Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  Radcliffe’s task was not an easy one. He had little time, no familiarity with the land or the people, and census statistics which were, by now, quite old and almost certainly outdated. Boundaries are usually demarcated along geographical lines — rivers, mountains, etc. Where the two parties on either side of the boundary are at loggerheads, even geographical boundaries become suspect. (Rivers, for example, tend to change course, and this can become a cause for tension.) And religious contiguity does not, in any case, follow geographical patterns. The most sacred of Sikh shrines, Nankana Sahib, lay deep inside Western Punjab. Lahore was a city loved and owned equally by both communities, as was Amritsar, an important trading and religious centre, sacred to the Sikhs, but also loved by many Muslims. Gurdaspur district was said to have a Muslim majority, but economically, it was the Sikhs who dominated here. The line that eventually became the border had some shrines of Muslim saints dotting it. Yet, the hundreds of thousands who visited these included Sikhs, Hindus, Christians etc. Political considerations had dictated that the border follow contiguous areas. Geography dictated otherwise: the demands of politics fitted ill with the constraints of geography, but in the end, politics won over geography. Unable to follow natural divisions, Radcliffe was forced to draw what are called ‘complex’ boundaries which ran through villages, deserts, shrines — and people’s lives. Equally, the constraints of geography fitted ill with the demands of economics and commerce. The Hindus and Sikhs made out a case that was based on rather unlikely bedfellows: religious identity and economics. They emphasized the role they had played in the development of industry and commerce in Lahore: they owned the bulk of the banking system, insurance, factories, education. These, according to Justice Meher Chand Mahajan, one of the representatives of India on the Commission, were the ‘other factors’ the Boundary Commission needed to take into account. A mere focus on population was not enough.

  In the end, predictably, the award satisfied no one. Indeed, there was no satisfactory way to make the division. The Amrita Bazar Patrika labelled it the ‘departing kick of British imperialism at both the Hindus and Muslims’, while Dawn called it ‘territorial murder’ and said ‘Pakistan has been cheated by an unjust award, a biased decision, an act of shameful partiality by one who had been trusted to be fair because he was neutral’.10 For his part, Cyril Radcliffe knew he had not made himself popular. He would never go back to India, he said, and wrote to his nephew: ‘Nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and travelled and sweated ... oh, I have sweated the whole time.’ Later — much later — he was asked in an interview whether he would have done differently had he had more time. And he said: ‘Yes. On my arrival I told all political leaders that the time at my disposal was very short. But all leaders like Jinnah, Nehru and Patel told me that they wanted a line before or on 15th August. So I drew them a line.’11

  The political developments that preceded the drawing of Radcliffe’s boundaries contributed to the growing hostility between the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. This did not only have to do with religion. Much more was at stake: jobs, livelihoods, property, homelands. A sort of competition developed for these, but significantly and differently, on religious lines: would a Muslim get x or y job or a Hindu? Just as religion had conflicted with geography — how many Hindus or Muslims on this side of a river or mountain or desert, so also it clashed with things such as property, and employment.

  But while hostility may grow easily enough, instant boundaries are not that easy to lay down. Despite the boundary, people travelled back and forth. For some years, there was no passport system between Pakistan and India. Today, in a tragic travesty of this earlier ‘openness’, for Pakistanis and Indians to get visas to visit each other’s countries is an extremely difficult, and often virtually impossible, enterprise. When they succeed, they must report to the other country’s police when they arrive and before they leave, and they have permission only to visit three cities in either country!

  Ironically, instant enmity and hostility were forced to rub shoulders with some sharing. The two countries were tied together in a relationship of fierce hatred and grudging interdependence. The departure of barbers, weavers, tailors, goldsmiths, and others en masse to Pakistan, crippled certain aspects of life particularly in Delhi. In Pakistan, the departure of accounts clerks, bankers, lawyers and teachers, dealt a similar blow, albeit at a different level, to life there. As a new country, Pakistan had no instant arrangements to print its currency: the mint was in India. Nor did it actually have a banknote to call its own. So, for about a year, Pakistani currency (Indian banknotes which were legal tender in Pakistan until it established its own) was printed in India, as was much government material and stationery, with the government press at Simla given over entirely to printing materials for Pakistan and a part of the press at Aligarh given over for the same purpose. Pakistani officers (for currency) were trained in India for several weeks, and India loaned accountants to Pakistan to help out with accounting work. Until July 1948, when the State Bank of Pakistan was set up, the Reserve Bank of India continued to function for both countries. During this time, a new Pakistani banknote was designed and once it went into printing, Indian banknotes ceased to be legal tender. As with everything else, a string of disagreements accompanied these changes too, for Pakistan accused India of refusing to accept and encash Indian banknotes which were no longer of any use in Pakistan.

