Partition

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Introduction

The saddest side effect of Indian independence was undoubtedly the partition of the country.

We start the decade less than 30 years after the Swadeshi movement had re-united Bengal against the will of the British colonial masters.

Yet throughout the 1940s decisions were taken which drastically changed the political landscape. The political consciousness of the rural Muslim majority rose and felt unrepresented by urban Hindu majority Calcutta. This made it possible for the Muslim league to persuade them of the potential benefits of a separate Pakistan.

By 1947, what in the late 30s had sounded like no more than eccentric ideas, had become seemingly impossible to avoid.

The sole remaining question, which for the future of Calcutta was vital and worried many of its inhabitants very deeply, was how exactly Bengal was to be partitioned.

Was it all, including Calcutta, to go to Pakistan, was it to be a separate independent state apart from both Indian and Pakistan, or was solely the greater Calcutta area to be split off to perhaps form some sort of neutral territory ?

Anxiety in Calcutta and especially its Hindu community led to much agitation against Pakistan.

In the end as independence drew ever closer the province was cut in two (sometimes very roughly) along communal lines, in less than a month.

India as a whole and one of its most culturally distinct provinces, Bengal, was partitioned, never to be re-united. The effects are stamped on to city and its culture to this very day. Calcutta has lost a large part of its economic and cultural hinterland, and countless of its old and new inhabitants their homes and their roots, many even their lives.

Even Ghandi who had done so much to ease partition in Calcutta in particularly was had been murdered within a few month.

[Please note that independence as well as the communal riots in 1946 each form separate chapters]

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The partition

The partition of Bengal had caused many upheavals in our economic and political life. If you talk to anyone who remembers those times, you'll understand that the basic factor behind the economic collapse was the partition. I have never been able to accept the partition, not even today.

Ritwik Ghatak. Calcutta, 1947s

(source: Recollections of Bengal and a Single Vision at http://216.152.71.145/filmmakers/ghatak/ghatak.html reproduced from the monograph Ritwik Ghatak prepared for the Festival of India in London, 1982)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Ritwik Ghatak 1982)

The Congress leaders never took the idea of partition seriously

The Congress leaders never took the idea of partition seriously. They couldn't believe that India would be partitioned and therefore my own opinion is that they didn't work at it. When it came it was too late to go back and fight it ... how the local communal troubles were stirred up by politicians or local thugs I don't know. How much it was because of the basic intolerance of the Hindu, not his aggression, but his non-acceptance of anything outside his caste - that's a very cruel aspect of Hinduism which people don't realise because it's a very soft and non-xenophobic religion but it's a very intolerant one - I also don't know. But I think that, politically, in the first thirty years of independence it was necessary for us to have a strong centre, though we have a fragile system. In Nehru's day the strength of the centre established us as a nation.

General Palit,

(source: page 203 of Trevor Royle: “The Last Days of the Raj” London: Michael Joseph, 1989)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Trevor Royle 1989)

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Original Ideas

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Jinnah Split

[…]

Socially, Indian Moslems are a solid, self-conscious minority group (just less than one-fourth of India's population) ; Hindus are a loosely-bound, sect-split, caste-stratified majority (three-fourths).

Hindus are the wealthier group. In general, Hindus are landowners, capitalists, shopkeepers, professionals, employers ; Moslems are peasants, artisans, laborers.

In Bengal, where Hindus are only 43% of the population, they pay 85% of the taxes.

One of the main reasons for this difference is that usury, which accounts for far more profit in India than trade, is forbidden to Moslems by religious law.

[…]

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Dec. 4, 1939)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

“Sthans and Isthans”

OF Pakistan we have heard much. Of Khalistan or Sikhistan, independent State for the Khalsa or Sikhs, and Zananisthan, Independent home for India's women where they shall be in direct obedience to the Paramount Power, but not to any husbands or other near authority, we have heard a little. Whispers tell of aspirations for an Achchutsthan for the Scheduled Castes and an Adibashisthan for the aboriginal peoples. All these in combination suggest that India will be well and sufficiently vivisected in the near future, and that the Office, must set up a number of new departments on its political side.

But there is more to come. A young correspondent has revealed what is going on in his sphere. "We, the students of India, view all this business of vivisection with undisturbed neutrality." As between Hindus and Moslems, wives and husbands, castes and outcastes, they are impartial and indifferent, having their own absorbing purpose to press on the authorities. In a few weeks, as soon as their university examinations are over (our correspondent, we regret, puts in a naughty adjective before "university") they will present their claim; not with humble submission as is duty bound, but as a demand not territorially limited but from the whole large body of students in all India's academic groves and haunts. That explains why, amid all the excitement and disturbance that India has seen of late, students everywhere have been quiet and restrained. As a general statement of what students have been doing that seems to have its weaknesses, but these may be passed over for the sake of the argument.

Students form a separate nation within, India larger than any other; larger than all others combined. Therefore, the letter gives us fifteen days' notice, Government will soon stand trembling in its trousers as hundreds and thousands of stalwart youths, compact of knowledge and resolution, march non-violently, non-violent swords in non-violent hands, to insist on autonomous republics for themselves at all seats of learning; for free cities constituted of themselves and governed by themselves for themselves. So one more "isthan" is on the horizon. Let there be free cities and autonomous republics for generous youth, owing no allegiance to the Government of the land. When a student ceases to be a student for this purpose the letter does not say.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, April 25. 1940)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

No Silence

EDITORS have been asked to be kindly reticent while negotiations are going on between Congress and Muslim League leaders, and not cloud prospects by careless or excessive comment. This is not the highest form of compliment. Why should it be supposed that newspaper comment clouds whereas men in politics clarify ? Most men, of all communities, whatever their occupations and interests, are glad to see some approach of the parties whose aloofness has contributed greatly to the present stagnation in Indian politics. It is a resumption of activity from which large change may come. If Mr Gandhi and Mr Jinnah can reach an understanding about the great thing that divides Hindus generally from Muslims generally in their outlook at the present, the satisfaction will be great.

A settlement to satisfy Hindus, Muslims, Scheduled Castes, as well as Britain, will not be easy, though Britain's concern is that there shall be agreement, among Indians. What is under debate is the future of India, in relation to Britain and the Empire, and in her own internal structure. These are matters of grave importance, about which newspapers however pleasantly invited to silence, cannot long be reticent. Problems of this magnitude call for the greatest and responsible publicity. Nor does it help if anyone, newspaper or political leader, uses language that conceals, obscures, or minimizes what is at issue.

The word "settlement" itself looks pleasant and comfortable, but what is sought is a settlement about Pakistan, a word that many find provocative. We hear a great deal about Pakistan in principle. Even the Mahasabha. we suppose, are not worried about Pakistan as a principle. What they are sounding the trumpet and putting on their armour against is Pakistan as operation and fact. The Sikhs too appear to be in earnest against it. Is anything to be gained by silence about these verities ?

There is general hope that the negotiations now begun will lead to something good, above all to the end of the miserable stagnation in politics ; but settlement is identical with some arrangement about Pakistan, a word still undefined, and a large part of the people seem resolute against any arrangement of the kind. It does no good to soften language in the hope of mitigating feelings if this obscures realities. India cannot decide great matters in a twilight of thought and emotion.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, August 8. 1944)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

Slaves, Promises, Passions

By every sign & portent this would be India's year of decision—a decision that would be bitterly contested by all three partners to India's future: the British Raj, 256 million Hindus, 92 million Moslems.

Votes & Issues. As the year opened, Secretary of State for India Lord Pethick-Lawrence dutifully reiterated Britain's old promise: she would do all she could to help India reach Dominion status. For over three years, in one form or another, Britain had been offering just that—postwar independence inside the Empire (i.e., Dominion status), provided Indians could agree among themselves on what form of self-rule they wanted. Hindus wanted a united, free India; Moslems wanted a separate state for themselves (Pakistan) inside a free India. Both Hindus and Moslems wanted the British to get out.

Last week the results of the first election in eleven years for the Central Legislative Assembly were announced. Because of franchise restrictions, which made them among the least representative of India's elections, only about 600,000 voted. In this preliminary test, the predominantly Hindu Congress Party won all the non-Moslem seats (56) and the Moslem

League won all the Moslem seats (30); minor groups won 16, with 39 members still to be nominated.

Words & Moods. In the far more significant provincial elections (30,000,000 voters), to be held between January and April, the issue will be Pakistan—whether or not to slice off the four predominantly Moslem provinces in India's northwest corner, plus Bengal and Assam in the east, as a separate Moslem land.

The Moslem League's shrewd, elegant President Mohamed AH Jinnah put it coolly: "India has never been a nation. It only looks that way on a map. ... I want to eat the cow the Hindu worships. When the Hindu shakes hands with me, he must go wash his hands. Our religion is not all. Culture, history, customs, all make Moslem India a different nation from Hindu India. The Moslem has nothing in common with the Hindu except his slavery to the British."

The Congress Party's grim, potent boss, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who hates Jinnah almost as much as he does the British, was openly scornful of both. The Moslem League, he said, had won electoral advantages during the war by stooping to aid Britain. "Do I think the British are sincere," he asked, "in their promise to leave India? They have been making promises ever since Queen Victoria's time, and they have always broken them."

While Hindus and Moslems were snarling at each other, Jawaharlal Nehru, ardent champion of Indian independence, summed up for them and for the world India's New Year's mood: "[We] will not willingly submit to any empire or any domination, and will revolt against it. It will be a continuing revolt of millions, with a passion behind it which even the atomic bomb will not suppress."

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jan. 14, 1946)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

"If I Were Dictator"

What should have been a week of triumph and hope for India was a week of confusion, riots, petty bickerings and incredible irrelevancies.

Things were so bad that Mohandas Gandhi devoted his weekly day of silence, when he usually gets a rest from the questions* that pour in from all over India, to fuming and fretting over the big question of Congress cooperation in an interim government.

Next day he successfully talked the Working Committee of the Congress Party (of which he is the boss, though not a member) into paying more attention to the crumbs than to the cake of freedom, which the Raj was holding out.

At Gandhi's insistence, the Working Committee refused to participate in the interim government of India unless the British agreed to name at least one Moslem to the Congress Party group in the interim government. Such a provision would further infuriate the Moslem League's Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Gandhi was very tough in handling the opposition to his policy. Objecting to newspaper stories about the negotiations, he dropped his airof outward benevolence, cried: "If I were appointed dictator for a day in place of the Viceroy, I would stop all newspapers—except, of course, Harijan" (Gandhi's mouthpiece).

Perhaps the only man who could have stopped Gandhi was brilliant, unstable Jawaharlal Nehru, but he went off on a small and dizzy tangent to his native Kashmir, where the local maharaja, Sir Hari Singh, had arrested a popular leader, the sheik Mohamed Abdullah. Sir Hari had Nehru arrested. In protest, thousands of Bombay mill workers and Calcutta transport workers went on strike. Markets closed in many cities, and in Madura five Indians were killed in riots.

The crowning irrelevancy came from the Government of India itself, which presented charges to the United Nations against South Africa's racial-discrimination laws covering Indian nationals. The Indian evidence against South Africa was strong enough, but the plight of 250,000 Indians in South Africa was scarcely as important last week as the plight of 389,000,000 Indians in India, who, instead of standing happily on the threshold of independence, were faced with famine and a growing chance of political chaos.

