pakistani propaganda perpetuated simi-
larly partial interpretations in pamphlets such as The Sikh Plan in Action. The
question of culpability for the crisis of 1947 remained a powerful silence in the
background of later diplomatic discussions over Kashmir, and it still exerts a
deep-seated force in the official mindset of both nations.
War over conditions in Bengal was narrowly averted in 1950. The Indian
and Pakistani prime ministers sealed the peace – at least temporarily – by
signing a far-sighted pact in April 1950. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact addressed
desperately urgent questions of fair press reportage, protection for migrants in
transit, affirmation of minority rights, the property rights of migrants and
restoration of women who had been held captive against their will. It came just
in the nick of time.
In Delhi in May 1950 newspaper editors gathered from India and Pakistan
at a joint conference. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact encouraged journalists to
tone down their alarmist coverage of what was happening in the two countries.
Journalists spent hours talking, trying to get to the bottom of what was happen-
ing across the border and learning about life in a place which had now become
mysterious and inaccessible. A Pakistani journalist admitted that he was re-
lieved to find that the reports he had seen in Pakistan of gangs massacring
Muslims had been exaggerated.15 At the conference, journalists wept to see
each other for the first time in three years. On hearing this, Nehru reflected that
the two states had to find a way to get their people to meet as often as possi-
ble. Sadly, the pact was a temporary sticking plaster and this aspiration to-
wards open borders remained a vain hope.
Visas and passports
Ahmad Hussain worked as a mechanic in a tin-printing plant in Lahore. He
had a wife and young children to support and he performed well at his job, ris-
ing to the position of chief mechanic. During Partition, in 1947, the factory
where he had been employed for over a decade was looted and his employer,
the mill-owner Amar Nath Bindra, fled to India. We do not know what Ahmad
Hussain made of this, or whether he was able to find alternative employment,
as his life goes unrecorded in the archives until one day a year later when his
former employer contacted him.
The indefatigable Amar Nath Bindra had managed to find his feet in the city
of Mathura in North India. He had borrowed some money from the central gov-
ernment, and along with the help of ‘some good-hearted capitalist’ had man-
aged to re-establish his factory, set up the necessary equipment and machinery
and had even secured a supply of precious electricity. But now he faced a prob-
lem: he could not find suitably skilled workers needed to operate the newly in-
stalled plant. His mind turned to the men he had left behind in Pakistan. If they
could come and help him, even for a limited time, he could get the factory run-
ning and use them to train some new staff. ‘I had to request the Government to
allow me to have my old five Muslim artisans from Lahore who worked in my
factory there for about ten years,’ he wrote to the Refugee Department: ‘during
that time they served me so honestly, sincerely and faithfully that I cannot still
dream that they belong to other Nationality or Dominion and I hold implicit faith
in them. [sic]’16
Remarkably, this appeal worked and Ahmad Hussain was granted a six-
month permit to travel to India from Pakistan, along with his teenage son,
Bashir Mohammad, completely against the flow of refugees still moving in the
opposite direction. Leaving his wife and three younger children behind in La-
hore, Ahmad Hussain was reunited with his old boss in India, where he re-
sumed his former occupation. Periodically, the factory boss applied to extend
the men's permits: ‘when large numbers of such Muslims who are not at all of
any use to India are being retained in India,’ he pleaded, in a revealing letter, ‘I
see no cause why these only two most useful persons [sic] be not retained to
train our people. I will stand any surety for these people.’ The pay, or the local
conditions, must have been to Ahmad Hussain's liking as in 1950 he applied
for permanent settlement in India.17
Now, though, three years after Partition, borderlines and permit situations
had hardened between India and Pakistan and the governments were introduc-
ing passports for the first time. Ahmad Hussain's life collided once again with
the contingencies of Partition and the state-making processes. In 1951, Ahmad
Hussain and Bashir Mohammad had both overstayed their permits, their appli-
cations were rejected and father and son were forced to separate from their
employer for the final time and were ordered by the police to return to Pak-
istan.
‘I do not consider Pakistan and India as two different countries. If I have to
go to the Punjab, I am not going to ask for a passport. And I shall go to Sind
also without a passport and I shall go walking. Nobody can stop me.’18 Gandhi
made this declaration to his audience at a daily prayer meeting a fortnight after
the plan for Partition had been agreed and, as so often, he captured the pre-
vailing Zeitgeist. The creation of Pakistan was now a certainty, yet despite all
the violence, the public anticipated soft borders and hoped for a free and easy
association with the neighbouring country. In the summer months of 1947
there was the occasional debate in the press about whether passports would
be necessary between India and Pakistan but, on the whole, the question was
ignored.
The permanent separation of Indians and Pakistanis from each other, and
their inability to cross the new border, was the most long-lasting and divisive
aspect of Partition although it was barely taken into consideration by the politi-
cians at the time. It is doubtful if even the leaders fully appreciated the full im-
plications of the rubric of the Partition plan as they deferred the question of
passports until a later date, leaving it to the two independent dominions to de-
cide their own border defences and immigration controls. In the summer of
1947 few could appreciate the full connotations of the division which would ul-
timately result in some of the harshest border regulations in the world; indeed
one newspaper headline read ‘Passport rules believed to be needless at pre-
sent.’19
By this date even less affluent Indians travelled widely around the subconti-
nent as the railways delivered the possibility of cheap long distance journeys to
pilgrimage sites, for trade and to attend and arrange weddings. It seemed un-
thinkable that destinations mapped in the imagination would become unreach-
able. ‘I did realise that it meant saying goodbye to my home and friends,’ re-
called one future Pakistani Foreign Minister ‘most people didn't think that an
iron curtain would come down’.20 Although the idea of distinct nation states
was starting to take root, few thought that India and Pakistan would be hermet-
ically sealed off from each other. A natural corollary to the empirical confusions
surrounding Pakistan's territorial extent and Pakistan's intrinsic meaning was
that it took a long time for people to come to grips with the idea of India and
Pakistan as separate sovereign lands. Members of so-called ‘divided families’
– often of Kashmiri or North Indian origin – even if they made definitive choices
in favour of India or Pakistan, did not anticipate the weighty consequences of
such a decision. ‘I went in November,’ recalled the renowned Urdu author, Inti-
zar Husain. ‘When I left, I had no idea that people who had migrated could
never go back to the places they had left behind. That their link with the past
had snapped.’21 In the semi-autobiographical novel Sunlight on a Broken Col-
umn two Muslim brothers in North India squabble about the future in 1947 and
one decides to stay in India while the other opts to migrate to Pakistan:
‘Can you imagine every time we want to see each other we'll have to cross national fron-
tiers? Maybe even have to get visas,’ he added wryly. ‘Oh come on Kemal,’ Saleem laughed,
‘there is no need to be as dramatic as all that. Visas indeed!’22
An early permit system devised in 1948 gradually evolved into full-blown cit-
izenship legislation. By 1951 Indians and Pakistanis required a passport and
visa to cross Radcliffe's infamous line in the west of the country, although the
meandering East Bengali border continued to be both more porous and less
systematically policed for a longer time and great stretches had not yet been
marked out with barbed wire or guarded with border posts. Naturally, the poor
and the illiterate could not afford the passport fee and the legal minefield of
Pakistani and Indian citizenship caused hardship and complications.
The system of entry and exit permits, which began as a logical attempt to
regulate the refugee flow, soon turned into a restrictive administrative regime
which became self-sustaining. Now the aim was to keep out terrorists and ene-
mies of the state, as well as stopping people from making claims on national
welfare systems or abusing the franchise. Most of all, the governments needed
to pin down precisely who was an Indian and who was a Pakistani. There was
no room for ambiguities or uncertain grey areas. Excessive red tape tied the
hands of those who wished to conduct trade or visit friends and relatives on
the other side of the border. At least seven categories of visa existed between
India and Pakistan by the mid–1950s. In reality, access became difficult and
cast suspicion on those who wanted to cross the border, while strict conditions
were attached to the visits and tough regulations limited the goods that could
be transported. Carrying gold, for example, was strictly forbidden.
Long after Partition the messy complications of real lives – which did not fit
within these paper categories – generated large numbers of court cases, de-
portations and arrests. The High Courts regularly heard cases in the 1950s and
1960s which hinted at a panoply of human dramas: wives who had migrated
with their husbands to Pakistan but now wanted to return to their families in
India, complications caused by cross-border marriages and divorces, the de-
fence of people who claimed they were forced to go to India or Pakistan against
their own free will, the arguments of those who had entered on false or forged
passports, claimed to hold two nationalities or who overstayed their visas.23
Indeed, the legacies of these boundary awards have sharpened rather than
blunted over time and all the paraphernalia of border control – barbed wire and
fencing (more prominent in the west than in the east, but currently expanding
along the Indo-Bangladeshi border), land mines, thermal imagers, floodlighting
and underground sensors designed to trap ‘infiltrators’ – have been brought to
bear along Radcliffe's pencil lines. Over time the determination with which
these borders have been patrolled has ebbed and flowed depending on the cli-
mate of relations between the countries but the general trajectory has been to-
wards more heavily guarded borders.
Limbs and lives have been lost as villagers caught in the middle of the bor-
der areas try to continue ploughing the land. ‘As a major part of the fence re-
mains unlit, chances of anti-national elements sneaking in are there,’ com-
mented the Director-General of the Indian Border Security Force interviewed in
2006 about the policing of the Indo-Bangladesh border. ‘This year alone we
have shot dead 75 people trying to cross the border.’ 24 Local people and bor-
der guards fall victim to routine border ‘scuffles.’ Fishermen sailing in the Ara-
bian Sea swept along unknowingly into foreign waters are routinely arrested
and imprisoned.
Currently, confidence-building measures agreed by the Indian and Pakistani
governments in 2004 give new reasons for optimism and enable separated
families to meet, often for the first time in decades; poor fishermen have been
freed and repatriated, the limited bus and train services between Amritsar and
Lahore resumed and new ones, most significantly the Thar express train which
crosses between Sind and Rajasthan and the Pan-Kashmir bus from Srinigar to
Muzaffarabad, have started. Given the language of impermanency surrounding
the creation of Partition and the limited way in which the emergent nation-
alisms related to territory, the monumental permanence of these borders is
paradoxical, and has had contemporary consequences barely imaginable to the
political protagonists in 1947.
These divisions have, over the years, thrown up some spectacular oddities
and ironies: Fazal Mahmood, the legendary fast bowler and cricket captain,
was picked to play for India on its maiden tour of Australia in 1947–8, and
even attended a conditioning camp in Pune before the team's departure. On
his way to Delhi, though, the twenty-year-old player was unable to proceed be-
cause of the violence. ‘I was informed about the slaughter when I reached the
airport,’ he recalled much later. ‘I could not go to Delhi and Lahore. A kindly
passenger gave me his ticket, and I managed to travel to Karachi. The incident
changed my life. I decided to stay in Pakistan. I had a lot in India, emotionally
and financially, but I had to reconcile myself and settle down in Pakistan.’25
Heading up the Pakistani national side, he played against India on numerous
occasions. Another of the quirks of Partition was that many of the first and sec-
ond generation of the leading officers in the Indian and Pakistani military facing
each other across the Kashmiri line of control in the wars of the twentieth cen-
tury had been close colleagues and worked alongside each other during the
days before Independence. In one such instance, an Indian soldier, General
Sinha, was responsible for the custody of an old Pakistani friend, General Niazi,
as a prisoner of war after his capture during the 1971 conflict. Prior to Partition
the pair had served together as captains in Indonesia during the Second World
War.26
These borders and demands of statehood persist and are far more than ab-
stractions. Border enclaves on the Indo-Bangladeshi border are perhaps the
most extreme and bizarre, yet painfully real, example of Partition's logic. A prod-
uct of 1947, they continue to exist and shape the lives of South Asians up to
the present day. There are 123 border enclaves technically belonging to
Bangladesh within India and 74 border enclaves which are legally Indian terri-
tories within Bangladesh lying in the eastern border region. These are tiny
pieces of land stranded in a wider sea of the ‘other’ state. They came about as
a result of the absorption of the princely state of Cooch Behar, sandwiched be-
tween the borderlines of East Pakistan and India in 1949. These scraps of land
were legal oddities under the sovereign control of Cooch Behar's ruler, rem-
nants of India's pre-colonial past and reminders of the piecemeal way in which
the subcontinent's political map had emerged. With better diplomatic effort
they could have been exchanged between the two new states after Partition. In-
stead, a 1958 agreement to effect the exchange has not been implemented,
and the enclaves have persisted as a technical and legal anachronism, with
devastating consequences for the inhabitants. People living in these tiny
patches of land have had their lives and identities stretched to the most incred-
ible limits by the demands of nationality and statehood.
Technically ‘Indian’ but living in Bangladesh, or vice versa, enclave dwellers
have found it immensely difficult to travel or trade beyond the limits of their tiny
isolated enclaves, and their movement has sometimes been at the risk of dan-
ger or death, while criminals and opportunists have taken advantage of law-
lessness within these third spaces. Enclave inhabitants have been living tax
free so these isolated areas have been abandoned by officials and left without
a franchise, policing, roads, healthcare or electricity supplies. The enclaves
have, in short, made successive generations of South Asians ‘stateless’ human
beings in a world now defined by nation states.27
All these consequences of Partition have reinforced the estrangement of
the two nation states. These twists and turns that have followed on from 1947
are far removed from the hopes and dreams of swaraj and Pakistan which peo-
ple rallied to in the late 1940s. Indians and Pakistanis continue to feel the un-
foreseen repercussions of the 3 June plan. At the same time, they also live
alongside memories and amnesia about what took place in 1947.
Remembering and forgetting
Two episodes which took place in 2005 shine a light on the way in which
Partition is simultaneously remembered and forgotten in South Asia today.
On 4 June 2005, a remarkable event occurred. A seventy-five-year-old In-
dian, L.K. Advani, climbed the steps to a glistening white marble monument in
Pakistan's chief commercial city and former capital, Karachi. To the sound of
bugles blasted by a Pakistani guard of honour, he laid a large wreath of purple
and pink flowers at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Honouring a man who
has been dead for over half a century can still have dangerous political reper-
cussions as Advani, president and co-founder of the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the chief opposition party in present-day India,
quickly discovered. In India, Jinnah is, of course, widely reviled as the progeni-
tor of Pakistan and the architect of a mistaken partition of the subcontinent,
while Pakistanis cherish his memory as their greatest leader and the founder of
their Muslim state. Advani, who later wrote in the visitors' book that Jinnah was
a ‘great man’ who forcefully espoused ‘a secular state in which every citizen
would be free to practise his own religion’, was committing virtual heresy in the
eyes of many in his own party who remember Jinnah as a dangerous religious
fundamentalist who forced the division of the subcontinent. BJP members
called for their party president's immediate resignation.28
Advani is not known to be a friend of Pakistan, and is renowned more as a
doughty-looking hawk than as a dovish peace campaigner whose personal un-
derstanding of Indian nationalism rests upon the bedrock of exclusivist Hindu
ideology. His party is usually noted for its demonisation of minority groups, par-
ticularly Muslims and, by extension, for a suspicious attitude towards Pakistan.
In the past he was nicknamed Demolition Man by the Pakistani press for his
role in instigating the brick-by-brick destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri
Masjid mosque in the North Indian town of Ayodhya in 1992 so his utterances
in Pakistan unleashed widespread speculation about his motives. What had
happened? Had Advani made an error of judgement and become sentimental
in his old age or was this a calculated strategy to reinvent the party and
broaden its electoral base? Did he really believe that Jinnah was secular? In
retrospect it seems that he had made a miscalculation while trying to broaden
the electoral foundations of the party and cultivate a role for himself as a cen-
trist elder statesman at the hub of national life.
His comments, however, struck at the heart of all the nationalist myths that
are held sacred by Indians and Pakistanis, and in both countries the front
pages of newspapers were consumed with the story, while reams of editorial
revisited the minutiae of Jinnah's character and his political intentions in the
1940s. Roundly condemned across the board by his own party, Advani was
forced to resign temporarily as president of the BJP, an embarrassing episode
that signalled the beginning of his withdrawal from Indian politics and perma-
nent removal from the post at the end of 2005. Myths of Partition are deeply
ingrained and Jinnah is characterised here as a cardboard cut-out hero or anti-
hero. Breaking Partition's myths comes with a price.
There was an added twist to the story; Advani, in common with President
Musharraf of Pakistan, belongs to a family displaced by the Partition of 1947.
Both men and their families were among the twelve million people uprooted.
Both have lived the remainder of their lives many miles from their ancestral
homes, which are now absorbed into foreign territory. They also belong to that
first generation of independent citizens who played a part in consolidating India
and Pakistan as distinct nation states and in fashioning these nations from the
remnants of the Raj.
Although there are currently reasons to be optimistic about a new détente
in Indo-Pakistan relations, the unfortunate price of the emergence of these
states has been the mutual hostility of the countries. There have been three
wars since 1947, the development of nuclear weaponry, and a putative cold
war. The movement of people and goods across 2,600 kilometres of interna-
tional borderline remains highly restricted. Yet, despite persistent animosities,
a paradoxical fascination with and attraction to the former homeland lingers.
Like Musharraf, who came to India in July 2001 and visited his crumbling an-
cestral home in the crowded alleys of Old Delhi, Advani desired to see places in
his home town of Karachi that he had left behind as a teenager when he de-
parted for India. With his wife and daughter he visited his former house and his
old school – the school, coincidentally, that was also attended by Musharraf as
a boy – and he expressed genuine emotion in the face of the intervening years:
‘I was truly overwhelmed by the warmth and affection of the people … I must
confess that I am somewhat at a loss to articulate the totality of my feelings
and thoughts…’29
In Pakistan, three months later, another episode equally signalled Parti-
tion's deep-seated political significance, which continues to resonate to the
present day. On Independence Day 2005, President Musharraf attended a cer-
emony inaugurating a mammoth 330 million rupee building project in Lahore.
The plan, known as Bab-e-Pakistan, has been in the pipeline since 1991. Archi-
tectural designs promise a sleek geometric structure, soaring into the sky,
which will be reflected in a rectangular ornamental pool below; locals have also
been promised a lavish new mosque, library, garden, restaurants and sports fa-
cilities. Standing on a platform in front of a large, graphic painting in which a
pantheon of national heroes loomed as he inaugurated the start of the con-
struction work, the President of Pakistan invoked the suffering of refugees and
their sacrifices at the time of Partition. ‘They were fired by passion and had an
unswerving hope in Pakistan,’ he declared.30 For the land on which Bab-e-Pak-
istan will stand is the exact site of the Walton refugee camp, the camp in La-
hore through which millions of Pakistanis trudged on their traumatic journey,
and the purpose of the project is to memorialise both the camp and the wider
story of Partition. The monument (and the library and exhibitions to be hosted
within it) will tell a linear story of the triumphal emergence of Pakistan and al-
though the bloodiness of Partition will have a place in this tale, it will be
glossed with the language of martyrdom and suffering in the cause of the Pak-
istani state. The Bab-e-Pakistan project has little to say about the experiences
of non-Muslims and avoids delving into the shared responsibility for violence at
the time of Partition.
These official versions of history have hardly gone unchallenged; some Pak-
istani observers immediately called for a more representative memorial. ‘If
Bab-e-Pakistan has to be built,’ suggested a newspaper editorial pointedly, ‘let
it represent suffering of all refugees from both sides.’31 Nevertheless, the
memories of the squalid refugee camp are to be carefully repackaged in the
form of a national monument, and the memories of bewildering social up-
heaval are to be replaced with a providential, chalked-out destiny.
All memorials and monuments, like history books, have their own ratio-
nales, and tell a very particular story. A different criticism sometimes levelled at
the governments of South Asia is that they have failed to commemorate the
brutality of 1947 in any way at all. In India there is only one official monument
to the victims of Partition, the Martyrs' Monument in Chandigarh, the experi-
mental city built after Independence as a symbolic focal point of national re-
generation and as a new capital of Indian Punjab. Here, in a square enclosure
near to the heart of governance, stone sculptures of a lion, a snake and a
prone human figure are intended to symbolise the sufferings of the Punjabis in
1947. However, the lack of other, official, public memorials does not mean that
Partition is in any way forgotten.
The political power of the memory of Partition, and the state's ability to ap-
propriate and manipulate these memories, has been graphically shown since
1947. A subtle and diffuse but no less politicised picture of Partition has ex-
tremely wide currency. Throughout the length and breadth of South Asia the
contents of well-thumbed schoolbooks in children's satchels, regurgitated in
undigested chunks for school examinations, tell opposing and sanctified ver-
sions of the story of Partition. In India this blends together the tales of the Mus-
lim League's intransigence, its ‘communal’ or religiously slanted political orien-
tation that made it impervious to cries of unity and resulted in the fracturing of
India. In this story, Pakistan's creation is entirely illegitimate and it is the failure
of the Leaguers to accept a secular, plural, peace-loving state which is at fault.
In this line of thinking, Partition as a violent, human tragedy is spliced together
with Partition as a political mistake. For this reason, the Indian child hears very
little about the ways in which the violence came about and the polarisation of
the League and the Congress in wartime India, or of Congress's own ambiva-
lences about religious nationalism and alliances with militant cadres.
This is at odds with the picture that emerges in Pakistan; here the state
proactively engages in rewriting the history of Partition as one of martyrdom,
courage and victimhood. Pakistanis, so the story goes, triumphantly created
the state, and gave up their lives for it, in the face of a planned attempt to bring
Pakistan to a point of collapse at the moment of the country's inception. In this
reading, the Congress was little more than a front for a Hindu and Sikh conspir-
acy. In the textbooks of both countries, national leaders are extolled as heroes,
and at its worst extreme this takes the form of a kind of morality play or fable
about the foundational moment of the state. But it is the absences in the
schoolbooks that are most striking. As Krishna Kumar, who has turned his criti-
cal eye on the production and consumption of these textbooks ironically ob-
serves, when it comes to the description of Partition violence, there are more
similarities than differences in the way that Indian and Pakistan school histo-
ries approach the thorny question of Partition's bloodiness: ‘The two narratives
come remarkably close in the cursory manner in which they deal with the vio-
lence associated with Partition. The horror and suffering that millions of ordi-
nary men and women faced receive no more than a few lines of cold recording
in most Indian and Pakistani textbooks.’32
The Partition of 1947 cannot simply be regarded as a historical event lo-
cated in the past. It may appear in history books on sale in every bookshop of
India and Pakistan but it is not history if ‘history’ is considered to consist of
past events that are detached from the political decision-making processes of
contemporary South Asian life. Advani's faux pas underlined how national inter-
pretations of Partition – why it happened and who was responsible – have be-
come ideological shibboleths and have a firm grip on the popular imagination
in both countries. There are still strict taboos on what can be said about Parti-
tion, and national myths persist, far beyond the limits of the more extreme na-
tionalist parties.
This does not mean that Partition is ignored. Far from it: Partition crops up
repeatedly, on South Asian television, in the newspapers, and in a torrent of
published memoirs, cinematic and fictional accounts, and these interpretations
have a direct bearing on how each neighbour perceives the other. Memories
and histories of Partition continue to reinforce and shape each other and are
intimately bound to the understandings of nationhood which have come to pre-
dominate in both of these countries.
South Asians are simultaneously wary of and hungry for stories of Partition,
whether discussing the publication of previously unpublished political diaries or
debating the representation of events in the latest Bollywood film or bestselling
novel. It is living history that is preserved inside family homes by women and
men, many of whom live alongside memories of terrible trauma, which are re-
told and passed on to descendants. Stories about Pakistan and Partition im-
press themselves upon the reader during a random browse through any issue
of an Indian news magazine: a television show that features debates about
Indo-Pakistani relations between guests from both countries, an article about a
recent India–Pakistan cricket match, including a story about the experiences of
an elderly Indian couple who took the opportunity to return to the Pakistani city
of Rawalpindi, ‘where they easily located their old family home. To their delight,
it still bears their father's nameplate’, an article on the suppression of popular
Indian satellite channels on Pakistani television.
On the Pakistani side of the border, an equivalent magazine will throw up
parallel stories: the construction of a railway station to receive the newly
planned cross-border Thar Express train, an article recounting a recent visit to
India by a Pakistani artist who enjoyed touring Jaipur and Hyderabad and also
took the opportunity to meet up with distant relatives, commenting, ‘My
cousins in India are now the third generation after partition.’33 Echoes of Parti-
tion resonate in contemporary discourse, and domestic and foreign policy deci-
sions are shaped, and received, by the experience and memories of 1947. Def-
initions of each country's own nationhood have often been made dialectically,
through an engagement with and perception of the other state and for this rea-
son it is difficult to evade the analogies of birth and childhood in descriptions of
bilateral relations, and the characterisation of the emergence of the two states
as sibling-rivals.
Both national capitals have produced one-dimensional versions of the past.
There has been a lot invested in perpetuating false memories and myth. Never-
theless, a broad sweep of Indians and Pakistanis remember 1947 in far more
subtle ways. In films, novels and poetry the violence of Partition has seeped
deeply into the cultural imagination. Bollywood has approached Partition from
many angles; some films, such as Deepa Mehta's Earth and Chandra Prakash
Dwivedi's Pinjar, are beautifully restrained depictions of the times. In the
1980s, the novel Tamas was controversially serialised on Indian television to
great acclaim. Other films are, however, gung-ho excuses for nationalistic pos-
turing. Sales of translations and new editions of Partition fiction and poetry are
booming in both countries, and the work of writers such as Saadat Hasan
Manto, Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni and Intizar Husain are as popular as
ever, while new writers revisit the perennial yet ever-intriguing themes of lost
homelands, regret, the pain of separation and the gross violence. Responses to
Partition cannot easily be pigeonholed. They traverse the full range of human
emotions from the acrimonious and bitter to the regretful and nostalgic.
Nevertheless, nationalist blinkers have more often than not shaped the way
in which the history of Partition's events has been viewed. The master narra-
tives, even if not accepted simplistically or without cynicism, have been remark-
ably potent. The messy ambiguities of Partition have been underplayed, and
the anachronistic gloss of nationalism varnishes later accounts. As this book
has shown, there is a gulf between these later renderings and the actual expe-
riences of Partition, between the idea and the reality of making two nations in
the theatre of decolonisation in 1947.
 Epilogue