  It can be argued that the conditions for Partition were obvious for all to see in Punjab. Although just short of a majority in numbers, non-Muslims (Hindus and Sikhs) were economically dominant. They owned the bulk of industry, agriculture and business and many were moneylenders. A very real fear of dominance and exploitation then lay behind the Muslim demand for separate electorates — your own representative in power, it was believed, would protect the interests of your community. Elsewhere in India, however, separate electorates had been granted to communities who were in a numerical minority. Here, in Punjab, if Census figures were to be believed, Muslims were in a slight majority, but their economic and social position vis-à-vis the Hindus and Sikhs was seen as a reason for granting separate electorates. Hindu and Sikh reaction to this in Punjab was, predictably, negative, with the Sikhs lobbying for similar treatment. Each of the contending claims had some justification, yet each meant injustice to the other.

  But a demand for power, for a voice in the legislature, was one thing. How did this get transformed into a demand for a homeland, a separate country? How — and whence — did the idea of Partition come? As always, it is difficult to fix a point at which an idea becomes more than just an idea — Partition is no exception. In books on the subject, the idea is sometimes credited to Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, at others to the poet Mohammad Iqbal; it is also said that it was mooted by the Indian politician Lala Lajpat Rai, and it comes to be ‘fixed’ as an idea, and attributed at this stage to Jinnah, after the Lahore resolution of 1940 (which is often also known as the Pakistan resolution). Yet ideas never have such a simple history, or indeed geography. Recent research has shown that despite the growing tension between the Congress and the Muslim League, even after the so-called Lahore Resolution, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, widely seen as the architect of Pakistan, remained ambivalent on the idea of Pakistan, while the Congress was not as reluctant to accept it as has been believed.12

  On the ground, too, there was evidence that religious differences were not so rigid. Historian Sumit Sarkar points out that the period preceding and leading up to Partition was marked by two seemingly contradictory processes — a number of protest movements on the ground in which Hindu-Muslim unity was a notable feature,13 as well as a series of processes at the broader political level where the Congress and the Muslim League played a complicated game of alliance and separation. Through this, the British negotiated their careful moves, now encouraging one, now the other, their
own approach varying as broader political developments on the home (the victory of Labour in the 1945 elections) and the international (the World War in 1939) fronts impinged upon it.

  Whatever the origins of the idea, however, by 1946, it was clear that the departure of the British was now imminent. In England, a Labour government had been swept to power in July 1945, and shortly after the end of the second world war, this government announced elections in India. Although a far cry from earlier promises of elections based on universal franchise, the Congress and Muslim League nonetheless took to these with gusto. They campaigned, and won impressive victories, with the League, for the first time, making inroads into the all-important state of Punjab. Even so, a clear majority still remained outside its grasp because of a tactical alliance between the Unionist Party and the Congress and Akalis. This would be broken, in roughly a year’s time, paving the way for the League’s full control of Punjab, with the resignation of the Punjab Prime Minister, Khizir Hayat Khan Tiwana in June 1947. What was significant about this pattern of voting was its communal nature, which reflected the increasing communal tension on the ground. Strong revivalist movements such as the Arya Samaj, the Singh Sabha and others had already found fertile ground in Punjab. Now, other, newer actors entered the fray: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Muslim League National Guards, the Akali Sena. All of these played no mean role in heightening tension between the different communities.

  Other developments followed: in February 1947 the British prime minister Clement Atlee announced that the British would transfer power in the Indian subcontinent by ‘a date not later than June 1948’. The Muslim League now made a concerted bid to capture power in Punjab, and with the resignation of the Punjab premier, this became a reality. On March 8, 1947, even as Sikh majority villages in Rawalpindi were facing concerted attacks from Muslim mobs, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution calling for a division of Punjab into two provinces.

  There are many interpretations about how all these tangled strands tied in with Partition: the debates are well known, and have formed the stuff of much history writing about this time. I have no wish to enter these debates, to establish who was more to blame, the Congress or the Muslim League, or how the British manipulated their departure, or who was more communal, and so on. I am not a historian and have neither the capability nor indeed the interest to explore these questions. I am concerned instead with the consequences of Partition for people then, and its ramifications now, in their lives. My focus here is on the small actors and bit part players, whose lives, as the lives of all people, were inextricably interwoven with broader political realities. How these realities touched on and transformed their lives, is what my work is concerned with.

