Yet neither she nor her husband ever regretted the creation of Pakistan. Strong early Congress supporters as they had been, and much as they hated the violence, which Faiz would articulate so movingly in poems like his famous ‘Freedom’s Door’, they saw Pakistan as being the only way forward. She didn’t think what happened in the Punjab was possible but it made her realise how deep the scars cut. But she and Faiz thought of Pakistan as the first step towards creating a fairer society, a step towards a goal of a democratic socialist state, which she saw as perfectly compatible with Islam.6
Others, like Saleem Siddiqi, saw Pakistan as some sort of indictment of the British failure. His father, an irrigation civil servant originally from the United Provinces, had to move Siddiqi and his nine siblings to Pakistan; they were lucky. Altogether sixty members of his extended family were killed in August and September. Siddiqi thought that the British had always denied Muslims power in India and that they favoured the Hindus, who enjoyed more wealth and who seemed to dominate the best jobs. The longing for Pakistan, which Jinnah had identified, went back a long way. For him the idea of Pakistan was equality of opportunity, a sort of re-establishment of Muslim identity, and especially the ability to get government jobs, which they felt had been so long denied them. Ironically Siddiqi ended up as mayor of the London Borough of Hackney, but his sentiments were echoed by many.7
For rulers like the Nawab of Bahawalpur, who returned to his capital on 2 October having spent the summer in Farnham, Surrey, the concern was that he had lost many loyal Hindu subjects who had lived happily under his autocracy for generations. Initially minded to compose a poem to thank Gurmani, his prime minister, and Penderel Moon for all their efforts at peacekeeping, he gradually came to blame them for, as he saw it, driving away loyal Bahawalpuris and replacing them with insolent Punjabi Muslims. He ordained that only refugees from Indian Princely states, who could be supposed to know how to behave, were to be allowed to settle. He would only accept families from Bikaner, Patiala, Alwar, Nabha and Bharatpur. Luckily many Bikaner refugees were crossing the border, given that Bahawalpur was the logical place for them to enter Pakistan geographically, but his preferences otherwise ‘did not have much practical effect’. For the nawab, Pakistan should not be allowed to disturb the workings of his state.8
Then there were those, however much Jinnah and Liaquat tried to demonstrate otherwise, who did see Pakistan as an Islamic state, a feeling heightened by the horror of the Punjab. There was a group who came to see the new state as defined by Islam; its 1949 constitution would start with a dedication to God and specifies that ‘Muslims shall be enabled to order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accord with the teachings and requirements of Islam as set out in the Holy Qur’an and the Sunna’.9 Containing militant Islam was to become one of Pakistan’s greatest challenges. Many millions more, mostly outside the Punjab and Bengal, remained unaffected, probably aware that their nationality had changed but were not unduly concerned. For them, as for so many million Indians, the idea of nationhood was an intellectual luxury that seemed alien to their priorities of tilling, sowing and harvesting and worrying whether they would have enough food to keep their families alive for the coming year.
But one group who were directly and painfully affected were those who lived in Bengal. Radcliffe’s line had left 11 million Hindus in East Bengal and 5 million Muslims in West Bengal. This latter group constituted a quarter of Bengal’s total Muslim population and 15 per cent of the total Muslim population of the new India.10 Both communities were as fearful of partition as their compatriots in the Punjab. The Great Calcutta Killings, the Noakhali gang murders and the riots of 1 September led many to think that the horrors of the Punjab would also be visited on them. It is one of the few positives of the story of 1947 that it never happened and although there were many small, localised outbreaks of violence and intimidation, there was none of the industrial scale savagery that happened a thousand miles west.