The Indian Raj was at the centre of the experimental tentative process of
forging nation states in the aftermath of empire. Sometimes it has been cele-
brated – in British thinking at least – as a successful act of British decolonisa-
tion, in comparison to the complications that bogged down other European
powers in South East Asia and Africa. Alternatively, it has been presented as a
series of gruesome horrors far removed from political calculations. These stale
views demand reappraisal.
More often than not the history of the Partition of India is read backwards. It
is incredibly difficult to see Partition from the perspective of individuals caught
up in the post-war whirlwind; people who carried on living daily life through the
disintegration of an imperial regime and its replacement by two new nation
states. The fog of nationalist myth-making has been thick and coats Partition
histories in a dark cloak of inevitability. Partition becomes a stepping stone on
a well-trod path and it is too easy to forget how euphoric, confusing, uncertain
or strange those days must have been for people who did not know or trust
that new states were going to replace the tired and discredited British Raj. In-
stead, in many history books Partition becomes the end point, or the apex, of a
great national struggle and the moment at which one set of historical stories,
about achieving liberation from colonial rule ends, and another – about the
building up of these new states – starts. As Nehru, the newly appointed Prime
Minister of India, and a brilliant practitioner of narrative history, unequivocally
stated in 1947, Partition was a ‘watershed’ which was ‘dividing the past from
the future’.1 The result has been that we have taken our cue too readily from
the politicians and the creation of the Indian and Pakistani political economies
of the 1950s are taken for granted. Partition was, in this reading, a massive
but contained historical event. This underestimates the scale of disruption of
1947 and the dangers of the crisis which, arguably, threatened the collapse of
the new post-colonial governments. The outcome was never a foregone conclu-
sion.
This book has taken a rather different angle. It has shown how, for several
years, South Asia was in a deeply ambiguous, transitional position between em-
pire and nationhood that threatened the very existence of the new states them-
selves. There was no straightforward exchange of the baton of government.
The protracted, unruly end of empire in South Asia was a shock of epic propor-
tions that destabilised life for millions of its inhabitants. In 1946, people felt
entirely uncertain about what the future would deliver. It is not implausible that
South Asia could have spiralled into an even more devastating civil war, or that
Pakistan could have failed to come into existence. It is not improbable that the
new states could have been created along entirely different lines or that some
of the princely states could have succeeded in their bids for autonomy. There
was nothing inevitable or pre-planned about the way that Partition unfolded.
Well accustomed as we are nowadays to the contours of these states on the
world map, and given the terrific speed with which they acted to establish
themselves, it is very challenging to visualise the moment at which they could
have been forged in different ways, and what that future might have looked
like.
On 15 August 1947 the first part of the British empire was unhooked from
the imperial metropolis. This history of Partition has suggested that modern na-
tion states had to be crafted out of a chaotic, diffused situation in which myriad
voices made their claims and counter-claims. As the first Asian countries to win
their freedom from empire, India and Pakistan pioneered decolonisation. Few
aspects of this were preconceived or well mapped out.
The flip-side of the story of liberation from colonial rule was the chaos and
violence that engulfed and almost overwhelmed the new states. Nationalism
exacted its own blood price. The violence of 1946–8, so regularly and conve-
niently portrayed by contemporaries and by later historians as the unstoppable
thuggery of madmen and hooligans, in an uncanny parody of the colonial lan-
guage of governance, was, instead, often planned, strategic and linked to mid-
dle-class party politics. The black and white imagery of ragged refugees and
bloodthirsty peasants should be replaced with a technicolour picture of modern
weaponry, strategic planning and political rhetoric, which was used to encour-
age and legitimise the killers and their actions. Fuelled by appeals to an ideal
society and determined to bring about their own interpretations of swaraj and
Pakistan, some of the murderers no doubt operated with the mistaken idea
that they were doing what was best for their nation. Others, living under the
shadow of curfew, daily stabbings and bombings, and exposed to misinforma-
tion and rumour, turned from a position of strategic self-defence to overt ag-
gression. It is beyond doubt that nationalist politicians and enthusiasts from
leading political parties colluded with, and became tangled up in, the mas-
sacres.
Individuals and communities felt the full brunt of Partition, far beyond the
gravest and most deadly sites of violence in Punjab. Centripetally, its effects ra-
diated out from the nerve centres in the north in a broader arc than is usually
presumed. It ripped apart the operation of everyday life in cities across North
India and often made ordinary life altogether impossible. The lives of factory
workers, teachers, government clerks and shopkeepers were massively, albeit
temporarily, disrupted because of the closure of offices and factories, ruptured
train lines, the heightened and abnormally anxious circulation of news and ru-
mour. Unfamiliar and desperate batches of refugees speaking strange tongues
started to turn up unannounced at local railway stations. Relationships with
communities of local people – who were suddenly branded as ‘minorities’ or
‘not one of us’ – were cast in a new light, especially when these groups began
to cluster together and move to another place for their own safety.
New opportunities to make extra profit or to secure promotion opened up
for some. For others, there were major and agonising decisions to make about
whether to leave for India or Pakistan. For the refugees, life would never be the
same again. In the worst affected places, in an almost carnivalesque manner,
relationships between men and women and between families became up-
ended and distorted as every taboo was broken and people clutched at older
caste or regional identities while trying to recreate in strange new conditions
and alien cities something of their former existence. There were small glimmers
of opportunity which enabled, for instance, women to work outside the home,
or to seize the political initiative in their new refugee camp or housing colony.
But it is difficult to see these attempts at an autonomous, dignified life as any-
thing other than small triumphs in the face of unending adversity.
After Partition, there was a sea change. The new national governments in
India and Pakistan worked spectacularly hard at supplanting the endemic con-
fusion with order and at recasting the disorder as the handiwork of thugs and
hooligans. Newly emerging nations, economically and politically precarious in
1947, quickly turned from defensive weakness to literal and metaphorical forti-
fication. From the earliest days of Independence, middle-class contemporaries
regarded state-building and nation-making as part of their inescapable duty. As
this book has argued, new types of nationalism were consolidated in the after-
math of Partition, not only in its prelude. Whether people had previously sup-
ported the League or the Congress had become a secondary consideration by
1947. Crucially, Partition had its own intrinsic revolutionary repercussions. It
was not just the product of the decades of electrifying change which preceded
it.
Pakistan and India are now established facts, distinctive nations, which
have followed trajectories that were scarcely dreamed of by their founders and
supporters in the 1940s. The Partition plan was, in some ways, a genuine com-
promise that allowed for a sharing of land and a division of people and materi-
als. It acknowledged the right to self-determination of a large group of Muslims
who, albeit in a contradictory and confused manner, had expressed their strong
desire to extricate themselves from the Congress's control. For these reasons,
the more optimistic onlookers in June 1947 welcomed the settlement as a so-
lution to the problematic tensions that had been plaguing South Asian politics.
The blueprint, which was loftily imposed from above in 1947, though, has
never escaped the stain of illegitimacy that marred it. It was a plan that went
catastrophically wrong: partly because it was sabotaged by militant groups who
did not subscribe to it and partly because it did not make detailed allowances
for many different grassroots realities that were shaping local politics in the
provinces. Even those inside the limited loop of political information in 1947
were shocked by the speed with which Partition was imposed, the lack of clarity
and reassurance provided to those living along the borderlines, the paucity of
military protection written into the plan, the complete abnegation of duty to-
wards the rights of minorities and failure to elucidate the questions of citizen-
ship. One apparently contradictory aspect of Partition's nature is this tension
between speed and sluggishness, decisiveness and prevarication. Far more
power had already been devolved by 15 August 1947 than is usually acknowl-
edged. The states that were coming into existence were works in progress. If
not entirely responsible for the contending nationalisms that emerged in South
Asia (which it certainly contributed to), the British government's most grievous
failure was the shoddy way in which the plan was implemented.
In a close approximation of each other, India and Pakistan swiftly moved to
consolidate their nations and to define themselves as autonomous states
using all the national apparel they could muster – flags, anthems and national
histories – and by implementing more concrete measures: the policing of
boundaries, the closure of lacunae in the definitions of citizenship and writing
constitutions. None of this is too surprising, but the ‘other’ state necessarily be-
came an object of comparison, a counterpoint, and was, to a greater or lesser
extent, vilified in the process. A cornerstone of nation-making was securing
control of a separate and powerful army. The Kashmir imbroglio and the subse-
quent wars since 1947 have, of course, sustained the tensions between India
and Pakistan and further entrenched the conflict in new and difficult ways. New
grievances and conflicts have arisen because of the growth of militancy, Pak-
istan's backing for violent atrocities carried out in Kashmir and beyond, Indian
human rights abuses in the Kashmir valley, not to forget the complications
caused by the creation of Bangladesh after the war of 1971, the acquisition of
nuclear weaponry, and the complex interplay of national and regional identities
in all three countries.
Not all of South Asia's current problems can be laid at the feet of Partition.
Events have moved on from 1947 and difficulties created by the Radcliffe line
– such as the maintenance of illogical and tricky boundaries – instead of being
salved with the balm of diplomacy have become running sores. Yet, the way in
which Kashmir is usually cited as the cause of these problems overlooks the
way in which Partition itself was the site for, and the origin of, so many of the
ongoing conflicts in South Asia, not least because it was the source of the sus-
picions and national myths that are deeply rooted in the definition of one state
against the other.
Today a peace process is under way in earnest and there are reasons for
optimism as the confidence-building measures agreed between the two govern-
ments are gradually implemented. New bus, rail and air services link up the two
nations. The prospects for commerce are excellent and the surge in bilateral
trade, which crossed the 500 million dollar mark in 2004–5, has outstripped
earlier levels of economic interaction. Chambers of Commerce send eager del-
egations across the border. Film, entertainment and tourism all have wide at-
traction for Indians and Pakistanis who have a shared taste in humour, music
and film. Pilgrims want to visit temples and sacred sites, artists would welcome
the chance to perform to the transnational audience, businessmen know full
well the market for their goods and services across the border which is con-
firmed by the thriving black market in everything from textiles to food products
and electronics. There are recent signs that the ban on showing Indian films in
Pakistani cinemas, which has boosted a pirate industry, may be lifted and Pak-
istani cinemas have been able to screen selected Bollywood movies for the first
time in forty years.
Nevertheless, Indians and Pakistanis are still, despite the ongoing and en-
couraging liberalisation of the visa regime in 2006, kept apart. For sixty years
Indians and Pakistanis have been largely segregated in a manner unthinkable
to the protagonists who agreed to the plan at the fateful meeting on 3 June
1947. The way in which Pakistan and India have evolved as nation states and
the literal, pedantic, policing of nationality in the interim seems in retrospect a
product of the anxieties and insecurities of Partition. The failure at the time to
define Indian and Pakistani citizenship fully, the contradictions of imagined na-
tionalisms and the territorial realities of state-making left a difficult and acrimo-
nious legacy. Today, queues outside visa offices remain long and depressing as
families camp out from early in the morning trying to acquire the necessary pa-
perwork to cross the border, while the visa regime explicitly favours the wealthy
and cosmopolitan. Visas, when issued, still restrict visitors to specific cities,
only allow trips of a short duration and involve complicated and dispiriting reg-
istration with the local police on arrival. It has become ever harder to recover a
sense of what it was like to be a pre-Indian or a pre-Pakistani.
Partition deserves renewed consideration and closer attention for abundant
reasons. It was one of the twentieth century's darkest moments. The millions of
people killed and forced to leave their homes merit greater recognition and a
place closer to the heart of history writing for their own sake. The Partition of
1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colo-
nial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It
stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution,
distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies
that would otherwise have taken different – and unknowable – paths. Partition
is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of
extreme nationalism. For better or worse, two nations continue to live alongside
each other in South Asia and continue to live with these legacies.
 Notes

