The Great Partition (15 page)

There were undoubtedly well-prepared Hindu militias ready for the moment, too. On both sides, the violence was anticipated – at least a week prior to the riot inhabitants of
bustees
were sharpening daggers and making weapons from railings uprooted from public parks, and political leaders along with local hard men instigated and carried out much of the violence. Members of Hindu militia organisations – ranging from more professionalised volunteer bands such as the Bharat Sevashram Sangha to local football and gymnasium club members – were equally prepared to fight.

That autumn, Gopal ‘Patha’ Mukherjee – Gopal the goat – was stirred to action. He had acquired his nickname because his family ran a meat shop in Calcutta. Like several of the major gang leaders in Calcutta, he had a background in the wrestling pits and gymnasiums of the city where he had built up a reputation for toughness and daring on the streets. Young men looked up to him and they called him other nicknames too: ‘brave’ and ‘strongarm’. The local police knew who he was, and probably kept a watchful eye on him. Once the riots started, Gopal was more than ready for them. He could summon at least a few hundred men, perhaps more. ‘It was a very critical time for the country,’ Gopal remembered: ‘we thought if the whole area became Pakistan, there would be more torture and repression. So I called all my boys together and said it was time to retaliate.’ He considered it his patriotic duty. ‘Why should we kill an ordinary rickshawwallah or hawker, they were not part of the politics … basically people who attacked us … we fought them and killed them … we prepared some country bombs, we'd also secured some grenades from the army … to camouflage myself … I grew a beard and long hair.’ This was preparation for war in the name of nationalism.

The links between local strongmen and politicians were blatant and well remembered by one of the perpetrators. ‘I had a club, an
akhara
,’ he says. ‘I was a wrestler, and I trained my boys, and they carried out my instructions. There was this Congress Party leader. He took me round Calcutta in his jeep. I saw many dead bodies, Hindu dead bodies. I told him, “Yes, there will be retaliation”.’
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As one student at the time recalled on College Street there were lots of small Muslim booksellers: ‘when we went there … we saw dead bodies piled up on both sides, men, women, children, and all the books on the road, burnt, gutted …’
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Rioters, as always, sought political legitimacy wherever they could find it, imagining blessings from omniscient national leaders and seeking the green light to kill from members of local party hierarchies.

The political purposes of the riots are not in doubt. The Calcutta killings reinforced, in a graphic way, the
idea
that Hindus and Muslims were incompatible, and planted this seed in the minds of British and Indian policy-makers. Violence and injustice were not unfamiliar in the largest Indian city where unemployed mill-hands suffered the stagnation of the post-war slump, and squalor and overcrowding badly affected a city still reeling from devastating famine. This level of violence was something entirely new, however, in a metropolis which also had a strong tradition of regional patriotism and coalition governance and where robust trade unions and anti-imperial organisations cut across religious lines.

Intense feelings had been aroused around the notions of freedom and oppression, independence and tyranny but nobody had come any closer to envisaging the final shape of a settlement, or spelt out emphatically what either
swaraj
or Pakistan would mean to the Indian people in reality. At the grassroots, then, these ideas of Pakistan and
swaraj
could both be glossed with a different set of dreams and priorities: euphoria, millenarianism, the idea of a freedom, which would not only deliver a territorial state to govern but also open the door to a new kind of world order. Many terms used by the imperialists and the colonised were lost in translation; British ‘Raj’, used in Indian languages to mean ‘rule’ or ‘kingdom’, was to be replaced, in the rendering of different Congressmen with
swaraj
(self-rule),
Hindu raj
(the rule of Hindus),
Ram-rajya
(the regime of the god Lord Ram),
gram raj
(village rule) or
kisan mazdoor raj
(peasant and worker autonomy). The various terms available for ‘state’ in Hindustani at the time –
raj, sarkar, hukumat, riyasat
, and
mulk
– carried different connotations to the British reading of the word and similarly clouded the possibilities of what form Independence could take.
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As one member of the public, identifying himself only as ‘V.K.J.’, wrote to a leading newspaper, ‘The thinking public have different visions of future India. The idea of Rama Rajya is one such vision which is sponsored by Mahatma Gandhi. The other day one of your readers proposed Dharma Rajya and I offer another conception of the future state of India … Kalyana Raj … in which the future head of state will be an elected president and not a hereditary king.’
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People inevitably filled in gaps in their understanding with their own experiences of oppression, their own hopes and expectations.

