India (3 page)

The book’s premise was that India’s present culture was linked to the Indus Valley civilization of four or five thousand years ago, a sophisticated sphere of planned cities, baths and sculptures. While Hinduism had been a common thread for millennia, he felt it would be “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture,” since it contained Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influences too.
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The emperor Ashoka had brought unity to the subcontinent more than 2,000 years ago, and it would be wrong, he said, to describe the repeated invasions by Muslim marauders over the last millennium as Muslim invasions, “just as it would be wrong to refer to the coming of the British to India as a Christian invasion … The Afghans might well be considered a border Indian group, hardly strangers to India, and the period of their political dominance should be called the Indo-Afghan period.” Although the Mughals were outsiders from Central Asia, “they fitted into the Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.”
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Having travelled widely in India during the 1930s, Nehru knew the nation had “depth of soul” and realized that although its people varied hugely, “everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us.”
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In this optimistic interpretation, India was a cheerfully composite and syncretic civilization, which would remain united.

London liked to think of Nehru as the last Englishman to rule India:
rather, he came from a wealthy, Anglicized, Hindu Brahmin family, originally from Kashmir, which had been influenced both by the West and by the refined, mannered culture of the Muslim nobility. It was a world in which literary references were expected to range from ancient Indian thinkers to contemporary European writers. His view of history came from this intellectual collision: the culture of the nawabs met Cambridge University. Nehru had a liberal, modern, perceptive, pluralistic view of India’s past, and his ambition was to make it come true for the future too.
The Discovery of India
was a fine, slanted and sometimes romantic version of history.

Come freedom, how would he implement his nationalist dreams? Would it be easier to borrow the mechanisms of the departed colonialists? You could have an autocracy where one social group prevailed, or a dictatorship where progress grew out of the barrel of a gun. Or—and this is where India was unusual—you could have a public discussion about the ideal system of government, and which outdated traditions should be given up.

First, it was necessary to secure the nation, the rashtra. When the British empire closed down, it was near to collapse. The police were demoralized, the army was breaking along religious lines and the administration was cracking. The imperialists had left no effective peace-keeping force; nearly bankrupt after depending on American financial support during the Second World War, Britain’s main concern was to get out.
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In independent India the situation was particularly unstable because, from a legal and practical perspective, the government was inheriting less than half of the empire’s original land mass. The north-east and north-west became Pakistan, leaving six complete provinces (Bombay, Madras, Orissa, Bihar, the United Provinces and the Central Provinces) which had been under British rule, and the partitioned remnants of three others (Punjab, Bengal and Assam). The princely rulers, whose states had covered more than a third of the empire, were in theory free to do as they liked. Some had private armies, while the larger kingdoms like Kashmir and Hyderabad—which had a government income equal to that of Belgium—thought they might stand alone.

Congress had not come this far, had not endured the Morley–Minto reforms (which allowed a limited number of Indians to elect legislators) and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre (in which nearly 400 unarmed demonstrators were killed) and the Simon Commission (talks about talks) and the Round Table conferences (further talks, in London) and the Government of India Act of 1935 (which introduced some provincial self-government) and the Quit India movement (total opposition to British rule during the Second World War) and the Cripps Mission (a time-wasting exercise) and
the Bengal famine (in which several million people perished) and the Simla conferences (further talks) and the tortuous negotiations with viceroys Wavell and Mountbatten and the baroque bigotry and chilly indifference of prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, let alone the beatings and marches and bandhs (general strikes) and dharnas (mass sit-ins) and the repeated terms of imprisonment, only to concede power to hereditary monarchs. According to the Gujarati lawyer and Congress power-broker Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the princes of India were parasites, “rotten fruit … incompetent, worthless human beings, deprived of the power of independent thinking and whose manners and morals are those of the depraved.”
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To break their substantial influence, though, would require subtlety.