Introduction: The Plan

1. USSA 845.00/6–647 Box 6070. Gordon Minnigerode to US Secretary of State, 6 June
1947.
2. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, ‘Who Killed India’, in Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The
Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 232.
3. IOR L/PJ/5/140, Akbar Hydari to Mountbatten, 5 June 1947.
4. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p.
106.
5. N. Mansergh, ed., TOP, vol. 11, pp. 86–101.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 96.
8. Ibid., pp. 97–8.
9. As the historian Gyanendra Pandey has stressed, Independence and Partition marked
out the problematic beginning of a process, ‘the normalization of particular communities and
particular histories …’ See Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histo-
ries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 52.
10. Times of India, 4 June 1947.
11. SWJN, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 506; Pakistan Assembly debate, 11 August 1947 repro-
duced in M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan
1941–1951 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 118.
12. The numbers of people who died during Partition are ultimately unknowable. Figures
discussed by contemporaries and historians range from 200,000 to one million. On the diffi-
culties with these figures see G. Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and
History in India (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–91. Paul Brass also
discusses the problem of counting the dead in ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Geno-
cide in the Punjab, 1946–7,’ Journal of Genocide Research, 5.1 (2003), pp. 75–6.
13. M. Hasan, India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection,
1995), vol. 2, p. 156; The Journey to Pakistan: A Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Is-
lamabad: National Documentation Centre, Govt of Pakistan, 1993), p. 258. These incidents
are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.
14. TOP, vol. 11, p. 159. Viceroy's Personal Report, 5 June 1947. For a perceptive cri-
tique of Partition historiography after fifty years of Independence, see David Gilmartin, ‘Parti-
tion, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, Journal of Asian Studies,
57.4 (1998), 1068–1095.
15. These examples are taken from Steven Wilkinson's data set reproduced in S. Wilkin-
son, ed., Religious Politics and Communal Violence (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 405–44. This lists towns with reported ‘communal’ riots in India (and for
the pre-1947 period) Pakistan and Bangladesh; based on two data sets compiled by Wilkin-
son and Ashutosh Varshney using colonial and archival records, published government
records, Indian and British papers and other secondary sources. Wilkinson acknowledges the
 many problems in deciding what constitutes a ‘communal riot’.
16. J. Greenberg, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and
Israel/Palestine’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25.1
(2005), p. 90. Joya Chatterji similarly highlights the misleading use of surgical metaphors to
describe the making of the international borderline between the two countries and the ‘clini-
cal detachment’ with which the operation was presented by the British. Joya Chatterji, ‘The
Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Mod-
ern Asian Studies, 33.1. (Feb. 1999), p. 185.
17. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London:
Hurst, 2000), p. 15. The phrase is from Roland Barthes.

Chapter 1: In the Shadow of War

1. M. Darling, At Freedom's Door (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. xiii, 35–6,
51, 68, 80, 194.
2. Ibid., p. 109.
3. Tan Tai Yong, The Garrison State: The Military, Government and Society in Colonial
Punjab, 1849–1947 (New Delhi and London: Sage, 2005), pp. 284–5.
4. Times of India, 8 Jan. 1946; Statesman, 2 March 1946.
5. SWGBP, vol. 10, p. 392. Speech at Agra, 13 Nov. 1945.
6. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082, 13 Nov. 1946.
7. Winston W. Ehrmann, ‘Post-War Government and Politics of India’, Journal of Politics,
9.4 (Nov. 1947), p. 660.
8. Daniel Thorner, ‘Problems of Economic Development in India’, Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, 268 (March 1950), pp. 96–7.
9. Ibid., p. 98.
10. Searchlight, 9 March 1946. Cited in Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular
Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–1946 (Delhi and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 290–1.
11. Rahi Masoom Reza, The Feuding Families of Village Gangauli: Adha Gaon, trans.
from Hindi by Gillian Wright (Delhi: Penguin, 1994), p. 140.
12. Times of India, 31 Jan. 1946; Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal ed.P.Moon (London: Ox-
ford University Press, 1973), p. 224.
13. Times of India, 25 March 1946.
14. The Statesman, 12 March 1946.
15. Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–45’, Past
and Present, 176 (Aug. 2002), pp. 187–221. On the Indian role in the Second World War
see also, Judith Brown, ‘India’, in I.C.D. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, eds, The Oxford Companion to
the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 557–65 and Ashley Jack-
son, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon, 2005).
16. By 1938–9 the All India membership figures for the Indian National Congress were
4,511,858. Source: B.R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–1942:
The Penultimate Phase (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 86.
17. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India, a People Partitioned (London: School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), A.S. Bakshi interviewed in Chandigarh, 16 March
 1997.
18. The colonial applications and implications of the decennial census are discussed in
N. Barrier, ed., The Census in British India (Delhi: Manohar, 1981). CWMG, vol. 85, p. 448,
1946.
19. The British granted the principle of representative government to Indians in 1861,
1892, 1909 and more substantially by the parliamentary Acts of 1919 and 1935, although
the franchise was always highly selective and powers were carefully curtailed.
20. The literature on the growth of Muslim and Hindu nationalism and the use of religious
symbolism by nationalist parties prior to 1947 is extensive. For a variety of perspectives see,
P. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974); S. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence
of Communalism in North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); William Gould,
Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2004); Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and In-
dian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Com-
munity in South Asian Islam since 1850 (London: Routledge, 2000); Gyanendra Pandey, The
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992); Peter Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam:
Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Francis Robinson, Islam and Muslim History in South Asia (New Delhi and Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy, eds, Living Together
Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005). On Indian community relations prior to the arrival of European colonialism, see
David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious
Identities in Islamicate South Asia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). For an ex-
cellent analysis of some of the major theoretical debates, see Gail Minault, ‘Some Reflec-
tions on Islamic Revivalism vs. Assimilation among Muslims in India’, Contributions to Indian
Sociology, 18 (1984), pp. 301–2, and Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim Society in South
Asia: A Reply to Das and Minault’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 20 (1986), pp. 97–104.
21. On the terms ‘communal’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno-religious’, and their relative merits, see
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006)
and Ayesha Jalal, ‘Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of “Communalism”: Partition Histo-
riography Revisited’, Modern Asian Studies, 30. 3 (1996), pp. 681–9.
22. C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspec-
tives, 1935–1947 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 409–10.

