The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson

  But the Congress high command only agreed India could be partitioned if Bengal and Punjab were also divided in two on religious lines. Hindu and Sikh leaders particularly saw the removal of large Muslim populations in these two marginally Muslim-majority provinces as a chance to assert their own dominance. In the anxious atmosphere of the 1940s, Indian leaders preferred to exercise a monopoly of power over truncated spaces rather than risk sharing authority over larger swathes of land. Jinnah and the Muslim League initially insisted the two provinces form part of Pakistan intact. But once Congress accepted partition, the Muslim League had no momentum in negotiations. Jinnah, reluctantly, accepted what he called a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan at the final meeting in the Viceroy’s residence with a sad, barely perceptible nod of the head. Z. H. Lari, a lawyer who had campaigned for partition, complained that what Pakistan offered ‘will be from every point of view so weak that we will find ourselves in serious difficulties’.

  The fears of millions meant that India had become a divided society long before the summer of 1947. But those divisions did not have neat boundaries. They occurred within cities and in non-contiguous parts of the countryside. They could not be placed on either side of single lines and form international boundaries at the eastern and western end of the Indian subcontinent. The announcement of the plan that India would be partitioned occurred on 3 June, two months before the boundary of the two states was announced. In the meantime, Indians imagined thousands of other ways to reconfigure the sovereignty of the subcontinent. Muslim League leaders in Bombay urged the creation of pockets of Pakistan in Bombay province; Muslim politicians in Punjab and Bengal campaigned for their provinces to stay united, arguing that Hindus and Sikhs should be allowed to join Pakistan’s constituent assembly; others thought India’s largest conurbations could become city-states and achieve independence in their own right. The Nizam of Muslim-ruled Hyderabad in the south-centre of the subcontinent, initially wanted his state to join Pakistan, and then tried to assert its autonomy from both countries. Travancore, in the far south-west, made a bid for complete independence based on the higher than average levels of education in its population and the possession of rare metals vital for the construction of nuclear weapons beneath its soil.

  Until the very date of independence in August 1947, Pakistan was nothing more than ‘a fictive counter-nationalism to the Congress’, as Yasmin Khan puts it. It was a fiction, nonetheless, which aroused passionate hopes and anxieties. In the months before independence, fear was fuelled by uncertainty, as no one knew where the boundaries of the new state would lie. Killings began in Punjab when gangs of Hindus and Sikhs attacked Muslims moving to make this fictional nation into a reality. Railway stations were attacked at the end of July. The first major act of sabotage occurred when the ‘Pakistan special’ carrying soon-to-be Pakistan officials from Delhi to Lahore was blown up five days before independence. Retaliation against Hindus and Sikhs occurred in Lahore, in particular, with some reports saying the station was a scene of constant gunfire on 14 and 15 August. Escalating fear of violence drove millions to trek one way or another across the border between India Pakistan. On their journey, hundreds of thousands were massacred. As in August 1946, frightened migrants brought with them a passion for revenge to their places of refuge. Violence escalated in mobile chains of retaliation. Muslims driven from northern India took their revenge when they moved to western Punjab. Hindus and Sikhs, angry about being driven from the land which had housed their families and shrines for centuries, arrived in Delhi and massacred the residents of the old city. Aggressors on both sides drew from professional techniques for inflicting violence they had learnt during the war. Mass death was not the work of mob frenzy. Partition killings were perpetrated by bands of disciplined, trained men using sophisticated weapons they had stolen from the army. A society mobilized to conquer outside itself had lost the capacity to live without fear, and entered into a brutal cycle of violence. Fractured into frightened, defensive enclaves, parts of India conquered themselves. The death toll has been estimated to be between 180,000 and 500,000.56

  There are strange parallels between the violence which began and sustained British rule in India, and the violence which ended it. In both cases, small groups, fearful of attack, huddled in heavily defended safe spaces. They took revenge on those who caused their fear when they could gain the upper hand. In both cases, groups of people asserted a violent right to defend themselves without conversation with their opponents, and with no notion of how the cycle of violence was going to end. Violence escalated as people took responsibility for the survival of their own community, narrowly defined, without ‘comprehending the working of other minds’, as Beni Prasad put it. The difference was that the British concern with the acquisition of money and territory, and their lack of interest in control over people, meant the violence of conquest ended whenever Indians rendered nominal submission to it. Unlike the violence of imperial power, the violence of partition had a potentially unstoppable genocidal dynamic, because the existence of the living bodies of the enemy without one’s own territory was a threat. In the history of political violence in India up to that point, the partition massacres were unique in being accompanied by rape and forced conversions. Many women who had been violated were not welcome back to their original families, however much India’s new patriarchal states insisted that they were to be returned to their husbands and fathers. It was, perhaps, the intention of the perpetrators to force women – the potential mothers of children who could fight against them – to abandon the community of their rivals.

