The Great Partition (28 page)

Now, in August and September 1947, professionally produced pamphlets that had an air of governmental legitimacy circulated widely.
The Rape of Rawalpindi
was one: a forty-page palm-sized brochure full of gruesome black and white photographs, showing burnt skulls, orphaned refugee children and ruined temples accompanied by one-sided and inflammatory captions: ‘All this is the result of the aggressive ideology of Pakistan. This is a foretaste of Pakistan.’
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Partition was a modern event: the technology of the printing press was fully utilised to promote killing and pressmen and propagandists played their role in Partition violence behind typewriters as bureaucratic killers in word if not in deed. These propaganda networks stretched tautly across the subcontinent. Such propaganda was part of a strategic plan to polarise the communities and helped embolden those at the forefront of gangs. Some journalists and rumour-mongers in South Asia, then and now, are not detached commentators on the clashes between communities but are deeply involved in stoking the fires to which their partial stories give legitimacy, and sometimes spur on the rioters by creating tableaux against which they believe that they can act with impunity.

Against this bleak backdrop, many people carried out unusually brave, heroic and humanitarian acts. Some individuals saved the lives of neighbours, friends and strangers of different communities, even by risking their own lives. Others gave word of impending attacks to their neighbours, sheltered large numbers of people, smuggled food to the stranded and helped secretly move them from danger in the dead of night by lending transport or arranging disguises or armed protection. ‘In the end I feel honour-bound to record that the lives of my children and those of about six hundred educated Hindus and Sikhs, male and female, of the Civil Lines, were saved by the efforts of some God-fearing Muslims who gave them shelter in their houses, even at the risk of their lives,’ noted the Civil Surgeon of Sheikhupura, a survivor of the atrocities in the district which became a byword for terror in the weeks that followed.
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Many of the acts were anonymous but abundant stories from all parts of India and Pakistan provide compelling evidence of a counter-flow to the polarisation of society in 1947. Even a future President of India, Zakir Hussain, owed his life to the intervention of a Sikh captain and Hindu railway employee who saved him from a gang at Ambala railway station. The Punjabi president of the Gujranwala City Congress Committee, Narinjan Das Bagga, was killed when he went to try and pacify an angry mob and rescue an injured Muslim.
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An unknown policeman labelled as a ‘South Asian Schindler’ used a stick to fend off a marauding gang and saved two hundred Sikh lives.
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Individuals built Hindu–Muslim unity leagues and peace brigades, and British observers, who had little reason to emphasise artificially the fraternity between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, frequently noted the extraordinary acts of heroism and generosity that occurred in the midst of Partition's worst atrocities. Groups ran ambulances and extricated the injured, ensuring that they got to hospital. Sometimes peace committees were well organised and sometimes individuals acted with spontaneous charity.

‘No words can express the innermost feelings of gratitude and thankfulness which sprout from my grateful heart every moment when I cast a look upon my children and wife who have escaped from the very brink of the other world,’ wrote one survivor to Dr Khushdeva Singh: ‘you are doubtless an angel doing humanitarian work which befits a true doctor.’
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Singh was the superintendent of a sanatorium and tuberculosis adviser to the government of Patiala in 1947. He also acted as a rationing officer for the area. Once the scale of the crisis became apparent he poured his energies into humanitarian work, collecting hundreds of rupees from local people to send to the Indian Red Cross society and urging peace. He worked with the wounded and the suffering at his clinic. Soon, he caught wind of the fact that truck drivers were leaking news of the planned evacuation of a large group of local Muslims. Avenging refugees had blocked their route out of the town and planned an ambush. Kushdeva Singh hatched a plan to evacuate the refugees secretly and to send them in an alternative direction. The doctor received 317 letters of gratitude from Muslims whose lives he had saved or from their family members.

