India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  Some friends deserve special mention, for their long-term help in matters professional and personal. These good souls are Rukun Advani, André Béteille, Keshav Desiraju, Gopal Gandhi, David Gilmour, Ian Jack, Sanjeev Jain and Sunil Khilnani. André and David also provided detailed comments on a draft of the book. And I was kept going by the memory of my friend Krishna Raj, editor for thirty-five years of the Economic and Political Weekly, the journal whose own life is so closely bound up with the life of the Republic – as the notes to this book testify.

  I thank, for their support, encouragement, criticism and chastisement, my editors, Richard Milner of Macmillan and Dan Halpern of Ecco/HarperCollins. I promise to be less tardy with the books that might follow! In fact, without my agent Gill Coleridge even this one would not have been finished. On more than one occasion I have been tempted to take an extended holiday, or drop the book altogether. Each time it was Gill who brought me back, showing me the ways in which it might be continued and, in the end, completed.

  My greatest debt, as expressed in the dedication, is to the always interesting and occasionally exasperating Indians with whom I am privileged to share a home.

  Postscript: In preparing this revised edition of India after Gandhi, I have got valuable research assistance from Sachin Arya. I am also grateful to Keshava Guha and T. N. Ninan for commenting on the new chapters, and to Diya Kar Hazra and Sushmita Chatterjee of Picador India for so expertly seeing the book through the press.

  Notes

  Prologue: Unnatural Nation

  1The translation is by Qurratulain Hyder.

  2See Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, ed. and trans., Ghalib, 1797–1869: Life and Letters (1969: reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 7.

  3John Strachey, India (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Co., 1888), pp. 2–5.

  4The best single-volume treatment remains Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (London: Macmillan, 1985). For a more up-to-date account see Sekhar Bandopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), an additional merit of which is its excellent bibliography.

  5Interview in the Adelaide Advertiser, November 1891, quoted in the ‘NB’ column of The Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 2001.

  6E. H. D. Sewell, An Outdoor Wallah (London: Stanley Paul and Co., 1945), p. 110, emphasis added. These words were written in 1934.

  7Winston Churchill, India: Speeches and an Introduction (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), pp. 38, 120, 125 etc.

  8These quotes are taken from Devesh Kapur, ‘Globalization and the Paradox of Indian Democracy’, mimeo, Department of Political Science, University of Texas at Austin, December 2005.

  9Don Taylor, ‘This New, Surprising Strength of Mrs Gandhi’, Evening Standard, 21 August 1969, emphasis in original.

  10The Statesman (New Delhi), 10 August 1998.

  11Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, José António Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), quoted in Kapur, ‘Globalization’.

  12Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 4.

  13Krishna Kumar, What is Worth Teaching? 3rd edn (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004), p. 109.

  14Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: William Heinemann, 2005), p. xiii.

  15Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Essential Characteristics (1931; reprint London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), preface.

  1. FREEDOM AND PARRICIDE

  1Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India, 1958–; hereafter cited as CWMG), vol. 42, pp. 398–400.

  2Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, with Musings on Recent Events in India (1936; reprint London: The Bodley Head, 1949), p. 209.

  3The Indian Annual Register, 1930, part I (Jan.–June), p. 23.

  4This account of the ceremonies is based on Jim Masselos; ‘“The magic touch of being free”: The Rituals of Independence on 15 August’, in Masselos, ed., India: Creating a Modern Nation (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1990); Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudesia, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 2; The Statesman, 15 August 1947; reports in Philip Talbot Papers, Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (hereafter CSAS); reports and correspondence in Mountbatten Papers (Mss Eur F200), Tyson Papers (Mss Eur F341), and Saumarez Smith Papers (Mss Eur C409), all in the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London (hereafter OIOC).

  5Actually, as Salman Rushdie once remarked, half the world had not yet gone to sleep, and the other half was already awake. This witticism did not stop Rushdie from including Nehru’s speech in an anthology of Indian writing that he edited – the only piece of non-fiction to find a place in the volume.

  6As related in Rajmohan Gandhi, The Good Boatman: A Portrait of Gandhi (New Delhi: Viking, 1993).

  7This section on Gandhi and the run-up to independence draws on D. G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 2nd edn (1963; reprint New Delhi: Publications Division, 1990), vols 7 and 8; N. K. Bose, My Days with Gandhi (1953; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1990); N. K. Bose and P. H. Patwardhan, Gandhi in Indian Politics (Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1967); and relevant volumes of CWMG.

  8The words of the then viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, speaking on 8 August 1940.

  9B. R. Nanda, ‘Nehru, the Indian National Congress and the Partition of India, 1935–47’, in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 183.

  10The Statesman, 16 August 1947.

  11The new governor was R. F. Mudie, a British member of the Indian Civil Service who had elected to stay on and work for the government of Pakistan. The quote is from a typescript in the Mudie Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur F164/12).