*Typical questions: "Of what advantage is decimal coinage?" "What should a sweeper do about the atom bomb?" "How can a girl avoid being raped?"

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jul. 1, 1946)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

Long Shadow (Jinnah)

India's festering sun beat down impartially on New and Old Delhi—on the precisely geometric, grandly drab preserves of the British Raj, on the noisy, squalid, sprawling native town. A sweat-soaked British wallah might change his shirt four times before settling down to an evening burra peg of bad Australian whiskey in the garden of the Cecil Hotel. Even the calloused, naked feet of shirtless Indians burned as they padded along the teeming Chandni Chauk. In the brassy glare, the flowering trees near the Viceroy's residence seemed to bear sparks rather than blossoms. The rind of an orange would shrivel the moment it was peeled from its fruit. Here & there an exhausted cow rested, sacred and undisturbed, in the traffic lanes of the boulevards.

Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed; it was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two Socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat for 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen—to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape, and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon and gentle Halifax. The Raj was finished: scarcely a voice in Britain spoke against independence; scarcely an Indian wanted the British to stay; scarcely a leader in India questioned the sincerity of Britain's intention to get out. The only questions were "when?" and "how?"

Last week the three members of the British Cabinet Mission strove to force Indians to take the ultimate step—agreement on the constitution of an independent state. Much like a judge locking a hung jury in an uncomfortable room, Ministers Lord Pethick-Lawrence, A. V. Alexander and Sir Stafford Cripps prepared for a long Easter weekend in Kashmir's cool mountains with a message that when they returned "they hoped to find sufficient elements of agreement on which a settlement will be based."

Inside the cream stucco Imperial Hotel, beneath the propeller-blade fans, zealots and schemers argued, intrigued and speculated in more tongues than the Ganges has mouths. When they repeated to each other (as they often did) that now at last Britain's colonial policy had lumbered to the point where Whitehall really wanted to free India, hope revived. When they reflected (as they often did) that civil war had never been closer, despair reached .its depth. The issue seemed to turn on one man—Mohamed Ali Jinnah. Last week all India watched Jinnah's words and actions.

Man with an Angora Cap. While the Cabinet Mission still talked with India's leaders, a meeting was held in the courtyard of Anglo-Arabic College across Delhi from the Viceroy's palace. Green and white banners flaunted unacademic slogans: "Pakistan or die," "We are determined to fight." The speeches were equally inflammatory. Said Abdul Qaiyum Khan from the North-West Frontier Province: "I hope the Moslem nation will strike swiftly before [a Hindu] government can be set up in this country. . . . The Moslems will have no alternative but to take out their swords." Said Sirdar Shaukat Hyat Khan of the Punjab (which furnishes more than half the troops of the Indian regular army): "The Punjabi Moslems . . . will fight for you unto the death."

One of the wealthiest of Moslem leaders, Sir Firozkhan Noon, a Punjab landowner, did not hesitate to wave the Red flag; "If neither [the Hindus nor the British] give [Pakistan] to us . . . if our own course is to fight, and if in that fight we go down, the only course for Moslems is to look to Russia. ... I will be the first to lose every rupee I have in order that we may be free in this country." Five thousand Moslems cheered. Even the women in the purdah enclosure to the left of the platform could be heard-applauding behind their screen.

The presiding officer was neither shocked nor carried away by the incendiary speeches. Mohamed Ali Jinnah, clad in black angora cap, a long black sherwani (tunic), and tight-fitting black churidar on his wire-thin legs, smiled his ice-cold smile. He was at the peak of his power. He was the man who might say whether one-fifth of the world's people would be free. His 5 ft. 11 in. and 119 Ibs. stood between India and independence.

Man with a Monocle. After the meeting, Jinnah got out of his political costume as soon as possible, relaxed in his comfortable New Delhi home (he has a more palatial one on Bombay's Malabar Hill). He changed quickly to a tropical grey suit, blue & black striped tie, black & white sport shoes. Later, as he read to a reporter passages from one of his past speeches, Jinnah screwed a monocle into his right eye. He wears Moslem dress only because his enemies sneer that Jinnah, head of India's Moslem League, is lax in his religious observances. ("Jinnah does not have a beard; Jinnah does not go to the Mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey!") With his perfect English, which he speaks better than his native Gujerati, his slick grey hair and graceful, precise gestures, he might be a European diplomat of the old school. How such a man at a fateful moment in history came to be the spokesman for millions of Moslem peasants, small shopkeepers and soldiers, is a story of love of country and lust for power, a story that twists and turns like a bullock track in the hills.

Jinnah was born on Christmas Day, 1876, the eldest son of Jinnah Poonja, a wealthy Karachi dealer in gum arabic and hides. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of wealth among a doting family. After going to school in Bombay and Karachi, young Jinnah, "a tall thin boy in a funny long yellow coat," as Poetess Sarojini Naidu described him, went to England. At the age of 16 he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn to read law. Soon after Jinnah returned to India, his father lost his money. Three hard, jobless years followed, until briefs and money started coming in.

Man of Unity. In 1940 Bombay Moslems elected him to the Supreme Legislative Council. Jinnah rose steadily in the councils of the nationalists and in the courtrooms of India. He revisited England and there, in 1913, enrolled in the Moslem League. "Typical of his sense of honor," wrote his rhapsodic biographer Naidu,* "he partook of it something like a sacrament . . . made his two sponsors take a solemn preliminary covenant that loyalty to the Moslem League . . . would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated."

During World War I Jinnah was a conspicuous worker for Moslem-Hindu unity, persuaded the Congress Party and Moslem League to hold joint sessions, used as his slogan "a free and federated India." In 1917 he could still attack the idea which later became his obsession. "This [fear of Hindu domination] is a bogey," he told League members, ". . . to scare you away from the cooperation with the Hindus which is essential for the establishment of self-government."

Man of Discord. The solemn dedication to the "larger national cause" began to waver after the war. The shrewd, suave Moslem saw a shrewd, complexly simple Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, step into the leadership of the nationalist Congress

Party. When Gandhi began to turn the party, once the sounding board for polite talk about independence among a few cautious Indian leaders, into a powerful mass movement, Jinnah drifted out of the fold. Some Hindus think he lost his nationalist ardor when he lost his beautiful Parsi wife (he was 42, she 18, when they were married) after their only child, a daughter, was born. His wife had been a zealous worker for independence.

Since then he has shared his Malabar Hill and New Delhi homes with his sister, Fatima. He lives austerely, has no close friends. He disowned his daughter for marrying a rich Christian.

Even Poetess Naidu found little warmth in Jinnah: "Somewhat formal and fastidious and a little aloof and imperious of manner. . . . Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emaciation, languid and luxurious of habit, Jinnah's attenuated form is the deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance."

Man of Threats. That vitality and cold intelligence were turned more & more to the Moslem cause during the late '30s. After the sweeping Congress Party victories in the 1936-37 provincial elections, Moslems charged that Hindus were trying to monopolize the government.

At a crucial meeting in March 1940 Jinnah first publicly plumped for Pakistan.* A hundred thousand followers thronged into the shade of a huge pandal (big tent) in Lahore, where the League was meeting, overflowed into the scorching heat outside, heard Jinnah proclaim over the loudspeaker: ". . . The only course open to us all is to allow the major nations [of India] to separate to their homelands." He warned that any democratic government in a unified India which gave Moslems a permanent minority "must lead to civil war and the raising of private armies." An enthusiastic woman follower tore off her veil, came from behind the purdah screen, mounted the speakers' platform. But Moslem revolutionary ardor was not ready to break with tradition; she was quietly escorted back to purdah by a uniformed guard.

When Gandhi led Congress into civil disobedience after the failure of the Cripps mission in 1942, Jinnah ordered his Moslems to take no part, promised a "state of benevolent neutrality" that would not hamper the British in fighting the Japanese. He boasted that if his followers joined Gandhi's pacifist program, the British would have 500 times more trouble "because we have 500 times more guts than the Hindus." He recalled past glories of the Mogul Emperor Baber ("The Tiger") and other Moslem warriors: "The Moslems have been slaves for only 200 years but the Hindus have been slaves for a thousand."

A historic meeting with Gandhi on Malabar Hill in 1944 ended in an impasse. Even Gandhi's healer, Dinshaw Mehta, who massaged Jinnah for two hours daily during the meetings, could not rub out the wrinkles of obstinacy that made the skinny Moslem uncompromisingly demand Pakistan, made the skinny Hindu as uncompromisingly demand a unified India, with the Pakistan issue postponed until after independence.

Man of Pomp. Today Jinnah revels in his one-man show. Nobody in all his Moslem League can be called a No. 2 man, or even No. 8. He delights in the princely processions staged by his followers when he tours the Moslem cities of northern India. His buglers herald his arrival at railway stations. Bands play God Save the King because "that's the only tune they know." Victory arches go up, rose petals flutter down from the rooftops, richly bedizened elephants, camels, mounted guards of honor accompany the Hollywood float in which Jinnah rides. Today Jinnah, and not the hated Hindu Gandhi, is prima donna on India's stage.

The gulf between Moslem and Hindu had always been real, but Jinnah dug it deeper. Last Christmas Day, Jinnah's 69th birthday, he summed up his demand for two nations. "I want to eat the cow the Hindu worships. . . . The Moslem has nothing in common with the Hindu except his slavery to the British."

Economic differences aggravate the irritation. Enterprising Hindus and Parsis almost monopolize banking, insurance, big business. Moslems, slower to welcome Western education, complain bitterly that Hindu factory owners rarely employ a Moslem clerk or foreman even when most workmen are Moslem. Moslems have a real fear that, in a unified India, Hindus would freeze them out of important posts in government and industry.

The British, in the years when they still hoped to hold India, gave the religious difference official standing by decreeing, in 1909, that Hindus and Moslems should vote separately. H. N. Brailsford, a sympathetic British student of India, has said: "We labeled them Hindus and Moslems till they forgot they were men." The British policy of "divide and rule" has been turned by Jinnah to the Pakistan demand "divide and quit."

The Poorest State. The British Raj had given India a unified defense and a unified region of internal free trade. Jinnah would destroy both. His Pakistan, in northwest and northeast India, would be an agricultural state, poor in resources and industry, unless, improbably, the Hindus agreed to turn Hindu Calcutta over to Pakistan. Between mighty Russia to the north and the main body of India to the south, Pakistan would dangle like two withered arms. Only half the population of the area claimed for Pakistan is Moslem. None could claim that to split India in twain would solve the minority problem—in Hindustan there would still be islands of Moslems, in Pakistan large Hindu minorities. Jinnah has not concealed that behind Pakistan lies the ancient Asiatic practice of taking hostages; a Hindu minority in Pakistan could, "by reprisals, be made to answer Tor persecution of Moslems in Hindu India.

To warnings that a separate Pakistan would be poor and backward, Jinnah answers: "Why are the Hindus worrying so much about us? Let us stew in our own juice if we are willing. . . . [The Hindus] would be getting rid of the poorest parts of India, so they ought to be glad. The economy would take care of itself in time."