This was where V. P. Menon proved the perfect flexible operator. Clever and thoughtful, he was the son of a schoolmaster from Kerala in the far south, and had worked as a railway stoker, coal miner and Bangalore tobacco company clerk before gaining a junior post in the civil service. He had an unusual home life: after his wife left him and returned to southern India, he had moved in with the Keralite friends who had arranged their marriage, and the couple helped to bring up his two sons. When the husband died, Menon married his widow, who was some years his senior.
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In the years between the two world wars, he had worked his way up the civil service and become a respected senior bureaucrat.

Menon had recently drafted the text under which Congress and the Muslim League agreed the terms of independence. When Mountbatten asked him how to deal with the princes, he said they should be encouraged to join the new nation, giving up control of external affairs in return for the retention of autonomy and a chunk of local taxation—their “privy purses.” He wrote craftily later: “The alternative to a peaceful and friendly settlement of the states’ problem was to allow political agitation to develop in the states and to create, especially in the smaller ones, dire confusion and turmoil. Anyone conversant with the conditions in the country after partition must be aware of the inherent dangers of such a course.”
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Despite his own royal connections, Lord Mountbatten was a pragmatist who preferred Menon’s plan to risking the possible Balkanization of India into a subcontinent of warring states, as had happened in China during the 1920s. So he personally persuaded the princes to sign up.

After independence, as the north imploded in the violence and chaos of partition, Menon worked under the iron guidance of Vallabhbhai Patel to integrate the remaining princely states. It was an epic task (there were estimated
to be 554 kingdoms in all) which he performed with great speed and diligence. Patel was clear in his intentions, telling his staff, “Do not question the extent of the personal wealth claimed by [the princes], and never ever confront the ladies of the household. I want their states—not their wealth.”
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V. P. Menon’s experience with the pistol-wielding Maharaja of Jodhpur was to be one of many bizarre encounters from Srinagar to Cape Comorin. His targets ranged from seriously obscure potentates to sophisticated royals who kept suites in the grander hotels of Paris or London; some taluqdars, or landowners, even approached him and asked to make treaties of accession despite having no princely status. The powerful and progressive Maharaja of Bikaner called on all hereditary rulers to be true patriots and embrace independent India, while an irate but inconsequential raja from near Mysore, who had only 16,000 subjects, refused to sign until the latest possible moment.

The complication was Kashmir, which should logically have joined Pakistan since it had a Muslim majority. The Hindu ruler thought otherwise, and India and Pakistan fought their first war within months of the end of empire. This led to the rough partition of its territory in a form that left everyone unhappy.

Each Indian kingdom was different, showing the sheer range of the subcontinent’s social, ethnic and religious communities. Up in the ancient hill kingdom of Tripura in the north-east, the monarch was a child, and his mother signed away the state on his behalf. In Orissa, Menon found “excited aborigines” were fighting the local raja with bows and arrows in an effort to make him join India. A neighbouring Oriya prince was attempting to sell his kingdom’s mineral rights in perpetuity before surrendering. In Rewa, a nervous V. P. Menon found himself gheraoed, or surrounded, by a fierce mob which refused to let him enter the palace. He suspected the ruler had himself arranged this reception, and asked him to put in writing that he refused to cooperate; the maharaja became nervous, and backed down.

Menon crisscrossed India by aeroplane, working out the best way to integrate the new nation. In Danta, a tiny state in Gujarat, a peculiar problem occurred: he could not contact the ruler. It seemed His Highness spent much of each day and night performing Hindu rituals, and between June and September in particular had not a moment to spare for official duties. In October 1948, he agreed his son could take the throne and sign the document of accession. In Cochin the royal family included several hundred princesses, and Menon made special provision for them because he thought
they resembled “a rare collection of birds” that would be unlikely to survive if released into the wild. Where necessary, he made symbolic concessions, enabling rulers to retain their ancient princely dignity; in one case, he allowed a grant for the supply and maintenance of royal cars. “It is high statesmanship,” wrote Mountbatten’s press attaché admiringly, “that can cover a revolutionary act in the mantle of traditional form.”
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Without the integration of the princely states, it would not have been possible for India to become a cohesive nation, or to invent itself as a modern democracy. In the crack-up of partition, the temptation might have been to reach for the gun and the edict. For many people, though, bloodshed would be the abiding memory.