Chapter 2: Changing Regime

1. A.K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (First published 1959, edition cited, Delhi: Orient Long-
man, 1989), pp. 92, 122.
2. Times of India, 27 March 1946.
3. Circular to all Provincial Congress Committees, 11 Jan. 1947, reprinted in Congress
Bulletin (AICC, Delhi, 1947), pp. 10–15.
4. CWMG, vol. 85, p. 35. Letter to V. Patel, 21 July 1946.
 5. SWJN, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 2; Malcolm Darling, At Freedom's Door (London, 1949), p.
17.
6. Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal, ed. P. Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p.
202.
7. Memoir of B.C. Dutt, one of the leaders of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, quoted in S.
Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition: 1946 Provincial Elections in India (Delhi:
Manohar, 1998) pp. 114–15.
8. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan, 1983) pp. 405–8.
9. A.K. Gupta, The Agrarian Drama: The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934–1951
(Delhi: Manohar, 1996), p. 287.
10. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082.
11. Gail Omvedt, Reinventing Revolution: New Social Movements and the Socialist Tradi-
tion in India (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 23. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 442–6.
12. Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Little,
Brown, 1997), p. 597.
13. TOP, vol. 6, p. 393. Twynam to Wavell, 25 Oct. 1945.
14. Times of India, 8 March, 1946.
15. Desmond Young, Try Anything Twice (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 330.
16. TOP, vol. 6, p. 554. Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, 27 Nov. 1945
17. TOP, vol. 6, p. 576. Clow to Wavell, 1 Dec. 1945; IOR, L/PJ/5/168 Colville to Wavell,
3 Feb. 1947.
18. SWGBP, vol. 10, pp. 378–9. Speech at a public meeting in village Syed Raja,
Varanasi district, 27 Oct. 1945.
19. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, pp. 418–23.
20. TOP, vol. 6, pp. 512, 516. Intelligence Bureau, Home Dept 20 Nov. 1945. It was also
reported that leaders at most of the 160 political meetings held in the Central Provinces dur-
ing the first half of October demanded the release of INA men.
21. TOP, vol. 6, pp. 554, 555.
22. Address by King George VI at Opening of Parliament, 15 August 1945, The Times, 16
August 1945.
23. The total electorate for the provincial elections was 41,075,839. As a proportion of
the adult population over twenty years old, this may have been approximately 28 per cent of
men and 16 per cent of women. See Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition, p.
47.
24. See for instance J.P. Narayan's far-sighted note on the communal question, AICC, G–
23 (1946–8). On the CPI's relationship with Nehru, see Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London:
Routledge, 2003), pp. 123–5.
25. Extract from an Urdu poem c. 1946 trans. Kedarnath Komal and Rukmani Nair in
Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection,
1995), vol. 1, p. 43.
26. An extract from the election bill of the Palamu district Kisan Sabha, translated from
the Hindi in Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition, p. 242.
27. Statement of A.K. Azad, 4 April 1946 quoted ibid. p. 144.
28. Speech of Jinnah quoted ibid., p. 134. On the expedient use of Islamic motifs during
this election, see also Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South
Asian Islam since 1850 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 386–471.
29. Times of India, 8 Jan. 1946.
30. SWGBP vol. 10, p. 378; Speech at a public meeting in Varanasi district, 27 Oct.
1945; Times of India, 27 Feb. 1946.
31. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India, a People Partitioned (London: School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), Zawwar Zaidi interviewed in Islamabad, 7 April
1997.
32. SWGBP, vol. 11, p. 414. Speech in Kakori, 22 Feb. 1946.
33. Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Karachi
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 195.
34. William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35. Cited in Khalid Bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase (London: Oxford University
Press, 1968), pp. 203–4.
36. Quoted in Usha Sanyal, Devotional Islam and Politics in British India: Ahmad Riza
Khan Barelwi and his Movement, 1870–1920 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 310.
37. Cited in Khalid Bin Sayeed, Pakistan, p. 199. On ‘Nationalist Muslims’ and the subtle
divisions among Muslim thinkers in the lead up to 1947 see Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic
Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004); Aziz Ahmad, Muslim self-statement in India and Pakistan 1857–1968
(Wiesbaden, 1970).
38. For a convincing critique of the term ‘Nationalist Muslim’ see Gyanendra Pandey, Re-
membering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001), pp. 154–5; Pandey, ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in David Arnold and
David Hardiman, eds, Subaltern Studies VIII (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 118–
221; and A. Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in
S. Bose and A. Jalal, eds, Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in
India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
39. AICC, P–17 (1947–8).
40. M. Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection,
1995), vol. 2, p. 45.
41. AICC, G–23 (1946–8), J. P. Narayan's note on the communal question, 1946.
42. Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition, p. 160.
43. AICC, G–22 (1945–6) Delhi Congress Committee to Secretary AICC, 16 Feb. 1946.
44. Times of India, 12 March 1946.
45. The Muslim League won all 30 reserved seats in the Central Legislative Assembly
and 86.6 per cent of votes cast. It also won 442 of 509 reserved seats in the provinces. The
Congress won 57 of the 102 seats in the Central Legislative Assembly and 91.3 per cent of
the non-Muslim votes cast.
46. On the provincial strategies of the different parties see Ayesha Jalal, The Sole
Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985), pp. 126–73; Jalal, Self and Sovereignty; Ian Talbot, Provincial
Politics and the Pakistan Movement: The Growth of the Muslim League in North-West and
 North-East India 1937–47 (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Kuwa-
jima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition.
47. TOP, vol. 6, p. 771.

Chapter 3: The Unravelling Raj

1. On Aligarh in the 1940s, see works by Paul Brass, especially Language, Religion and
Politics in North India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Also, E.A. Mann,
Boundaries and Identities: Muslims Work and Status in Aligarh (New Delhi: Sage Publica-
tions, 1992) and M. Hasan ‘Negotiating with Its Past and Its Present: The Changing Profile of
the Aligarh Muslim University’ in M. Hasan, ed., Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and
the Partition of India (New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). SWJN, 2nd ser.,
vol. 1, pp. 49–50. Letter to Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, 28 Sept. 1946.
2. Dawn, 28 Jan. 1946.
3. Times of India, 11 April 1946. See also S.S. Pirzada, ed. Foundations of Pakistan: All-
Indian Muslim League Documents: vol. 2 1924–1947 (First published, Karachi, 1970); edi-
tion cited, New Delhi: Metropolitan Book Co., 1982), pp. 521–2.
4. Pirzada, ed. Foundations of Pakistan, p. 524.
5. Khalid Bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase (London: Oxford University Press,
1968) pp. 181–2.
6. JP 2nd ser., vol. 12, p. 643. M.A. Ishaque to Jinnah, 8 March 1946.
7. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for
Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Ayesha Jalal's revisionist interpre-
tation of Jinnah's motives caused shock waves when it was published, yet it was also suc-
cessful, and persuasive, because Jinnah's actions had hitherto been interpreted in a one-di-
mensional way. The ambiguity surrounding the Lahore Resolution and the uncertain atti-
tudes to the meanings of Pakistan had been noted by contemporary observers, but Jalal
gave these new credibility and scholarly authority, so much so that her interpretation of Jin-
nah has become the new orthodoxy. The Jinnah who hovers malevolently like a bad spirit in
Attenborough's epic Oscar-winning film, Gandhi, has been replaced by an astute lawyer, who
managed to sit upon the powderkeg of diverse Muslim interests, and subtly bartered with the
British in order to win the best possible deal for Muslims. In the event, his preferred dream of
a federated India with parity for Muslims was shattered and he accepted the option of a Pak-
istani state with greatly curtailed borders and inherent limitations, resolving to make the best
of a bad situation.
8. Ata-ur-Rehman, ed., A Pictorial History of the Pakistan Movement (Lahore: Dost Associ-
ates), p. 103.
9. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1963), p. 135.
10. AICC, G–42 (1945–6).
11. Rajeshwar Dayal, A Life of Our Times (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998), p. 78.
12. Ibid., Rajeshwar Dayal was appointed Home Secretary to the United Provinces gov-
ernment in 1946.
13. C.H. Philips and M. Wainwright, eds., The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives,
1935–1947 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970)p. 410–1.
 14. Times of India, 3 April 1946.
15. Malcolm Darling, At Freedom's Door (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 11.
16. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
17. Ibid., pp. 14, 24.
18. Inverview with Sarfaraz Nazine in Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposi-
tion and Memory in the North West Frontier (Oxford and Delhi: James Currey, 2000), p. 170.
19. P. Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal (London: Oxford University Press, 1973),
p. 494.
20. IOR L/PJ/5/168, S.V. Ramamurty to Mountbatten, 30 May 1947.
21. D. Potter, India's Political Administrators: 1919–1983 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 135.
22. A.K. Azad, India Wins Freedom (first published 1959; edition cited) (Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1989), pp. 134–5.
23. AIHM, C–190 (1946–7), Undated note on Ram Sena. UP Hindu Mahasabha Papers,
P–108 (part 2) (1946–7).
24. IOR L/PJ/5/275, FNR, first half Jan. 1946.
25. TOP, vol. 8, p. 519.
26. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India, a People Partitioned (London: School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), Kewal Malkani interviewed in Delhi, 16 Jan. 1997.
The RSS, founded in 1925 by K.B. Hedgewar, has a persistent presence in India and still
trains up the young foot-soldiers of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism today. Hindutva conflates
a thoroughly modern idea of ‘race’ with ‘Indianness’. It means relegating all those who fall
outside the Hindu civilisational pale – including Christians, dalits and Muslims – to the sta-
tus of minorities or second-class citizens.
27. Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Shadows of the Swastika: Historical Perspectives on the Poli-
tics of Hindu Communalism’, Modern Asian Studies, 34.2 (May 2000), pp. 259–79.
28. Trans. from Urdu by Hira Lal Seth, The Khaksar Movement (Lahore: Hero Publica-
tions, 1946), p. 61.
29. Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in
Mid-twentieth century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006); M.S. Golwalkar, We, or
Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur, 1939).
30. Bhisham Sahni, Tamas (Delhi: Penguin, 2001), pp. 57–8.
31. JP, 2nd ser., vol. 12, p. 624. Durrani to Jinnah, 1 March 1946.
32. S.C. Sharma, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla: Life and Times (Delhi: Bharatiya Bhasha
Peeth, 1991), p. 207. Speech of Shukla at a press conference, 27 April 1946.
33. SWJN, 1st ser., vol. 15, 5 Aug. 1946; 2nd ser., vol. 1. 25 Sept. 1946. Speech at a
meeting of Congress volunteer organisations, Delhi 25 Sept. 1946.
34. Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed, p. 186.
35. Civil and Military Gazette, 9 May 1947.
36. AICC, G–53 (1946). Nehru to K. Chatterji, 30 Aug. 1946.
37. Times of India, 15 Jan. 1946; 5 Feb. 1946.
38. Ruchi Ram Sahni, To the British Cabinet Mission (Lahore: Dewan Ram, 1946), pp.
13, 91.
39. Times of India, 19 March 1946; TOP, vol. 7, p. 23. Note by Major Wyatt, 28 March
 1946.
40. Times of India, 15 April 1946.
41. J.P. Chander, Cabinet Mission in India (Lahore: Indian Printing Works, 1946), p. 107.
42. Ibid., p. 108.
43. TOP, vol. 7, pp. 592–4.
44. TOP, vol. 7, p. 766. Meeting of Cabinet Delegation, Wavell, Wylie and Twynam, 1 June
1946.
45. Times of India, 17 May 1946.
46. On G.D. Birla's role during Partition see Medha M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of
G.D. Birla (Oxford and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
47. Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal, p. 239.
48. TOP, vol. 7, p. 858; Times of India, 18 May 1946.
49. Nasim Ansari, Choosing to Stay: Memoirs of an Indian Muslim (first published in
1987; edition cited trans. from Urdu by Ralph Russell, Karachi: City Press, 1999), pp. 17–18.
50. TOP, vol. 8, p. 161. Wylie to Wavell, 31 July 1946.
51. TOP, vol. 7, p. 655. Wavell to Henderson, 21 May 1946.
52. CWMG, vol. 85, p. 54.

Chapter 4: The Collapse of Trust

1. Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994), p. 171.
2. See Bidyut Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–1947: Contour of
Freedom (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), p. 98.
3. Dawn, 16 Aug. 1946; Eastern Times, 16 Aug. 1946.
4. Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, p. 168.
5. From a League pamphlet entitled Let Pakistan Speak for Herself (1946) cited in
Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, p. 99.
6. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Orien-
tal and African Studies, 1997, 2000); Jugal Chandra Ghosh, interviewed in Calcutta, 24 May
1997.
7. Ibid.; Syed Nazimuddin Hashim interviewed in Dhaka, 22 April 1997. On ethnoreligious
conflict in Bengal see John H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century
Bengal (Berkeley, 1968); Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition,
1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Das, Communal Riots in Ben-
gal; Taj I. Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The Communalization of Class Politics in
East Bengal, 1920–1947 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1992).
8. Andrew Whitehead, ‘The Butchers of Calcutta’, Indian Express, 1 July 1997.
9. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Syed Nazimuddin Hashim interviewed in
Dhaka, 22 April 1997.
10. M. Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-
twentieth-century India and Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 75.
11. Times of India, 25 May 1946.
12. Saumya Gupta, ‘The “Daily” Reality of Partition: Politics in Newsprint, in 1940s Kan-
pur’, in S. Sengupta and G. Lovink, eds, The Public Domain: Sarai Reader 01 (New Delhi:
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2001), p. 83.
13. Ibid.
14. AICC G–10 (1947) Bengal Provincial Congress Committee Papers, 15 Oct. 1946.
15. Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, p. 193.
16. Ashoka Gupta, ‘Those Days in Noakhali’, Indian Seminar, 510 (2002).
17. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Sailen Chatterjee interviewed in Delhi, 25
Jan. 1997; CWMG, vol. 86, p. 138, 20 Nov. 1946. See also India Today, 18 Aug. 1997.
18. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 1, pp. 47–112. Speeches at Bakhtiarpur and Fatwa, 4 Nov.
1946; letter to Vallabhbhai Patel, 5 Nov. 1946.
19. Cited in Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism
and the Congress Party in Bihar, 1935–1946 (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), p. 356. Damodaran describes post-war Bihar and the growth of agricultural and eth-
nic conflict in detail, pp. 284–369.
20. IOR L/PJ/5/275, Wylie to Wavell, 21 Nov. 1946. My description is drawn from ac-
counts of the violence in AICC, G–10 (1947), Congress Reports on Garhmukhteshwar; IOR
L/PJ/8/575, Reports on the disturbances in Bihar and UP, and IOR L/PJ/8/650, UP Ministe-
rial and Political Affairs, 1946–7. For an analysis of the different interpretations placed on
the violence by the Congress, League and British, see Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Par-
tition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), pp. 92–120.
21. A.P. Jain, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai: A Memoir of his Life and Times (London: Asia Publish-
ing House, 1965), p. 75.
22. AICC, G–10 (1946). Report of B.B. Jetley, Superintendent of Police, Meerut, 19 Dec.
1946.
23. For example the Government of Bombay immediately after Independence described
‘the three great vices of modern times’ as ‘prostitution, gambling and drinking’, enforced pro-
hibition in six districts of Bombay and made it illegal to advertise liquor in newspapers, while
the film censor banned drinking scenes from films.
24. S.S. Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1963),
p. 143.
25. Sarfaraz Mirza,Muslim Women's Role in the Pakistan Movement (Lahore: Research
Society of Pakistan, University of the Punjab, 1969), p. 83.
26. C.H. Philips and M. Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives,
1935–1947 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 377.
27. TOP, vol. 8, p. 849. Jenkins to Wavell, 31 Oct. 1946.
28. IOR L/PJ/5/167.
29. Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 240–59.
30. Ibid., pp. 242, 244.
31. Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, pp. 141–6.
32. Ibid., pp. 18–59.
33. IOR Mss Eur. D724/13, Hume Papers, 10 Nov. 1946.
34. AICC, CL–10 (1946–7); AICC, G–10 (1947).
35. AICC G–10 (1947). Note on Noakhali.
36. IOR L/PJ/5/167, Clow to Wavell, 4 Nov. 1946.
 37. IOR L/PJ/5/139, FNR, second half Oct. 1946.
38. Gupta, ‘The “Daily” Reality of Partition’, p. 86.
39. Medha Kudaisya,$The Life and Times of G.D. Birla (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2003), p. 234; Letter to Rajagopalachari, 21 Nov. 1946.
40. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An eyewitness account of the Partition of India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 74.
41. IOR L/PJ/5/275, FNR, first half Jan. 1946.
42. IOR Mss Eur. D724/13, Hume Papers, Jan.–Dec. 1946.
43. TOP, vol. 8, p. 750. Patel to Stafford Cripps, 19 Oct. 1946; IOR L/PJ/5/276 Wylie to
Wavell, 22 Jan. 1947; JP, 1st ser., vol. 3, p. 224. Mountbatten to Jinnah, 9 July 1947.
44. CWMG, vol. 85 p. 282. 15 Sept. 1946; Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India, p.
292.