The Plainest Answer. The Congress Party's position on Pakistan was just as firm as Jinnah's. The party's official head, goateed Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a Moslem who looks like a caricature of a Kentucky colonel, paced up & down in his Delhi quarters last week, smoking a big cigar. "Eighty percent of the Indian people live in villages where Hindus and Moslems get along well together—the only trouble is among the twenty percent living in the cities. This is basically an economic conflict, not religious." Jawaharlal Nehru made the plainest answer: "Nothing on earth, including the United Nations, is going to bring about the Pakistan of Jinnah's conception." The Congress Party might compromise on some plan for a limited Pakistan within a federated India. Jinnah might change his mind—as he has so often before. But if neither gave way, the British Cabinet Mission would probably impose a constitution on India despite the threats of civil war. When a British official in Delhi last week said, "This is the most important British diplomatic effort of the century," he had in mind the danger that a failure to settle the Indian problem would keep the whole East in turmoil and disturb international relations throughout the world by presenting Rus sia with an opportunity to increase her influence among Asia's people.

Even if settlement of the constitutional issue resulted in an independent, unified India, the future was none too bright.

Famine was tightening its grip on the subcontinent. Sir A. Ramaswami Mudaliar warned of "ten million dead on the streets of India" unless he could buy four million tons of grain this year in the U.S.* Independence alone would not answer the food problem, which would recur until India had more irrigation, more fertilizer, better agricultural methods and more industry. Many Indian leaders looked to the U.S. for machinery and technical advice. The most practical immediate step would be a U.S. loan to Britain, which would permit London to pay off much of its wartime debt to India and to give India the dollars she needs for imports from the U.S.

Where Akbar Failed. If India, with its diverse tongues, its anachronistic princes and princelings, its millennium of dependence on the rule of outsiders, could become a nation in the Western sense, the achievement would be one of the greatest triumphs of history. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, a Moslem character, Dr. Aziz, recalled that the great Mogul Emperor Akbar had worked with tolerance and wisdom to unite India, had even attempted to devise a new unifying faith. But, says Dr. Aziz: "Nothing embraces the whole of India—nothing, nothing, and that was Akbar's mistake."

This people without a common denominator are at the same time the most bound and the most free in the world. They are bound by poverty, by caste, by religious practices that often descend to the crassest animism, by political ignorance and by disease. Yet they have been free enough to produce great contemporary leaders and thinkers. Nobody, not even the British Raj in the days of its strength, has regimented the Indians, who wear a thousand local costumes, speak 225 languages, and follow highly individual patterns of behavior. An Indian is free to sleep on the sidewalks of Madras when he feels tired, or to declare himself a saint and sit waiting for disciples by the burning ghats of Benares; or to send out a seven-year-old child with a dead baby dangling from its hand to beg in Calcutta's Howrah railroad station.

No one who looked at India's anarchic scene last week could believe that Jinnah had created all the obstacles to India's freedom, but in the present crisis he had come to symbolize them. The Indian sun cast Jinnah's long thin shadow not only across the negotiations in Delhi but over India's future.

^{* At 67 plump Madame Naidu is still a member of the Congress Party's Working Committee, is considered India's topmost orator. She paints her toenails bright red.}

^{* Pakistan, a dream of Moslem students before it became a political issue, was originally concocted from P for Punjab, A for the Afghans of the North-West Frontier, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, "pure" in Tan from Urdu, with "stan" Baluchistan. means "Pak" also "Land of the means Pure." Last week the League convention defined it to embrace Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan, North-West Frontier Province (all in northwestern In dia), Assam and most of Bengal (in the north east). Jinnah has even advocated a thousand-mile corridor across Hindustan to connect the two parts.}

^{* In 1943's Bengal famine 1.5 million starved.}

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Apr. 22, 1946)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

Flight to Nowhere?

In the four-engined York monoplane, London-bound, the "No Smoking" sign stayed on for an hour out of Karachi. When it went out, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, in a front-row seat, chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarets, buried his hawk's head in a book pointedly titled A Nation Betrayed. Behind him sat Pandit Jawar-halal Nehru, chain-smoking Chesterfields, wearing Western-style clothes for the first time in eight years. Between Karachi and Malta, Nehru breezed through Rosamond Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source and Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane, chatted with his good friend, Sikh leader Sardar Balder Singh. In the plane's third row sat Viscount Wavell, Viceroy of India. For three years he had been trying to bring Nehru and Jinnah into agreement, now, with the peace of India hanging by a thread, they were a yard apart in space, politically as remote as ever.

At Malta, where they had to wait for another plane, the rival leaders spoke for the first time. Their conversation, in toto:

Jinnah: "Well, what have you been doing all day?"

Nehru: "Partly reading, partly sleeping, partly walking."

Who Gets Pushed? At the London Airport, where they were greeted by Britain's aging, able Lord Pethick-Lawrence, local Indians were out before dawn in coal trucks, bicycles and buses. A policeman grumbled: "You can't tell by looking at these Indians who are the VIPs and who are the riffraff. One day you're arresting a fellow and the next he turns up as an important bloke. . . . You never can tell who to push around."

Nehru moved about at receptions with high good humor and grace. At India House, he shook hands with the Dowager Marchioness of Willingdon, whose husband had jailed him; at Buckingham Palace, he ate from His Majesty's gold plate, a delightful change from the tin service he had known as a nine-year guest in H. M.'s prisons. Jinnah was socially crusty, giving the impression of a man deeply aggrieved. When the travelers got down to cases, however, it was the smiling Nehru who proved most stubborn.

The point at issue was one of those legal technicalities on which the fate of whole nations sometimes depends. The British Cabinet Mission had divided India's provinces, for purposes of writing the provincial constitutions, into three groups. In Group A, which comprised the bulk of British India, the Hindus would have a huge majority. Group B was the predominantly Moslem Northwest. The trouble narrowed down to Group C in the East, consisting of Bengal and Assam. Nehru said that the vote in the Assembly should be cast by provinces, which would let him take advantage of the 7-to-3 Hindu majority in Assam. Jinnah said that the vote should be cast for Group C as a whole. In this way his 33to-27 majority in Bengal would wipe out the Hindu margin in Assam and give the Moslems a 36-to-34 edge (in effect, a limited Pakistan) in Group C. The British agreed with Jinnah.

On this interpretation of the rules, Nehru would not play. Jinnah said that unless he got his way, the 75 Moslem League seats would be vacant when the Constituent Assembly met in New Delhi to draft free India's constitution.

Silly? Finally Clement Attlee tired of this variation of musical chairs, in which one seat was always empty. He warned the Indians that if "a large section of the Indian population" (i.e., the 92,000,000 Moslems) were not represented in the framing of a constitution, His Majesty's Government would not turn over power to a Congress Party government. It looked like a win on points for Jinnah. Said Nehru: "It was silly to expect to solve in three days problems which have been under discussion for many months."

Off he flew to New Delhi, where he found Congress Hindus in a belligerent mood: fierce-eyed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel thought Nehru had been "tricked" into going to London. Cried Patel: "So long as the Moslems insist on their demand of Pakistan, there shall never be peace in India. We will resist the sword with the sword."

The Assembly that was to make India a nation quietly convened in New Delhi's Central Assembly Library. Pictures of former British Viceroys had been removed from their gilded frames. Special police were standing by with tear gas.

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Dec. 16, 1946)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

Reprieve from Disaster

Down a jungle walk on Bengal's marshy coast last week, two Indian political leaders stalked solemnly away from Mohandas K. Gandhi's tin-roofed hut, burned out in recent communal rioting. They were Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and President Acharya Kripalani of the All-India Congress Party. Hindu women blew conch shells, and thousands of devotees showered the two leaders with flowers.

Well might Nehru and Kripalani look solemn. As India seemed to teeter on the brink of bloodshed, they were returning to New Delhi, to face the Congress organization's toughest problem: to accept or reject the British version of how the Constituent Assembly should be run (TIME, Dec. 16). With Nehru and Kripalani went Gandhi's blessing and advice. They would not say whether the Mahatma had recommended concessions that might win Mohamed Ali Jinnah's Moslem League to Assembly participation.

Next day, Gandhi renewed his spiritual campaign against India's bitter communal feuding. At 7:35 on the morning of Jan. 2, clasping a long bamboo pole in his right hand and flanked by four companions, Gandhi set out on a walking tour of Bengal's Noakhali district. On his "last and greatest" experiment, the Mahatma said he would visit 26 Moslem villages, would seek to rekindle the lamp of "neigh-borliness" quenched in that area (and in much of India) by blood.

Few dared hope that Gandhi's saintly pilgrimage would influence more than a handful of Moslems. But few, doubted this week that it was his New Year's advice which Nehru and Kripalani ex pressed in a Congress resolution that gave a well-hedged "yes" to the British pro posal, and opened the door to Jinnah for a face-saving entry into the Assembly.

Third Alternative. The British Cabinet Mission had divided India's eleven provinces into three groups for drafting provincial constitutions, and had made it clear last month that each group must vote as a whole on each draft. Group A was incontestably Hindu; Group B lumped Moslem-dominated Punjab and Sind together with the Congress-dominated North-West Frontier; Group C paired Bengal and Assam, where 36 million Moslems live with 34 million non-Moslems. Congress held out for a prov-ince-by-province vote within each group, which would assure it of a dominant voice in eight drafts instead of six. Mohamed Ali Jinnah sat tight with the British; under the group-voting plan, he had a slight edge over Congress in Groups B and C. The apparent Hindu choices: acceptance, or an immediate showdown with the British and the Moslem League.

The ameliorating resolution was in part political doubletalk. It accepted the group voting plan, but asserted: "In the event of any attempt at . . . compulsion, a province or a part of a province has the right to take such action necessary as to give effect to the wishes of the people concerned." Since the British plan was only for constitution-drafting, this represented little change except to give the Congress Party a future out if some Congress provinces or districts later proved recalcitrant.

Anti-British Revolution. Like most compromises, the resolution satisfied no one completely (it was passed 99-to-52—the narrowest victory the Congress High Command has won in the working committee). Least of all did it please Jai Prakash Narain, 44, head of the Congress Party Socialists, who favors an anti-British revolution, has called Jinnah a British stooge. Last week he told the students and faculty of the Hindu University of Benares: "In the coming fight, Congress will not have the same objects as in past struggles. Congress workers will not go to jail. Instead, they will have strength enough this time to do the arresting themselves. When the revolution starts, our strategy will be to capture all Government offices and institutions and establish a People's Raj. British governors and pro-British officials should be jailed. . . ."

A year ago this speech would have landed Narain himself in jail. Now the British are powerless to stop his rabble-rousing without the consent of the Congress Ministry of the United Provinces. The very fact that Narain remains free to speak as he does underscores the fact that the British are virtually throwing themselves out of India.

"Steel Frame." From New Delhi, TIME Correspondent Robert Neville reported: "The British position in India is weakening so fast that in a few months' time the British will be unable to impose their will here a day longer, leaving Congress sitting pretty. Eighty-five per cent of the British personnel of the Indian Civil Service have indicated their intention of leaving soon, and 80% of the British officers of the Indian Army are leaving.