The reasons for this, and the story of Bengal’s second partition, has been studied rather less than that of the Punjab, possibly because it would soon be overshadowed by the terrible wars of 1965 and 1971, and the famine that followed the flooding of the Brahmaputra river in 1974.11 There are several factors that contributed, although none of these appear decisive. First, Gandhi’s presence, and his ability to preach peace at his prayer meetings in Calcutta between 15 August and 1 September, and his fast after 1 September, showed the Mahatma’s magic at its most powerful. Mountbatten described him in a speech as a ‘one man boundary force who kept the peace while a 50,000 strong force was swamped by riots’, referring, inaccurately and optimistically, to Rees’s actually rather smaller PBF.12 At the same time, Ghosh, the premier, displayed an uncompromising pragmatism and had effected a good working relationship with Tuker and the military. Although still resisting the imposition of martial law, which Tuker had seriously considered asking for on 1 September, the new West Bengal government’s robust stance meant that Calcutta remained quiet throughout September. One of the unsolved questions of 1947 is why the military and civil administrations could work in harmony and effectively in Bengal when they seemed unable to in the Punjab. The fact that Calcutta did not erupt meant that the outlying rural areas remained calm as well; outside its few cities Bengal was largely a society of poor farming families.
Secondly, Radcliffe’s line in Bengal was less contentious than in the Punjab and he had been receptive to advice on how it should be drawn. Although his panel of judges turned out to be of limited use, opining always according to party lines and lacking objectivity, Radcliffe had listened carefully to local opinion. The critical difference between Bengal and the Punjab was that in Bengal, Congress and nearly half of the population actually wanted partition to happen; without it Bengal’s Hindus would always live under a Muslim majority government, hence the strong opposition to Huseyn Suhrawardy’s calls for independence. Congress’ chief tactical concern was also to ensure that Calcutta remained an undivided city. Consequently they offered a less partisan view outside the city than they might have done. Radcliffe also had a precedent for partition in Bengal – something he lacked in the Punjab – in Curzon’s partition of 1905. His line would in fact be very similar. Congress had offered two ‘cardinal principles’ in Bengal. First, they asked that the two parts of Bengal should contain as much of the total Hindu and Muslim populations as possible. This may have seemed an obvious point but it allowed Radcliffe some leeway in deciding on where the final line should run. Secondly, Congress had asked that the ratio of Hindus to Muslims and vice versa should be roughly equal in both parts of the partitioned province. Radcliffe achieved this remarkably successfully, with East Bengal ending up 71 per cent Muslim and West Bengal only marginally less Hindu. There was therefore a basic feeling of equity.
Radcliffe also accepted more detailed proposals. He agreed to use the thana, effectively the area controlled by a local police station, and for which the most up-to-date census figures existed, as his ‘unit’ for partition. This meant that his line grouped communities more accurately than if he had relied on the larger tahsils as he had to in the Punjab. He also found that the geography of Bengal allowed him to allocate the river systems more coherently. Calcutta relied on the River Hooghly, which was not only its commercial artery but also, being part of the Ganges system, holy to Hindus. By allocating its headwaters of the Murshidabad and Nadia rivers to West Bengal, he preserved its integrity, even though this meant including the Muslim-majority Murshidabad district; in exchange East Bengal received the southern district of Khulna, despite it having a Hindu majority. There were areas of serious contention. The League were furious that the northern city of Jalpaiguri, the railway terminus before the hills and the entrepôt for the tea-growing region around Darjeeling, went to India. Similarly Congress complained vociferously about Chittagong going to Pakistan, and that despite having Darjeeling and Jalpaiguri in the north, together with the Princely state of Cooch Behar, they had no
land link to West Bengal.
Thirdly, the movement of refugees was to be slower. Both Hindu and Muslim leaders spoke out strongly against any migration at all. The influential Sarat Chandra Bose, speaking at a press conference on 1 October, said any idea of a transfer of population was ‘suicidal, ill-advised and wholly impractical’ while Dr Syed Hossan, on behalf of the Muslim community, called the concept of a mass migration ‘Monstrous’.13 Only 700,000 Muslims would move from West to East Bengal that autumn; a similar number would migrate over the years ahead so that by the mid-1960s nearly one and a half million would have moved but it was a trickle compared with the huge flood from East Punjab. More Hindus would move to West Bengal: 1.1 million would move in the year following partition; 2.6 million had made the journey by 1951. Again, this was a more staged migration than that from West Punjab.14 Many had already left the Noakhali and Tripura districts after the killings in 1946. They were also different people. The Hindu communities tended to be grouped either in the south, in Jessore, Khulna or in Dacca itself, or in the north, around Rangpur and Dinajpur. Many of these were quite well off, either landlords or successful traders, who managed migration more as a planned move by air or ship than in desperation. Of those 1.1 million who moved soon after partition, over half were ‘rural gentry’, or landowners. Relations with their Muslim tenants had not always been good. The villagers in Bardarpur, near Narayanganj just south of Dacca, resented the fact that the biggest landowners were the Hindu Biswanath family; the family did not improve things by insisting that all Muslims walking to the village bazaar take a long detour so they didn’t have to see them cross in front of their house. They actually stayed put, although with far less power in the village, while others were forced out.15 In Ratanpur, twenty miles south-east of Chittagong, thirty-nine houses belonging to the Hindu landlord Sitanath Das were burned. A correspondent who visited soon afterwards thought the place ‘represents a ghastly scene, starving and panic stricken victims, some of whom have severe burn wounds’ who surrounded him ‘and narrated their awful story with tearful eyes’.16
Of the early refugees, 350,000 were urban craftsmen and businessmen, who found similar work in the west, although it would take time. A large part of the given Hindu population were also tribes people from Chittagong and the hill areas that bordered Burma. They were listed as Hindus for want of any other categorisation but had no intention of moving nor felt any pressure to do so.
