The Great Partition (6 page)

This depth of feeling opened a window of opportunity for the politicians as perilous food shortages and hunger, the threat of hunger, and anxiety about food supply were running sores in 1946. India had been living ‘hand to mouth for the past three years,’ admitted the Secretary of the Food Department. A devastating cyclone destroyed crops in the west of the country and the monsoon failed in the south. Nearly half the Indian population was subject to rationing. In the early months of 1946, the Viceroy was preoccupied by the food issue, which, in his own words, ‘threatened calamity’.
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Farmers were tempted to dodge fixed-price government procurement, keep back their rice, wheat and vegetables and to sell their produce on the black market. ‘One way to defeat the food law-breaker is to report him to the authorities. Another is to hound him out of society,’ instructed a government-sponsored newspaper advert. ‘Hound him out!’
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Despite the adverts, selling on the black market became commonplace and the government itself admitted that food could be bought for nearly three times its ration price in the small towns.

Understandably, resistance to forced requisitioning broke out as the poor and ravenous rebelled. In a Gujarati town, hungry labourers refused to load bags of wheat on to lorries and a sympathetic crowd gathered to join their protest, tearing at the sacks with their hands.
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The very poorest were worst hit as they were compelled to make do with the paltry, leftover rations doled out by the state. At the close of the war large painted hoardings in Calcutta could still be seen, sponsored by the biscuit-maker Britannia, which depicted smiling, uniformed soldiers. The slogan in neat letters accompanying the picture spelt out the wartime food equation with stunning brevity: ‘Their needs come first!’ A shocking lesson that Calcutta had come to feel only too painfully. In the Bengal famine of 1943 the Bengali public had been left starving to death, and perhaps as many as three million died because of shoddy government food allocation and skewed political priorities.

It is not easy to say, then, where wartime politics ended and the politics of partitioning began. Partition took place in a society only partially emerging from long years of war. Two-and-a-half million Indian soldiers served in the Second World War, over 24,000 were killed and 64,000 wounded. This, the largest volunteer army in history, which had served in theatres from Greece to Burma, was now in the process of a euphoric and disruptive demobilisation. It was only a fortnight after Victory Week in Delhi, when huge processions of soldiers, brass and pipe bands with regimental flags rolled through the centre of the city to celebrate the end of the war, that the members of the British delegation sent to negotiate a constitutional settlement for India, and to plan its disengagement from empire, arrived in the capital. Partition emerged from a cauldron of social disorder. The Indian economy, which had been completely geared towards feeding soldiers and supporting the war effort, now shifted in a new direction. The Second World War and Partition bled into each other. Indian society, like the British, was undergoing widespread readjustment and demobilisation from 1946–7 and this determined the lines upon which the state fractured.
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Indians stood on the threshold of change and revolution but, as yet, the shape of this change was unknown and frighteningly uncertain.

How and when the British should leave India, and who they should leave power to, were the vital questions dominating all facets of Indian political life by 1946. The Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League were unquestionably the frontrunners in the race to acquire official sanction as ‘leaders’ by the mid–1940s. Indian imperialism had long operated through a careful balance between the forced coercion and the assistance of Indians who had entered into public life in India, both in cooperation with, and in resistance to, the political and administrative structures erected by the Raj.

The most successful party, the Indian National Congress, created in 1885, would have been unrecognisable to its founders by 1946. Under the leadership of Gandhi an elite, patriarchal group of lawyers had, since the 1920s, transformed itself from a polite pressure group into a mass nationalist party, with over four-and-a-half million members and many more sympathisers. The League, in contrast, was far more of a latecomer to the political scene. Although it was founded in 1909 the League had only caught on among South Asian Muslims during the Second World War. The party had expanded astonishingly rapidly and was claiming over two million members by the early 1940s, an unimaginable result for what had been previously thought of as just one of numerous pressure groups and small but insignificant parties.
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By the late 1940s the League and the Congress had impressed on the British their own visions of a free future for Indian people. These visions appeared, on the surface, to be incompatible as one, articulated by the Congress, rested on the idea of a united, plural India as a home for all Indians and the other, spelt out by the League, rested on the foundation of Muslim nationalism and the carving out of a separate Muslim homeland. Yet, things were far more finely nuanced than these simple equations between the League as the-party-of-the-Muslims and the Congress as the-party-for-everyone-else would suggest, especially as both parties continued to vacillate about the future nature of a free India, and its constitutional division of powers.