  Whenever it took root however, the idea of partition was not new. India had already, for example, seen the partition of Bengal. But an internal partition, a dividing up of a province, is quite different from partitioning a country. Initial discussions in Punjab too included the possibility of partitioning the province, making a separation between East and West because Hindus and Sikhs dominated in one and Muslims in the other. All sorts of schemes were discussed — the separation of Ambala division from Punjab in order to make one community predominant; the amalgamation of Rawalpindi and Multan divisions (excluding Montogomery and Lyallpur districts) with the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) which would then ensure that Hindus and Sikhs were in a majority in what was left of Punjab.

  Part of the problem, it seemed, was that the three communities were too evenly balanced. Moving of one away from the province would change this balance — and perhaps solve the problem. But things are never this simple. Electoral victories and the assumption of power, albeit limited, had shown both parties how seductive power could be, and they now colluded in the confusion, the ad hocism and the rush to push things through. The original date of independence was advanced by Mountbatten, the man who was said to be ‘in a hurry’, and political leaders endorsed this speeded-up agenda, giving people little time to make thought out decisions. As early as 1940 Nehru is reported to have said that Partition was preferable to any postponement of independence. Despite their reluctance to partition the country then, leaders, particularly within the Congress, began to see it as a necessary price for independence, and were complicit in the processes that led to the severing of what Sardar Patel described as a ‘diseased limb’. The blood that was shed, however, was not only that of a limb cut off, but of thousands of lives.

  To some extent, the seeds of the idea of Partition can be said to have lain within the economic and social differences that existed between Hindus/Sikhs and Muslims. Most Partition memories speak of pre-Partition days, when Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs lived in a state of — often mythical — harmony. Yet this harmony was built on concrete, material differences. At a more day to day level, there were other differences. Bir Bahadur Singh, to whom I spoke some years ago, described these eloquently:

  ... if a Musalmaan was coming along the road, and we shook hands with him, and we had, say, a box of food or something in our hand, that would then become soiled and we would not eat it; if we are holding a dog in one hand and food in the other, there’s nothing wrong with that food. But if a Musalmaan would come and shake hands our dadis and mothers would say, son, don’t eat this food, it has become polluted. Such were the dealings: how can it be that two people are living in the same village, and one treats the other with such respect and the other doesn’t even give him the consideration due to a dog? How can this be? They would call our mothers and sisters didi, they would refer to us as brothers, sisters, fathers and when we needed them, they were always there to help. Yet when they came to our houses, we treated them so badly. This is really terrible. And this is the reason Pakistan was made.

  These are some of the ‘facts’ of Partition. As facts, they recount only the minutiae of history, not its general, overarching patterns. These are well known and don’t, in my view, need repetition here. It is the smaller actors I am interested in, the bit part players. Even as I look back to the history that we know of Partition, my purpose is not to question the veracity of its ‘facts’ but to question what I can best describe as the ‘adequacy’ of such facts: can we continue to think of the history of Partition only in terms of broad political negotiations? Where then do we place the kinds of ‘facts’ I have talked about here, and where the stories the lie beneath and behind them? Having spent a little more than a decade listening to people’s memories, collecting their stories, the question before me is: given what these stories have told me, and what I, from my context and politics, have read into them, can ‘that’ history now serve? Carolyn Steedman describes what I think I am trying to do as a process of interpreting (or re-interpreting) ‘facts’ — a reworking of ‘what has already happened, to give current events meaning’. The point, she says, ‘doesn’t lie there, back in the past, back in the lost time in which they [the events] happened; the only point lies in interpretation.’14 I am concerned then with a different reality, a different interpretation.

  Behind all the facts that I have described above, and those that don’t figure in this telling, lie human beings, real flesh-and-blood figures whose lives were profoundly affected by Partition. Some have lived, as my uncle has, with a sense of permanent loss and regret, others have lived with the trauma of rape, the conscious, perhaps slow and always difficult process of the acceptance of so deep a violation as abduction; some with the knowledge that in the past they have killed ... It is only when one is able to look behind and beyond the ‘facts’ of Partition, that these different, multi-layered histories begin to unfold. The stories that I recount in this book therefore, might be said to be of a different order of ‘facts’ from those that the tools of conventional history allow us to apprehend. For such tools, used as they are to dealing with documents, with reports, with speeches, are simply not adequate to unpick the seams behind which lie the silences I am trying to look at. There is no historical entry point, for example, that
allows me to look for — and find — a story like my uncle’s if all I have to hand are the tools of conventional history. No historical document can approximate his pain and anguish, none that can reflect his trauma or even begin to understand his confusion and ambivalence. None that can see him — or any of the other people you will meet in this book — as human beings upon whose bodies and lives history has been played out. In most historical accounts of Partition, people are just numbers, or else they are that terrible word, ‘informants’, mere sources of information. For me, in my study of Partition, it is the people I spoke to who are an integral part of the history of Partition. In many ways, it is they whose lives are the history of Partition.