"In the press, both League and Congress are very violent, and speeches of leaders on both sides are continually inciting bloodshed. At last week's Hindu Mahasabha* Session at Gorakhpur, the mention of Nehru's name was greeted with shouts of 'Traitor!' At the conclusion of a violent speech, a member of the audience climbed on the platform, cut his hand, and offered blood then & there. The recent Sind election campaign generally consisted of speeches of vilification, one community v. another.

"In other words, there is little give-&-take these days in Indian public life. Instead of one Government, there are two. The Government's Moslem League members do not even answer the queries of Congress members, and refuse cooperation and coordination. The Government of India is simply running down. No decisions are being taken, no policies are being formulated, all actions are postponed. Unabashed communalism in the Government of India's secretariat has almost ruined that once efficient civil service. Permanent secretaries refusing to subscribe to the political and religious views of communal-minded Cabinet ministers are soon transferred or retired. The frank purpose of many Pakistan-minded Government servants is to undermine the central administration.

"Topping this, there is also an elaborate spy system throughout the secretariat, where the Government servants of one department report for the heads of other departments. There are Moslem League cells throughout the secretariat, and often the League's paper Dawn reprints secret letters and memoranda taken from Government files. The League's avowed purpose, to sabotage the Interim Government, is being rapidly achieved."

If Narain, Jinnah and their followers continued to pour oil on the troubled flames, even Mohandas K. Gandhi's genius for "neighborliness"—political and personal—might not be enough.

* The militant, Hindu communal organization, which considers the Congress Party too lenient toward the Moslem League.

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jan. 13, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

Anti-Vivisection

Hindu holy men were alarmed. Holy India was going to be divided. Worse, the Indian Government had taken steps to break down untouchability and other extreme outgrowths of Hinduism. So, from all over India, the holy men trudged to Delhi, set up camp along the bank of the Jumna River. There the sadhus huddled around holy fires and chanted appeals to the Universal Force "to save earth's children from destruction." In groups they picketed the Parliamentary Rotunda (where the Constituent Assembly was meeting), Cabinet ministers' homes, the Government Secretariat. They shouted slogans: "Absolute Good unto All," "Cow Slaughter Must Be Banned," "Woe unto Evil."

They also cried the chief demand in their five-point program for a revival of Hindu orthodoxy: "Stop the vivisection of India."

Agreement to Disunite. Far away from the Jumna's banks, in the quiet atmosphere of London's No. 10 Downing St., a Briton who had striven desperately to save Mother India from vivisection reluctantly prepared the operating table. Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, laid before the full British Cabinet his plan for handing over British power to Indians. The knotty question was, what power to which Indians? Every Indian leader except Mohandas Gandhi had agreed that they could not unite, but could not agree how to disunite.

"Dickie" Mountbatten was for a quick showdown. India's leaders would meet in Delhi June 2. Mountbatten would give them one more chance to accept or reject, once & for all, Britain's 1946 plan for India—a loose federation of states. If they rejected it (and Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the Moslem leader, almost certainly would), then Mountbatten would suggest an alternative. Under it, each province could decide for itself whether 1) to join Hindustan, 2) to join Pakistan, 3) to set itself up as an independent nation.

In both the Punjab and Bengal, provincial assemblymen from each side of tentative dividing lines would meet separately to pick an electoral college which would register its choice. Punjab Sikhs would be split if the Punjab split. In the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress Party controls the Government but 93% of the population is Moslem, a popular referendum would be held. The likely choice: Pakistan. Bengal, with its rich industrial nucleus of Calcutta, might choose to stand apart as a separate nation, part Moslem, part Hindu.

Who Gets the Army? Not one British Cabinet member liked this melancholy geometry. Even if it had to be accepted, the British hoped there would be one strong mold to bind the pieces—the Indian Army (present strength: 400,000, with 9,000 Indian officers, 4,000 British officers). The Hindus (56%), Moslems (34%), Sikhs and Christians in its ranks have worked together with minimum friction. In recent communal riots local police proved ineffective, while the Army's Hindu and Moslem troops obeyed orders, often succeeded in checking disturbances. But a purely Moslem army could not be expected to protect Hindu minorities in Pakistan, nor a Hindu army to protect Moslems in Hindustan. That did not bother Jinnah. Last week he pontificated: "All the armed forces must be divided. . . ."

Typically, Jinnah wanted to eat the cake of Moslem separatism, and have the cake of Hindu manpower. Pakistan, said his mouthpiece Dawn, should have all troops now stationed in the northern and eastern commands (most of the troops, including Hindus and Sikhs, are in those areas). Even a division along communal lines, which Jinnah might consistently have asked for, would wreck the Army at a crucial time when Britons are pulling out, leaving many half-trained reserves in lower echelons, a drastic shortage of officers at the top.

If the Indian Army could be broken into two efficient parts, the main mission of each would be to watch the other. This cancellation would leave India defenseless, invite the evolution of Pakistan and Hindustan into Stalinistan.

A Martyr's Grave. By week's end, the 600 sadhus who had gathered on the Jumna's banks had a martyr,* if not a program for India. Swami Krishnanandji, like many another holy picketer, had been taken to jail. The police took away his trishool (5-ft. wooden staff with three points, known as the "stick of righteousness"), without which no sadhu can take food. So Krishnanandji went on a hunger strike. The police released him, but too late. He trudged wearily back to the sadhu camp. The next day, while a score of fellow ascetics chanted prayers and slogans ("Victory unto the Lord who alone destroys all Evil"), Krishnanandji quietly died. His friends dug a grave, 6 ft. deep, in the sandy banks of the Jumna. There, in a sitting position, banked on all sides with cakes of salt, Krishnanandji was buried.

Thereafter the police were reluctant to jail the holy men. Instead they piled demonstrators into a van (although many holy men had vowed always to walk and never to ride on wheels), drove them 20 or 30 miles out into the country. Some wondered if even a Jinnah would show the single-minded stubbornness of the sadhus; many of them plodded back to Delhi through the blistering heat (113°), chanting "Good understanding among all living beings."

*They also had an unofficial pressagent. No sadhu, Nandlal Sharma, like pressagents the world over, stated his case in soaring sentences. "I am proud that I can trace my dynasty back a thousand years," he said, "even back to the Creator. That is because of the chastity of our women. The ground has always been pure and the seed has been good. We believe Hinduism has existed for so many thousands of years because of the purity of our blood. The world today is threatened with imminent destruction, mainly because of the unchastity of women all over the world. . . ."

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jun. 2, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

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06 April 1947 - Tarakeshwar Conference of Provincial Hindu Mahasabha

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Twilight of Bengal

WHERE all are for the party and none is for the State, and parties grow increasingly communal, an independent outlook tends to be regarded as pusillanimous or, worse, is supposed to arise from some hidden, disreputable motive. To be in the fashion oil must seemingly be poured not on troubled waters, but on the flames. We have not lately written much on the communal-political affairs of Bengal, because we felt it would do little good. Goondas may be illiterate, politicians purblind.

The origin if not the causes of the disorder in Calcutta are obscure and it is hard to find a remedy. This does not daunt our contemporaries who have many suggestions to offer—though that which is most popular, to overthrow the Government, and paralyse the police seems with all respect not good.

Extremists -have the upper hand. An evident exception nowadays is the Chief Minister, Mr H. S. Suhrawardy, whose reputation has risen since last year, and who is unpopular despite all his moderation, perhaps because of it. Politically-minded Hindus, though they could probably even now get the seats in the Cabinet for the asking, have become so embittered that nothing less than division of the Province will content them.

During ten weeks or so, the movement for re-partition of Bengal has grown from a cloud no bigger than a man's hand into a storm which blows over all the Province and outside the borders, though the centre remains Calcutta. Postered initially by the Hindu Mahasabha, which has not lost its influence with its seats in the legislatures, it received strong impetus from the declaration of Feb. 20 and the Congress Working Committee's resolution of March 8, on partition of the Punjab. It has not been taken over by the Provincial Congress Committee, which demands regional Ministries, and has backed this up by a powerful assault on the financial policy of the League Cabinet.

The Cabinet, however, seems likely to remain passive before an attack which it claims with some truth is communally inspired. Seeing that the plan for an interim division is unlikely to be realized. Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, the Mahasabha leader, has now gone further, and suggests the alternative of administration under Section 93.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, April 24, 1947)

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11 April 1947 - Petition for the Partition of Bengal in Constituent Assembly

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27 April 1947 - Suhrawardy Bose Plan for an independent undivided Bengal

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April 1947 – Governor Burrows’ Plan for a Free City of Calcutta

[31630historiceventspartitiont.html#freecity]

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Plan for a British/Hindu West Bengal

[??] Chattarji, Calcutta, 4^th March 1947

(source: personal scrapbook kept by Malcolm Moncrieff Stuart O.B.E., I.C.S. seen on 20-Dec-2005 / Reproduced by courtesy of Mrs. Malcolm Moncrieff Stuart)

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03 June 1947 – Mountbatten’s announcement of Bengal partition

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Centrifugal Politics

Perhaps, after all, there would be no independent India; indeed, there might be no India.

By last week nine months of slaughter, pillage, and arson had killed nearly 15,000* Indians (according to low Government estimates), had all but persuaded Britons and Congress leaders that Moslems and Hindus could not cooperate in a unified nation. Almost everybody but Gandhi now accepts the principle of Pakistan (a separate Moslem state or states). Even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has said: "The Moslem League can have Pakistan if they wish to have it." But he served notice that if India was going to split along communal lines, Congress would not let Jinnah have non-Moslem territories which he claims. "If parts of Punjab and Bengal want to separate no one can compel them the other way."

Even the Moslem League's cold, uncompromising Mohamed Ali Jinnah was getting cold feet. He said: "The question of the partitioning of Bengal and Punjab is raised ... to unnerve the Moslems by . . . emphasizing that the Moslems will get truncated or mutilated in a moth-eaten Pakistan. . . . It's a mistake to compare the basic principle of demand for Pakistan [with] cutting up provinces throughout India into fragmentation."

Jinnah could not stop the centrifugal spin even if he wanted to. His Moslem followers had been whipped into an irreversible crusade for Pakistan. Their motives ran all the way from deep religious fervor to that of one Moslem politician who said: "In Hindustan I would be nothing, but in Pakistan I could be Secretary of State for Air."

Two men worked for unity. The Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten (who had just returned from a peace tour in the turbulent North-West Frontier Province), sent two emissaries to London. Their report stressed the danger of dissolution, but contained no suggestion that the British remain in India beyond next year's deadline.

Gandhi, dressed in a newly starched khadi loin cloth, with a white cotton shawl over his bare shoulders, drove in a new, green Studebaker to Jinnah's stucco house. Acting the part of Qaed-e-Azam (Head of the Nation), Jinnah sent his secretary to greet Gandhi at his car, waited inside the house for his first private meeting with the Hindu leader in three years.

When Gandhi left, two hours and 45 minutes later, Pakistan was closer than ever. Jinnah had not budged an inch. Neither had Gandhi. Said he: "I can never be a party to the division of India. I cannot bear the thought of it."

Perhaps the most discouraging sign in India was the fact that factional intolerance had invaded Gandhi's own prayer meetings. Some of his followers no longer allowed him to read the Koran along with the Hindu Bhagavadgita.