Yet this was still a mass migration. Many Hindus who became refugees were very poor and they only moved, given the acute shortage of productive land in Bengal, because they felt they had to. Joya Chatterji analysed why refugees living in a village in Nadia, a southern district of West Bengal bordering East Bengal, had decided to leave. Eighty-two said they faced harassment from Muslims; forty-one cited fear of violence; sixteen had suffered actual violence. Twenty-three left ‘because everyone else had’ and because their community was disintegrating; many would cite poor Muslims now demanding to marry high-caste Hindu brides. For those in East Bengal, stories coming from West Bengal, where many had existing family ties, were not encouraging. Jobs and land were very difficult to find and most poor refugees would end up either in Calcutta, or in the swampy areas of the 24 Parganas and Nadia to the south.17 Many would stay in the government-run camps for a very long time. Those who found jobs or livelihoods in Calcutta would swell its numbers so that it became the most densely packed city on earth.
Prafulla Kumar Chakreborty described a group of these unfortunates huddled miserably on Sealdah, one of Calcutta’s stations. ‘They had come away leaving behind all to live here with self-respect’, he wrote, in a piece that was critical of the West Bengal government’s lack of effort on their behalf. ‘They could never guess what death in life awaited them in West Bengal. They got their first poisonous taste on Sealdah station.’ Having been inoculated against cholera, ‘they were herded into roped off areas on the platforms waiting transport to the camps. Five or six thousand people packed within this barely manageable space. Water comes from three taps. Women have two lavatories’.18 Many had endured a difficult journey, and there were frequent complaints of belongings being looted by the Muslim National Guard, the vigilante body that operated on the fringes of the League. There was also a feeling that the poor had been abandoned to their fate by the richer Hindus who could afford to re-establish a similar life in the west. ‘Their morale’, wrote K. N. Dalal, for Associated Press, of the hundreds of thousands of poor, ‘is completely broken with the evacuation of the middle class people’.19
The pattern among the Muslims who made the move east was not dissimilar. In the early stages government servants, their households, and well-to-do Muslim traders and businessmen went, mindful of the opportunities on offer. They were followed by people who came from areas where the violence had been worst in 1946, particularly from Calcutta and the cities. The Muslim population of Calcutta would fall from being roughly one third in 1947 to about a seventh by 1951. In Nadia town the proportion of Muslims fell by three quarters and in Jalpaiguri by 90 per cent. Others came from the rural districts of Nadia and the 24 Parganas, close to the border. However, the majority of the rural population stayed put. There was no mass migration from Murshidabad, for example, despite it being left in India. Yet there was a definite ‘anti-Muslim’ feeling in post-partition West Bengal, and an unjustified feeling that East Bengal had taken the most productive agricultural land. Muslims, used to commanding a majority, had to note Congress’ dictat that the government would ‘not tolerate the existence within its borders of disloyal elements’. Ashok Mitra, a local magistrate in Malda, wrote that there was a recurring tendency among Malda’s Hindus to embark ‘on a witch-hunt of Muslims’ and said they ran a list of thirty thousand ‘undesirable Muslim families’.20 In the remote village of Patuabhanga the local Muslims were determined to state their case. On 25 October they sacrificed a cow, something inimical to Hindus for whom cows are sacred. The Hindus protested, saying such things should not now be allowed. The police intervened and six Muslims were shot.21 Even Suhrawardy was heard to declare publicly that ‘the mainspring of our policy [is that] we shall serve our country’ and that ‘we pledge support to the government of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru – not merely lip support but true and loyal support’. It did not stop him later becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan.22
