Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  The third category were those British who saw the end of the Raj as the end of their service. Many had already started to leave after the war and understandably there were few new recruits joining from Great Britain. Sir John Colville, Governor of Bombay, estimated on 20 January that 70 per cent of his ICS officers and 90 per cent of his police officers were leaving.89 There had also been a perceptible decline in commitment among some British ICS officers during the last decade. Norval Mitchell, happily married to an American wife, was horrified at the amount of adultery he found among the ICS and European community at his first station of Nagpur. It seemed to him that the chief occupations of most of his brother officers were ‘adultery and bridge’.90 He was equally shocked by the amount of time the police spent investigating it. Others lost their moral focus. Mitchell became enraged in Kolhapur at his senior officer, the Resident – an officer from the Indian Political Service, the select sub-group of the ICS who managed the Raj’s affairs with the Princely states – whose own preoccupation was rebuilding his house from public funds. It had probably always gone on but for Mitchell it felt like a terrible betrayal at a time when the future of the whole service was unsure.

  Many of those who served in the 1930s and 1940s also found they didn’t like it. Kushwant Singh, that bemused and not unsympathetic observer of the Raj, thought that British nostalgia for India was a figment of their imagination, as they all seemed to hate it while they were there.91 Even the Indophile Mitchell admitted that he found the Central Provinces ‘extremely depressing, extremely hot and extremely dirty’.92 ‘Going there with me in 1943 were about one hundred young men who felt much, and knew as little, as I did and hated the place’, wrote Paul Scott as he joined the Indian Army; ‘we had no sense of having arrived at the splendid and glittering heart of the British Empire’.93 Scott actually came to love India but many did not.

  It was perhaps the inevitable result for a class who had tried to isolate themselves, impose their own views and morality, warts and all, and lost the easy relationship their East India Company forebears had originally enjoyed in the happier times before the Mutiny.

  Tired, demoralised, lacking support, with an apparently intractable political situation, increasing violence and with a crumbing country, January 1947 was not a happy month for Wavell. On 17 January he wrote to Attlee saying that he was ‘very sorry that the Cabinet had not been able to give him a more definite policy’ and that all he could do ‘at present is to draw up plans for an emergency withdrawal’.94 On 21 January he established an Emergency Planning Committee tasked with preparing plans to evacuate the 100,000 British and European civilians and 63,000 British military and British serving with the Indian Armed Forces. It was not what Attlee wanted to hear. Then on 24 January it looked as if the Punjab would erupt. The premier, Malik Sir Khizar Hayat Tiwana, supported by Sir Evan Jenkins, the British governor, moved against the RSS (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the League National Guards, the paramilitary groups respectively representing the Muslim and Hindu communities, whom he correctly felt were causing disturbances. For a tense week there was the threat of major violence until Khizar, under pressure from Delhi, backed down.

  Wavell’s problem was that he knew India too well, was almost too accommodating and, after eight long years of war and political infighting, lacked the necessary energy. Wavell collected other men’s poetry. Clement Attlee wrote his own. On 31 January he sent Wavell a letter. ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘you may agree that the time has come to make a change in the viceroyalty.’95

  2. FEBRUARY

  A VICTORY FOR CONGRESS?

  ‘We no longer have any real power to control events . . . if we stay we may become involved in a situation like Palestine’

  (WAVELL)

  Wavell was not alone in feeling worn out by the beginning of February. On 1 February Muhammad Ali Jinnah announced that the Muslim League would play no further part in the Constituent Assembly. The League’s Working Committee had met the day before in Karachi, the day Attlee wrote to Wavell telling him he was being replaced, and formally resolved that the Constituent Assembly should be dissolved and that the Cabinet Mission Plan had ‘definitively and finally failed’.1 It seemed to Congress as if a resolution was as far away as ever. Their leadership, the heirs apparent to the new independent nation of India, was equally as tired and frustrated as the sacked viceroy. Gandhi was seventy-eight and Vallabhbhai Patel seventy-two; Jawaharlal Nehru was admittedly only fifty-eight but he, like many senior Congress leaders, had spent much of the last twenty-five years in jail and had suffered illness and bereavement. They were beginning to wonder if they would ever achieve their goal.