Chapter 5: From Breakdown to Breakdown

1. Pran Nevile, Lahore: A Sentimental Journey (Delhi: Penguin, 2006), p. xx.
2. IOR L/PJ/5/276, FNR, second half April 1947; IOR, Mss Eur.$C290, Unpublished
memoirs of C. Pearce (UP Police), c. 1977.
3. Ian Copland, State, Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c.1900–
1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 115.
4. Wm Roger Louis, ‘The Partitions of India and Palestine’, in Ends of British Imperialism:
The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (New York, 2006), p. 407.
5. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An eyewitness account of the Partition of India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 62–3.
6. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Orien-
tal and African Studies, 1997, 2000); Amjad Husain, interviewed in Lahore, 11 Oct. 1995.
7. Raghuvendra Tanwar, Reporting the Partition of Punjab, 1947: Press, Public and Other
Opinions (Delhi: Manohar, 2006), pp. 143, 152.
8. IOR FNR L/PJ/5/168 and USSA 845.00/7–3047, Box 6070.
9. IOR L/PJ/5/168, Fortnightly report 3 March 1947. Civil and Military Gazette, 13 May
1947.
10. Bhisham Sahni, Tamas (Delhi: Penguin edn, 2001), p. 162.
11. Ibid., p. 103.
12. This has resonance with Paul Brass's description of an ‘institutionalised riot system’
in contemporary India. See Paul Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contem-
porary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); and Paul Brass, Theft of an Idol:
Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997).
13. Asim Roy, ‘The High Politics of India's Partition’, Modern Asian Studies, 24.2 (May
1990), pp. 385–408, p. 404.
14. Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia, Some Notes and Reminiscences (Bombay: Times of India
Press, 1948), pp. 29–30.
15. Congress resolution on Partition of Punjab, 8 March 1947.
16. UP Hindu Mahasabha Papers, P–108 (Part 1) (1947); Gist of conversation between
Sampurnanand and Mahasabha leaders, 22 July 1947 agreed by Sampurnanand. Prithwiraj
was the last Rajput (and therefore ‘Hindu’) ruler of Delhi. He ruled in the twelfth century, was
killed in battle with Afghans and was succeeded by Mohammed Ghori. For a close interpreta-
tion of Sampurnanand's political ideology see William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Lan-
guage of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.
166–80.
17. Alan Campbell Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), pp.
64–73.
18. Ibid., p. 47.
19. JP, 1st ser., vol. 2, p. 416. Jinnah to Patrick Lacey, 22 June 1947.
20. L. Carter, ed., Mountbatten's Report on the Last Viceroyalty 22 March to 15 August
1947 (Delhi: Manohar, 2003), p. 188.
21. Times of India, 4 June 1947.
22. JP, 1st ser., vol. 2, p. 51, 4 June 1947.
23. Times of India, 5 June, 1947.
24. Moon, Divide and Quit,p.68.
25. S.S. Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1963),
p. 154.
26. JP, 1st ser., vol. 3, pp. 842–3. Minutes of the meeting of the All India Muslim League,
9 June 1947.
27. JP, 1st ser., vol. 2, pp. 141–2, 10 June 1947.
28. S.M. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, 1947–8 (Karachi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2000), p. 25. Constituent Assembly Address, 11 Aug. 1947.
29. IOR L/PJ/5/276, FR, second half June 1947.
30. IOR L/PJ/5/276, FR, second half May 1947.
31. IOR L/PJ/5/168, Fortnightly report, 3 June 1947.
32. A. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since
1850 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 539, 543.
33. Times of India, 9 June 1947.
34. Shahid Hamid, Disastrous Twilight: A Personal Record of the Partition of India (Lon-
don: Cooper and Secker and Warburg, 1986), p. 178.
35. Ibid. p. 180.
36. Civil and Military Gazette, 17 July 1947.
37. JP, 1st series, vol. 2, p. 609, letter to Jinnah, 30 June 1947.
38. AICC Resolution on 3 June plan, passed 14 June 1947. TOP, vol. 11, p. 398.
39. USSA 845.006–647 Box 6070, Gordon Minnigerode to US Secretary of State, 6 June
1947. Reactions in Karachi and Sind to the British Plan for the Partition of India.
40. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India,’ Imago Mundi,
vol. 53 (2001), pp. 97–114. On the intersections between gender and the shaping of nation-
alism see also Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Em-
pire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
41. IOR L/PJ/5/168, Fortnightly report 18 July 1947.
42. USSA, 845.00/5–147–845.00/7–3047 Box 6070, State Department Records.
43. Hindustan Times, 11 June 1947.
44. T. Tan and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London and New
 York: Routledge, 2000), p. 163.
45. Rajendra Prasad, 3 June 1947, cited in Raghuvendra Tanwar, Reporting the Partition
of Punjab, 1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), p. 167.
46. J. Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 260; Times of India, 9 June 1947.
47. CWMG, vol. 88, p. 374. Speech at prayer meeting, 19 July 1947; UPSA General Ad-
ministration, Box 659, 169/1. Resolution passed 10 Aug. 1947.
48. Malcolm Darling, At Freedom's Door (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 307.
49. L. Carter, ed., Mountbatten's Report on the last Viceroyalty: 22 March–15 August
1947 (Delhi: Manohar, 2003), p. 157; IOR L/PJ/5/168, Fortnightly report, 18 July 1947.
50. Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire 1917–1947 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 229–60.
51. Quoted ibid., p. 257.
52. See W.A. Wilcox, Pakistan: The Consolidation of a Nation (New York, 1963) on the as-
similation of the Pakistani princely states.
53. For analysis of these princely schemes during the Raj's disintegration see Copland,
State, Community and Neighbourhood especially chapters 4 and 5.
54. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 104.
55. Times of India, 5 June 1947.
56. TOP, vol. 12, p. 125, Governor of Central Provinces and Berar to Mountbatten, 12
July 1947.
57. USSA 845.00/5–147–845.00/7–3047 Box 6070, Encl. to dispatch dated 19 June
by American Consul-General, Bombay.
58. JP, 1st ser., vol. 2, p. 541, 27 June 1947.
59. Civil and Military Gazette, 6 May 1947.
60. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 93–4.
61. Civil and Military Gazette 21 June 1947; USSA 845.00/6–647 Box 670 Gordon Min-
nigerode to US Secretary of State, 6 June 1947. Reactions in Karachi and Sind to the British
Plan for the Partition of India.
62. NMML, Pant Papers, File IV, doc. 96. Enclosure on the Indo-Pakistan Muslim League,
1948.
63. USSA 845.00/5–147 – 845.00/7–3047 Box 6070, Attlee in conversation with US
Ambassador and Sir Paul Patrick in conversation with State Department representatives, 29
May 1947.
64. Civil and Military Gazette, 5 July 1947.

Chapter 6: Untangling Two Nations

1. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An eyewitness account of the Partition of India (Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 90–1.
2. CWMG, vol. 88, p. 135, Speech at a prayer meeting, 11 June 1947.
3. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 90–1.
4. IOR L/PJ/5/140 Hydari to Mountbatten, 1 Aug. 1947.
5. TOP, vol. 11, p. 26. Jenkins to Mountbatten, 31 May 1947.
6. Ibid., p. 136. Jenkins to Mountbatten 5 June 1947.
 7. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 114.
8. TOP, vol. XI, pp. 561–3, Nehru to Mountbatten, 22 June 1947; JP, 1st ser., vol. 2, p.
829, Mountbatten to Jenkins, 24 June 1947.
9. Ibid., p. 51, 10 June 1947.
10. JP, 1st ser., vol. 1, p. 903. A.A. Quddoosi to Jinnah, 22 May 1947.
11. CWMG, vol. 88, p. 113, Speech 11 June 1947.
12. Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan's recollections republished in Ahmad Salim, ed., La-
hore, 1947 (Delhi: tara-india research press, 2006), pp. 232–4.
13. IOR R/3/1/157, Radcliffe to Bengal Boundary Commission, 17 July 1947; Dawn, 19
July 1947; Joya Chatterji,‘The Making of a Borderline’, in I. Talbot and G. Singh, eds, Region
and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent (Oxford and Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 172.
14. IOR R/3/1/157.
15. IOR R/3/1/157, Appeal forwarded to Mountbatten, 23 June 1947; Dawn, 17 July
1947.
16. IOR R/3/1/157, Maharaja of Patiala to Mountbatten, 7 Aug. 1947.
17. IOR R/3/1/157, on some aspects of untouchable/scheduled caste politics at Parti-
tion see R.S. Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes
Federation, and Dalit Politics in UP, 1946–8’, in S. Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The
Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), pp. 111–39.
18. AICC, G 11 (1946–8), undated letter from Lahore, c. mid–1947.
19. Dawn, 17 July 1947.
20. TOP, vol. 12, p. 148.
21. Diary of Fikr Taunsvi, 11 Aug. 1947 reproduced in Salim, ed., Lahore, 1947, p. 19.
22. The authorities in Lahore prohibited noises made by all these items in May 1947.
23. Diary of Fikr Taunsvi, 11 Aug. 1947 reproduced in Salim ed. Lahore, 1947, pp. 14–
15.
24. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, 1997, 2000); Shanti Seghal interviewed by Anuradha Awasthi in
Delhi, 1 Feb. 1947.
25. IOR Mss Eur. C290; unpublished manuscript of William Chaning Pearce.
26. USSA 845.00/8–147–845.00/12–3147 Box 6071, 13 Aug. 1947.
27. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 115.
28. L. Carter, ed. Mountbatten's Report on the last Viceroyalty, 22 March to 15 August
1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003), p. 79.
29. Epstein Papers (Private Collection), Col. G.S.N Hughes to Mr Bowen, 24 June 1947.
30. Epstein Papers (Private Collection) Anthony Epstein to family, 14 Oct. 1947.
31. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, interviewed in Delhi,
15 March 1997.
32. Indian Emergency Committee Meeting Minutes, 6–7 Sept. 1947, reprinted in H.M.
Patel, Rites of Passage: A Civil Servant Remembers (New Delhi: Vedam, 2005), pp. 280,
284; Civil and Military Gazette, 29 May 1947.
33. Letter from a British police officer quoted in Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves
(London: Cassell, 1950), pp. 486–7.
 34. IOR, Mss Eur. C290, Unpublished memoirs of C. Pearce (UP Police, 1945–7), c.
1977.
35. USSA 845.00/8–147–845.00/12–3147, Box 6071, Phillips Talbot to Institute of
Current World Affairs on the Indian political situation, 22 July 1947. Talbot would later be-
come a diplomat and specialist on South Asian affairs.
36. JP, 1st ser., vol. 3, pp. 668–9. Recommendations of the Muslim members of the
Health Committee.
37. TOP, vol. 11, pp. 682–5. USSA 845.00/5–147–845.00/7–3047 Box 6070. Charles
Thomson, Consul in Calcutta, 30 June 1947.
38. JP, 1st ser., vol. 4, p. 126. ‘Agha’ to Fatima Jinnah, 1 Aug. 1947. Attia Hosain's novel,
Sunlight on a Broken Column (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) also vividly depicts the in-
decision among Muslim families confronting the prospect of moving to Pakistan.
39. JP, vol. 2, p. 521. S. M. Hasan to Jinnah, 26 June 1947.
40. Manzoor Alam Quraishi, Indian Administration, Pre and Post Independence: Memoirs
of an ICS (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1985), p. 155.
41. Anwar Ahmed Hanafi interviewed by Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India's journey
to Independence and division (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 315.
42. Dawn, 11 Aug. 1947, cited in Tan Tai Yong and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Parti-
tion in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 48.
43. Intizar Husain interviewed in Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost
Home (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 105.
44. Carter, ed., Mountbatten's report on the last Viceroyalty, p. 216.
45. TOP, vol. 11, p. 404.
46. TOP, vol. 7, p. 169. Note on Meeting of Cabinet Delegation, 8 April 1946.
47. Hindustan Times, 20 June 1947.
48. W.C. Smith, Modern Islam in India (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), p. 266; Intizar Hu-
sain interviewed in Bhalla, Partition Dialogues, p. 94.
49. TOP, vol. 11, pp. 193–4; USSA 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147, Box 6071,
Phillips Talbot to Institute of Current World Affairs on the Indian political situation, 22 July
1947.
50. Ravinder Kaur, ‘Planning Urban Chaos: State and Refugees in Post-partition Delhi’, in
E. Hust and M. Mann, eds, Urbanization and Governance in India (New Delhi: Manohar,
2005), p. 236.
51. M. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A report on the new India (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1949), pp. 22–3.
52. JP, 1st ser., vol. 3, p. 343. Nawab of Bhopal to Jinnah, 12 July 1947.
53. Quoted in M. Hasan, ‘Memories of a Fragmented Nation’, in S. Settar and I. Gupta,
eds, Pangs of Partition (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), vol. 2, p. 182.
54. Civil and Military Gazette, 15 Aug. 1947; USSA 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147
Box 6071, Note by American Consul, Calcutta 13 Aug. 1947.
55. TOP, vol. 12, p. 190.
56. IOR L/PJ/5/140, Hydari to Mountbatten, 1 Aug. 1947.
57. Satish Gujral in Hasan, ed., ‘Memories of a Fragmented Nation’, pp. 47–8.
58. Quoted ibid., p. 182.
 59. Bhisham Sahni, Tamas (New Delhi: Penguin edn, 2001), pp. 127–8
60. Report of the Punjab Boundary Commission (Govt of India, 1947), p. 10.
61. The Journey to Pakistan; A documentation on refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of
Pakistan, 1993), p. 150.
62. Moon, Divide and Quit: An eye-witness account of the Partition of India (Delhi and Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 186.
63. M. Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence (London
and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 128.
64. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst,
2000), p. 236.
65. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p.
167.
66. Broadcast speech of Jinnah on 2 Sept. 1947, in The Journey to Pakistan: A Docu-
mentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of Pakistan, 1993), p. 241.
67. Shail Mayaram, ‘Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat’, in
Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian
History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 149.

