The Great Partition (25 page)

Even those who had attempted to stay aloof from the nationalist struggles were now pulled into the oppositional foundation of the two nation states. Political interference added to the difficulties. Liaquat Ali Khan told Mountbatten that the situation had become so tense between Pakistani and Indian officials that he did not know how much longer they could continue working together.
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The situation was even more fractious in the provincial Partition committees, which had the task of splitting the nuts and bolts of the Punjabi and Bengali Legislative Assemblies, and the Governor of Punjab complained of receiving ‘poor political essays’ from the civil servants responsible for the job, rather than ‘objective reports’. Magistrates in Punjab, he added, were now ‘completely unreliable’.
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In the extraordinary conditions of the time many urban office-workers had their everyday life – and their own ideas – profoundly affected by the partitioning process.

Still, few, if any, were contemplating a mass migration of any description. Some leaders mooted the idea of moving people long before 1947. ‘Quite a number of people, especially educated people, might be expected to migrate,’ a leading Muslim Leaguer, Choudhry Khaliquzzaman had breezily told the Cabinet Mission delegation in 1946.
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And others had advised that co-religionists cluster together in ‘pockets’ for safety in the towns and cities afflicted by rioting. Some Sikh leaders had talked up the exchange of population as a solution to their own community's anxiety. Tara Singh told his Sikh followers in a press statement that they faced ‘extinction’ and that they should start shifting eastwards in Punjab.
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This could all be written off too easily as bravado and posturing.

The thought that the intermingled populations of towns such as Amritsar, Lahore, Calcutta or Dacca would be systematically weeded out and completely shorn of minorities was simply too far-fetched and preposterous for most people to contemplate. One Sayyid ‘Abd al Latif of Uthmaniyah University had put forward a strategy involving the mass exchanges of population of tens of millions of people in the late 1940s as a possible solution to the constitutional gridlock. ‘This was so utterly impracticable that even its author subsequently rescinded the suggestion and favoured a federal constitution,’ commented Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1946, similarly agreeing that any exchange of population was simply too unfeasible and too undesirable to bear thinking about. ‘Some people hoped Pakistan would be formed but no one thought that they would have to migrate,’ was how Intizar Husain remembered those days.
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This myopia about the risk of mass upheavals was still very much present as the Partition plan was being put into operation in June and July.

Yet, by the summer of 1947, before Independence, the first trickle of refugees had already started. Soon it would turn into a torrent. ‘There is some movement of bank balances to “Hindustan” and a certain fall in the value of real property in Hindu areas. There is also vague talk of emigration to Hindustan,’ said a government report from Sind. Phillips Talbot, an American journalist, took things more seriously: ‘trains and planes are loaded, according to local stories with gold bullion, jewelry and local currency. Bank accounts are being transferred in large numbers. Houses which sold six months ago for 60,000 $ are being offered for 20,000 $ if their owners are Hindu and anxious to get out of Pakistan.’ He concluded that ‘the amount can safely be estimated at tens of millions of dollars’.
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In the early days of Partition, the well-informed put arrangements in place to transfer precious objects and savings. People often regarded this as a precaution rather than as permanent evacuation.

G.D. Khosla, a judge of the Lahore High Court, and later author of several well-known books about Partition, described how he received a letter from his wife who was staying with their children in the cooler hill station of Musoorie, in the summer of 1947; in it she insisted ‘that I must withdraw all her jewellery from the bank locker in Lahore, take it to Delhi and deposit it there in a locker without fail’. He complied with his wife's demand and safely removed the jewellery to Delhi.
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Others were not so fortunate as they hid or buried gold in their own locality with the intention of returning to recover it at some later stage, such as the ‘rich Muslim woman from Amritsar’ witnessed by Margaret Bourke-White, later in the year, who ‘had thrown her jewels in the bottom of the well, when her home fell on the Indian side of the line. She had run across the border to Pakistan, and when I saw her there she was trying hysterically to hire a driver to go back and retrieve the jewels from the well.’
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These were danger signs which the politicians failed to pick up on. If families did move, it was still regarded as something transitory and reversible. Those who packed up a few bags and left their homes to find a place of greater safety with relatives or friends did so with the full expectation of returning when things returned to normal. Most politicians impressed on people the need to stay put. The super-rich could make their own insurance policies, by keeping a foot in both camps. The Nawab of Bhopal bought two houses in Karachi in July, planning an escape route if things became really awkward for his family in India. ‘I may have to be in Karachi quite often and I must have a place in Pakistan where my womenfolk may take shelter should things begin to get really hot here.’
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But underneath the surface of these grand gestures was a quieter, more dangerous, story of fearful people, weighing up their position and leaving their homes. The violence of the first six months of the year in Punjab had already seriously shaken communities. Over 100,000 people had already started to move internally within the Punjab, to be with relatives, to find safety in numbers, hopelessly trying to predict the borderline between India and Pakistan.