Lastly, many of the rural poor had other things on their mind. Although the terrible famine of 1942–44 was now under control, and there were some food stocks, there was still a threat of starvation that October, particularly in the very poor areas like Noakhali. ‘Thousands of famished men, women and children, dressed in rags, were to be seen loitering in the streets of Chittagong day and night, begging for food and alms, a reminder of the pitiful scenes of 1943’, wrote Tuker. ‘Reports of deaths from starvation were constantly dribbling in from the villages. The general vitality of the people had deteriorated from want of proper nourishment’. Many cattle had been killed during the Monsoon floods and milk, a village staple, was now scarce.23
The new provincial government of East Bengal formed under the effective direction of Khwaja Nazimuddin. He selected two people to help him run the province: Nurul Amin, a quiet and well-liked barrister who had been the former Speaker of the united Bengal Assembly, and Hamil Chowdury. Their appointments were announced in Dawn on 15 August. They faced a difficult task. Many Pakistanis believed that East Bengal would not be able to survive, much as Burrows had predicted back in April. Famine was thought to be the inevitable consequence of an overpopulated area that now lacked commerce, communications and industry; partition had left it with just 12 per cent of Bengal’s industrial capacity. Agricultural productivity was, despite the complaints of East Bengal having taken the best land, low and food production, insufficient to feed the growing population. The city of Chittagong, on the Bay of Bengal, was not developed as a port. The population density of East Bengal in 1947 was 700 per square mile compared to just 109 for Sind and the Punjab. Dacca was
not a city like Calcutta. It was ‘a city of bamboo and corrugated iron whereas Calcutta is proverbially a city of palaces’, although some would argue that was being over-generous to Calcutta.24 It was a thousand miles from its own capital in Karachi, its people shared few links to their compatriots in Sind or the Punjab, speaking a different language, and dressing and eating differently. Pakistan was oriented towards the Middle East; East Bengal was ‘irrevocably part of Asia’.25
The lack of industry and the low agricultural productivity meant that the province’s ability to raise revenue was limited. Nazimuddin faced a formidable bill for the provision of essential infrastructure and services and very limited means to pay for it. In 1947 provincial taxes would raise only just over 4 rupees per head, compared to 17 rupees for West Bengal; the comparable figures for the Western Pakistani provinces were 18 rupees for Sind and nearly 8 rupees in the Punjab. One of the strangest British legacies was the 1793 Bengal land settlement, known as the ‘Permanent Settlement’. This had been part of Cornwallis’s reforms where he had tried to equate land tenure in India with the English system that he so admired. This well-meant piece of legislation capped the amount the Bengal government could collect in land tax from landowners but, by also creating a landlord class, it had left them free to extract higher rents from their tenants.
Enormous as the political and financial problems were, and however concerned the nation’s new leaders may have been, partition was, at least to begin with, very popular among the majority of the now East Bengalis. The Hindus had bitterly opposed Curzon when he divided Bengal in 1905 but had strongly supported partition; the Muslims, once they realised that a unified Islamic state of Bengal was unachievable, now began to see the opportunities that partition offered. East Bengal was one of the most Muslim parts of India. There were more mosques in Dacca than in any other Indian city; it had proved fertile ground for Wahhabi preachers in the nineteenth century. Bengali Muslims were mostly converted low-caste Hindus whose popular history reminded them that they had held effective power until the arrival of the British and many had felt oppressed by their Hindu landlords. There was a discernible zeal for separation and the jobs they hoped it would now offer, a spirit that has translated into the modern nation of Bangladesh once the Province rejected its semi-colonial status as an adjunct of West Pakistan. The issue Nazimuddin faced was more one of making his remote province relevant to a Pakistani government grappling with similarly enormous problems. He was not helped when it was announced that the official language would be Urdu, almost unspoken in Bengal.
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