Evidently, in the run up to Partition something had gone badly wrong between Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. The nature of this breakdown has remained mysterious and unfathomable even to some of those who experienced it or who were caught in the middle of it. As a civil supplies officer, A.S. Bakshi, a turbaned, Sikh civil supplies officer from the fertile district of Jullundur later puzzled, ‘we used to be together … for days and nights, all of a sudden they lost confidence in us … at that time there were only two things … Muslims, and non-Muslims’. These feelings run to dismay as well as bitterness: ‘we have lost the best of our friends, the people whom we loved, the places … so much of us was embedded in every brick where we'd stayed for genera-tions’.
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The sorrow at the centre of numerous Partition stories – and the lack of reconciliation with Partition among so many people – hints at the lack of legitimacy in the division, the wider feeling that good social relationships had been ruptured by a settlement forcefully imposed from on high.

Most histories of Partition necessarily cast back in time, to the 1920s or earlier, to find the answer to this dark question at the heart of Indian nationalism, to understand why Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims grew apart, and debate whether this schism and sense of division were actually widespread. In the three decades preceding Partition a self-conscious awareness of religious ethnicity – and conflict based on this – had undoubtedly escalated in intensity and was becoming more flagrant. Riots, which had been breaking out on religious festivals such as the festival of colour,
Holi
, or in connection with the slaughtering of sacred cows or when Hindu religious music was piped too loudly in front of mosques during prayer time, broke out after increasingly shortened intervals, and with more frightening ferocity, from the end of the First World War onwards. Groups working for religious education and conversion were becoming ever more adept at winning followers and were powerfully entrenched by the 1940s. Reformist groups such as the Tablighi Jamaat, Arya Samaj, and Jam ‘at-i Islami became richer, stronger, more dogmatic and more persuasive. They blended, in different ways, politics and religious symbolism, the internal personal quest with an external missionary zeal. Inevitably, perhaps, they also clashed doctrinally and politically with each other. The most important storm centres of this new type of conflict tended to be the cities and towns of north and west India and the newly minted identities were strongest in the educated, middle-class urban milieux of the burgeoning cities.

By the end of the war, many people were revelling in new and simplistic expressions of religion. There was nothing ancient or predestined about these politicised manifestations of identity. The experience of colonial rule had doubtless stirred up these divisions and added to a sense of separation, especially among elites. Reminders of religious ‘difference’ were built into the brickwork of the colonial state; a Muslim traveller would be directed to the ‘Mohammedan refreshment room’ at a train station and drinking taps on railway platforms were labelled ‘Hindu water’ or ‘Muslim water’. Religious holidays were factored into the official working calendar and government statistics, maps, gazetteers, routine instructions, laws and, above all, the census, all operated on the premise that highly distinct communities, of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus resided in the subcontinent. ‘A stranger travelling in Indian trains may well have a painful shock when he hears at railway stations for the first time in his life ridiculous sounds about
pani
[water], tea and the like being either Hindu or Muslim,’ lamented Gandhi in 1946. ‘It would be repulsive [for this to continue] … it is to be hoped that we shall soon have the last of the shame that is peculiarly Indian.’
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Generations of European administrators, travellers and scholars foregrounded the ‘spiritual’ in all their interpretations of India and, in their eyes, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were inescapably separate and mutually incompatible. As a result of this short-sightedness and an inability to see the finely grained distinctions and differences within, and between, these peoples, all sorts of misguided imperial interventions on behalf of ‘communities’ were put in place. Well-intentioned policies intended to show British fair play and even-handedness could end up encouraging co-religionists to bond more tightly together. The most important of these moves was the decision to give separate electorates to different religious communities from 1909 so that they were represented by their ‘own’ politicians.
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Religious groups acquired stronger voices and more visible spokesmen. New types of association and organisation could link up together, using the railways and the power of the printing press. All this backfired catastrophically as religious boundaries, both more porous and less sharply defined in an earlier age, now hardened.

