The Great Partition (5 page)

Darling met hundreds of villagers on his ride and they all answered his questions about
azadi
, or freedom, differently: among a group of Punjabi Muslims, he noted, ‘The village headmen riding with me were all supporters of the League. “What is its object?” I asked them. “
Sanun kuchh patta nahin
– we have no idea,” said one of them and another added: “It is an affair of the Muslims”.’ A third was more explicit and said: ‘If there were no League, the Hindus would get the government and take away our land.’ In another village named Balkassar, he met prosperous members of the Khatri Sikh community who told him, ‘Sikh and Muslim … had lived together in harmony, but now, with the cry for Pakistan, each eyes the other critically and keeps apart.’ ‘But surely you want
azadi
?’ Darling asked. ‘
Azadi
’, said one of the younger men ‘is
bebadi
– destruction, and Pakistan is
kabaristan
– a graveyard.’ In another village, Miani Gondal in Punjab, he asked the difference between the Congress and the League. Someone piped up saying, ‘we don't bother about that’ and another attempted to explain the meaning of Pakistan. ‘Our area’, he said, ‘must be separate, and the Hindu area must be separate.’ When he asked a group of Sikhs on the other side of the Chenab River in a central Punjabi village in the district of Lyallpur, ‘What would they do with freedom?’ he recorded, ‘When the word
azadi
– freedom – was mentioned there was no dissentient voice. All wanted it and when I asked what they would do with it when they got it, a Sikh replied, “Now we are slaves. When we are free we shall serve ourselves and do as we like. Then we shall gladly pay more taxes.” Another colonist, one of the more educated present wearing a fine black achkan [long coat] said that when they were free they would have prosperity.’ Darling could not help but conclude that
azadi
is ‘the word which comes up sooner or later at every meeting’.
¹

Darling's account must be handled with suspicion because he was, for all his liberal compassion and interest in Indians, ambivalent about the end of the Raj. His stories play down the great strength of nationalist feeling in India at the time and can be read as justification for the prolongation of empire. There was absolutely no shortage of well-educated, articulate and fiercely political Indians alive at the end of the war, determined to start shaping the fate of their own state. The central question though was a valid one. What did ordinary Indians expect from Independence and what were the hopes and dreams at the end of the Second World War as people felt themselves to be on the brink of a revolution? Above all, Darling was right about one thing. ‘What a hash politics threaten to make of this tract, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh are as mixed up as the ingredients of a well-made pilau,’ he predicted as he rode across the fertile Punjabi plains that winter.
²
Within a year this region would be divided in half and many of the people he met along the way in these ‘mixed-up’ populations would have been wrenched out of their homes, made destitute or murdered.

The land which Darling rode through was much changed from the pre-war years. At the end of the war India was either an exciting and exhilarating or a dangerous place, depending on your particular circumstances and viewpoint. The divisive question about how best to settle the representation of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in a future Indian state was only one of numerous problems facing the British government as it tried to resume service after the summer of 1945, and it was by no means certain that it would become the most critical. The demands and compromises made during the war had badly cracked the foundational scaffolding of the Raj. This structure, which was so good at giving the illusion of permanence and durability, was actually built on specific sets of relationships between British administrators and an unlikely coalition of Indian princely rulers, self-promoting landed oligarchs, hand-picked civil servants, locally hired policemen and soldiers. By the end of the Second World War, a thread had loosened in the political fabric of the state. An unparalleled naval mutiny shook the authority of the Raj to its foundations and strikes, student activism and peasant revolt reverberated throughout the country, while an ill-advised attempt to prosecute members of the rebellious Indian National Army became a national
cause célèbre
. Above all, this was a time of transition, and India, and its old colonial system of governance, was irreversibly altered by the tremendous economic, social and psychological consequences of war.