Friends and neighbours relied upon each other. ‘I still have more non-Muslim friends than Muslim and I have reasons to be proud of them,’ wrote one Muslim author, Mahmud Brelvi to the Congress.
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Others felt guilt for not doing more to save their neighbours or lamented the destruction of life as they had known it. Joginder, a small shop owner, who was a child in 1947 recalled, ‘as soon as the Muslims left the others started coming … they took away everything, loaded them on bullock carts, and even took away the cattle … we felt very sad, we were completely heart broken, we'd been with them for generations, the elder people in our community were extremely sad, we still talk about them … we used to cry after they left…’
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Acts of mercy and charity were very common. Violence was not all encompassing. The complexities of these emotions cannot be easily stereotyped. Nationalism was entirely compatible with love for an individual neighbour, member of staff or colleague. In other ways, the passage of time makes it incredibly challenging to disentangle slivers of memory and fragmented stories. ‘On the one hand individuals like Amiruddin could save the lives of members of other communities at considerable personal risk,’ the historian Ian Talbot writes of the city's mayor, who conveyed Hindu and Sikh friends to safety under showers of bullets but also later glorified the ‘marvellous’ way that the Muslims in Amritsar ‘put up a fight’ in 1947. ‘Simultaneously they could gloat at the removal of their “enemies” symbolic and physical presence.’
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The compulsions of violence forced many to look the other way, or made them too fearful to intervene. In mixed
mohallas
and villages, acute anxiety about the safety of neighbours could sit flush with nationalistic feeling and fear for one's own family. At its worst, this became a Judas-like denial or incrimination. Shanti Seghal was a young woman of twenty in 1947 and lost two sisters, their children and a sister-in-law. She was caught up in an attack outside Shiekhupura in which troops lined people up against trees and mowed them down with guns. She tried to convince the attackers that her family were Muslims but believed it was a neighbour who revealed their true identity as Hindus.
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Partition was accompanied by an acidic paper trail of pamphlets, letters and newsprint that created a sphere of paranoid and partial knowledge. Abundant rumours and their magnifying, generalising tendencies made it impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from apprehension. Rumours and panic spread to areas such as Sind, which remained mercifully free from violence until January 1948 as well as to those where it was becoming endemic. The shortage of sound information, among political elites as well as villagers, was a two-way process and official actions – from sending out troops to ordering mass evacuations – were based on hearsay and rehashed stories just as much as localised violence depended on distorted stories from a distant Delhi. Leaders were overwhelmed by painful stories and inundated with tales of horror. Leaders and ministers, especially in Punjab, became conduits for news between members of their rank-and-file. Mumtaz Daultana, a senior Pakistani minister, was to be found sitting near a petrol pump in August 1947 in the Punjabi countryside, on the outskirts of Okara, ‘surrounded by a group of men’. Often, the political imperative was to believe the worst about the other, a tendency still apparent in the contemporary national press of both countries: that it was the other side that was
really
the chief aggressor and the other side that was
really
responsible for the horrors of 1947.
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News was shaped so that it became entirely partial and was chiselled in such a way that people often only heard about the crimes against their own community: in the North West Frontier Province, the Muslim Pathan knew all about the terrible atrocities committed against fellow Muslims in Bihar but little of events in Bengal, where Hindus had been the victims. The public news sphere was sophisticated enough for news to travel rapidly, and between different parts of the country, connecting people together in imaginary religious communities across time and space.

Translation from English to vernaculars also offered scope for creative inventiveness. Crude tales of violence proved the most problematic obstacle to peace. Sometimes news was inverted, so that news of riots was turned entirely upside down and the real victims were painted as the culprits. After the violence in Garhmukhteshwar, ‘the propaganda was so blatantly false that in the beginning it only caused amusement’.
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Rumours of various kinds included details of major atrocities that sometimes had not actually taken place, in particular of grotesque acts against women, which intersected and overlapped with rumours about the actual course of political events – whether or not Pakistan was or was not being made, and where it was going to come into existence, what it would be like when it did.