  12Quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 98.

  13See L/P and J/8/575, OIOC.

  14Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Punjab Boundary Force and the Problem of Order, August 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1974.

  15‘Partition’ (1968), in W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 803–4.

  16Quoted in Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Delhi: Viking, 1998), p. 65.

  Before he left India Radcliffe burnt all his notes and papers. He never wrote about his experiences in the subcontinent either. Auden was cynical about this silence, saying that ‘he quickly forgot the case, as a good lawyer must’.

  17This and subsequent quotes from Rees are from his papers deposited in the OIOC (especially files Mss Eur F274/66 to Mss Eur F274/70).

  18Quoted in H. M. Seervai, Partition of India: Legend and Reality (Bombay: Emenem Publications, 1989), p. 148.

  19Nehru to Rees, 3/9/1947, Mss Eur F274/73, OIOC.

  20Baroo, ‘Life in the Punjab Today’, Swatantra, 4 October 1947.

  21See Mss Eur F200/129.

  22Donald F. Ebright, Free India; the First Five Years: An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief and Rehabilitation (Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1954), p. 28. Later estimates have pushed up the number of dead to a million or more.

  23Note by Major William Short dated 17 October 1947, in Mss Eur F200/129, OIOC.

  24As reported in Pyarelal, ‘In Calcutta’, Harijan, 14 September 1947.

  25This quote, and much of the preceding two paragraphs, draw from Denis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), chapter 5, ‘The Calcutta Fast’.

  26See Richard Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  27The violence against the Meos is described in Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory a
nd the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  28Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, pp. 112–31.

  29‘To Members of the R.S.S.’, Harijan, 28 September 1947.

  30Nehru to Patel, 30 September 1947, in Durga Das, ed., Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, 1945–50, 10 vols (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1971–74), cited hereafter as SPC, vol. 4, pp. 297–9.

  31Entry dated 13 September 1947, in Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1953), p. 189.

  32‘A.I.C.C. Resolutions’, Harijan, 23 November 1947.

  33Golwalkar, We, or Our Nation Defined (1938; Nagpur: Bharat Prakashan, 1947), pp. 55–6, quoted in Mohan Ram, Hindi against India: The Meaning of DMK (New Delhi: Rachna Prakashan, 1968), p. 64.

  34Hindustan Times, 8 December 1947.

  35Tendulkar, Mahatma, vol. 8, pp. 246–66.

  36Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1969), pp. 637–41; see also Ashis Nandy’s fascinating essay on Gandhi and Godse in his At the Edge of Psychology and other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).

  37Patel spoke in Hindustani. The English translation used here is from The Statesman, 31 January 1948.

  38Quoted in Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000), pp. 320–1.

  39See the correspondence between Nehru and Patel in SPC, vol. 6, pp. 8–31.

  2. THE LOGIC OF DIVISION

  1Khizar Hayat Tiwana to Major Short, 15 August 1947, Short Papers, OIOC (Mss Eur. 189/19).

  2There is a massive literature on Partition, which includes: (i) memoirs by key civil servants and military officials who served in the government at the time; (ii) biographies of the important politicians involved in the negotiations – Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Mountbatten et al.; (iii) regional studies of Partition in the Punjab and in Bengal; and (iv) wider analytical overviews. To this must be added the volumes of original documents published both in Britain (the Transfer of Power project) and in India (the Towards Freedom Project plus the published correspondence of Nehru, Patel, Gandhi et al.). A fine recent overview, with much of the relevant literature cited therein, is Sucheta Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000). An earlier work representing most of the competing points of view is C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970).

  3See the revealing portrait in the memoir of Jinnah’s former junior, M. C. Chagla, Roses in December: An Autobiography (1973; reprint Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1994), chapter 5.

  4Lord Birkenhead to Lord Reading, quoted in John Grigg, ‘Myths about the Approach to Indian Independence’, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 211.

  5See Khalid bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1857–1948, 2nd edn (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. chapter 6. Two magisterial treatments of Muslim consolidation during late colonial rule are C. S. Venkatachar, ‘1937–47 in Retrospect: A Civil Servant’s View’, in Philips and Wainwright, The Partition of India; and Hamza Alavi, ‘Misreading Partition Road Signs’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2–9 November 2002.

  6Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 221.

  7‘The Pakistan Nettle’, in Moon Papers, OIOC (Mss. Eur F230/39).

  8This account of the 1946 elections is based largely on Sho Kuwajima, Muslims, Nationalism and the Partition: 1946 Provincial Elections in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 1998), supplemented by David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and ‘A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 40, no. 3, July 1998; and I. A. Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab Election’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1980.

  9See Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889–1952 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), part V.

  10Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (Freedom’s Dawn), as translated from the Urdu by V. G. Kiernan in Poems by Faiz (1958; reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 123–4.

  11Humayan Kabir, ‘Muslim Politics, 1942–7’, in Philips and Wainwright, The Partition of India, p. 402.