Just as it had in Britain, the war effort strained, and ultimately reconfigured, the very nature of the political economy of the state and the partition that followed is difficult to comprehend in isolation from this upheaval. Daily terror and dread of an impending attack by the Axis powers had suffused life during the war years for many, especially once Singapore toppled to the Japanese in 1942. Even though such an attack failed to materialise on Indian soil, apart from the oft-forgotten Japanese bombing of Bengal, fear of imminent invasion had been inculcated quite deliberately by government propaganda. In North India blackouts and bomb shelters were not unusual in the homes of the wealthy, and fearfulness and rumour had become a feature of public life well before Partition appeared on the political horizon, as is attested by the withdrawal of bank savings and their conversion into cash and jewellery in Punjab.
³
At the war's cessation, thousands of troops, fired up by exposure to new political ideas and expecting some recompense for the rigours of military service, returned to their villages. Troops housed in one camp twenty miles from Delhi, ‘had become accustomed to a new standard of living in Germany … some had the conviction that they were coming to a free India’ and others wrote to the newspapers. ‘We who have done real hard work and our duty as we were expected to do should be told frankly that we are not to expect anything from Government. If there is no expectation there will be no disappointment,’ appealed one officer stationed in Bangalore.
⁴

Expectations of freedom were sky high and India was set to become the first part of the empire, beyond the dominions, to win its independence, paving the way for the later decolonisation of other countries in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. At the same time, British civil servants in their isolated outposts throughout the country waited nervously for news that they could take long-overdue leave, and surveyed the political landscape with trepidation while local politicians found ready audiences on soapboxes and in the press. Book sales boomed, papers sold in unprecedented quantities and a sense of imminent change and transformation was palpable in the cities. Congressmen, jailed for the duration of the war, leaped back into the political arena after their release from prison in June 1945, talking more freely and provocatively than ever. ‘Independence will be attained soon. It has almost come to us. We have it. None can snatch it away from us’, a leading Congressman told the swollen crowds at a political rally in Agra, weeks after his three-year jail sentence had ended. ‘Yearnings and hunger for independence have so much increased that anyone who obstructs or comes in the way will be burnt to ashes.’
⁵
Abstract notions of freedom and fine British sentiments would no longer do; the people were determined to have independence and to experience it for themselves.

After two centuries of imperial rule the British had become confused, equivocal imperialists in India, at best. The state had postponed, or simply abandoned, many of the other projects which might have warranted attention in peacetime and resorted to a simplistic form of basic imperialism during the war: keeping the peace and extracting the necessary resources to fight the war. The bureaucracy itself, the notorious ‘steel frame’, was creaking under the weight of the new duties that it had assumed during wartime. Indians now outnumbered Europeans in the civil service and a deliberate policy of gradually Indianising the services had been greatly accelerated. It was becoming practically impossible to recruit young British men to staff the Raj and by 1943 Indian Civil Service recruitment in Britain had effectively dried up. By 1946, many of the British men who had enlisted during the Second World War were attracted by the business opportunities of the postwar world, and were not inclined to travel four thousand miles to manage a fading empire. High-ranking British policemen in India started casting around for openings elsewhere in the empire or even beyond: ‘this consulate alone has already been approached by three of the higher ranking officials who have been interested in the possibilities of obtaining positions in the United States,’ reported the American Vice-Consul in Karachi.
⁶

Grainy photographs of the Partition era sometimes hint that it was a ‘medieval’ horror that occurred in a poor and undeveloped landscape, but this is a manipulation of the truth; urban India was in the midst of rapid change by 1946, change which had been greatly accelerated by the industrial spurt caused by war, and although it is unwise to generalise about such a vast and variegated economy – which ranged from gritty industrial centres such as Jamshedpur (home to the largest single steelworks in the British empire pioneered by the entrepreneurial Tata family) to remote and extremely poor villages entirely dependent on agricultural crops – Partition took place in the mid-twentieth century. The battle over India and Pakistan was fought in towns and cities that would be instantly recognisable today.