  The founders of Congress, the creators of the independence movement that resolved that the Raj must end, had died many years before. The reaction of both Hindus and Muslims to the failure of the 1857 Mutiny had been one of intellectual reflection, a soul-searching as to why the British had prevailed. The Hindus looked back to their religious root, to their original scriptures, the Vedas and to the later Upanishads for guidance on how society should react. The Muslims looked naturally to the Holy Qur’an and the Hadiths. Movements like the Deobandis thought their failure was because they had drifted too far from the original teaching of the Prophet. Yet this period of spiritual reflection, and subsequent lack of political organisation and action, did not last long.

  Three factors would ensure that within thirty years, by 1885, Indian opposition to the Raj would take a much stronger form. The first of these was education. The East India Company had realised in the 1830s, well before the Mutiny, that they would need a pool of local people with the necessary skills to run their administration as their territory and remit expanded. In January 1857 the University of Calcutta was founded as a multi-disciplinary, secular body and although its original governance was exclusively British, by 1890 it had its first Indian vice chancellor, Gooroodas Banerjee, a High Court judge. In July 1857 Bombay University followed, modelled on London University and with two departments – arts and medicine. Finally Madras University was founded the same year. Indians now had an opportunity to update themselves with Western scientific and medical progress but they could also appreciate English values, language and culture away from the stifling world of the military or bureaucracy. There turned out to be a huge interest in the English language and English literature, which seems quite odd in a country like India with its own rich literary tradition, but less surprising when taken in the context of not only wanting to understand the Raj but also to be able to secure junior jobs in its administration. Alongside the universities there was a mass founding of schools and colleges, mostly based on a British model, often complete with impractical British-type school uniforms, quaint traditions and an emphasis on the classics. Some of these were more Anglo-Indian than Indian, and were sometimes quite racist in their attitude, but slowly this began to change.

  These schools and universities not only allowed intellectual Indians of different backgrounds to mix in a way that had previously been difficult but they also exposed them to the values of patriotism and enterprise, ironically at the core of the Imperial British education system. These were precisely the ideas and approach that educated Indians needed to articulate protest. As importantly, it was difficult to read Shakespeare and Shelley, and to listen to British lecturers extolling the virtues of British freedom without questioning why that was not also being extended to the Raj’s Indian subjects. The Indian universities were also remarkably freethinking, encouraging ideas and experimentation without the domination of the Church, which was still such a strong influence in many European universities.

  This study of British culture had a twofold effect. It gave some Indians a deep understanding and appreciation of elements of British culture, such as the English language, which has lasted to today. Rather as many British became fascinated with Indian culture, so the process worked in reverse. V. P. Menon summed it up when he said to a BBC interviewer in 1964, ‘Culturally we were [your] product. All
our leaders were absolutely saturated with British culture’.2 Even Gandhi was a London-trained lawyer; so was Nehru, the father of modern India, a qualification he had gained after Harrow and Cambridge.

  The second major influence on the formation of Congress was the emergence of an Indian middle class, a new phenomenon to the Raj and one with which they felt distinctively uncomfortable. Whereas they understood the princes and their courts, who would invite them to do agreeable things such as shoot tigers, and they had based their whole system of government on the flawed concept of protecting the peasant farmers, they never really understood the commercial urban class that gained strength in the second half of the nineteenth century and from which Congress would initially draw its support. These were the graduates of the new universities, the men who made money from the law or commerce, and who saw themselves as the leaders of a future India rather than the princes who had been discredited, in their eyes, during the Mutiny.