  12Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten (London: Collins, 1985), p. 439.

  13Andrew Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, in his Eminent Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994).

  14Jenkins to Mountbatten, 3 May 1947, Mss Eur F200/125, OIOC.

  15Jenkins to Mountbatten, 30 July 1947, Mss Eur F200/127, OIOC.

  16J. D. Tyson to ‘Dear Folk’, 5 May 1946, Mss Eur E341/40, OIOC.

  17Note by Sir Francis Burrows, 14 February 1947, Mss Eur F200/24, OIOC.

  18See Malcolm Darling, At Freedom’s Door (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).

  19Nicholas Mansergh, editor-in-chief, Constitutional Relations between Great Britain and India: Transfer of Power, 1942–47, 12 vols (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983), cited hereafter as TOP, vol. 12, items 200, 209, 389 and 489.

  20Quoted in Richard Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1924–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 3.

  3. APPLES IN THE BASKET

  1Pothan Joseph, ‘Mountbatten Quits India’, Swatantra, 19 June 1948.

  2Brian Hoey, Mountbatten: The Private Story (London: Pan Books, 1995), pp. 3, 4, 201.

  3Denis Judd, ed., A British Tale of Indian and Foreign Service: The Memoirs of Sir Ian Scott (London: Radcliffe Press, 1999), p. 147.

  4See Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (London: Oxford University Press, 1973).

  5The books I have in mind are Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1951); H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain–India–Pakistan (London: Hutchinson, 1969); Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, Freedom at Midnight (New Delhi: Rupa, 1975); and Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1985). For an early revisionist view, see Leonard Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961).

  6Ziegler, Mountbatten, p. 424.

  7V. P. Menon, Integration of the Indian States (1956; reprint Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997). There have been some fine studies of individual princely states, and of British policy towards the Maharajas. However, no one since Menon has attempted an analytical overview of the demise of the princely order, with its (often profound) implications for the history of independent India.

  8For a brilliant brief survey of British relations with princely India, see K. M. Pannikar, Indian States, Oxford Pamphlet on Indian Affairs, no. 4 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1942). See also the essays in Robin Jeffrey, ed., People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  9Quoted in Mario Rodrigues, Batting for the Empire: A Political Biography of Ranjitsinhji (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003).

  10Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgames of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 227.

  11W. H. Morris-Jones, ‘The Transfer of Power, 1947: A View from the Sidelines’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1982, pp. 17–18.

  12S. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, vol. 1: 1889–1947 (London: Cape, 1975), p. 359.

  13See Rajmohan Gandhi, Patel: A Life (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Press, 1991), pp. 408–11; SPC, vol. 5, passim.

  14The phrase was coined by Pannikar, and is the underpinning of his classic Asia and Western Dominance (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959).

  15‘Maharaja of Bikaner’s Appeal to the Princes’, appendix 2 to SPC
, vol. 5, pp. 518–24. This appeal was almost certainly drafted by K. M. Pannikar.

  16Penderel Moon to Major Billy Short, 29 March 1947, Mss Eur F179/16, Short Papers, OIOC.

  17A representative view is that of the last head of this department, Sir Conrad Corfield. See his ‘Some Thoughts on British Policy and the Indian States, 1935–47’, in C. H. Philips and Mary Doreen Wainwright, eds, The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 527–34.

  18Menon to Sir P. Patrick (under-secretary of state for India), 8 July 1947, in TOP, vol. 12, pp. 1–2.

  19SPC, vol. 5, pp. 536–8.

  20TOP, vol. 12, pp. 36, 51.

  21Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, p. 140.

  22‘Press Communiqué of an Address by Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma to a Conference of the Rulers and Representatives of Indian States’, TOP, vol. 12, pp. 347–52.

  23See TOP, vol. 12, pp. 585–8; Hodson, The Great Divide, pp. 369f.

  24The words are those of Vallabhbhai Patel, from his statement to the princes of 5 July 1947. See SPC, vol. 5, p. 537.

  25‘Satyagraha Movement in Mysore’, Swatantra, 27 September 1947; H. S. Doreswamy, From Princely Autocracy to People’s Government (Bangalore: Sahitya Mandira, 1993), chapter 9.

  26Menon, Integration of the Indian States, pp. 153–4, 179.

  27See E. M. S. Namboodiripad, ‘Princedom and Democracy’, New Age, August 1956 (a review article on V. P. Menon’s Integration of the Indian States).

  28Robert Trumbull, As I See India (London: Cassell and Co., 1952), pp. 76–7.

  29See speeches at Jaipur, Gwalior and Bikaner in Time Only to Look Forward: Speeches of Rear Admiral The Earl Mountbatten of Burma, as Viceroy of India and Governor-General of the Dominion of India, 1947–8 (London: Nicholas Kaye, 1949), pp. 76–8, 91–3, 102–4.