  Historians often write about the violence of 1947–8 as the original trauma of India and Pakistan, as an unparalleled moment of tragedy which should always cloud our thinking about the creation of the subcontinent’s new independent states. It was certainly tragic. But given the scale of social and political collapse, the violence which occurred in 1947–8 should be seen neither as surprising nor unique. The adjustment of the boundaries of Europe and the rest of Asia that followed the end of the Second World War was accompanied by mass migration, rape and death in many parts of the world. Proportional to their overall population, the transfer and massacre of Germans from Czechoslovakia were as devastating as India’s partition violence. The civil wars that followed defeat of the Japanese in South East Asia were far longer and, again, led to greater loss of life. What is remarkable about the violence which accompanied India and Pakistan’s independence is the speed with which it ended. Compared to the dreams of Indians before independence, partition was a disaster. But it could have been much worse.

  Violence had been allowed to escalate because the British regime’s priority before 15 August was to organize the safe retreat of soldiers and officers to ports and then on ships home. In the weeks before the handover of power, Mountbatten instructed the British army to avoid any operational situations unless British lives were at stake. The only Indian soldiers the British deployed were members of the newly created Punjab Boundary Force, an organization which lasted only thirty-two days, and was so small it could only allot two men to every square mile in the border regions. It took three disastrous weeks for the new governments of India and Pakistan to act. In those first weeks, there was a moment of uncertainty about who the citizens of each of the new states actually were. For a brief moment, the government of Delhi seemed to have abandoned responsibility for Muslims, for example. Huge refugee camps for Muslims which sprang up the tombs of Mughal emperors in the city were deemed the responsibility of the distant Pakistani government. But by the middle of September, fast-acting emergency committees had been set up, soldiers from southern India had been deployed and political leaders were touring the worst affected districts.

  In Delhi, it was Gandhi’s tours of Muslim camps in the second week of September which made it clear to many that Muslims in India were Indian citizens. By November, Muslims started to move back to their homes, although only 150,000 out of 500,000 were left in the city. Still unhappy about the scale of
violence, in January 1948 Gandhi decided to fast until violence ceased completely. The effect was massive. ‘[C]ontrition written on people’s faces, a stoop in their walk, tears in their eyes,’ wrote Begum Anees Qidwai, everyone’s ‘conversation was about Bapu’s fast’. A hundred thousand government employees signed a pledge to work for peace, as did many political leaders, from the Hindu Mahasabha and various Muslim organizations who had long been critics of Gandhi. Peace committees were formed. Formerly antagonistic religious groups repaired each other’s desecrated mosques and shrines.

  Twelve days after he ended his fast, Gandhi was killed by a bullet fired by a Hindu nationalist frustrated at his ‘concessions’ to Muslims. Gandhi’s death created a reaction against the cycles of violence he had struggled with throughout his life. As Gyan Pandey puts it, ‘Gandhi achieved through his death even more than he had achieved through his fast.’ His assassination stopped India from becoming an exclusively Hindu and Sikh space. Muslims in India and Hindus in Pakistan were still nervous, still ready to migrate at a moment’s notice; many did move over the following years. The largest movement of Hindus from East Bengal, where there was little direct violence in 1947, occurred in the early 1950s. But with Gandhi’s death, ‘the world veritably changed’, as the Urdu writer Ebadat Barelvi put it. ‘Overnight, such calm was established, such a peace that one could not have dreamed of even a few days earlier.’ Reason, briefly, seemed to have prevailed over chaos and passion.57

  15

  THE GREAT DELUSION

  At the midnight hour of 15 August 1947 South Asia was bathed in darkness. If they were awake, most citizens in the newly independent dominions of India and Pakistan saw in the transfer of sovereignty by candle flame or paraffin lamp, without electricity able to power a wireless. From the parliament building in New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru announced India’s awakening ‘to life and freedom’. But Nehru’s speech was heard by a fraction of India’s population. More than 80 per cent of the people in the two countries which had just achieved independence lived in the countryside, and all but 1,500 (0.2 per cent) of India’s half a million villages had no power.

  The British left India a society of extremes. In pockets amid poverty South Asia was prosperous and modern. In the fifty years before 1947, cities had grown fast, British India going from one to six settlements with more than a million people. In India, 31.5 million (out of 370 million) people lived in settlements with a population of more than 100,000. These cities had electric streetlights and modern typewriters, railway stations and buses as well as slums and open drains. In the mid-1930s, 200,000 cars drove on the streets of India, every one imported from Europe or Japan. Bengal had one of the oldest Automobile Associations in the world. India had the highest rate of road accidents. University departments worked at the cutting edge of international science. By 1947, India was one of a small number of countries which conducted research in nuclear physics.1

