The Great Partition (26 page)

Bitterly disappointed groups who found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the boundary would now fight to purify and cleanse their home areas, to reverse the line or to rob it of meaning. The unforgiving calculus of Partition, which depended on head counts and the percentages of people living in districts, now came into full effect. From 15 August the violence would be utilised to achieve new ends: to drive out the other and stake a claim to land, while killers attempted to mark out the limits of the two new countries’ ‘rightful’ borders with different sorts of macabre signposts: dead bodies floated up irrigation canals, or were left in visible spots, on display. ‘The dead,’ as Shail Mayaram has graphically expressed it in a powerful study of Partition violence, ‘thereby became signals to the living of the construction of ethnic boundaries.’
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The violence was designed to eliminate and drive out the opposing ethnic group while forging a new moral community. For all the superhuman effort which had been invested in untangling the two nations – their land, possessions and military stores – few had turned their minds to the new nations’ most precious asset: their people. Emphatic clarification about
who
was a bona fide citizen of India or Pakistan was urgently needed. Yet, it was still unthinkable that elaborately embroidered communities would be permanently unpicked.

By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarised police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Force, and a petrified, well-armed population. The violence which preceded Partition was grave, widespread and lethal. After 15 August 1947, it took on a new ferocity, intensity and callousness. Now militias trawled the countryside for poorly protected villages to raid and raze to the ground, gangs deliberately derailed trains, massacring their passengers one by one or setting the carriages ablaze with petrol. Women and children were carried away like looted chattels.

The British evacuation was in full swing by this stage. Far away in Bombay, British soldiers were parading through the monumental Gateway of India and boarding their troopships, kitbags slung over their shoulders, guns still in hand as crowds cheered from the shore. They were waved on by nationalist leaders and the imperial withdrawal meshed conveniently with the nationalistic stance of the Congress and League leaderships. ‘Foreign armies are the most obvious symbol of foreign rule,’ Nehru allegedly told the first contingent of British troops before they sailed away from the Indian coastline just two days after Independence Day in 1947. ‘They are essentially armies of occupation and, as such, their presence must inevitably be resented.’
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His viewpoint neatly overlapped with the interests of the British establishment which was eager to bring its war-weary and homesick soldiers back to Britain.

The terrorised public in the polarised atmosphere of Punjab might not have agreed. Instead of using these troops to quell the trouble, the British command confined them to barracks and evacuated the men as quickly as they possibly could. Mountbatten's instructions confidentially stated that British army units had no operational functions whatsoever, could not be used for internal security purposes and would not be used on the frontier or in the states. There was only one exception: they could be used in an emergency to save British lives.
²
The Punjabi Boundary Force – a toothless and dreadfully inadequate response to Partition's violence – was the alternative British initiative to protect life and limb in Punjab.
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It was in existence for just thirty-two days. At its peak, the Punjab Boundary Force, in which Delhi's administrators had ‘remarkable faith’, covered only the twelve most ‘disturbed’ districts of Punjab and included, at most, 25,000 men. This meant that there were fewer than two men to a square mile. Sharing a train compartment from Delhi to Bahawalpur at the end of July with a young Sikh army major who was about to join the Boundary Force, Penderel Moon recalled that, ‘He was himself about to join it, but was utterly sceptical of its capacity to maintain order.’
⁴
As a cartoon at the time expressed it, showing a goat sliced in two by a knife, ‘You asked for it.’ The message from London seemed to be that this was the price of freedom.

Violence must sit at the core of any history of Partition. It is the phenomenal extent of the killing during Partition which distinguishes it as an event. It affected women, children and the elderly as well as well-armed young men.
⁵
Grisly scenes of violence in Punjab have been better described in fiction, poetry and film. Children watched as their parents were dismembered or burned alive, women were brutally raped and had their breasts and genitals mutilated and the entire populations of villages were summarily executed. Eyewitnesses in Punjab reported the putrid stench of corpses and the crimson bloodstains on walls, station concourses and roads. After an atrocity in Hasilpur in Bahawalpur state, in August, when approximately 350 people were gunned down by rifle fire by a gang of Pathans, Penderel Moon groped for an analogy. ‘Men, women and children, there they were all jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures, some of them so life-like that one could hardly believe that they were really dead. I was forcibly reminded of pictures that I had seen as a child of Napoleonic battlefields…’
⁶

Broken bodies lay along roadsides and on train platforms, while charred wood and rubble were all that remained of large quarters of Amritsar and Lahore. The two cities were
de facto
war zones: barbed wire had to be coiled along the length of station platforms in Lahore to keep people apart, looted objects lay abandoned in deserted streets, vultures perched on walls, broken and grotesquely splayed carriages and rickshaws lay at jarred angles, large suburban areas of bustling jewellers, bakeries and bookshops were now reduced to voluminous debris which took many years to be bulldozed away. Human figures in photographs of the time look pitifully small against the mountains of rubble left behind.

All this has been written about in lurid technicolour and from jarring perspectives. Partition stories of Punjab in 1947 are marked by specific details and are layered in unique and entirely individual family memories. Yet these descriptions are also shot through with generic imagery and the haunting motifs that have entered the popular imagination of South Asia: the corpse-laden refugee train passing silently through the province, the penniless rows of refugees streaming across new international borders, which submerge individual tragedies in wider community histories. Generalisations do not do justice to the multiple atrocities. Poets and novelists offer more carefully calibrated, fragmentary insights into personal agonies and ruinous dilemmas of the time. The best have turned the emptiness of this moment into poetry, and grown new creative life into the hollow abyss of Partition's worst moments. The sound of silence in Punjab remains resounding, however. Partition is both ever-present in South Asia's public, political realm and continually evaded.