Chapter 7: Blood on the Tracks

1. L. Carter, ed., Mountbatten's Report on the Last Viceroyalty: 22 March–15 August
1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2003), p. 266.
2. Ibid., p. 191.
3. For a convincing account of the severe limitations of this force see Robin Jeffrey, ‘The
Punjab Boundary Force and the Problem of Order, August 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 8.4
(1974), pp. 491–520. The Boundary Force had an operational existence of 32 days, covered
only the twelve most ‘disturbed’ districts of Punjab and included, at its peak, up to 25,000
men, which meant that ‘At its greatest strength, the Boundary Force was in a position to allot
four men to every three villages or fewer than two men to a square mile; to the population [of
these districts], it stood in a ratio of 1:630’, p. 500.
4. Moon, Divide and Quit: An eye witness account of the Partition of India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 95.
5. Official state-sponsored accounts have shown a resilient amnesia and ‘massacres’
comprise a subsidiary appendix tacked on to the greater story of the freedom struggle. There
are immense difficulties in disentangling the slivers of memory, anecdotes and fictional ac-
counts preserved by survivors and witnesses. Mapping what took place and placing it in an
explanatory framework is no easy task. The jigsaw puzzle of regional and district-level snap-
shots is still being painstakingly pieced together by historians who are starting to disaggre-
gate the sweeping generalisations and stock imagery of 1947, and realising through sifting
through oral history interviews, government archives, personal letters and newspapers that
the violence had very particular characteristics; riots and pogroms varied in their intensity, in
their precise relationship to the handiwork of local politicians, and in the havoc that they un-
leashed. For works which specifically address violence in Punjab at the time of Partition see
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: Hurst,
2000); Ian Talbot, Freedom's Cry. The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and the
Partition of the Subcontinent (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul Brass, ‘The Parti-
tion of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–7’, Journal of Genocide Re-
search, 5.1 (2003); Pippa Virdee, ‘Partition and Locality: Studies of the Impact of Partition
and its Aftermath in the Punjab region 1947–61’ (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Coventry Univer-
sity, 2004); Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ayesha Jalal, ‘Nation, Reason and Religion: The
Punjab's Role in the Partition of India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 Aug. 1998; Anders
Bjørn Hansen, Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab, 1937–1947
(Delhi, 2002); Swarna Aiyar, “August Anarchy”: The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947’, in
D.A. Low and H. Brasted eds, Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Indepen-
dence (Delhi: Sage, 1998); Ian Copland, ‘The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes
and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 36. 3 (2002); Indivar
Kamtekar, ‘The Military Ingredient of Communal Violence in Punjab, 1947’, Proceedings of
the Indian History Congress, 56 (1995), pp. 568–72.
6. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 134–5.
7. Ishtiaq Ahmed, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First
Person Accounts’, in I. Talbot and Shinder Thandi, eds, People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial
and Post Colonial Migration (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 132–4.
8. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 237.
9. Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Oriental
African Studies, 1997, 2000); Harcharan Singh Nirman interviewed in Chandigarh, 17 March
1997.
10. Ibid., Ram Dev interviewed in Chandigarh, 17 March 1947.
11. Bhisham Sahni, Tamas (Delhi: Penguin, 2001), p. 229.
12. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Krishna Baldev Vaid interviewed in Delhi, 12
Jan. 1997.
13. Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), pp. 357–8.
14. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Mrs Ashoka Gupta interviewed in Calcutta,
24 April 1997.
15. Extract from interview with Taran in Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, pp.
46–7.
16. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned; Kuldip Nayar interviewed in Delhi 14 Aug.
1996; Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 32.
17. Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 76.
18. Official figures ibid., p. 70. Urvashi Butalia cites 75,000 abductions in The Other Side
of Silence, p. 3. In 1948, Mridula Sarabhai, who organised the Indian recovery operation, be-
lieved that the official figure of women abducted in Pakistan – 12,500 – could have been
ten times that in reality.
19. Ian Copland, ‘The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan, 1947’,
Past and Present, 160 (1998), pp. 203–39. The violence in Alwar and Bharatpur is also
analysed in S. Mayaram, ‘Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat';
Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds, Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian
History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 128–61.
20. Copland, ‘The Further Shores of Partition’, pp. 203–39. There are similarities here
 with events in the princely states of East Punjab, which Ian Copland has also described in
‘The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East Punjab Massacres of 1947’,
Modern Asian Studies, 36. 3 (2002).
21. IOR Mss Eur. C290, Unpublished memoirs of C. Pearce (UP Police, 1945–7) c. 1977.
22. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, B.L. Dutt interviewed at home in Chandigarh,
15 March 1997.
23. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 164.
24. IOR Mss Eur. F161. Notes of E.S. Thomson, Railway Protection Force, c. Sept. 1947
[undated] see also IOR Mss Eur. 147, Demi official reports by D. Cruickshank, East India Rail-
ways, 13 Sept. and 22 Sept. 1947.
25. Ibid.
26. Ian Copland, State Community and Neighbourhood in Princely North India, c. 1900–
1950 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 156–7.
27. USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082, 8 Sept. 1947.
28. SPC, vol. 6, p. 319. Patel to Nehru, 4 May, 1948.
29. IOR L/PJ/5/167, Fortnightly reports, Oct. 1946.
30. The Rape of Rawalpindi (Lahore: Punjab Riot Sufferers' Relief Committee, c. 1947),
unpaginated.
31. G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning: A survey of events leading up to and following the Par-
tition of India (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 133.
32. AICC, CL-9 (File 1) (1946–7).
33. BBC news online: ‘Indian director Mahesh Bhatt is hoping to make the first ever In-
dian film shot entirely in Pakistan – a project he described as a “South Asian Schindler's
List”.’ 16 May 2003.
34. M. Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: the Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection,
1995), vol. 2, p. 96.
35. AICC, G–18, Part 2 (1947–8), M. Brelvi to Sadiq Ali, 24 Oct. 1947.
36. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Dalit Joginder, interviewed 18 March 1997.
37. Ian Talbot's introduction to Ahmad Salim, ed., Lahore, 1947 (Delhi: tara-india re-
search press, 2006), p. 6.
38. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Shanti Seghal interviewed in Delhi, 1 Feb.
1947.
39. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 120.
40. AICC, G–10 (1947), Report of Meerut District Magistrate, 13 Feb. 1947.
41. IOR L/PJ/5/168, Colville to Wavell, 16 March 1947.
42. SPC, vol. 6, p. 266. R. Prasad to V. Patel, 14 May 1948.

Chapter 8: Leprous Daybreak

1. P.N. Chopra, ed., Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel: 1936–50
(New Delhi: Vision Books, 2001), pp. 164–9.
2. Richard Symonds, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pak-
istan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 34.
3. Partition Emergency Committee Minutes, 16 Sept. 1947, reprinted in appendix to H.M.
Patel, Rites of Passage: A Civil Servant Remembers ed. Sucheta Mahajan (New Delhi: Rupa
and Co., 2005), p. 360.
4. Partition Emergency Committee Minutes, 16 Sept. 1947, reprinted in appendix to
Patel, A Civil Servant Remembers, p. 360.
5. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London: Robert Hale, 1951), p.
180; Judith Brown, Nehru: A political life (London and New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), p. 176.
6. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, pp. 33–4. Many stories of Nehru's agitated
state were in circulation at this time, including one that he had kicked a group of sadhus, or
Hindu holy men, who had blockaded the entrance to his house and refused to move: see
USSA 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147 Box 6071, 5 Aug. 1947.
7. Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York and Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1967), p. 17.
8. M.M. Kudaisya, The Life and Times of G.D. Birla (Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), p. 243. Birla to Katju, 29 Sept. 1947.
9. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An eye-witness account of the Partition of India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 154.
10. Extract written by the Urdu journalist Shorish Kashmiri reproduced in M. Hasan, India
Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 156.
11. S.M. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, 1947–8 (Karachi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2000), p. 14. Press conference, 14 July 1947.
12. Suhasini Das, ‘A Partition Diary’, trans. Kumkum Chakravarti, Seminar, 510 (Feb.
2002).
13. F. Tuker, While Memory Serves (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 530.
14. M. Hasan, ed., India Partitioned, vol. 2, p. 194.
15. Epstein Papers (Private Collection), Letter to Parents, 15 May 1947.
16. IOR Mss Eur. 147 Demi-official reports by D. Cruickshank, East India Railways, 13
Sept. and 22 Sept. 1947.
17. Mahatma Gandhi, Delhi Diary: Prayer speeches from 10 Sept. 1947 to 30 Jan. 1948
(Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), 28 Oct. 1947.
18. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 33.
19. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 441. Letter to Provincial Premiers, 15 Oct. 1947.
20. Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, pp. 178–9.
21. The Journey to Pakistan: A documentation on refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of
Pakistan, 1993), p. 256. Jinnah's speech, 14 Sept. 1947 on the establishment of the Quaid
e Azam Relief Fund.
22. Millions on the Move: The Aftermath of Partition (Govt of India, Delhi, 1948), photo-
graph and caption facing p. 4.
23. R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1998), p. 232.
24. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 54; Tuker, While Memory Serves, p.
476.
25. USSA, 845.00/8–147 – 845.00/12–3147 Box 6071, Howard Donovan to Secretary
of State, Washington, 30 Sept. 1947. Encl. extracts from a personal letter written by a retired
British officer (unidentified), Simla 17 Sept. 1947.
 26. Millions on the Move, p. 55.
27. Pakistan Times, 26 Aug. 1947.
28. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (School of Oriental and
African Studies, 1997, 2000); Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, interviewed in Delhi, 15 March
1947; Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, p. 35.
29. Mangla Prasad, United Provinces Provincial Congress Secretary, Lucknow, to all dis-
trict and town Congress committees, 30 July 1947. Quoted in Tan Tai Yong and G. Kudaisya,
The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 37.
30. Times of India, 13 Aug. 1947; 18 Aug. 1947.
31. Syed Mahmud to S.K. Sinha, c. 1948 (undated) in V.N. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn, eds,
A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics: Selected Letters of Syed Mahmud (Delhi: Macmil-
lan, 1974), pp. 263–4.
32. UPSA, Home Department Police (A), Box 22, 63/1948.
33. Hindustan Times, 22 July 1947. Cited in Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Parti-
tion in South Asia, p. 42. For a very detailed account of Independence Day ceremonies and
celebrations, on which my account draws, see ibid., pp. 29–77.
34. Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition, pp. 29–77.
35. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 115.
36. A.N. Bali, Now it can be told (Jullundur: Akash Vani Prakashan, 1949), p. 39.
37. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned; Amjad Husain, inter-
viewed in Lahore, 11 Oct. 1995.
38. Ibid., Saroj Pachauri interviewed in Delhi, 28 Jan. 1997.
39. Moon, Divide and Quit, p. 125.
40. Times of India, 12 Aug. 1947.
41. Constituent Assembly of Pakistan debates, 11 Aug. 1947 in M Rafique Afzal, ed.,
Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan, 1941–51 (Lahore: University of
Punjab, 1967), p. 117.
42. Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006), p. 162.
43. IOR FNR, L/PJ/5/276, Wylie to Mountbatten, 10 Aug. 1947.
44. Ayesha Jalal, Gyanendra Pandey and Mushirul Hasan have analysed these confla-
tions and confusions which were worsened by setting up ‘nationalism’ as a binary to ‘com-
munalism’. See, for instance, Ayesha Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism: The Politics of Muslim
Identity in South Asia’, in S. Bose and A. Jalal, eds, Nationalism, Democracy and Develop-
ment: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); G. Pandey, ‘Can a
Muslim be an Indian?’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41.4 (1999),and M.
Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India's Muslims Since Independence (London and Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
45. Burke, ed., Jinnah: Speeches and Statements, p. 28. Speech to Constituent Assem-
bly, 11 Aug. 1947.
46. Abdul Quaiyum Khan to Syed Mahmud, 8/10 Feb. 1948 in Datta and Cleghorn, eds,
A Nationalist Muslim, p. 267.
47. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Danial Latifi interviewed in Delhi, 23 Dec.
1996.
 48. Figures are taken from tables and appendices in After Partition (Delhi: Publications
Division, Govt of India, 1948) and The Journey to Pakistan (Govt. of Pakistan).
49. Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (first published in 1956; edition cited Ravi Dayal
and Permanent Black, New Delhi, 1988), p. 57.
50. JP, 1st ser. vol. 2, pp. 824–5, ‘Jinnah Anxious to have non Muslims live in Pakistan’.
51. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 442. Letter to Premiers of Provinces, 15 Oct. 1947.
52. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 80.
53. Ibid., p. 92.
54. Emergency Committee minutes, 7 Sept. 1947, reprinted in H. M. Patel, A Civil Ser-
vant Remembers, p. 292.
55. Millions on the Move, p. 6.
56. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned Harcharan Singh Nirman interviewed in
Chandigarh, 17 March 1997.
57. Symonds, In the Margins of Independence, p. 55.
58. Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–
1962 (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 54.
59. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 180–1.
60. The Journey to Pakistan, p. 34.
61. M. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom. A Report on the New India in the Words and
Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1949), p. 20.
62. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
63. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Kuldip Nayar, interviewed in Delhi, 29 Oct.
1996.
64. Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan, p. 57.
65. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned Nasreen Azhar, interviewed in Islamabad, 25
Sept. 1995.
66. Moon, Divide and Quit, pp. 110–11.
67. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1963), p. 158; Mian Amiruddin's ‘Memories of Partition’, in Ahmad Salim, ed., La-
hore, 1947 (Delhi, 2006), pp. 257, 251.
68. Millions on the Move, p. 67.
69. Whitehead, India: A People Partitioned, Khorshed Mehta, interviewed in Delhi, 18
Jan. 1997.
70. The Indian government estimated at the end of 1947 that there were 1.25 million
refugees in 160 camps in India and the Pakistani government estimated that there were
1,116,500 refugees in 16 camps in West Punjab (Sources: After Partition and The Journey to
Pakistan).
71. Report by K.M. Malik Khuda Baksh, 4 Oct. 1947, reproduced in The Journey to Pak-
istan, p. 209.
72. Anis Kidwai, ‘In the Shadow of Freedom’, trans. from Urdu and reproduced in Hasan,
ed., India Partitioned, vol. 2, pp. 167–80.