‘The decision about the creation of Pakistan had just been announced and people were indulging in all kinds of surmises about the pattern of life that would emerge. But no one's imagination could go very far …’ The novelist Bhisham Sahni captured the essence of public uncertainty as India stood on the brink of the unknown. ‘The Sardarji [Sikh fellow] sitting in front of me repeatedly asked me whether I thought Mr Jinnah would continue to live in Bombay after the creation of Pakistan or whether he would resettle in Pakistan. Each time my answer would be the same, “Why should he leave Bombay? I think he'll continue to live in Bombay and continue visiting Pakistan.” ’ Indeed, Jinnah continued to own a large white mansion house in Bombay and Liaquat Ali Khan had extensive farmlands in North India; such guesses were not so far-fetched. ‘Similar guesses were being made about the towns of Lahore and Gurdaspur too, and no one knew which town would fall to the share of India and which to Pakistan.’
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It made good business sense at first to try and sit astride both new states. Initially, some businessmen with outlets and branches across South Asia reacted pragmatically to the situation. Lilaram and Sons, a silk merchant's and tailor's, placed an advertisement in the 15 August special Independence Day supplement of several national papers, illustrated with the black silhouette of the whole of undivided India. ‘To all our patrons we offer our very best wishes on this auspicious occasion,’ it boldly proclaimed. Similarly, the Punjab National Bank tried to continue straddling the border, wishing ‘Greetings to all our countrymen of both Hindustan and Pakistan on this auspicious day.’ Behind the scenes, though, industrialists and businessmen were trying to calculate where their businesses would be most secure and were withdrawing from Pakistani or Indian interests as conditions deteriorated. Mr B.T. Thakur, Managing Director of the United Commercial Bank told American diplomats that he wanted to keep some of his branches in Pakistan open but would close down those ‘in areas where he fears police protection may be inadequate’.
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Meanwhile the two boundary commissions sweated over the highly secretive plans for the new national boundaries. These were ready on 12 August but were deliberately held back for five days, despite the requests of administrators coping with panicked border regions who implored the government for advance warning of where the boundary lines would fall ('even a few hours would be better than none,’ pleaded Evan Jenkins to Mountbatten).
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Nobody in India knew where the borders would lie on Independence Day itself; rumours, hints and suggestions flew around. Staff at the Viceroy's house leaked information. Newspapers published provisional maps with erroneous indications of where the boundary was likely to be drawn. Administrators complained about the manner in which the boundary was being sketched, and in Assam the Governor told the Viceroy ‘… the lack of an authoritative interpretation here is going to give us a lot of trouble’.
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His feelings might have been echoed by every other governor in the country. Preserving good Indo-British relations, especially during the lavish ceremonial display of 15 August, was the unjustifiable excuse for holding back the award. The Radcliffe line was finally revealed to the public on 17 August – exactly the same day that the first regiment of British troops departed from Bombay.