  The Second World War was a good time for some. Business boomed as shortages in every sector of the economy needed to be filled at any price. Rampant inflation was good for people living in the countryside able to tap the profits of production. This was boom time for rich peasants in places like Mysore and Punjab, where there were few agricultural labourers whose income would rise slower than the cost of living. But people paid in fixed wages suffered. Field labourers, factory workers and middle-class government employees all faced massively higher prices but no increase in income. Despite big industrial profits, one economist estimated that industrial wages fell by 30 per cent during the war. Agricultural labourers who did not own the land they worked on fared even worse. For many, it was a struggle to survive. Roughly the same amount of food was grown as in 1900, but the population was a fifth larger. Famine and serious scarcity had recently returned to parts of the subcontinent. The average new-born could expect to live only thirty-two years. In 1947, life for the vast majority of citizens in South Asia was rural, hard and short.2

  Despite the century-long British effort to control the natural environment, millions were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the seasons and the landscape. Two years after partition the 27-year old Pakistani writer Syed Waliullah wrote a description of rural Bengal in these years of chaos, emphasizing the brutal effects of nature on people’s lives. From a family of minor government officials, Waliullah grew up during the depression in a village near Chittagong, before studying in the small town of Mymemsingh and then Calcutta University. At partition he chose Pakistan and became a news editor on Pakistan Radio. His novel Lal Shalu (translated later as Tree Without Roots) described the collapse of sociable norms in rural Bengal during years of famine and war, and was brutally unsentimental about life in the countryside. Waliullah was writing about a region which had once been one of India’s most productive places. His home district was where the East India Company had hoped to conquer in the 1680s to profit from local agriculture and trade. By 1947, it was home to a struggling population left exposed to storms, floods and drought. To survive, land needed to be ploughed and reploughed to the point of exhaustion with ‘no rest, no peace and what is worse, no nourishment, at least not from the ravenous ones who suck it dry’.

  Waliullah described a rootless society in constant motion. Millions searched for something to eat or a place to make their home. People were ruled by ‘a great restlessness’, yet ‘go hungry and starve’. Everyone dreamed of ‘leaving their homes’. But the rivers, the trains, the paths were all crammed full of people on the same search. ‘[T]hey sweat and they swear, they solemnly pray for the infliction of God’s curse on their neighbours and then they pray, equally solemnly, for their own safety,’ Waliullah wrote. The political institutions which might have protected the vulnerable had long broken down. The forces which once ensured the poor were looked after had long collapsed. This was a description of a chaotic society in which everyone sought a refuge or an enclave just to survive.3

  Enclaves

  India’s later British rulers and their post-imperial chroniclers liked to propagate the view that imperial rule in India was a systematic form of power driven by coherent ideas. ‘The Raj’ is a phrase which embodies a certain kind of authoritarian high-mindedness. On television or in fiction it is now associated with unbending, stiff-lipped men capable of imposing their visions of order and hierarchy and on an otherwise chaotic society. Historians of empire spend much of their time discussing those visions, tracing the British belief in the inferiority of Indian society, their rhetoric about ‘civilization’ and ‘development’, their arguments about property and the rule of law. Too often the context of those visions is absent, and texts are read with no reference to the situations they were written in. In reality, the British proclaimed their strength and purpose when their authority seemed the most fragile. In fact, as we have seen in this book, British power in India was exercised sporadically. It was driven by a succession of short-term visceral passions. It did not have a systematic vision of peace and stability, nor a way of working able to produce order. It created chaos.4

  Rather than a coherent political vision, British rule in India was based on a peculiar form of power. Fearful and prickly from the start, the British saw themselves as virtuous but embattled conquerors whose capacity to act was continually under attack. From the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, they found it difficult to trust anyone outside the areas they controlled. Their response to challenge was to retreat or attack rather than to negotiate. The result was an anxious, paranoid regime. The British state was desperate to control the spaces where Europeans lived. Elsewhere it insisted on formal submission to the image of British authority. But it did not create alliances with its subjects, nor build institutions that secured good living standards. The British were concerned to maintain the fiction of absolute sovereignty rather than to exercise any real power.

  The result was that the British left South Asia a fragmented society. In theory, they transferred authority to new governments which possessed the power to protect everyone in
the territories they ruled. In reality they left an uneven mess of enclaves and ghettoes, in which people were divided from each other by a jumble of different authorities, institutions and economic forces. The political institutions which the British left protected some people; institutions nationalists had built supported a few more. But most people were left unprotected from whoever or whatever forces had the greatest clout in mid-twentieth-century South Asia, whether the weather, rapacious landlords or powerful local political bosses. The British empire’s greatest legacy was to create some of the most disjointed and chaotically ruled societies in the world.

  To start with, the British transferred supreme authority to more than two states. When they announced their rapid timetable for departure in June 1947, the British declared that their supreme authority over India’s 565 ‘native states’ would simply lapse. By the date of partition, only 114 of these half-independent regimes had been cajoled into joining the Union of India and none to join Pakistan. For a brief period after August 1947 the world’s list of independent sovereign regimes was swelled by hundreds of new absolute monarchies. Amir Khan’s old principality of Tonk, with 2,500 square miles and 300,000 people, was formally independent for seven months until its Nawab signed up for his state to be incorporated into the Indian state of Rajasthan.