Chapter 9: Bitter Legacies

1. Note by Delhi's Superintendent of Police, 4 Jan. 1948 enclosed in SPC, vol. 6, pp.
260–1.
2. SPC, vol. 6, p. 162.
3. Catherine Rey-Schirr, ‘The ICRC's Activities on the Indian Subcontinent following Parti-
tion (1947–1949)’, International Review of the Red Cross, 323 (1998), pp. 267–91, p. 268.
4. SPC, vol. 6, p. 244. Nehru to V. Patel, 12 Jan. 1948.
5. Ibid., pp. 119–20. Bardoloi to Patel, 5 May 1948.
6. Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–
1962 (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 46–121.
7. The Journey to Pakistan: A Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Islamabad: Govt of
Pakistan, 1993), pp. 310–11.
8. Quoted in Urvashi Butalia, ‘An Archive with a Difference: Partition Letters’, in Suvir
Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2001), p. 219. Urvashi Butalia's brilliant account of these letters suggests that,
‘notwithstanding their sense of reproach, and sometimes alienation’, through all the letters
‘ran a thread of commitment to the new nation, and to the newly-forming state’.
9. A classic example of this thinking is Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons in Bombay
State: A Decennial Retrospect (Govt of Bombay, 1958), p. 28: ‘The rehabilitation of millions
of displaced persons from Pakistan, who have migrated to our country, no doubt, has pre-
sented special problems but viewed broadly, it has to be regarded as an essential aspect of
development of the economy of the country as a whole.’ On the intellectual consensus
around ‘development’ as a state goal, the prioritisation of scientific expertise and state wel-
fare, and its interpretation by nationalist elites in the late colonial state, see in particular,
Benjamin Zachariah, Developing India: An Intellectual and Social History c. 1930–50 (New
Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
10. Rehabilitation of Displaced Persons (Publications Division, Ministry of Information
and Broadcasting, Govt of India, 1948), p. 17.
11. The Indian and Pakistani governments also used Victorian terms such as ‘the deserv-
ing poor’ and ‘sloth’ (no doubt inherited from the lexicon of the Raj) in their discussion of the
displaced. Hard-working refugees who would stand on their own two feet were to be re-
warded and encouraged while ‘measures to eliminate forced idleness’ were essential. While
touring the kitchens of refugee camps in Lahore, Jinnah instructed the staff to, ‘Make the
refugees work. Do not let them nurse the idea that they are guests for all time.’
Dependency on the state was an expensive sin to be discouraged, and this official mind-
set was entirely compatible with socialistic, centralised planning projects.
12. AICC, G–18 (Part 1), Frontier and Punjab Riot Sufferer Committee to Pant, 4 Oct.
1947; UPSA, Relief and Rehabilitation, 197(18)/47, Pakistan Sufferers Cooperative Housing
Society.
13. Ravinder Kaur, ‘Planning Urban Chaos: State and Refugees in Post-partition Delhi’, in
E. Hust and M. Mann, eds, Urbanization and Governance in India (New Delhi: Manohar,
2005), p. 235. This attitude was most pronounced in the different way that Bengali and Pun-
jabi refugees were treated by the Indian government. Punjabis had the lion's share of these
schemes and benefited most from government help while the Bengalis were often left to
fend for themselves. Less money was spent, per head, on Bengali than Punjabi refugees.
The Punjabi crisis was more visible in the national capital than the Bengali one as the region
was closer and Partition's damage was more concentrated, bloody and horrifying. But as the
historian Joya Chatterji has illustrated, Congress politicians also drew on old colonial stereo-
types and blatantly discriminated between the hardy Punjabis and the ‘weak’, ‘dependent’
Bengalis. Joya Chatterji, ‘Right or Charity? Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal’, in Kaul,
ed., The Partitions of Memory.
14. NMML AIHM C–177. The Hindu Mahasabha claimed that 15 were killed and 60 in-
jured in the firing.
15. L. C. Jain, The City of Hope: the Faridabad Story (Delhi: Concept Publishing Co.,
1998), p. 75.
16. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 68 153/51, Disbanding of women's home at
Darbhangha Castle, Allahabad.
17. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation C, File MC/50 14 July 1951.
18. UPSA Relief and Rehabilitation Dept, 273/48 Box 18, 12 March 1950.
19. Ata-ur-Rehman, ed., A Pictorial History of Pakistan Movement (Lahore and Karachi:
Dost Associates, c. 1998).
20. The Journey to Pakistan, p. 296.
21. Ibid., Letter to the editor of the Pakistan Times on conditions at Walton camp, 23
Aug. 1947 from Mohammad Qureshi, p. 231.
22. The Journey to Pakistan, 19 Sept. 1947 p. 258.
23. W. Anderson and S. Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder: Westview, 1987), p. 50.
24. Mawdudi's statement, 7 Oct. 1947, reproduced in The Journey to Pakistan, pp. 267–
8. On Jam ‘at-i Islami and refugee rehabilitation in Pakistan, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, The
Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-i Islami of Pakistan (London: I.B. Tauris,
1994), pp. 88–9.
25. Mudie to Jinnah, 5 Sept. 1947, cited in Khalid B. Sayeed, Pakistan: the Formative
Phase, 1857–1948 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 262.
26. I. Talbot, Freedom's Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Parti-
tion Experience in North-West India (Karachi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p.
174.
27. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 4, p. 441.
28. Emergency Committee minutes, 18 Sept. 1947, reproduced in H. Patel, Rites of Pas-
sage: A Civil Servant Remembers (New Delhi: Vedam, 2005), p. 367.
29. V.N. Datta and B.E. Cleghorn, eds, A Nationalist Muslim and Indian Politics. Selected
Letters of Syed Mahmud (Delhi: Macmillan, 1974), Nehru to Syed Mahmud, 26 Feb. 1948,
p. 268.
30. SPC, vol. 8, pp. 46–7.
31. SPC, vol. 8, pp. 49–50, 1 Dec. 1949.
32. Ayub Khan, Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography (New York and Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1967), p. 48.
33. After Partition (Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1948), p. 35.
34. Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, in At the
Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp.
70–98.
 35. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 5, pp. 1–15.
36. The contrast with Liaquat Ali Khan's assassination could not have been more striking:
he too died of gunshots to the chest, in October 1951. The motive of the assassin, a civil ser-
vant from NWFP, remained obscure, and the death of the premier did little to assuage social
tensions.
37. M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements of Quaid-i-Millat Liaquat Ali Khan,
1941–51 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 121, Radio broadcast, 7 Oct. 1947.
38. ‘Gandhi Foresees Race for Armaments’, Civil and Military Gazette, 9 July 1947.
39. Quoted in Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political
Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 42. Jalal analyses
the partition of the armed forces and implications for the Pakistani state in detail. See espe-
cially pp. 25–48.
40. Liaquat Ali Khan's Speech to the Pakistan Muslim League Council, 20 Feb. 1949 in
Afzal, ed., Speeches and Statements, p. 211.
41. F. Tuker, While Memory Serves (London: Cassell, 1950), p. 497.
42. SPC, vol. 6, p. 210. Patel to Baldev Singh, 12 Jan. 1948.

Chapter 10: Divided Families

1. G.D. Khosla quoted in R. Kaur, ‘Planning Urban Chaos: State and Refugees in Post-par-
tition Delhi’, in E. Hust and M. Mann, eds, Urbanization and Governance in India (New Delhi:
Manohar, 2005), p. 231.
2. M. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A report on the new India in the words and pho-
tographs of Margaret Bourke-White (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949), p. 32; R. Menon
and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women,
1998), p. 178.
3. Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 196.
4. M.A. Quraishi, Indian Administration Pre and Post Independence: Memoirs of an ICS
(Delhi: BR Publishing, 1985), p. 154.
5. From Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
(London: Hurst, 2000), p. 204, cited in S. Kamra, Bearing Witness, pp. 165–200. In an inter-
esting discussion on the psychology of Partition, and in contrast to my argument here, Kamra
argues that recovery, or at least the ability to live alongside the past, was possible and did
occur with the passage of time, so that these events are ‘fixed’ in the past for many sur-
vivors. She also argues that the strong social cohesion of communities who were collectively
displaced helped to mitigate the impact of trauma.
6. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 7, p. 258. Broadcast from Delhi, 18 Sept. 1948.
7. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 14, part 2, p. 111. Nehru to Attlee, 20 March 1950.
8. Richard Symonds, The Making of Pakistan (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 112–
13.
9. Ibid.
10. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 14, pt. 2, p. 23. Nehru to Rajagopalachari, 11 April 1950.
11. Resignation letter of J.N. Mandal to Government of Pakistan, 8 Oct. 1950, Tathagata
Roy, My People Uprooted: A Saga of the Hindus of Eastern Bengal (Kolkata: Ratna
Prakashan, 2001), pp. 353–76; M. Rafique Afzal, ed., Speeches and statements of Quaid-i-
Millat Liaquat Ali Khan, 1941–51 (Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 311.
12. See the acrimonious letters exchanged between Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan in 1950
reproduced in Afzal, ed. Speeches and Statements, p. 585. Liaquat Ali Khan writes: ‘the
whole country was ravaged by fire and sword. Vast numbers were butchered and countless
women were abducted’, and blames India for the violence; to which Nehru replies: ‘any im-
partial person familiar with the tragic happenings in the Punjab will recognise the complete
baselessness of the suggestion that India organised the wholesale massacre of the Muslim
population in any part of its territories’ and describes the violence against Muslims carried
out, ‘by way of retaliation’. Other officially produced publications that accuse the ‘other side’
of initiating and sustaining Partition's violence include: Note on the Sikh Plan: An Account of
the Secret Preparations of the Sikhs (Lahore: Govt Print, West Punjab, 1948); The Sikhs in
Action: Showing the Sikh Plan in Actual Operation (Lahore: Govt Print, 1948).
13. Concerning Evacuee Property: problem and solution (Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Govt. of India, Delhi, 1950) p. 4.
14. After Partition (Delhi: Publications Division, Govt of India, 1948), p. 40.
15. National Herald, 10 May 1950.
16. UPSA, Home Police C, Box 2, File 128(PT)/49. Extension of stay for Pakistan artisans.
Amar Nath Bindra to Govt of UP, 24 May 1949.
17. Ibid., Amar Nath Bindra to Govt of UP, 24 July 1949.
18. CWMG, vol. 88, p. 164, Speech at a prayer meeting, 15 June 1947.
19. Civil and Military Gazette, 29 June 1947.
20. Andrew Whitehead, Oral Archive: India: A People Partitioned (London: School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, interviewed in Delhi 15
March 1997.
21. Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006), p. 91.
22. Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), p.
287.
23. See cases in Mazhar Husain, ed., The Law relating to Foreigners in India and the Citi-
zenship Laws of India and Pakistan (Delhi and Lucknow: Eastern Book Co., 4th edn, 1967).
24. The Statesman, Interview with the Director-General of the Border Security Force, 28
Oct. 2006.
25. Guardian, 2 June 2005, Obituary of Fazal Mahmood.
26. The Hindu, 29 Aug. 2004.
27. Willem van Schendel, ‘Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India–Bangladesh
Enclaves’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61.1 (Feb. 2002), pp. 115–47. See also W. van Schen-
del, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London: Anthem,
2005).
28. Speech of L.K. Advani quoted in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) press release, Karachi,
4 June 2005.
29. L.K. Advani's speech at the South Asian Free Media Association, Islamabad, 2 June
2005. See also ‘Musharraf ‘s Family Ties to Delhi’, BBC News, 13 July 2001.
30. The Nation, 16 Aug. 2005. See also www.bab-e-pakistan.gov.pk.
31. Daily Times, 17 Nov. 2005.
 32. Krishna Kumar, ‘Peace with the Past’, Seminar, 522 (2003). See also Krishna
Kumar, Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan
(New Delhi and London: Penguin, 2002).
33. Outlook, 27 Feb. 2006; Dawn magazine, 19 March 2006.

Epilogue
1. SWJN, 2nd ser., vol. 3, p. 99.
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Menon, R. and Bhasin, K., Borders and Boundaries: Women in India's Partition (Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1998)
Menon, R. (ed.), No Woman's Land: Women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh Write
on the Partition of India (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004)
Metcalf, Barbara Daly, Islamic contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan
(New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Minault, G., ‘Some Reflections on Islamic Revivalism vs. Assimilation among Muslims in
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pp. 70–98
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Pandey, G., The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh: A Study in Imperfect Mo-
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Pandey, G., The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford
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Pandey, G., ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in D. Arnold and D. Hardiman (eds), Subaltern
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Pandey, G., Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cam-
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 Index

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, (i)