Giant metropolises – Bombay, Madras, Delhi and Calcutta – differed from the smaller towns founded on government service and small-scale production, such as Karachi, Lucknow, Dacca or Lahore, yet by the 1940s all these towns and cities had richly complex civic lives, with numerous banks, schools, hospitals, chambers of commerce, temples and mosques, densely packed roads, bazaars and alleyways. Colleges and universities swarmed with well-read, politicised students who awaited the start of a new era. Many wealthy landowners and members of princely elites failed to notice, or mistakenly ignored, the winds of change blowing through society and persisted with their annual rounds of balls, parties and dances.

Among the middle classes, the buzz was about new poets, fashion magazines and pulp fiction. Eating out was becoming more popular, and there was a sudden rash of new restaurants and coffee-houses. Standing on the fringes of the middle class, city dwellers with jobs, perhaps as petty clerks or schoolteachers, could buy new types of consumer goods for the first time in the 1940s. They packed the cinema halls and took the opportunity to travel more than their forefathers, either by bicycle or train. New attitudes percolated through society: in Punjab women were increasingly going without the veil and favouring high heels and synthetic saris. Tea-drinking from ceramic cups was becoming more commonplace and smoking leaf tobacco was catching on. Markets selling brightly patterned cloth, gold jewellery and sweets would have looked entirely familiar. The towns, typically based on small trading businesses, petty shopkeeping and service trades, were, and are, disproportionately powerful in relation to a vast agricultural sector. ‘No favorite wife could have been treated with more favor than the town’, noted one observer, and provincial towns such as Amritsar, Lucknow, Lahore, Dacca and Karachi were the nerve centres of political life.
⁷

For those without money, the cities were darker and more dangerous places. Many landless agriculturalists were compelled to seek work and the overcrowding of the greatest cities had been greatly exacerbated by the wartime boom. ‘Nowhere in the world today’, wrote one eminent economic historian and well-travelled contemporary commentator, ‘are there slums worse than the single-story
bustees
of Calcutta or the multistory
chawls
of Bombay.’
⁸
Cities such as the northern manufacturing metropolis Kanpur exploded during the war owing to the escalating demands for cotton, wool, jute and sugar and the population of the city, overwhelmed by migrant labour, nearly doubled between 1941 and 1951. At the end of the war, when much of this production contracted, labourers faced unemployment. Thousands of workers returned to their wives and children in their home villages, and tried to revive livelihoods as cultivators. Others remained as casual workers, or carved out a life on the margins of the city, living among other caste and community members, taking part in union politics, local clubs or
akharas
. In the 1940s, 40 per cent of the debt-ridden peasantry neither owned nor rented any land at all and were entirely dependent on casual, seasonal employment.
⁹
Too many were barefoot, poorly dressed, sick or suffering, barely surviving on one meal a day. ‘It was market day,’ wrote a journalist from Bihar. ‘We were surrounded by starving people and in the whole of the market except for
sag
[spinach] and
mahuwa
[edible seeds and flowers] we found nothing else. For three months, rice had not been selling in the bazaar and the people were living on
sag
.’
¹⁰
The empire had not delivered much in the way of development to its poorest members. Unstoppable waves of sometimes seasonal, sometimes permanent, migration to the ballooning cities persisted, despite the post-war depression, and have continued ever since.

For most Indians, especially town dwellers, life revolved around getting hold of daily essentials, especially bread. Wheat, grain, cloth, and kerosene were all in desperately short supply. In a classic Hindi novel of the time,
Adha Gaon
, Phunnan Miyan, the father of a soldier serving abroad in the army, anxious because he hasn't heard any news from his boy, is asked to donate money to a war fund towards the end of the war, and promptly retorts: ‘You can't get cloth. Eh,
Bhai
, everything to eat has disappeared from the bazaar. I couldn't get sugar to make offerings. Kerosene has become like the water of paradise. Only certain special people get it. I'm not giving an
anna
to the war fund. Do whatever you like.’
¹¹