  Thirdly, although the Mutiny cannot be seen as a national movement, it did make people start thinking about India as a nation. Part of the reason that the East India Company was able to dominate India relatively easily in the eighteenth century was the lack of an effective central power to oppose them. The Mughal emperors, who had invaded India in the sixteenth century, had never succeeded in integrating it as one country. Through a series of treaties with the powerful Rajput and Maratha rulers who dominated Central India, they had achieved some sort of partial unity, but it was liable to constant uprisings and civil war. In the seventeenth century Sivaji, a charismatic leader and effective military commander, had led a major Maratha revolt; the Sikhs had been growing in strength in the Punjab and states like Hyderabad were virtually independent. There was no unifying language, no universal religion, the Mughals were Muslim but most of their subjects Hindu. The Mutiny had taken the aged King of Delhi, the last vestige of the Mughal monarchy, as their figurehead but he had never been more than that. Now, post-1857, there was a desire to see India as one nation, to look back before the Mughals, even to the great King Ashoka, who ruled most of what is today India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the third century BC and whose lion symbol is now the national emblem of modern India.

  The issue that brought these three influences together was the Ilbert Bill introduced by the liberal Viceroy Lord Ripon in 1883. This was a simple legislative reform, which would have allowed Indian judges to try Europeans in certain criminal cases, occasioned because Indians were now rising up the junior levels of the Indian legal structure. The Raj exploded in fury at the prospect of such an insult. Ripon, a fair-minded reformist but lacking resolve, backed down, and the bill was shelved. It was now the turn of the Indian political class to explode. In 1885 came the first meeting of the Indian National Congress in Bombay. From its initial seventy members its numbers quickly spread, its popularity sending a message in itself. By 1900, despite some tacit support from Ripon’s successor, it became the vehicle to oppose the Raj and demand greater Indian representation and ultimately independence.

  Although Congress would later inevitably become closely associated with Hinduism, that was never its intention. Hinduism is not a religion that easily allows itself to be used as a political force, being more a way of life, and Congress insisted, as it still does today, that it spoke for all Indians, the claim that Jinnah would find so hard to accept. In its early days the Congress movement was dominated by two great thinkers, both of whose legacies would translate into the various wings of the party that now debated where to go in the depressing early days of February 1947.

  The first of these was Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He was the epitome of the new Indian, born in 1866 to a not-very-well-off Brahmin family of the Chitpavan Brahmin sub-caste, in what is today Maharashtra, and was educated at Elphinstone College and then Bombay University. He secured a job as a junior civil servant in Bombay and rose to be on the Governor General’s Council. He was a keen Anglophile, a disciple of John Stuart Mill and Burke, whose approach was to work with the British to achieve first social reform and then self-government. His famous line was that if the British ever left India the Indians would call them back before they reached the Red Sea.3 He became president of Congress in 1903 when he also founded the Servants of India, a society dedicated to furthering education. He was, in many ways, the Raj’s ideal nationalist – reasoned, conciliatory, and easy to deal with; he was made a Companion of the Indian Empire, one of the Raj’s highest honours. Gokhale visited Ireland and corresponded widely across the English-speaking world. In 1909 he was instrumental in the Morley-Minto Reforms. Yet he was a convinced nationalist and an influential mentor to Gandhi, whom he visited in Africa, and to both Nehru, who particularly admired his Westernised, constitutionalist approach, and to Jinnah.