Advani, L.K., (i), (ii)
Africa, (i), (ii), (iii)
Agra, (i), (ii), (iii)
ahimsa, (i), (ii), (iii)
see also Gandhi, M.K.; non-violence
Ahrars, (i)
Akali Dal, (i)
Akali Fauj, (i)
Akali Sena, (i)
akhara, (i), (ii)
Alexander, A.V., (i)
Alexander, Horace, (i)
Ali, Chaudhuri Mohammad, (i)
Aligarh, (i), (ii), (iii)
Aligarh Muslim University, (i), (ii)
see also illus. no. 5
All India Radio, see radio
Alwar, (i), (ii)
Alwar, Maharaja of, (i)
Ambala, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Americans, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Amritsar, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Partition politics, (i), (ii)
and peace process, (i)
and refugees, (i), (ii)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Andaman and Nicobar Islands, (i), (ii)
Anglo-Indians, (i), (ii)
Arya Samaj, (i)
Assam, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Cabinet Mission, (i)
reactions to Partition plan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
rumours in, (i)
Attlee, Clement, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Auchinleck, Claude, Field Marshal, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Auden, W.H., (i)
Australia, (i), (ii)
Ayodhya, (i)
Azad, Abul Kalam, (i), (ii), (iii)
azadi, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Azhar, Nasreen, (i)
Bab-e-Pakistan, (i)
Babri Masjid, see Ayodhya
Baden-Powell, B.H., (i)
Badshahi mosque (Lahore), (i)
Bahawalpur, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Bahawalpur, Maharaja of, (i)
Bakshi, A.S., (i)
Baluchistan, (i)
Bangladesh, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
see also Bengal
banks, (i), (ii)
flight of capital, (i), (ii)
loss of bankers, (i)
and refugees, (i)
Bareilly, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Benaras, (i), (ii)
see also Varanasi
Bengal, xxv (map), (i)
borders, (i), (ii), (iii)
famine (1943), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Partition politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and post-1947 crisis, (i)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and wartime, (i)
see also illus. no. 18
bhadralok, (i), (ii)
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), (i), (ii)
Bharatpur, (i), (ii)
Bhasin, Kamla, (i)
Bhopal, (i), (ii), (iii)
Bhopal, Nawab of, (i)
Bihar, (i), (ii)
food shortages, (i)
and Muslim Congressmen, (i)
and police mutiny, (i)
and pre-Partition politics, (i), (ii)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Bindra, Amar Nath, (i)
Birla, G.D., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Bollywood, (i), (ii)
see also cinemas; films
Bombay, (i), (ii), (iii)
and naval mutiny, (i)
and politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
reactions to Pakistan's creation, (i), (ii)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
troops depart, (i)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
border enclaves, (i)
Border Security Force (India), (i)
borders, (i)
control of, (i)
and League demands, (i)
people crossing, (i)
and princely states, (i)
uncertainties over, (i), (ii), (iii)
Bose, Sarat Chandra, (i)
Bose, Subhas Chandra, (i), (ii)
boundary commissions, (i), (ii), (iii)
Bourke-White, Margaret, (i), (ii), (iii)
Boy Scouts, (i), (ii)
Britain
Cabinet Mission plan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
civil servants, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
creation of empire in India, (i), (ii), (iii)
government, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv)
and Indian elections, (i), (ii)
and memories of Partition, (i), (ii)
policemen, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Second World War, (i), (ii), (iii)
withdrawal from India, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
British Army, in India, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
withdrawal of troops, (i)
see also illus. no. 15
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), (i)
business, see economy
Butalia, Urvashi, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Cabinet Mission, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Calcutta, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Gandhi, (i)
and Partition politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
censuses, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Central Emergency Committee (India), (i)
Central Provinces, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Chandigarh, (i), (ii)
Chaning Pearce, William, (i)
Chatterjee, Sailen, (i)
Chatterji, Joya, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Chauri Chaura, (i)
Chenab, river, (i), (ii), (iii)
children, (i)
and curfew, (i)
and education, (i), (ii)
and Partition politics, (i), (ii), (iii)
and violence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
see also illus. no. 25
Chittagong, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
cholera, (i), (ii), (iii)
Christians, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Churchill, Winston, (i), (ii)
cinemas, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
citizenship, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
confusion over, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
clothes, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Clow, Andrew, (i)
Commonwealth, (i), (ii)
communists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Communist Party of India, (i)
see also illus. no. 1
Congress, see Indian National Congress
Constituent Assembly of India, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
conversion, religious, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Cooch Behar, (i)
Copland, Ian, (i)
cow slaughter, and campaigns for abolition of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
cricket, (i), (ii)
Cripps, Stafford, (i), (ii)
curfews, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Dacca, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Dalmia, Seth Ramkrishna, (i)
Darling, Malcolm, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Das, Suhasini, (i)
Das, Suranjan, (i)
Dawn (newspaper), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
decolonisation, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
defence spending, (i)
Dehlvi, Masud Hasan, (i)
Delhi, (i)
elections (1946), (i)
and Gandhi's funeral, (i)
Independence Day in, (i), (ii)
Musharraf's visit, (i)
Muslim League supporters in, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact, (i)
Partition crisis in, (i), (ii)
and Partition machinery, (i)
policy mutiny in, (i)
post-war life in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and reactions to Partition, (i), (ii)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Durgapur, (i)
Durrani, F.K. Khan, (i)
Dutt, B.C., (i)
economy
post-war dislocation, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
impact of Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
trade between India and Pakistan, (i)
elections
in 1937, (i), (ii), (iii)
in 1946, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
in 1950 (India), (i)
see also illus. no. 4
Epstein, Anthony, (i)
ethnic cleansing, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
European civilians, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Faiz, Faiz Ahmed, (i)
Faridabad, (i)
Faridkot, (i), (ii)
Fatima Begum, (i)
fatwa, (i), (ii)
Ferozepore, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
fiction, and representations of Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
films, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
representations of Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
flags, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii)
importance of symbolism of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
food
committees, (i)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii)
shortages, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
France, (i), (ii)
Gandhi, M.K.
assassination and funeral of, (i), (ii)
and attempts to restore peace, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
memories of, (i)
and Pakistan, (i), (ii)
and pre-Partition politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
and women, (i), (ii), (iii),
see also illus. nos 11, 22
Gandhians, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Ganges, river, (i), (ii), (iii)
Garhmukhteshwar, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
George VI, King, (i), (ii), (iii)
Germany, (i), (ii), (iii)
Ghaziabad, (i)
Ghosh, Jugal Chandra, (i)
Gidwani, Chothi Ram, (i)
Gujarat, (i)
expectations of freedom, (i)
food protests in, (i)
reception of refugees, (i)
riots in, (i)
Gupta, Ashoka, (i)
Gupta, Saumya, (i)
Gurdaspur, (i), (ii)
Gurgaon, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Gurkhas, (i), (ii)
Hamid, Shahid, (i)
Hapur, (i), (ii), (iii)
Haridwar, (i)
see also illus. no. 11
harijans,25
see also ‘Untouchables’
Hashim, Syed Nazimuddin, (i)
Hedgewar, K.B., (i)
Hindu Mahasabha, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Hindustani, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hindustani Seva Dal, (i)
historiography, of Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
home guards, (i), (ii)
Hoshiarpur, (i)
House of Commons, (i), (ii)
housing, (i), (ii), (iii)
Humayan's Tomb, (i), (ii)
Hume, A.P., (i)
Husain, Amjad, (i), (ii)
Husain, Intizar, (i), (ii), (iii)
Hussain, Ahmad, (i)
Hussain, Masood, (i)
Hussain, Zakir, (i), (ii)
Hyderabad, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Hyderabad, Nizam of, (i)
Iftikhar-ud-Din, Mian, (i)
Ikramullah, S.S., (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Independence Day, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
celebration in India and Pakistan (1947), (i)
Indian Air Force, (i)
Indian Army (Second World War), (i), (ii), (iii)
deployment during riots, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
division of, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Punjab, (i)
reactions to Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and volunteer movements, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Wavell, (i)
Indian Civil Service (ICS), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii),
Indian National Army (INA), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Indian National Congress, (i)
and army, (i)
and Cabinet Mission, (i)
and local Congressmen, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and election (1946), (i)
and Gandhi's death, (i)
and historiography, (i), (ii)
and Independence Day, (i)
and Pakistan idea, (i), (ii), (iii)
and peace workers, (i), (ii)
and pre-Partition politics, (i)
and princes, (i)
and provincial ministries, (i), (ii), (iii)
and violence, (i)
and volunteer movements, (i), (ii)
and post-Partition reconstruction, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Indonesia, (i)
influenza, (i)
intelligence services, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
International Red Cross, see Red Cross
Iran, (i)
Jalal, Ayesha, (i)
Jam ‘at-i Islami, (i), (ii), (iii)
Jamia Millia University, (i)
Jamiat-ul-Ulema i Hind, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Jamshedpur, (i), (ii)
Japan, (i), (ii)
Jenkins, Evan, (i), (ii), (iii)
Jind, Maharaja of, (i)
Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, (i)
and Independence Day, (i)
memories of, (i)
and minorities in Pakistan, (i), (ii)
and Partition plan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and post-war politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and refugees, (i), (ii)
and riots, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
see also illus. no. 3
journalists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
and Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact, (i)
see also radio
Jullundur, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Junagadh, (i)
jute, (i), (ii), (iii)
kafila, (i), (ii), (iii)
Kalat, (i)
Karachi, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Independence Day in, (i), (ii)
and pre-Partition politics, (i), (ii)
and reactions to Partition, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
relations with India, (i), (ii), (iii)
and violence, (i)
Kashmir, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Kashmiri, Shorish, (i)
Kaur, Ravinder, (i)
khadi, (i)
Khaksars, (i), (ii)
Khaliquzzaman, Choudhry, (i)
Khan, Ayub, (i)
Khan, Abdul Ghaffar, (i), (ii)
Khan, Abdul Qaiyum, (i)
Khan, Liaquat Ali, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
and Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact, (i)
Khan, Sahabzada Yaqub, (i)
Khan, Shaukat Hyat, (i)
Khan, Syed Ahmad, (i)
Khan, Zafrullah Muhammad, (i)
Kher, B.G., (i)
Khosla, G.D., (i)
Kidwai, Anis, (i), (ii)
Kidwai, Rafi Ahmad, (i)
Kidwai, Shafi Ahmad, (i)
kisan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Kripalani, Acharya, (i), (ii)
Kumar, Krishna, (i)
Kurukshetra (refugee camp), (i)
Labour Party, (i)
Lahore, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Independence Day in, (i)
and memories, (i)
and peace process, (i)
reactions to Partition plan in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
violence in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Lahore Resolution, (i)
landlords, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Lari, Z.H., (i)
Latifi, Danial, (i)
Lucknow, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Macleodganj, (i)
MacNeice, Louis, (i)
Madhya Pradesh, (i)
see also Central Provinces
Madras, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
magistrates, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Mahalanobis, P.C., (i)
Mahmood, Fazal, (i)
Mahmud, Syed, (i), (ii)
Malaya, (i)
Malkani, Kewal, (i)
Mamdot, Khan of, (i)
Mandal, J.N., (i), (ii)
Manto, Saadat Hasan, (i)
maps, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Mathura, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mawdudi, Maulana, (i)
Mayaram, Shail, (i)
Mehta, Deepa, (i)
Mehta, Khorshed, (i)
memories
of famine (1943), (i)
of Partition violence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
of Quit India movement (1942), (i)
Menon, Ritu, (i)
Meos, (i), (ii), (iii)
Military Evacuation Organisation, (i)
Mohammad, Ghulam, (i)
Mohani, Hasrat, (i)
Mookerjee, Syama Prasad, (i)
Moon, Penderel, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Moradabad, (i), (ii)
Mother India, idea of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mountbatten, Louis, first Earl, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
and appeals regarding the boundary award, (i), (ii)
approach to question of Partition, (i)
attitude towards violence, (i), (ii)
and princes, (i)
and withdrawal of the British Army, (i)
see also illus. no. 13
Mughal Empire, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Muhajirs, (i), (ii)
see also refugees
Mujeeb, Mohammad, (i), (ii)
Multan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Musharraf, Pervez, (i)
Muslim League, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Aligarh, (i)
and elections of 1946, (i)
and memories of 1947, (i)
and Pakistan demand, (i)
and pre-Partition politics, (i)
and reactions to Partition plan, (i)
and refugees, (i), (ii)
and violence, (i), (ii)
Muslim League National Guards, (i), (ii)
Mussoorie, (i)
Nanak, Guru, (i), (ii)
Nandy, Ashis, (i)
Nankana Sahib, (i)
Narain, Govind, (i)
Narayan, J.P., (i), (ii)
Nawaz, Begum Shah, (i)
Nayar, Kuldip, (i), (ii)
 Nehru, Jawaharlal, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Hyderabad, (i), (ii)
and Independence Day, (i)
and Indian Muslims, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact, (i)
and Partition plan, (i), (ii)
and Patel, (i), (ii)
and post-war politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii)
and riots, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
see also illus. nos 12, 20, 23, 25
Nehru–Liaquat Ali Pact (1950), (i)
Noakhali, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
see also illus. nos 8, 9
non-violence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Noon, Firoz Khan, (i)
North West Frontier Province (NWFP), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii),
(xiii), (xiv)
Oudh, (i)
Pakistan Times (newspaper), (i), (ii)
Pakistani Army (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
panchayats, (i)
Pant, Govind Ballabh, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
see also illus. no. 12
Partition Council, (i)
passports, (i)
Patel, H.M., (i)
Patel, Kamlaben, (i)
Patel, Maniben, (i)
Patel, Vallabhbhai, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Patiala, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Patiala, Maharaja of, (i)
Patrick, Paul, (i)
peace activists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
see also illus. nos 7, 10
peasants, see kisan
Pethick-Lawrence, F.W., (i), (ii)
see also illus. no. 6
pirs, (i), (ii), (iii)
Planning Commission (India), (i), (ii)
police
and actions to control violence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii),
(xiv)
and colonialism, (i), (ii), (iii)
 involvement in violence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
loyalties of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
mutiny (1946), (i)
post-Independence, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and refugees, (i), (ii)
and volunteer bodies, (i), (ii)
postal services, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Prasad, Rajendra, (i), (ii)
princely states, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv)
aspirations to independence, (i), (ii), (iii)
private armies in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
relations with India and Pakistan, (i), (ii)
prisons, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
provincial politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv)
formation of governments in provinces in 1946, (i), (ii)
and reactions to Pakistan's creation, (i)
and responses to Partition refugees, (i)
Punjab, xxiv (map), (i)
army in, (i)
ethno-religious polarisation in, (i)
Independence in, (i)
post-Independence, (i), (ii)
provincial politics in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and reactions to Partition decision, (i)
refugee camps in, (i)
refugee movements in, (i)
and rehabilitation of refugees, (i), (ii)
violence in 1947 in, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
volunteer movements in, (i), (ii), (iii)
Punjab Boundary Force, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Purana Qila (Old Fort, Delhi), (i)
Quakers, (i)
Quetta, (i), (ii)
Quit India movement (1942), (i), (ii), (iii)
Quraishi, Manzoor, (i), (ii)
Qureshi, I.H., (i), (ii)
Radcliffe, Cyril, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
see also borders; boundary commissions
Radcliffe Line, xxiv (map), xxv (map), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
radio, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii)
Rampur, (i)
Ranchi, (i)
Rann of Cutch, (i)
The Rape of Rawalpindi (pamphlet), (i)
Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Rawalpindi, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Red Cross, (i), (ii)
Red Fort (Delhi), (i), (ii)
Red Shirts, (i)
refugee camps, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv)
refugees, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
movement of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
politics of, (i), (ii)
in Bengal, (i)
rehabilitation of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
see also illus. nos 8, 11, 16, 18, 23, 25
religious identity
in colonial India, (i), (ii)
and confusions with citizenship, (i)
and riots, (i), (ii)
simplifications of, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
symbols of, (i), (ii)
riots, see violence
Royal Indian Navy mutiny (1946), (i), (ii), (iii)
see also illus. no. 2
rumours, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv)
about atrocities, (i), (ii)
about Nehru, (i), (ii)
about Partition scheme, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
attempts to counter, (i)
power of, (i), (ii)
sadhus, (i), (ii), (iii)
Sahni, Bhisham, (i), (ii)
see also Tamas
Sahni, Ruchi Ram, (i)
Salaam, Amtus, (i)
Sampurnanand, (i)
Sarabhai, Mridula, (i)
Sarwar, Golam, (i)
satyagraha, (i)
Savarkar, V.D., (i)
Second World War, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Seghal, Shanti, (i), (ii)
separate electorates, (i)
Seth, Maheshwar Dayal, (i)
Sheikhupura, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Sialkot, (i), (ii)
Sikhs
 and army, (i), (ii)
and Cabinet Mission, (i)
and citizenship, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Partition plan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and pre-Partition politics, (i), (ii), (iii)
and Radcliffe line, (i), (ii)
and refugees, (i), (ii), (iii)
and religious identity, (i)
and violence in Punjab, (i)
Simla, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Sind, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii)
Singapore, (i), (ii)
Singh, Baldev, (i)
Singh, Giani Kartar, (i)
Singh, Khushwant, (i), (ii), (iii)
Singh, Kushdeva, (i)
Singh, Tara, (i), (ii)
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, (i), (ii)
Sobti, Krishna, (i)
social workers, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
socialists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
strikes, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
students, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi)
Sufi shrines, (i), (ii)
Suhrawardy, Husseyn, (i), (ii)
Sunlight on a Broken Column (novel), (i)
swaraj, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Sylhet, (i), (ii)
Symonds, Richard, (i), (ii), (iii)
Tablighi Jamaat, (i)
Talbot, Ian, (i)
Talbot, Phillips, (i), (ii), (iii)
Tamas (novel), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Tandon, Purushottam Das, (i)
Tata family, (i)
Taunsvi, Fikr, (i)
taxation, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
telecommunications, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Telengana uprising, (i)
Thapar, Krishna, (i)
Tiwana, Khizr, (i), (ii), (iii)
trade
between India and Pakistan, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
see also economy
trade unions, (i), (ii)
trains, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
disruption caused on trainlines, (i)
and imagery of Partition, (i)
see also illus. no. 16
transfer of population, see refugees
Tuker, General, (i), (ii)
ulema, (i)
see also Jam ‘at-i Islami
Jamiat-ul-Ulema i Hind
Unionist Party, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
United Nations, (i), (ii), (iii)
United Nations Refugee Convention, (i)
United Provinces (UP), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
see also Uttar Pradesh
universities, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
‘untouchables’, (i), (ii), (iii)
see also harijans
uprising, of 1857, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Uttar Pradesh, (i), (ii), (iii)
see also United Provinces
Vaid, Krishna Baldev, (i)
Varanasi, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
see also Benaras
violence
against women, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
in Bihar, (i), (ii)
in Calcutta, (i)
in Delhi, (i)
in Gurgaon, (i), (ii)
in history books and memory, (i)
locations of, (i)
in Noakhali and Tippera, (i), (ii)
numbers killed in Partition violence, (i)
in Punjab, (i), (ii)
in United Provinces, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
psychological impact of, (i)
violence of 1946, (i)
violence of 1947, (i), (ii)
see also ahimsa; ethnic cleansing
non-violence
visas, (i), (ii), (iii)
volunteer movements, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Wagah border crossing, (i), (ii)
Walton camps (Pakistan), (i), (ii), (iii)
Wavell, Archibald, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Whitehead, Andrew, (i)
women, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii)
involvement in nationalist politics, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
recovery of abducted women, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
refugee activism of, (i), (ii)
role in 1946 elections, (i), (ii)
violence against, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
see also illus. no. 24
Yamuna, river, (i)
Zaidi, Zawwar, (i)
Zilme Pukhtun (Young Pathans), (i)
Table of Contents
Cover 254
Title 2
Copyright 4
Dedication 5
List of Illustrations 7
List of Maps 9
Acknowledgements 10
List of Abbreviations 12
Glossary 13
Timeline of Major Events, 1945–1950 15
Introduction: The Plan 23
1 In the Shadow of War 32
2 Changing Regime 42
3 The Unravelling Raj 57
4 The Collapse of Trust 77
5 From Breakdown to Breakdown 92
6 Untangling Two Nations 112
7 Blood on the Tracks 133
8 Leprous Daybreak 146
9 Bitter Legacies 167
10 Divided Families 184
Epilogue 200
Notes 205
Select Bibliography 230
Index 238
1 19
2 20
3 21
4 22
5 205
6 205
7 205
8 205
9 205
10 205
11 205
12 205
13 205
14 205
15 205
16 206
17 206
18 207
19 207
20 207
21 207
22 207
23 208
24 208
25 208