Pakistan, then, meant myriad things to different people. The call for Pakistan could be equated with all manner of ambiguous hopes and dreams. Conversely, for many of those who supported the Congress, Pakistan was perceived as a total and sweeping threat which risked shattering the whole of Mother India, rather than as a question of territorial self-determination in a specific part of the subcontinent. It was feared that Pakistan, if granted, would mean alien rule, even for those who resided in Hindu ‘majority’ provinces as hard-hitting editorials in Hindi newspapers reflected. In one North Indian Hindi newspaper during the late 1940s ‘Pakistan was understood as an all-encompassing catastrophe about to befall India’ and as a ‘death-wish’.
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Allowing Pakistan to be created was akin to dismantling the promise of a free India altogether, and risked opening the floodgates to further national disintegration and secessionist movements. As a commentary in the paper
Vartman
put it during the pre-Partition debate, Saumya Gupta notes, ‘Giving in to the Pakistan demand would only lead to endless partitions. We will not be able to sit peacefully. … All minorities would ask for the right to self-determination. How would we then stop them? Even women … would one day demand a separate
Jananistan
[land for women].’
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By the late 1940s, ‘Partition’ and ‘Pakistan’ had meanings far in excess of paring off two rather small and poorly industrialised corners of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan had come to signify anti-freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims, and political propaganda nourished such ideas.

The Calcutta killings marked – and continue to mark – a psychic break between many South Asians and the idea of Pakistan. Neutrality or political indifference was fast becoming an unrealistic and untenable option in the face of this activity and the killings hardened the nationalist lines as other, older and overlapping ideas about identity were stripped back to more simplistic badges of allegiance to either the ‘Hindu’ or the ‘Muslim’ cause. Whereas in the previous months these allegiances, when they had existed, had been along
party
lines they now reworked themselves and became more sinisterly along
religious
lines.

Calcutta also marks a watershed. It was followed by the first major series of Partition massacres that spanned the northern flank of the subcontinent and in which, again, both Muslims and Hindus suffered. On 15 October 1946, only weeks after the Calcutta riots, and as the city was still returning to normality, workers in the Bengal Congress Office received a shocking telegram from their colleagues in the East Bengali district of Noakhali nearly 200 miles away:

HOUSES BURNT ON MASS SCALE HUNDREDS BURNT TO DEATH HUNDREDS KILLED OTHERWISE LARGE NUMBER HINDU GIRLS FORCIBLY MARRIED TO MOSLEMS AND ABDUCTED ALL HINDU TEMPLES AND IMAGES DESECRATED HELPLESS REFUGEES COMING TO TIPPERA DISTRICT GOLAM SARWAR LEADER INCITING MOSLEMS TO EXTERMINATE HINDUS FROM NOAKHALI …
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The telegram was a call for help and the Congress workers dispatched a delegation to investigate immediately. But by this time it was too late. A programme of well-planned ethnic cleansing had been augmented in Noakhali and its neighbouring district of Tippera and perhaps five thousand people had perished. In addition there had been public conversion ceremonies to Islam where Hindus were forced to consume beef, cows were sacrificed in public spaces, shops were looted, temples and idols desecrated. As the historian Suranjan Das has suggested, ‘The fact that 1800 troops, 600 armed police, 130 unarmed police, and Royal Air Force Planes had to be mobilized indicates the magnitude of the crisis.’
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Much of rural Noakhali, which is in present-day Bangladesh, is a watery area of paddy fields intersected by lakes and canals connected by bamboo bridges. It is a very different place to Calcutta and the way in which violence occurred in this quiet and poor backwater was especially frightening. There were old grievances among poor Muslim peasants against the Hindus who tended to be more prosperous landowners and dominated trade in the region but the main cause of the violence was a systematic and political pogrom organised by one man, Golam Sarwar, an elected politician and his henchmen, some of whom came from outside the region and were former military men or members of the Muslim League National Guard. They primed local Muslims through incendiary speeches and deliberate provocation, telling terrible tales of atrocities in Calcutta and meshing this with a millenarian command that the world was coming to an end and that all non-Muslims should be converted.