  Gokhale’s conciliatory, gradual way of doing things was in marked contrast to that of the other great nationalist leader, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Ten years older than Gokhale, he was also a Maharashtra Chitpavan Brahmin, and another early product of the new education, eventually qualifying as a lawyer but whereas Gokhale became an admirer of British culture, Tilak came to despise it. The Chitpavans had previously enjoyed some status in the Maratha states, something they saw as having been reduced with the coming of the British. Tilak’s reaction to his education was to look back to the great days of the previous Hindu dynasties and to find inspiration in traditional Indian rather than Western culture. Consequently he became the leader of the radicals, seen as the more dynamic leader of the nationalist movement, and known by the British as a seditious troublemaker. His first major opposition came in Bombay in 1896 following an outbreak of plague when he thought British troops had overreacted by forcefully entering the sanctity of Hindu homes. In the ensuing trouble two British officers were shot and Tilak was accused of protecting the culprits; he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Tilak then supported the Hindu opposition to Curzon’s partition of Bengal and in 1908 he was given a six-year jail sentence for sedition when he campaigned for two men who had thrown a bomb at the chief magistrate of Muzzarfarpur. He served his time in Mandalay, returning to India somewhat chastened in 1914, and supported the Morley-Minto Reforms and the British war effort. In his later life he despaired of converting Gandhi and Congress to his more extreme home rule views and founded the All India Home Rule League. An admirer of the Russian Revolution, Tilak was also responsible for giving greater focus to traditional Hindu practices. He made the worship of Ganesh a major part of people’s lives and was also an early exponent of swadeshi, supporting Indian-made goods and boycotting foreign imports, something Gandhi was later to develop so successfully.

  The legacy of Gokhale and Tilak was to be played out in the respective factions in Congress throughout the 1930s and 1940s. However, they both also had a profound influence on the greatest of Congress leaders, and arguably the greatest Indian of modern times, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It was Gandhi more than any other man who had brought Congress so close to its goal of independence and who, although less directly involved by 1947, still exercised enormous influence. Gandhi was one of those extraordinary men who come to change world history by force of intellect and character and one of the very few who sought no material or financial reward for doing so. Many people loathed him. To the more reactionary of the Raj and to right-wing British politicians he was wily and unscrupulous – Churchill called him a ‘seditious fakir’4 – and Wavell described him as ‘intransigent, obstinate, uncompromising’5 (although he also applied that view to Churchill and Jinnah). The far right of the nationalist movement hated him as they thought he compromised with Islam, and eventually they would kill him. He drove many of his Congress colleagues mad by his changing moods and priorities, reducing Nehru to tears on several occasions. Many Muslims loathed him because they felt he was a Hindu nationalist at heart who wanted to deny them Pakistan. Modern cynics delight in making fun of his undoubtedly slightly strange sexual practices, and hardly a year goes by without some new lurid revelation about his sex life. Yet to many
hundreds of millions of Indians, and to a wider international diaspora, he was the Mahatma, the ‘Great Soul’.

  What is equally remarkable about Gandhi as a leader, apart from his absolute rejection of any material benefit, is that the nationalist creed he preached and its intellectual and spiritual underpinning were largely original. Deep down a Hindu, he hated many Hindu customs, and he was in fact really an adherent of his own religion. He interpreted his role, and by extension that of Congress, not just as getting rid of the Raj but also of replacing it with an Indian culture based on what he saw as the essential wholesomeness of its millions of poor villagers. There was an element of expediency about this, and it was a useful and clever way of attacking the Raj, but equally it was founded on genuine belief and it has remained deeply influential in modern India.

  Like many of the main characters in the extraordinary story of 1947, Gandhi was from Gujarat, born in 1869 into a middle caste, a modh bania, family of officials in Kathiawad, a small Princely state on the western coast. He was educated at the single college in the state where only English was spoken during his last three years. His father was a devout Hindu, a member of the Vaishnava sect, devotees of the God Vishnu, but the family were equally influenced by the Jain tradition, which was particularly strong in Gujarat. He was married in his early teens to Kasturbai, a girl from the same caste group in Kathiawad, and who, together with ther son, would probably suffer the most from her husband’s more eccentric beliefs. After the early death of his father Gandhi was sent aged nineteen to study law in London, something he accomplished with some success. He found less racism in London than he might have anticipated, and, like so many of his counterparts, left with a respect and affection for Britain but unable to comprehend why the British could not practise in India what they preached at home.