He might find a bitter prophecy in a poem by Mohamed Iqbal:

Why can I not manage this earthly business?

Why is the religious sage a fool on earth?

* Almost double the total of Americans killed in the War of Independence, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, May. 19, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

June Hopes

OUR views about Pakistan are known. Consistently, for years, we have deplored the project. Until the last moment, which was this week, we argued fervently against it. We think it retrograde. Profounder impoverishment and weakness in this populous sub-continent will we fear be its consequences, initially at least. It affronts world-tendencies; everywhere nowadays—except here—humanity is a disintegrator. It undoes the grandest achievement of Britain's 200 years Raj; the establishment of cohesion from diversity.

Nevertheless, by Tuesday's pivotal announcement in Delhi and London, creation of Pakistan this year becomes practically certain. That fact must now be fully accepted, by men of goodwill and the best be made of it. However sharp their regrets, the fair-minded must recognize that the considerations and actualities which led to this dismal happening have weight. What optimists may now look forward to is that. Having agreed to part, the two fragments of hitherto unified India may before very long spontaneously find their way back to some amicable re-combination for the good of the common people in each.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, June 6. 1947)

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20 June 1947 - Bengal Assembly votes for Bengal to join Pakistan

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Partition

VOTING in Bengal has gone as expected—for Pakistan and for partition. There was no practical alternative. Speculation about, what would have happened had Muslims preferred to forgo division of the country, so as to keep the Province united, or Hindus not to divide the Province so that India would not be divided, is futile. That some voted yesterday against their better judgement is clear. That others will live to regret their voice is possible. But it would be vain to spend time in regret over what is done, or hope that it will be undone.

LIKE Bengal, the Punjab has chosen Pakistan and partition, but in circumstances different and less easy. Though in Calcutta communal outrages continue and have slightly worsened again lately, so that the strictest control is still needed, the general disposition in the Province, after as before the vote, evidently is to accept the inevitable calmly and to strive to part as friends, In burning Lahore such an attitude is hardly possible. Now that the decision has been taken, perhaps communal passion, which has dominated events in the Punjab since HMG's declaration of February, will diminish. But we see little positive basis for expecting this, and the activities some weeks hence of the Boundary Commissions, in the Punjab even more than in Bengal may again try tempers sorely.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, June 24, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

End of Forever

On a turf-covered plain near Delhi, a splendid assemblage gathered Jan. 1, 1877. The High Officers and Ruling Chiefs of India took their seats behind a gilt railing in an amphitheater of blue, white, gold and red, to hear Queen Victoria proclaimed first Empress of India. They rose to their feet as a flourish of trumpets announced the arrival, across 800 feet of red carpet, of His Excellency the Viceroy, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Second Baron Lytton. The proclamation was read, the Royal Standard was hoisted, and artillery fired a grand salute of 101 salvos. Mixed bands played God Save the Queen, then trumpeted the blaring march from Tannhduser. Richly caparisoned elephants trumpeted too, and rushed wildly about with trunks erect when they heard the roll of musketry.

His Highness the Maharaja Sindia was first to congratulate (in absentia) the new Empress: "Shah-en-Shah Padishah [Queen of Queens], May God bless you. The Princes of India bless you and pray that your sovereignty and power may remain steadfast forever."

Bleats of a Goat. "Forever" might have been a longer time if it had not been for a scrawny, timid schoolboy then in the northwest India town of Porbandar on the Arabian Sea, 700 miles away. Mohandas Kamarchand Gandhi was eight years old at the time of the Great Durbar at Delhi. He was already sensitive about his British rulers. His schoolmates used to recite a bit of doggerel:

Behold the mighty Englishman! He rules the Indian small, Because being a meat eater He is five cubits* tall.

Although his parents were pious Vaishnavas (a Hindu sect which strictly abstains from meat eating), Gandhi was goaded a few years later into sampling goat meat to emulate the British. "Afterwards," he reported, "I passed a very bad night. . . . Every time I dropped off to sleep, it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me; and I would jump up full of remorse."

Gandhi's frail body never grew beyond no pounds, but the youthful conscience matured into a towering spirit that laid the meat eaters low, five cubits or not. Winston Churchill had once called Gandhi "a half-naked, seditious fakir. . . . These Indian politicians," he said in 1930, "will never get dominion status in their lifetimes." But 70 years after the Great Durbar both Gandhi and Churchill were still alive, and freedom was only 50 days away.

Froth of a Flood. Last week in New Delhi, Queen-Empress Victoria's great-grandson, Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, was working hard to get out of India as fast as he could. To Hindu and Moslem politicos responsible for setting up two new dominions in India before mid-August he sent memos reminding them "only 62 more days," "only 55 more days." The British did not rely on Hindu and Moslem leaders' continuing to work together. The British wanted to clear out before India blew up in their faces.

On the outskirts of New Delhi, in the dingy, dungy Bhangi (untouchable) Colony, Gandhi was not jubilant, although the British were leaving at last. To him, the violence and disunity of India were a personal affront. To Gandhi, ahimsa (nonviolence) is the first principle of life, and satyagraha (soul force, or conquering through love), the only proper way of life. In the whitewashed, DDT-ed compound which serves him as headquarters, Gandhi licked his soul wounds: "I feel [India's violence] is just an indication," he told his followers, "that as we are throwing off the foreign yoke, all the dirt and froth is coming to the surface. When the Ganges is in flood the water is turbid."

Ironically, Gandhi himself, who has spent a lifetime trying to direct the waters into disciplined channels, had helped to roil his people into turbulence. What he had called the "dumb, toiling, semi-starving millions," who revered (and sometimes worshiped) Gandhi, could understand him when he cried for their freedom; they could not always understand him when he told them they must not use violence to win that freedom. "To inculcate perfect discipline and nonviolence among 400,000,000," he once said, "is no joke."

A Young Bird Knows. Gandhi seriously began his own self-discipline when he went to South Africa as a London-educated vakil (barrister) at the age of 23. There he first felt the full weight of the white man's color bar. More & more he neglected a lucrative law practice to lead his fellow Indians in a fight against local anti-Indian laws.

A British friend lent him Count Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. The Russian Christian's doctrine of nonviolent resistance to unjust rule gripped the Hindu lawyer's mind. "Young birds," wrote Tolstoy, ". . . know very well when there is no longer room for them in the eggs. ... A man who has outgrown the State can no more be coerced into submission to its laws than can the fledgling be made to re-enter its shell."

Gandhi broke his shell. He decided manual labor was essential to the good life; he still thinks Indians will find peace only through making their own clothes on the charka (spinning wheel). So he gave up a legal practice bringing in about £5,000 a year, moved to a farm settlement where his helpers worked the ground, and began to get out a newspaper, Indian Opinion.

Gandhi mobilized local Indians for his first civil disobedience campaign. They won repeal of some anti-Indian laws from an obstinate South African Government. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to Bombay, the hero of India.

Colossal Experiment. The first year after his return Gandhi toured much of India. The gentle ascetic in loincloth, walking among the villages, won the hearts of millions of Indians. "Gandhi says" became synonymous with "The truth is," for many a peasant and villager. When simple peasants crowded round to see him (many tried to kiss his feet), Gandhi tried to stop "the craze for darshan" (beholding a god).

The Mahatma (Great Soul), as he came to be called, insisted he was a religious leader, not a politician. "If I seem to take part in politics," he said, "it is only because politics today encircle us like the coils of a snake from which one cannot get out no matter how one tries. I wish to wrestle with the snake. ... I am trying to introduce religion into politics."

Applied to India, that meant to Gandhi that people could not be pure in thought, word and deed unless they were their own masters. So he began to work for Indian independence. He found India's "struggle" for independence in the hands of a few well-educated Indians. The Indian National Congress,* was a polite debating society, pledged to win dominion status for India by "legitimate" means. Gandhi converted it into a mass movement. Indian peasants did not worry about independence until Gandhi told them to.

British repressive measures after World War I convinced Gandhi that the British would never willingly give India dominion status. So he organized satyagraha. This first campaign came near to unseating the British Raj. "Gandhi's was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding," admitted the British governor of Bombay.

Himalayan Miscalculation. But passive resistance always erupted into violence. When he saw the bloodshed that followed his call for resistance, Gandhi was overwhelmed with remorse. He called off his campaign in 1922, admitted himself guilty of a "Himalayan miscalculation." His followers were not yet self-disciplined enough to be trusted with satyagraha. To become a "fitter instrument" to lead, Gandhi imposed on himself a five-day fast.

The pattern repeated itself in later years. The ways of passive action—the sari-clad women lying on railway tracks, the distilling of illicit salt from the sea, the boycotting of British shops, the strikes, the banner-waving processions—would lead to shots in the streets, to burning and looting. Gandhi always punished himself for his followers' transgressions by imposing a fast on himself.

With each fast, each boycott, and each imprisonment (by a British Raj which feared to leave him free, feared even more that he would die on their hands and enrage all India), Gandhi came closer to his goal of a free India. With the same weapons he got in some blows at his favorite social evils—untouchability, liquor, landlord extortions, child marriages, the low status of women.

But as he wrestled, India and Indian politics changed along the road. The Indian National Congress, which claimed to represent Indians of every religious community, finally had to admit that Mohamed Ali Jinnah spoke for the Moslems. Left-wing groups left the Congress, Communists led by Puran Chandra Joshi threatened the placid order of the agricultural, home-industrial India which Gandhi strove for. The Congress leadership (since 1941 Gandhi has ruled only from the sidelines) passed more & more to a group of well-to-do conservatives bossed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The only outstanding exception was socialistic Jawaharlal Nehru. Indian independence was certain to be followed by a struggle for economic power. For all these bewildering problems Gandhi had an answer: hurt no living thing; live simply, peacefully, purely. But fewer & fewer listened to that part of his advice. Just as Gandhi had outgrown the shell of the British Raj, so Indian nationalism, Hindu and Moslem, showed signs of outgrowing Gandhi's teachings.

Horse Trading. The India of New Delhi politicians was little concerned with soul force. Old (70), rabble-rousing Mohamed Ali Jinnah, head of the Moslem League, was greeted by followers with shouts of "Shah-en-Shah Zindabad" (Long live the King of Kings). His birthplace, Karachi, would probably be capital of the new Pakistan, possibly be renamed Jinnahabad.

Jinnah was already using his new power to disrupt India further. In the face of Jawaharlal Nehru's blunt warning to the Indian princes ("We will not recognize the independence of any state in India"), Jinnah began courting them. Most princes had already decided to join Hindu India (see map), but the Nizam of Hyderabad (a Moslem) and Maharaja of Travancore (a Hindu) had each said he would go it alone. Jinnah dangled alliance-bait before them: "If states wish to remain independent ... we shall be glad to discuss with them and come to a settlement." Big Kashmir, still on the fence, was ruled by a Hindu, but its 76% Moslem population would probably bring it into Pakistan sooner or later.

Last week Harry St. John B. Philby, Briton-turned-Moslem, familiar intriguer in the Arab world and intimate of Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud, arrived in India "to buy tents." He went into a huddle with Moslem Leaguers and Hyderabad officials. Delhi was sure Jinnah was angling for the support of Moslem states in the Middle East.