The violence in Noakhali and Tippera was defined by clear strategic organisation (roads in and out of the almost inaccessible region were cordoned off), systematic destruction of Hindu-owned property, temples and homes, and mass killings. This marks the terrible beginnings of an era when women became the repositories of national identities and their bodies were used to demarcate possession of land and space. Religious ‘conversions’ which ranged from perfunctory recitations of the
Kalma
to fully-fledged conversion processes involving regular prayer, re-education programmes and ritualised beef-eating, were frequently followed up by the rape of women. The bodies of ‘the other’ were to be completely controlled, both figuratively and literally, as in Punjab the following year, when mass violence against women became commonplace. ‘All our efforts in Noakhali came to naught,’ lamented one peace worker. ‘It broke our hearts. If the land was to be divided, then who belonged to whom and where? Who would listen to our words of unity and peaceful cohabitation?'
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Gandhi arrived in Noakhali on 6 November and remained in Bengal until March the following year, far detached from the political machinations in Delhi. His train was fitted with a special microphone; pulling up at small stations along the way, he would preach peace to as many people as possible. Gandhi had to practise negotiating the rickety bridges which linked together the district and went walking for long days at a time, sometimes barefoot, with his band of workers, holding prayer meetings in villages, consoling victims, trying to instil the spirit of unity. Just to catch a glimpse of Gandhi was a privilege; children and young men clambered on to the roofs of trains and women lined his route with palms clasped together in respectful greeting. Others looked on silently and inquisitively. ‘In the beginning there was some resistance,’ remembered a journalist and peace worker, Sailen Chatterjee, who accompanied Gandhi during his stay: ‘they were not coming to his prayer meeting, they [Muslims] were not coming to meet him … slowly they began to realise here is a man who is not that type of Hindu or anything, so they began to come …’ Indeed, it was the most taxing and dispiriting mission Gandhi had ever undertaken. His own life was at risk and he had an armed police guard at times, despite his resistance to the idea. His frustration and unhappiness was clear. ‘Oldest friendships have snapped,’ he wrote in one report. ‘Truth and
ahimsa
by which I swear and which have, to my knowledge, sustained me for sixty years, seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them.’ A fellow companion, Nirmal Kumar Bose, wrote later of hearing the Mahatma mutter to himself, ‘
Main kya karun
?’ or ‘What can I do?’
¹⁷

Gandhi was not walking alone. Other peace workers also spread his message, often leaving their families in the face of incredulity, and travelling many hundreds of miles to follow in the footsteps of their leader. Amtus Salaam was one such woman, born into a landowning Muslim family in Patiala in the Punjab. A slight young figure, with thick dark hair and thick-rimmed glasses, in the winter of 1946 she arrived in Noakhali to play her part in the peace mission. Amtus Salaam, dismayed by the scenes in Noakhali, fasted for twenty-four days to try and convey the message of Hindu–Muslim unity. By the time that Gandhi came to visit her, she was verging on starvation and was too weak to speak. She sat up a little, cloaked in pale homespun blankets, and took some orange juice to end the fast. There were still faithful groups of Gandhian believers in India at the end of 1946, trying to counteract the spirit of the age and to carry out his teachings. The waves of terror brought by the massacres, however, meant that their work was more difficult than it had ever been.

In late October and November, the violence spread rapidly westward. On Bihar's seemingly endless, flat Gangetic plains, the poor in villages and towns suffered some of the worst poverty in India. Troubled by an inequitable landholding system and the domination of landlords, during the preceding years more people had become increasingly poor and landless. Little by little those with even a small plot of land had been forced in the post-war years to sell up, much against their will. Congress had long built its Bihari support on the bedrock of protests by farm labourers and left-wing activists. It was not really considered a danger zone for Hindu–Muslim conflict. In October, though, the same patterns of violence raged in Bihar; thousands of Muslims were killed and perhaps 400,000 Muslims were affected – by mass migrations, upheaval and brutality – in Patna, Chapra, Monghyr, Bhagalpur and Gaya in both the towns and the countryside. National jubilation and expectations of freedom had become muddled and entwined with the ‘othering’ of Muslims. Slogans, symbols and songs were utilised to rally the rioters. Nehru was shocked to see that ‘In the main bazaar as well as elsewhere every Hindu house and shop had Jai Hind or some other slogans [including ‘Hindus, beware of Muslims’] written in Hindi on the wall’ and was devastated by what he saw. ‘These two days here [in Bihar] have been so full of horror for me that I find it difficult to believe in the reality of things I must believe in.’ He upbraided the crowds who came to see their future Prime Minister: ‘Is this a picture of Swaraj for which you have been fighting?’ and ‘All of you are shouting Jai Hind and “Long Live Revolution” but what kind of country do you want to build up?’ The Congress message of freedom and liberty had been reworked and manipulated in new and frightening ways.
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