The events of 1947 have an enduring capacity to shock. Bir Bahadur Singh is a retired shopkeeper, a handsome old man with an elaborate white beard. In the spring of that year, his village near Rawalpindi, in what is today Pakistan, came under siege. All the Sikh families in the area gathered together in a haveli, a large house with a courtyard. When they walked across the rooftops between the buildings, they risked being shot. There seemed to be no way out. In the distance they could see fires burning and, according to the rumours, a large gang of armed men was approaching the village, seeking revenge for horrific attacks committed against Muslims many hundreds of miles away in Bengal. Yet only days before that, everything had been normal: theirs was a lovely village, protected by hills which were dotted with trees and bushes, running down to fields of ripening green wheat and paddy and an orchard, and the houses themselves were well-built and well-ordered and the place was kept clean.

A local Muslim farmhand came to the trapped Sikhs and offered a solution. If they gave him a woman of his choosing, he would try to broker a settlement with the mob. It was discussed. What was the use of keeping the girl? Hadn’t this one been having a secret relationship with the farmhand? Wasn’t she a bad girl anyway? Why not give her up, if it meant saving all their lives? It was agreed: she would be swapped for freedom. But when the farmhand returned, Bir Bahadur Singh’s father intervened and said no, this was a question of their dignity. A long cultural tradition of purity and sacrifice met raw fear. They would pay money, pay anything, but they would not give up a member of the community. He told them that even centuries before in the time of Mahmud of Ghazni, the first of the Muslim invaders of India, they had never abandoned their women to these raiders. “We
brought those girls back,” he said in Punjabi, casting his imagination across many hundreds of years, “and today you are asking us to give you this girl, absolutely not.” They would preserve their honour, and face death.

What happened next has lived with Bir Bahadur Singh ever since. Tears came down his face and he turned his head away to one side as he described—sixty years on—how his father had prayed to the Sikh gurus. Seeing there was no way out, he would sacrifice the vulnerable before being killed himself, knowing the girls faced abduction, rape and forced conversion. Bir Bahadur Singh’s father took his kirpan, his sword. A labourer confronted him and asked to be killed because he had swollen knees and would not be able to run. The labourer was beheaded. Another old man came and said to him: “Do you think I will allow Musalmans to cut this beard of mine and make me go to Lahore as a sheikh? For this reason kill me.” So he too was killed. Now Bir Bahadur Singh’s father approached his own daughter, Maan.

“My father said, ‘Maan Beta, come here.’ She was eighteen or nineteen years old, two years older than me. She sat down and my father raised his sword, but it didn’t strike properly. My sister lifted her plait over her head, and my father angrily pulled her scarf back and brought down his sword. Her head rolled away. My uncles started beheading. All you could hear was the ‘cut cut cut’ sound. They just chanted god’s name. Nobody ran away, nobody screamed.”

Twenty-five women and girls were killed in this haveli, in this one village. Nearly all of the men died too, including Bir Bahadur Singh’s father, but the son escaped. When he thinks back to those childhood days, he remembers the happier moments, like the times when he was little and sat with an old Muslim lady whom he called dadi, or grandmother. “Her name was Ma Hussaini, and I would go and sit on one side in her lap, and her granddaughter would sit on the other side. I used to pull her plait and push her away and she would catch hold of my jura, my hair [the Sikh topknot], and push me away. I would say she is my dadi and she would say she is my dadi.” Relations between the communities were destroyed by the reciprocal massacres. Bir Bahadur Singh wondered, looking back over the decades, whether Hindus and Sikhs were themselves in part to blame, through their attitude to caste and religion. When they visited a Muslim household during his childhood, the family would refuse to eat, and if they were walking with a lunch box and happened to shake hands with a Muslim along the way, the food would become polluted and have to be thrown away. “If we had been willing to drink from the same cups,” he said wistfully,
“we would have remained united, we would not have had these differences, thousands of lives would not have been lost, and there would have been no partition.”
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