His Pakistan would be strong agriculturally (with a wheat surplus in the rich Punjab, 85% of the world's jute an eastern Bengal), but weak industrially.

Pakistan would begin its career with no cotton mills, jute mills, iron or steel works,† copper or iron mines. Jinnah hoped to compensate for this weakness with foreign support, might keep Pakistan a British dominion even if Hindu India declared complete independence.

What Will Happen? But these maneuverings were remote from the India of mud and dung and (endless toil, which wondered in bewilderment what was happening to it. The little man in India had never asked for Pakistan or Hindustan or even for independence, except when his leaders told him. He was scarcely aware who ruled him. Recently a tattered Hindu peasant helped to repair a blowout on a car in the Punjab. Asked what he thought of the Government in New Delhi (now a temporary, joint Hindu-Moslem Cabinet, operating under viceregal veto), he replied, "I never heard of it."

If the symbol of unity at New Delhi was remote, the communal hatred that had forced the partition now faced was real enough. On both sides of the new dividing line, between Pakistan and Hindu India, minority groups wondered what to do. A Moslem tonga (two-wheeled carriage) driver, who had lived 20 years in Delhi, thought of moving to the Punjab. "I will wait and see what happens," he said. "If there is any trouble, I will send for my mother, my sister and my two buffalo, on my farm in the United Provinces." But it would cost him $50 to move to the Punjab—and the meager amount he collects in fares barely pays for food on the black market. Besides, he was still paying off a $200 debt incurred when he had tried vainly to save the life of a typhoid-stricken son.

A Hindu milkman in Bombay thought of moving his 68-year-old father from the Lahore district (which will go to Pakistan). "We own half a dozen cows and bullocks and three-quarters of an acre of land. My father would hate to leave our village and breathe the foul air of Bombay. I, my wife and five children are sharing a one-room apartment with another couple with three children. How can I accommodate my father? But I must bring him down. I cannot abandon him to Pakistan."

A Pathan watchman from the North-West Frontier Province thought he might have to go back to the barren soil of his native district. "The Hindu who owns the firm where I work has given me notice, saying he cannot trust foreigners to guard his shop. Who will give me jobs now? What will happen to my family?"

Who Will Pay? A Hindu chaprasi (office boy) in a Delhi Government office, who owned three acres of land in a Pakistan district, thought he had better bring his wife and family to Delhi. But then he would have to sell his land. "Who will pay a good price for my property?" he asked. "I tried to sell it recently, but some Moslems who were originally prepared to purchase it now say they will get it anyway, once Pakistan comes into being, for little or no money."

All along the prospective border between Pakistan and Hindu India, minorities were on the move. From little villages in the Moslem Punjab, Hindu and Sikh traders and moneylenders trekked to Delhi or the United Provinces. Among them were men who had been in charge of rationing food and clothing during the war, and men who profited by high wartime prices.

Returning Punjabi soldiers last year had turned in hate against the moneylenders, merchants and all their coreligionists. In Bengal it had been the same. While 1½ million died of famine, landowners and food dealers, Moslem and Hindu alike, had reaped profits of 1½ billion rupees. "Every death in the famine," estimated the Woodhead Famine Enquiry Commission two years ago, "was balanced by roughly a thousand rupees of excess profit." The economic grievance of peasants against landlords and profiteers became a religious fight.

In the cities, as always, the warnings of conflict and disorder were sharpest. Throngs of wartime jobholders were idle. In sweltering Calcutta, it took but the flick of a Moslem cigaret butt against the flanks of a sacred Hindu cow, or a Hindu tonga driver's bumping a Moslem child, to start a fight that would engulf the city. Last week Calcutta was still divided into "Pakistan" and "Hindustan" quarters, with strong points bristling with .barbed wire and machine guns. A Hindu driver dared not cross into a Moslem quarter, nor a Moslem into "Hindustan." In Bombay, where Hindus and Moslems had formerly lived mixed in together, streetcar signs now said "Pakistan Bombay," meaning the Moslem quarter.

"Are You Happy?" With the political leaders' agreement to partition India had come a lull in communal fighting. But last week it flared again at Lahore in the Punjab. In the Gurgaon district near Delhi, Moslem and Hindu-Sikh tribes still burned and looted each other's villages. There, for the first time in communal riots, firearms were used on a big scale by each side. The embattled tribes had been turning out homemade wooden rifles, six feet long. In a divided India, where 38 million Moslems are still within the borders of Hindu India, 18 million Hindus and two million Sikhs within Pakistan, few supposed that political deals in Delhi could really repair the breach between religious communities.

One Moslem, who had lost his leather works in riots at Amritsar, no longer cared whether he was in Pakistan or Hindustan. Unshaven and ragged, Chaudhri Ahmen Hasan wandered aimlessly among the ruins of his property, carrying a big framed photograph of Jinnah. From time to time Hasan paused and addressed the picture: "Are you happy now, Qaid-e-Azam [Great Leader]? You have at last achieved Pakistan."

One Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, still hoped to bring Hindus and Moslems together in a united India. If, in spite of divisive forces, India's 400 million really form themselves into a nation in the modern sense, Gandhi will have brought off (almost as a by-product of his larger purpose) a revolution greater than Danton's, bigger than Lenin's. The subcontinent had never been a nation; its separate peoples had, however, tolerated each others' very different ways of life. As both a politician and a Great Soul. Gandhi knew that if tolerance was replaced by permanent hatred, there would be not just two Indias, but no India. For India's future, nonviolence was not a philosopher's dream, but a political necessity.

Far closer than Queen Victoria's little isle was the Soviet Union which might, like Britain before it, exploit the weakness of a divided India to win hegemony. Already Puran Chandra Jpshi, India's grinning Communist leader,' and other Russian agents had a small (50,000), growing, tightly organized machine within India. If dissension grew in India, Joshi's grin (and Russia's chance) would grow with it.

Road to Noalchali. Across the northern frontier, in the Tajik Socialist Soviet Republic, loomed Mt. Stalin (24,590 ft.) and Mt. Lenin (23,386 ft.), mightiest peaks of the U.S.S.R. Gandhi's thoughts last week turned to the lowest part of India, the mushy flats of Noakhali at the mouth of the Ganges. That part of Bengal, where Moslems and Hindus are mixed, will become part of Pakistan.

Noakhali was the first place Gandhi visited last spring in his tour of India's riot areas. Barefoot, staff in hand, leaning on his grandniece Manu, he had padded through the water-soaked fields and the mixed Moslem-Hindu villages, preaching peace. Last week Gandhi planned a symbolic return. "My work is in Noakhali," he said. "Nobody will prevent me from going there." For Gandhi considered himself a citizen of both new Indian states. "I will go freely to all parts of India . . . without a passport." The question was, would other Indians be able to do the same?

^{*Length of biblical (and British) cubit: 18 inches. David's Goliath towered six cubits and a span (9 ft. 9 in.).}

^{*Allan Octavian Hume, a British theosophist and retired civil servant, founded the Congress in 1885. He persuaded the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, that the best way to combat growing unrest in the villages was to let Indian leaders discuss political development.}

^{†The great 1,2500,000-ton plant at Jamshedpur is owned by the Parsi Tata clan and manned mostly by Hindus.}

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jun. 30, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

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03 July 1947 - Formation of shadow cabinet for West Bengal

_____Introduction____________________________________

with Dr. P.C. Ghosh as shadow chief minister.

Muslim League MLAs from East Bengal elect

Khwaja Nazimuddin as chief minister of East Bengal.

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The Legatees

On U.S. Independence Day, Britain's Prime Minister Clement Attlee presented to the House of Commons an Indian independence bill. It was, said the bespectacled, scholarly Earl of Listowel, last Secretary of State for India, a "nice, neat, tidy little bill." The bill was certainly neater than the mess Indians will try to clear up before the British leave on August 15.

Last week the Indians were tussling with the complexities brought by the partition of India. They agreed on one major problem: partition of the Indian Army. In the first stage it will be split on the basis of religious communities, with Moslem-majority units going into the Pakistan forces, non-Moslem majority units into the Indian Army. Next April, each soldier will be allowed to transfer to the army of the state where his religion is predominant.

In effect, two new armies will be built up from scratch. Last week the British-owned Calcutta Statesman lamented: "Within nine months, therefore, unless plans have meanwhile to be altered under pressure of events, the best army in Asia (with the possible exception of that which Russia keeps in Siberia) will, we reckon, be reduced to about a sixth of its present military value—perhaps less."

Typewriters & Inkpots. Meanwhile, Moslems and Hindus were wrangling over their shares of the inheritance from the British Raj. Fifty committees set up to divide the Government's assets proceeded along 50 different lines. The Moslem League wanted one-fourth of India's assets, but was not willing to pay one-fourth of the $6 billion national debt. Railway rolling stock will probably remain on that side of the border where it stands on independence day. (The Moslem League accused the Hindu-controlled Government of switching brand-new American locomotives from Pakistan areas to Delhi, substituting old, burnt-out engines.) The 40,000 staff members of New Delhi's vast imperial Secretariat were busy last week counting typewriters and almirahs (cabinets), carpets and inkpots. Typists worked four hours a day overtime copying files, so that each of the two new Governments would have a set. Moslems and Hindus accused each other of stealing files that both wanted.

Hindus accused the Minister of Communications, Moslem Leaguer Abdur Rab Nishtar, of carting off to Karachi (temporary capital of Pakistan) every piece of telephone and telegraph equipment he could lay hands on. Calcutta's Hindu press said that Bengal's Prime Minister Huseyn Shabad Suhrawardy, a Moslem, was stripping western Bengal (which will be part of Hindu India) of food, clothing, machinery and hospital equipment.

Moslems claimed for Pakistan the famed Moslem-built Taj Mahal at Agra, deep in Hindu India, only 100 miles from New Delhi. Extremist Hindus retaliated by claiming the river Indus (deep in Pakistan), on the ground that the sacred Hindu Vedas had been written on its banks some 25 centuries ago.

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jul. 14, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

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08 July 1947 - The Boundary commission

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09 August 1947 - Bengal Boundary commission report

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August 1947 - Division of the Bengal administration

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Partitioning

Malcolm Moncrieff Stuart, I.C.S. (Indian Civil Service) District Magistrate 24 Parganas, Calcutta, 1947

(source: personal scrapbook kept by Malcolm Moncrieff Stuart O.B.E., I.C.S. seen on 20-Dec-2005 / Reproduced by courtesy of Mrs. Malcolm Moncrieff Stuart)

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17 August 1947 - Official Partition of Bengal

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I am of the opinion that dividing India […] was a great blunder

Personally, I am of the opinion that dividing India into two separate countries was a great blunder of Lord Mountbatten. India had been ruled as one country for centuries, and Muslims and Hindus had lived side by side all over the land. Yes, there had been small outbursts between the two communities at religious festivals and the like, but not on the scale that had now broken out.

The Muslims in Pakistan were, in my opinion, the first and worst offenders. They seemed to think it was their right to begin exterminating the Hindus who lived inside their borders. The Hindus again, as in the case of Calcutta, at first accepted the situation with calmness, appealing to their Muslim brethren to desist from such senseless and inhuman slaughter. But in the end, when their prayers went unheeded, they were compelled to retaliate. So, in its own good time, they began to kill Muslims in the districts where they were outnumbered. It was especially in Bihar that the Muslims suffered severely.