Outside Punjab people started to worry about what was happening there, ‘Events in the Punjab and NWFP are occasioning concern,’ wrote the Governor of Bombay. ‘It is difficult to follow what is happening here as information is confusing.’
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Subsidiary rumours fed like tributaries into the wider stream: about where relief could be found, who was responsible for the trouble, preparations for attacks and stories of impending disasters. Slogans warned soldiers of the danger of rumour in watchwords reminiscent of the Blitz spirit: ‘Careless talk costs lives. Keep a 24 hour guard on your tongue. Do not listen to Rumour’, ‘Rumour-mongers are public enemies’, and ‘Do not spread bazaar talk and gossip’. The potency of rumour should not be underestimated, and more recent calamities in South Asia have continued to spark lethal rumours across the country long after events have receded from the media's purview: after the tsunami disaster in South India in 2004, news of another giant wave sparked mass evacuations along several parts of the Indian coastline, and in 2005, in Bombay, eighteen people were killed and over forty injured when a stampede broke out after word spread that a tsunami was approaching. During Partition the circulation of false information – whether intentional or accidental – frightened people in a parallel way and caused stampeding and panicked evacuations. To try and counter false propaganda the Indian government air-dropped over 20,000 newspapers to refugees in the distressed districts of Jullundur, Amritsar, Lahore and Ferozepore. Even a year later, rumour of impending riots was still a powerful weapon and a ‘whispering campaign’ among refugees in Delhi put all the law and order authorities on red alert in May 1948.
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India and Pakistan emerged shattered, but intact, as two separate nation states at the end of the summer of 1947. Nobody had imagined that the Partition plan or Pakistan's creation would lead to this scenario of death and destruction. Nobody had thought that freedom would come in this guise. Newly anointed Indian and Pakistani leaders now had to juggle the ceaseless flow of distressed and penniless refugees, to set up a feasible and functioning state, and to integrate princes and provincial interests in the shadow of Partition. Although no one could be naïve enough to suggest that only one side was responsible for the terrors of 1947, it is little wonder that nationalism was given a new edge. The two states necessarily saw each other through the prism of the violence that had taken place and eyed each other warily across the expanses of the ruptured Punjab.

By Independence Day, the national leaders of both countries were badly shaken by their personal experiences of witnessing the violence at first hand or by hearing the stories of the survivors and distressed refugees flooding into the national capitals. Daily, anguished crowds queued at the residences of political leaders, asking for recompense, help with finding lost ones or for vengeance. Maniben Patel, the Indian Deputy Prime Minister's daughter and secretary, records in her diary for late August and September how these early morning callers became part of the Deputy Prime Minister's regular routine. On 1 September 1947, typically, ‘Large crowd from Punjab waiting in early morning in the compound. Whole day passed in seeing visitors.’
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New Delhi was in chaos, with constant murdering and rioting in August and September, throngs of refugees arriving, local people living under the daily threat of death, armed gangs roaming the streets and thousands waiting in the camps at Purana Qila and Humayan's Tomb to be taken to Pakistan. The ornamental fountains at the picturesque sixteenth-century monument Humayan's Tomb became so fouled with human dirt that they had to be filled in with sand. The Quaker aid worker and author Richard Symonds witnessed Kafkaesque scenes in the Delhi camps:

I joined Horace [Alexander]in the largest camp, the Purana Qila, which was sheltering 60,000 refugees in tents, in corners of battlements and in the open, together with their camels and tongas and ponies, battered old taxis and luxury limousines. There were orderly rows of tents which organized bodies of college students had put up. You might meet anyone from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered you thousands of rupees if you could hire them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to the hawkers' boxes of matches, which were now the only ones available in Delhi. From time to time Europeans hurried through looking for their bearers who had fled from their houses.
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Ordinary life had been turned upside down.

Knitted together in a collective feeling of crisis, the Congress – now the party of government – turned to the citizens of Delhi. Military reinforcements were meagre. ‘Only a small number of Gurkhas and Madras paratroopers could be made available quickly. Madhya Pradesh contributed a contingent of armed police.’ So instead of using more conventional troops and police, ‘every possible source of trained and disciplined manpower was tapped’. The government gathered together under its wing all manner of groups from Boy Scouts to members of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema. Congress corps and Home Guards were armed by the Central Emergency Committee with shotguns. The government seized hold of private vehicles owned by the public and asked people to donate spare parts for vehicles, while ‘trained mechanics were literally rounded up from their homes’.
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This was the first
national
crisis for the free India and the free Pakistan.