Communicating the reality of the line and making it meaningful to the people affected was another matter altogether. The artist Satish Gujral, whose swirling, evocative paintings of mourning faces later depicted the horrors of 1947, remembered how he learned that his home city of Lahore would be in Pakistan: ‘Curiously, the news of such magnitude was conveyed to us not by newspapers (which had ceased publication) but by posters pasted on the walls of our camp. These posters proclaimed: “Do not burn now. It is Pakistan's property.” ’
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Others heard through the grapevine of rumour and news or through hurriedly distributed maps. Yet what did such maps and news about territory mean to those who had never known any place but their own home? Others found out because of the celebrations of football-like jubilant crowds on the ‘winning’ side, while others heard mixed and erroneous news. Nobody bothered to think about how to communicate the strange reality of this new world to peasants and villagers. ‘One day I ran into a Muslim villager who had come to Lahore all the way from Sargodha looking for my grandfather, a well-known criminal lawyer,’ Kuldip Nayar recalled. ‘Poor chap he didn't realise that Partition had taken place and that the Hindus had left. It just shows how long it took for the implications of Partition to sink in.’
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For many outside the grip of middle-class, nationalist mentalities, the line was irrelevant to their daily hardships. In the novel
Tamas
, one coolie describes to another how he had been carrying a heavy load on his head for a customer, when the man said to him, ‘ “
Azadi
is coming. India will soon be free.” I laughed and said, “Babuji what is that to me? I am carrying loads now and shall continue carrying them then.” ’
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For those who were caught up in the nationalist campaigns, though, the line meant everything. Radcliffe was aware of the contentiousness and unsatisfactory nature of the award and admitted as much in the final text itself, saying, ‘I am conscious too that the award cannot go far towards satisfying sentiment and aspirations deeply held on either side.’
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He waived the right to the generous salary he had initially accepted for the work. The final line, when it was revealed, came as a shock. ‘With the announcement of boundary commission award our last hope of remaining in Amritsar disappeared,’ a former tax inspector, Choudhary Mohammad Said, recorded. ‘The morale of the Muslims was completely shattered causing great panic.’
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This was something of an understatement as the result was uproar.

The line zigzagged precariously across agricultural land, cut off communities from their sacred pilgrimage sites, paid no heed to railway lines or the integrity of forests, divorced industrial plants from the agricultural hinterlands where raw materials, such as jute, were grown. Penderel Moon was urgently called to the scene of an irrigation plant on the Punjabi borderline shortly after Independence. He found a standoff and administrative chaos. There had already been a clash at the site between Indian troops and Pakistani police. It turned out that the line ran directly across the plant's headworks and protective embankments. ‘It seemed extraordinary that there had been no-one to impress upon Lord Radcliffe the importance of including the principal protective works in the same territory as the headworks,’ he later mused. ‘This could very easily have been done, as the area involved was uninhabited and, for the most part, uncultivated. I fondly imagined that this absurd error would quickly be rectified. But it never was.’
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There were many other jumbled parts of the line. The award bestowed a variety of eccentric features on the subcon-tinent's political geography. East and West Pakistan were separated by over a thousand miles, and travelling by sea between the country's two major ports of Karachi and Chittagong took approximately five days. The shaping of new borderlines left a complex and inflammatory legacy in the north-east, now only joined precariously to India by a 21-kilometre sliver of land. It was a very long, intricate border through Himalayas, dense jungle and river valleys. In sum, Radcliffe's line created a geographical settlement which would have been difficult to manage at the best of times, even if all parties were in agreement.

The inevitable result, particularly in the most contested districts in Punjab– Lahore, Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur and Jullundur – and in parts of Bengal, was dire confusion about which places were in Pakistan and which places were not. In Malda district, the Pakistani flag brazenly flew from the administrative headquarters until 14 August, but then the area fell to India, inevitably leaving the local population in turmoil.
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One woman, Maya, who had been a child in a Punjabi village that straddled the contested area, remembered stories flying about whether the place would ultimately go to India or Pakistan. ‘Each time one of these rumours became rife,’ Urvashi Butalia, who recorded her story explains, ‘people of the other community would abandon their homes and run, leaving everything behind. Maya and her friends watched this helter-skelter flight almost as if it was a game.’
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Radcliffe's judgement – which was meant to be fixed and incontestable – instead appeared soft and malleable and had little real or imagined authority behind it. People could not see the line, nor did it seem that there were enough troops available to demarcate it even if it did exist. Even the national leaders, solemnly bound to the terms of the border, discussed some horse-trading about districts when the new maps were first revealed at a ‘sombre and sullen gathering’.
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Jinnah reflected the disappointment of the Pakistani people in an evening radio broadcast to the population when he described it as ‘an unjust, incomprehensible and even perverse award,’ although urging people to abide by it.
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The repudiation of the line or ambivalence about it from the highest tiers of government exacerbated the potential for violence.