The Great Partition (41 page)

(Lahore: University of Punjab, 1967), p. 118.

12.

The numbers of people who died during Partition are ultimately unknowable. Figures discussed by contemporaries and historians range from 200,000 to one million. On the difficulties with these figures see G. Pandey,

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–91. Paul Brass also discusses the problem of counting the dead in ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–7,’

, 5.1 (2003), pp. 75–6.

13.

M. Hasan,

(Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 156;

(Islamabad: National Documentation Centre, Govt of Pakistan, 1993), p. 258. These incidents are discussed in Chapters 8 and 9.

14.

, vol. 11, p. 159. Viceroy's Personal Report, 5 June 1947. For a perceptive critique of Partition historiography after fifty years of Independence, see David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’,

, 57.4 (1998), 1068–1095.

15.

These examples are taken from Steven Wilkinson's data set reproduced in S. Wilkinson, ed.,

(Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 405–44. This lists towns with reported ‘communal’ riots in India (and for the pre-1947 period) Pakistan and Bangladesh; based on two data sets compiled by Wilkinson and Ashutosh Varshney using colonial and archival records, published government records, Indian and British papers and other secondary sources. Wilkinson acknowledges the many problems in deciding what constitutes a ‘communal riot’.

16.

J. Greenberg, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine’,

, 25.1 (2005), p. 90. Joya Chatterji similarly highlights the misleading use of surgical metaphors to describe the making of the international borderline between the two countries and the ‘clinical detachment’ with which the operation was presented by the British. Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947–52’,

, 33.1. (Feb. 1999), p. 185.

17.

Urvashi Butalia,

(London: Hurst, 2000), p. 15. The phrase is from Roland Barthes.

1.

M. Darling,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. xiii, 35–6, 51, 68, 80, 194.

2.

Ibid., p. 109.

3.

Tan Tai Yong,

(New Delhi and London: Sage, 2005), pp. 284–5.

4.

, 8 Jan. 1946;

, 2 March 1946.

5.

, vol. 10, p. 392. Speech at Agra, 13 Nov. 1945.

6.

USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082, 13 Nov. 1946.

7.

Winston W. Ehrmann, ‘Post-War Government and Politics of India’,

, 9.4 (Nov. 1947), p. 660.

8.

Daniel Thorner, ‘Problems of Economic Development in India’,

, 268 (March 1950), pp. 96–7.

9.

Ibid., p. 98.

10.

, 9 March 1946. Cited in Vinita Damodaran,

(Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 290–1.

11.

Rahi Masoom Reza,

, trans. from Hindi by Gillian Wright (Delhi: Penguin, 1994), p. 140.

12.

, 31 Jan. 1946;

ed.P.Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 224.

13.

, 25 March 1946.

14.

, 12 March 1946.

15.

Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–45’,

, 176 (Aug. 2002), pp. 187–221. On the Indian role in the Second World War see also, Judith Brown, ‘India’, in I.C.D. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, eds,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 557–65 and Ashley Jackson,

(London: Hambledon, 2005).

16.

By 1938–9 the All India membership figures for the Indian National Congress were 4,511,858. Source: B.R. Tomlinson,

(London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 86.

17.

Andrew Whitehead,

(London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1997, 2000), A.S. Bakshi interviewed in Chandigarh, 16 March 1997.

18.

The colonial applications and implications of the decennial census are discussed in N. Barrier, ed.,

(Delhi: Manohar, 1981).

, vol. 85, p. 448, 1946.

19.

The British granted the principle of representative government to Indians in 1861, 1892, 1909 and more substantially by the parliamentary Acts of 1919 and 1935, although the franchise was always highly selective and powers were carefully curtailed.

20.

The literature on the growth of Muslim and Hindu nationalism and the use of religious symbolism by nationalist parties prior to 1947 is extensive. For a variety of perspectives see, P. Brass,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974)

S. Freitag,

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); William Gould,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Christophe Jaffrelot,

(London: Hurst, 1996); Ayesha Jalal,

(London: Routledge, 2000); Gyanendra Pandey,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Peter Van der Veer,

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Farzana Shaikh,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Francis Robinson,

(New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy, eds,

(New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Indian community relations prior to the arrival of European colonialism, see David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence, eds,

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). For an excellent analysis of some of the major theoretical debates, see Gail Minault, ‘Some Reflections on Islamic Revivalism vs. Assimilation among Muslims in India’,

, 18 (1984), pp. 301–2, and Francis Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim Society in South Asia: A Reply to Das and Minault’,

, 20 (1986), pp. 97–104.

21.

On the terms ‘communal’, ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno-religious’, and their relative merits, see Amartya Sen,

(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and Ayesha Jalal, ‘Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of “Communalism”: Partition Historiography Revisited’,

, 30. 3 (1996), pp. 681–9.

22.

C.H. Philips and M.D. Wainwright, eds,

(London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), pp. 409–10.

1.

A.K. Azad,

(First published 1959, edition cited, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1989), pp. 92, 122.

2.

, 27 March 1946.

3.

Circular to all Provincial Congress Committees, 11 Jan. 1947, reprinted in

(AICC, Delhi, 1947), pp. 10–15.

4.

, vol. 85, p. 35. Letter to V. Patel, 21 July 1946.

5.

, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 2; Malcolm Darling,

(London, 1949), p. 17.

6.

, ed. P. Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 202.

7.

Memoir of B.C. Dutt, one of the leaders of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, quoted in S. Kuwajima,

(Delhi: Manohar, 1998) pp. 114–15.

8.

Sumit Sarkar,

(Delhi: Macmillan, 1983) pp. 405–8.

9.

A.K. Gupta,

(Delhi: Manohar, 1996), p. 287.

10.

USSA 845.105/8–1547 – 845.105/12.3149 Box 6082.

11.

Gail Omvedt,

(New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 23. Sumit Sarkar,

, pp. 442–6.

12.

Lawrence James,

(London: Little, Brown, 1997), p. 597.

13.

, vol. 6, p. 393. Twynam to Wavell, 25 Oct. 1945.

14.

, 8 March, 1946.

15.

Desmond Young,

(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), p. 330.

16.

, vol. 6, p. 554. Wavell to Pethick-Lawrence, 27 Nov. 1945

17.

, vol. 6, p. 576. Clow to Wavell, 1 Dec. 1945; IOR, L/PJ/5/168 Colville to Wavell, 3 Feb. 1947.

18.

, vol. 10, pp. 378–9. Speech at a public meeting in village Syed Raja, Varanasi district, 27 Oct. 1945.

19.

Sumit Sarkar,

, pp. 418–23.

20.

, vol. 6, pp. 512, 516. Intelligence Bureau, Home Dept 20 Nov. 1945. It was also reported that leaders at most of the 160 political meetings held in the Central Provinces during the first half of October demanded the release of INA men.

21.

, vol. 6, pp. 554, 555.

22.

Address by King George VI at Opening of Parliament, 15 August 1945,

, 16 August 1945.

23.

The total electorate for the provincial elections was 41,075,839. As a proportion of the adult population over twenty years old, this may have been approximately 28 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women. See Kuwajima,

, p. 47.

24.

See for instance J.P. Narayan's far-sighted note on the communal question, AICC, G–23 (1946–8). On the CPI's relationship with Nehru, see Benjamin Zachariah,

(London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 123–5.

25.

Extract from an Urdu poem

1946 trans. Kedarnath Komal and Rukmani Nair in Mushirul Hasan, ed.,

(Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 1, p. 43.

26.

An extract from the election bill of the Palamu district Kisan Sabha, translated from the Hindi in Kuwajima,