So the experience of empire exacerbated religious difference. Of course, taboos about purity and pollution, especially about eating, drinking and intermarrying, did have a far longer pedigree and much older historical precedent; internecine warfare
had
taken place in the past. Yet Partition and its build-up was something entirely new in India and directly related to the ending of empire. Soldiers in the wars of the pre-European era would have considered their religious affiliations in much more localised and less universal ways. They would not necessarily have identified with other co-religionists in other parts of the region, let alone the country or even the world. These earlier wars did, though, provide twentieth-century Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs with a full-blooded stock of superheroes, myths and stories, in which one righteous spiritual community pitted itself against another, from which to draw during their own struggles.
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The exclusionary politics of Partition, the scale of the killings and the grouping along religious lines were new. Even non-believers or self-proclaimed atheists were labelled as members of a ‘community’ because of the group that they happened to be born into – not what they believed. Such rigid classifications were novel and completely different from any battles of the preceding centuries.
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Professor Mohammad Mujeeb would have meditated on this, and would undoubtedly have been familiar with the heroes and villains of the old stories of Mughal rule and Indian dynasties before the British conquest of the eighteenth century. He was an eminent scholar and educationalist, in his mid-forties at the time of Partition and Vice-Chancellor at the influential Jamia Millia University in Delhi. As a leading nationalist, from a family of staunch Congress supporters, he had a rich social circle of friends and colleagues in the urban literati, which crossed all religions. It was not untypical for Muslims such as Mujeeb to support the Congress and to oppose the League, and he was close to many prominent national politicians. And yet, despite all this, and his great personal friendship with Nehru, his account of shopping in Delhi's markets in the years leading up to Partition is highly revealing. ‘For a few years under the influence of the idea that the Muslim consumer should support the Muslim trader,’ he remembered, ‘I made it a point to buy what I needed in Muslim shops in Old Delhi.’ Among educated nationalists during these years, a sense of separateness and self-conscious awareness of difference had set in. Yet this was not the end of the story. Making such straightforward connections between co-religionists was not so easy. Whenever he went shopping, the harsh, practical realities of the situation quickly came home to Mujeeb. ‘There were good and bad salesmen,’ irrespective of religion and the shops of the good salesmen – with their stacks of sweets, silver pots and pans, or bundles of cloth – ‘were always crowded, and Muslim customers were an insignificant part of the crowd’. When the professor tried to get the women in his family to take up his scheme of ‘buying Muslim’, he was rebuffed with undisguised scorn; practical housewives would shop where the produce was good and where they were given courteous service, they told him, not on the basis of some simplistic, abstract notion.
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Mohammad Mujeeb's tale is instructive. On the threshold of Partition, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs – especially those in the highest political circles – lived with an awareness of difference. This was not grounded on how often someone prayed or went to the temple; it transcended individual levels of piety. It was a strongly felt kinship with others of the same faith that was preserved and promoted through intermarrying (and the strict censure of those who dared to marry outside the group), shared histories and myths, and the instillation of customs, habits and superstitions from an early age. But it was pragmatic. It was not easy to hook together co-religionists in political allegiances across great expanses of territory; there was no such thing as one Muslim, Hindu or Sikh community in South Asia, as numerous demagogues found to their peril. For one thing, linguistic and cultural differences zigzagged across the country and for another, there was little common ground between people with such divergent incomes.