How to record these acts and disentangle rationality from madness, political intent from momentary insanity? In the sheer diversity and density of the violence, killers acted out of fear or in self-defence, were swept away on a buoyant tide of killing-induced euphoria, felt the intolerable pressure of their peers or found themselves conditioned by the conformity and regulations of institutions such as the police or by the inducements of their friends and colleagues in armed militias. One devout Khaksar, Mujahid Tajdin, who later stormed the gurdwara on Temple Road, Lahore, remembered being trained for the task for four days by a local police sub-inspector. The men in his gang were promised martyrdom or heroism, depending on whether they lived or died, and he remembered how they were told tawdry stories about the massacres of Muslims elsewhere in the country. They set up defence posts and stormed the walls of the gurdwara in the middle of the night, with cries of ‘
Pakistan Zindabad
.’ Someone took a petrol canister along. At least twenty to thirty Sikh men and women burned to death in the inferno that followed. Today the former Khaksar bakes
naan
bread on a street in Lahore and prays for forgiveness for his part in the murders.
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Sometimes such actions are inexplicable, even by the perpetrators.

At the time, testosterone-fuelled ideals of martyrdom, bravery, honour and heroism sanctioned the killings. The spoils of looting attracted others who mopped up after the murderers, acquiring land, jewels and houses from the detritus of massacres. Even those untouched by ideological concerns were able to seek opportunities in the aftermath. Maya Rani, a young sweeper at the time, was not involved in the fighting but accrued valuable dowry goods in the wave of looting which followed, almost as if it was a game. ‘From one shop we stole pure ghee and almonds; at other places we found cloth, we collected so many utensils that we filled up a room as large as this one.’
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Harcharan Singh Nirman who was a child of just six at the time recalled people looting and carrying things from houses, in heaving gunny bags and on their heads. ‘I also brought out a small chair … I could lift only this thing because it was very light … the impression in my mind was people are taking things, I should also take something.’
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Explaining actions long after the event is sometimes impossible. Many memories become shrouded with the overcoat of regret and cold reason.

Others killed members of their own family and community, or committed suicide, preferring an ‘honourable’ death to the shame of rape or conversion of their loved ones, while it is impossible to know how many people eliminated romantic rivals or murdered long-standing adversaries with impunity while disguising their actions behind the façade of Partition's carnage.

This was war by any other name, and the principal aggressors were paramilitaries composed of former soldiers and well-trained young men working hand in glove with the armed forces of the princely states. Young men stood on the front lines. Political interpretations of freedom, self-rule and power gave these men credibility and a sense of legitimacy. As Ram Dev, a young man working at a university in Lahore in the spring of 1947, who was arrested and detained for rioting, later recalled in an evasive, implicit acknowledgement of his own personal role, ‘there was no tradition of fighting or killing in my family, but I wanted to keep Punjab together at all costs’. He claimed he acted to give a ‘warning signal’ to the ‘other’ side but also remembered ‘a lot of milkmen and wooden sheds, and a lot of haystacks, there were thousands of tons of wood; someone threw kerosene, someone threw a bomb, it was set on fire and for twenty miles you could see the smoke; there were thousands of thousands of buffalo there, the entire milk supply of Lahore came from there; it was a milkmen's colony – all Muslims.’
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This was not haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systematic ethnic cleansing. Large groups of men, with their own codes of honour, and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other. It is no coincidence that it is a war veteran who organises the defensive preparations of the village depicted in the novel
Tamas
: ‘he had taken part in the Second World War on the Burmese front and he was now hell-bent on trying the tactics of the Burmese front on the Muslims of his village’.
¹¹
In Punjab these gangs used military tactics, mortars, bombs, traps and automatic rifles. They covered large distances in formation and cut off supply routes and exit points for the fleeing refugees.

The result was terror. Krishna Baldev Vaid, a youth at the time, later a distinguished writer, lived through a prolonged, and life-threatening ordeal, and had to wait over a day and night for rescue with his family after they escaped from Dinga, a small town near Amritsar which fell under siege:

we were numb … we were six of our family … and three more people … it's an awful feeling … we could hear the gunshots, we could guess from the shouting that people were being killed, that several houses were on fire … and we were numb with terror … my father was quiet, but my mother was constantly mumbling something, prayers … everyone was tense and short-tempered … this man he wanted to smoke … and he was very curious as to what was happening … and peeped out … partly out of idiocy, and everyone would snap at him.

After Krishna Baldev Vaid was rescued, one of his most graphic memories was of arriving at a makeshift camp in an office compound in the early light of dawn and the horrible sight of the survivors, bandaged in every way imaginable, and the traumatic process of counting the victims. It was here that he discovered who was alive, dead, raped or injured.
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The poet Louis MacNeice witnessed similar scenes. He was part of a British BBC features and news team sent to the subcontinent to record the imperial transition. The team drove out from Delhi on 26 August in a BBC van, heading for Peshawar.
En route
they passed overspilling
kafilas
making their treacherous journey across the Punjab. Somehow, the BBC team found their way to Sheikhupura, a satellite town of Lahore, which had been badly devastated by violence during the preceding weeks. The hospital held eighty seriously injured Sikhs and Hindus, covered with flies and attended by one doctor, with little or no equipment. A further 1,500 were packed into a nearby schoolhouse. The scene carved itself deeply into the minds of the helpless onlookers. ‘A v. large number of these had been wounded with swords or spears & their white clothes were covered with rusty-brown blood. Some with their hands cut off etc. & again the hordes of flies. But hardly any moaning – just abstracted, even smiling in a horrible unreal way.’
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