August Peter Hansen, Customs Inspector, September 1946

(source: page 215 of August Peter Hansen: “Memoirs of an Adventurous Dane in India : 1904-1947” London: BACSA, 1999)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with 1999 Margaret [Olsen] Brossman)

Long live a united India!

It was, with great delight, I at last saw that India had been given its freedom from foreign domination. However, it was likewise, with sorrow in my heart, I saw the dividing of that great and kindly land into two, separate countries: Hindustan and Pakistan. If England could run it as a whole for centuries, why couldn't it remain so under its own regime?

Mahatma Gandhi reluctantly agreed to the division, much against his true nature. Had he been allowed to live his full span of life, I feel convinced he would have been able to set aside the partition in time, because he was as loved by the Muslims as by the Hindus. Had he outlived Mr Jinnah, I feel convinced that he would have gained his point. In fact, at his untimely assassination, I firmly believed it would have given the impetus to unify all of India.

It failed, however. Mr Jinnah had too much love of his own self-importance to see clearly that a divided India would not be the same world force as a united India! Therefore, to maintain his own prestige, he kept whipping up the Muslims against the Hindus. As it was, even a divided India, with its 400 million [in 1946], was a force to reckon with. But what a different force it would have been if united and, after a few years of organisation, it would have been a prime mover in all Eastern politics! Long live a united India!

August Peter Hansen, Customs Inspector, 1947

(source: page 217 of August Peter Hansen: “Memoirs of an Adventurous Dane in India : 1904-1947” London: BACSA, 1999)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with 1999 Margaret [Olsen] Brossman)

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Partition Killings

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The Trial of Kali

On a bed of stretched thongs in an open courtyard in Lahore, half naked, her head "wrung steeply back, her legs rigid in a convulsion as of birth, a woman lay dead.

Under the law of the English, whose writ ran for a third of mankind, it was fixed that whenever a person, however humble, died of violence or even unexpectedly, public inquiry was made into the causes of his death. If guilt seemed to fall upon another, a trial was held and punishment sought lest murder, undetected or held lightly, spread.

In India and Pakistan since mid-August at least 100,000 have died, not of germs or hunger or what the law calls "acts of God," but of brutal slaughter. Scarcely one died in fair combat or with the consolations of military morale.

No human tribunal ever conceived could try that case, with its clouds of witnesses, the surging contagion of its guilt. Yet the mind, squinting at the horror now that the tide of blood had washed back, naturally cast the evidence in the familiar and dreadful form of The Trial. The world, with one war still red under its nails and another beating in its belly, knew, more or less subconsciously, that it would have to build a prisoner's dock bigger than the subcontinent of India, that the crime was not contained by geography, and that the less the crime was understood the more it would infect the whole of humanity.

Before the Fact. The accused had many aliases; Satan and Evil were two. In India, however, the accused was feared and terribly propitiated by millions as Kali, goddess of death and catastrophe, wife-conqueror of the eternal Siva, the dancer. Not in Kali's name were the 100,000 killed. The Moslems despised her as a wretched idol. The Sikhs* ignored her. Even most Hindus no longer participated in the rites of Kali's priests, who dismembered goats (in lieu of human victims), spraying the blood upon worshipers crowded in fields of which Kali was mother, fructifier and scourge. Nevertheless Kali, the Black One, could stand as symbol (or perhaps as scapegoat) for the horror that had walked hand in hand with bright liberty into India.

Kali has been in India at least 50 centuries, long before Hinduism, which gradually assimilated her. A few years after the Prophet Mohamed sent Islam forth to conquer the world, Moslems appeared in India. After the 11th Century they were masters, sometimes in fact but more often in name, of the subcontinent. Some Moslems in India today descend from the conquerors; more are the children of Islam's vigorous proselytizing, and none the less fanatical for that.

Six centuries of Hindu political inferiority began to be reversed when the great Sivaji in the mid-17th Century led his Marathas against the Moslems. Thus, by the time the British reached India, both Hindu and Moslem were deeply immersed in hate, deeply conscious of dispossession before the British dispossessed both. Through all the changes, Kali, both as mother and as evil, persevered, so that when freedom came there were more Indians than ever to hate each other more intensively than ever.

Corpus Delicti. If there had indeed been a Prosecutor to try the enormous case of this murdered woman and the 100,000 other Indians, he might have opened with a point of wide application.

An ancient Hindu holy book, the Vishnu Purana, he could recall, says that the life of man will run in four cycles. The last is to be the Age of Kali. It closes in, says the book, when "society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth, becomes the only source of virtue, passion, the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion."

Then the Prosecutor could turn to India: "Everywhere the armed and the many devoured the helpless and the few. In Calcutta, in Lahore, in Amritsar, in Old Delhi and New Delhi and throughout the magnificent plain of the dismembered Punjab, in homes and shops and factories and farms and villages and in the religious sanctuaries of all faiths, amid the clotting of the terrified in depots and on guarded trains and on lonely station platforms and in the vast shelterless encampments of refugees and their hypnotized columns across the land, the devastation raged alike among Hindus and Moslems and Sikhs.

"In the first six weeks of Independence, about half as many Indians were killed as Americans died during nearly four years of the second World War. There is still no possible numbering of the wounded and the mutilated who survived, or of those who must yet die for lack of the simplest medical facilities, or of so much as a roof over their heads. It is unbearable, and unwise as well, to cherish memory of the bestial atrocities which have been perpetrated by Moslem and Sikh and Hindu alike. It is beyond human competence to conceive, far less to endure the thought of, the massiveness of the mania of rage, the munificence of the anguish, the fecundity of hate breeding hate, perhaps for generations to come."

The Eyewitness. On this point, the witness Niranjan Singh, a Sikh, testified. Singh, a few weeks ago a prosperous merchant in the Montgomery district of the Punjab, now moves about New Delhi on crutches. He said:

"I shall never rest until revenge is taken upon the Moslems for all the wicked atrocities they have perpetrated upon innocent people. Moslems killed my old father, abducted my young daughter, slew my son and maimed my foot. No mercy whatsoever should be shown to them. I've always treated my Moslem laborers with kindness but the dirty swine have repaid me with brutality.

"I smelled trouble in my village when Moslems began gathering at the mosque every day for long conferences. One morning Moslems from all neighboring areas gathered around our village and attacked it. But although we were outnumbered, we held them for eight hours. We had only our kirpans [swords] and a few old rifles. They had modern weapons. When finally they broke through, there was not one among us who had not sustained some injury or other. The brutes killed my 90-year-old father and when my young son rushed to his defense, they speared him to death. I had been injured on my forehead and gushing blood had made me partly blind. A young, cowardly Moslem attacked me from behind with a hatchet, injuring my foot. Before I fell and fainted, I saw some Moslems carrying away my 16-year-old daughter, who put up stiff resistance.

"I was left among the dead for two days, dying of thirst, when at last a Hindu battalion of the Indian Army visited our village and rescued me. I insist revenge be taken on these traitors and brutes. We ought to declare war on Pakistan."

The Madness. The Prosecutor said:

"The stone of murder spread like a huge wave. This outrage in retaliation for that one and that in retaliation for still another, and a new one in retaliation for the latest before it, and still a newer in retaliation for that, another set aflame by the stories of refugees and another still by pure rumor, and another in retaliation for that and still another by rumor. The genius of India has ever been for myth, not rationality: and no man's reason may be expected to remain intact under the intricate chemistries of horror, heartbreak, revenge, the vertiginous contagion of mobs, a thousand years' collective, unconscious fertilization in allegiance to one faith and culture.

"Mere rumor, which runs at its wildest under such circumstances, is enough to dethrone reason; great terror, in a brave man or a cringer, can turn loose adrenal energies which must exhaust themselves in outrage and spoliation. It would be untrue to describe as a form of religious madness, even in religious India, a madness which operates also with equal fury among godless men. But where deep religiousness is present it is inevitably used, inevitably adds its own peculiar intensity."

The Bereaved. India's Premier Jawaharlal Nehru testified: "India has disgraced herself in the eyes of the world."

The Prosecutor commented:

"The thousand million of Asia, lifting up their hands for freedom, had looked to India for leadership. Now, East and West, hope is undermined and confidence destroyed. India's killings, not instigated by any alien force, are more morally burdensome upon Asia's cause than is China's war."

Mahatma Gandhi's confidante, ex-secretary and the present Indian Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, testified: "Gandhiji is very sad today. He has told me repeatedly that he is experiencing the pain and anguish of a thousand daggers pierced in his body."

During the killing, Gandhi had warned that there was danger of open war between India and Pakistan.

But the Prosecutor said:

"The world thought war was the ultimate horror, and civil war the worst of wars. It is not. India is what Macaulay called it, a 'decomposed society.' Even the British could not establish law; they merely kept order. A decomposed society cannot make war, which requires law, authority, organization. India and Pakistan may progress to the point where they can make war or even to the point where, being able to make war, they will decide to live in amity. But in the six weeks of the killing India and Pakistan were beneath war."

The Killers. The Court (which is composed of all men who want, for their own self-preservation, to understand violence) needed clarification of this point. One way of putting the court's question was this:

"It has long been held that mass killing is the work of states, not of peoples. War, some say, is caused by professional militarism, the existence of large arsenals and the itch of governments to exercise their most spectacular function. Similarly, the killing of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe was the work of a state, mad with its organized power. Are you suggesting that the Indian killing sprang out of the people themselves, out of the evil which you call Kali?"

The Prosecutor's answer: "Although leaders of the two states are, in different degrees, responsible for agitating or at least for misunderstanding the communal hatred, the appalling fact is that most of the killing was unorganized and spontaneous. In this case, a rare and significant one, the state power was not guilty. As for armaments, the massacres in India and Pakistan were as far removed as possible from modern war or from the gas chambers of Maidanek. The murderers with whom we are dealing used knives, chisels, ropes, hockey sticks, screwdrivers, bricks and slender fingers."

The Half Innocent. At least half innocent of the killing are the leaders who had demanded liberty or death for India and got, by Kali's black grace, both.

"When tragedy runs amok blame is universal, inextricable and irrelevant. That the horror was deeper than the ideals or ambitions of the leaders was ironically demonstrated when they tried to stop it. Mohamed Ali Jinnah urged restraint, but the killing did not cease. Gandhi fasted in Calcutta with ultimate local effect, but elsewhere the killing did not cease. When he visited their sanctuary, 30,000 groaning Moslems virtually adored him, but the killing did not cease. Nehru personally rescued two Moslem girls from a gang of Sikhs, but the killing did not cease. A conference between Nehru and Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan ended in complete accord and the Joint Defense Council ordered troops to fire on all rioters and looters, but the killing did not cease. The newly communalized police force proved ineffectual and sometimes took part in the riots, and the killing did not cease. The newly communalized armies, now that the British troops were inactivated, were like bodies from which the bones had been drawn.

"At length, by no outward control or rational cause, but only because destruction itself sickens, the violence quieted, for the time being, at least."

Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Governor General of Pakistan, did not testify. Seeing few, taking advice from none, he sulked in Karachi, the raddled capital of his already half-ruined country. Of him, the Prosecutor said:

"Jinnah is far too easy a villain: conceivably an obsessed child of Mohamed conceivably a man seized in his declining years by that most dangerous form of satyriasis which longs for naked power alone, Jinnah has beyond question done more than any other man in India to exacerbate the sores of communalism and to tease and torment their rawness; and this purely to secure his nation, and a torn body for India.

"Even so, he is much too shallowly accountable, and there are extenuating circumstances. He is only a portion of Islam, and today all Islam stirs. In India, moreover, his people are a minority, largely an impoverished minority, and could by no means fully trust in the majority's will; Congress Party leaders consistently ignored his Moslem League in favor of Moslems he regarded as Congress puppets; Nehru himself, Gandhi himself, must be held as sorely responsible for underestimating the force that Jinnah tapped, just as Western leaders for so long underestimated the evil wellspring that Hitler opened up."

The Orphans. A witness who had seen the Punjab border between Pakistan and India testified:

"At Wagah, a little town on the grand trunk highway between Amritsar and Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, armed Baluchi troops, all certified Moslems from the frontier territory of Baluchistan, called a loud halt to travelers trying to go through the border. A mile down the road, at Atari, armed Dogras, who are a Punjabi Hindu tribe, searched and checked all Pakistan-bound vehicles. The mile between the two posts was no man's land. On the Pakistan side, just behind an improvised guardhouse, a bulldozer was digging graves for Moslem bodies which arrived from the India side of the frontier."

Another witness had been to the map room in New Delhi where the riots had been spotted in the neatest Pentagon tradition, and where now, still more incongruously, the tidy pins show columns of humanity passing in opposite directions to escape their tormentors. Each column has its thousands of unspeakable histories, yet on the map each exodus is a mere number.

The Prosecutor summed up the evidence behind the maps:

"Men, women and children and bullocks and groaning carts were plodding eastward and westward beneath the autumn skies and nights of the cloven Punjab; past unharvested fields, past empty villages and eviscerated villages and villages which resemble rained-out brush fires. Huge, forlorn concentrations of Sikhs and Hindus labored forward to leave the West Punjab forever. On one day last week, columns No. 8 and 9 moved across the famous Balloki headworks between Amritsar and Lahore and passed into the Indian Dominion; not far behind, foot columns No. 10, 11 and 12 lumbered steadfastly eastward. Carefully feeling its way around Amritsar, a foot convoy of perhaps 100,000 Moslems made towards Lahore and Jinnah's Promised Land, at a rate of ten miles a day.

"One madly ironic note was furnished by a group of Jainist monks who alighted from an airplane at New Delhi, their mouths and nostrils scrupulously masked. Fleeing for their own lives, they had not neglected a strange precaution of their sect. The Jains believe that the air is a living thing and that they protect the air from injury by filtering it through the masks as they breathe.

"At one village, on foot, a wretched gaggle of perhaps 100 refugees arrived. One of them, a woman, was stripped of everything save a clutched newspaper. Her companions were so stupefied by woe that it had occurred to none of them to share their clothing with her.

"From Dasuya in Hoshiarpur district came a mass of 114,000 Moslems, which branched into lesser columns and slowly diminished in the direction of Bahawalpur State.

"The refugee movement each way is now at a rate of about 150,000 each week; last week it was speeded up, for both Governments hope to finish it off by mid-November. From the East Punjab into Pakistan, 2,550,000 Moslems have crossed, leaving 2,400,000 still to be evacuated; 2,275,000 Sikhs and Hindus have crossed from the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province into their Dominion, leaving 1,800,000, chiefly in isolated pockets, still to come. It is one of the great exchanges of population in recorded history."

The Despoiled. An American witness testified:

"It is almost impossible to have a watch repaired in New Delhi now; the watch craftsmen were Moslems. So were the tailors and the barbers, the butchers, and the cooks, the waiters and bearers, the rug dealers, and the drivers of tongas and taxicabs.

"In Lyallpur, Moslem shopkeepers refuse to sell durable goods, because the increasing scarcity is sure to force the price up; moreover, even if the shopkeeper did sell, he would have no place to bank the money (for Hindus and Sikhs were the bankers) and no wholesaler from whom to buy more goods (for Hindus and Sikhs were the wholesalers). In Lahore, on the other hand, there is a corrupt buyers' paradise in looted goods. A refrigerator goes for 100 rupees ($30), a radio for 30. Parker "51" fountain pens, which used to sell for 60 rupees, now go for 5. "There is no economic exchange between Pakistan and India. India may survive this schism; Pakistan cannot. Almost its whole middle class, which was Hindu, has fled. The literacy rate, never higher than 9%, is now less than half that. Pakistan's Government is not able to support more refugees. It is trying to shut off the flood. Moslems who hear that Pakistan will not let them enter are embittered and terrified."

The Threatened. Another witness had talked to rich Hindus who last week had begun fleeing into Calcutta from Eastern Pakistan. These Hindus, he said, reported increased activity of the Moslem League National Guard organizations. If terrorism breaks out in northeast India, where 13,000,000 Hindus live, the carnage might be unimaginably greater than in the Punjab.

And had the Punjab killing ended, or was it merely suspended? Two weeks ago Master Tara Singh, leader of the Sikhs, estimated that the killing would last three more months and that 500,000 Hindus and Sikhs and as many Moslems would die of murder, epidemic and starvation. In another statement, Tara Singh gave this grisly forecast an algebraic twist. He pointed out that fleeing Sikhs (who are richer) had left six million acres of land, while an equal number of fleeing Moslems had left only two million acres. His proposal: drive enough Moslems from their farms to balance the property exchange.

The Motive. At this point the Attorney for the Defense addressed the court:

"Do not forget that for centuries Moslem and Hindu and Sikh lived side by side, if not in harmony, at least in uneasy tolerance. It is true that over the centuries, from time to time, they killed and rioted and even fought great wars, but not more often or more fiercely than peoples elsewhere. This in spite of India's abysmal poverty which turns men against one another, in spite of the enraging climate, either osmotic dust or illimitable ooze.

"If this society, stable enough to breed 400 million men, is decomposed, then forces outside the peoples of India, not within them, must be to blame."

The Prosecutor answered: "Hindu and Sikh and Moslem tolerated each other, insofar as they did so, not through love or virtue but because each community was aware that its rival did not possess the power to coerce it into a hated way of living. Neither the Rajputs, nor the Moguls, nor the British ever established in India a state whose police reached out to the ordering of people's daily lives. Now, with independence, with the possibility of modern states, each community saw behind the other the shadow of the policeman and the propagandist. The Indian communities rushed into violence not to seize power, but out of the fear of the power that was about to fall into the hands of others. And this is a primal fear, deeper than rivalries between such nations as have already known and submitted to police power wielded in their own names."

The Guilt of Innocence. The Defense Attorney tried again. He recalled how the subcontinent had been brought to freedom by good men, nonviolent men, men above superstition and narrow sectarian hatred. How could such evil come from a victory won by moral force alone?

And how equally admirable, he said, was it that Britain, another great and ancient nation, even grander and far more benign in her twilight than Imperial Rome before her, had at length bowed before that moral force in a moral beauty as unprecedented and still more graceful. The Defense Attorney recalled the midnight ceremonies of India's manumission in New Delhi two months ago as extraordinarily touching, the action itself as one of history's rare moments of good will and good hope.

The Prosecutor did not deny the point. But, said he:

"Gandhi and Nehru and their like, innocently intent upon their lofty goal, ascribed communal strife to British machination, so blinding themselves that, in all good faith, they assumed that once liberty was achieved, communal violence would immediately cease, and brotherhood and British guilt prove themselves thenceforth.

"Thus, not in spite of innocence but because of it, blood appeared; and not the jubilant blood of birth alone, but blood more especially pleasing to Kali, who is both mother and demolisher. India tore herself in two in the womb as a condition to being born at all. Even in the womb, the two unborn nations tore at each other, and from the instant they were born they fell upon each other in maniacal fury."

Thrones & Altars. The fury, now apparently spent, might be renewed to pour in fresh evidence against Kali. Of the 562 princely states, danger lay in three which stood apart from both India and Pakistan. One was little Junagadh, whose dog-loving Moslem Nawab* has announced for Pakistan against the wishes of most of his subjects, who are 80% Hindu. One was Kashmir, most of whose people are Moslem, but opposed to Jinnah's Moslem League. The third was fabulous Hyderabad, whose Nizam had a good chance of maintaining his state's independence. India's Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel is applying pressure on all three states; of the Government's top ministers Patel is the most outspokenly anti-Moslem, although he is more moderate than extremist Hindu "Brownshirt" groups. Troops of both India and Pakistan are actually near Junagadh's borders.

Or renewal of the fury might come from, an utterly unpolitical cause. This week, in tense Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal, worshipers of the goddess Durga will celebrate her festival with clay images and ceremonial parades. Durga is the good side of the same ambivalent goddess of which Kali is the evil face.* In this same week Moslems will celebrate Id-el-Atha, their version of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Usually they sacrifice cows, but this week many, lest the Hindus be offended, plan again to sacrifice sheep.† Even so, the two coincident festivals might touch off killing in Bengal, which, along with Bihar and the United Provinces, is considered the next great danger spot.

The Sky & the Sea. Whether the killing remained suspended or was mercifully at an end or was to be tragically revived, India was not to be singled out for condemnation or contempt. No nation had ever come into the world without bloodshed. In every process of hope, ambition, confused value, self-deceit, India is merely the world in small, and one more terrible warning to the conscience of the world. India's gravest error, her deepest sin, is rampant in all the world and never so madly so as in those portions of the world which call themselves "modern": the incapacity of those who desire to lead people, whether for power or in the highest of good will, to know, love, fear, respect, or even to imagine, what human beings are.

Said the Prosecutor, in closing: "Yet, in spite of Kali the Destroyer and because of Kali the Mother, India has been and is a great and ancient land, a wellspring and tabernacle of some of the most inspired conceptions of the divine will in man which man has ever dreamed of; and more lately a fount of brotherhood and, among the nations, a preacher of peace. If India could descend to the depths, it could also look up to moral Himalayas. Its recent sin was great, but not unique, especially not unique in origin. It sprang from Kali, from the dark and universal fear which rests in the slime on the blind sea-bottom of biology."

*A Hindu reformist sect founded by Guru Nanak, a contemporary of Luther. *The Nawab Saheb of Junagadh once threw away 100,000 rupees on the wedding of his prize Airedale bitch, which wore ribbons to the ceremony; vows were read for her and her dog. *In 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, a group of British residents of Calcutta presented the temple of Kali with 5,000 rupees as a thank offering for victories over Napoleon. A century later Kali became a symbol of anti-British Indian nationalism, a place to which Mahatma Gandhi succeeded. That this substitution was only temporary was indicated not only by the killing but by Gandhi's recent loss of popularity among Hindus. Because he preached communal peace, Hindu extremists last week had begun to call him "the Mudathma," meaning "stupid one." †Until about a century ago, the sheep was customary. The cow was a vindictive, communal-minded substitution.

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Oct. 27, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

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Fleeing form East-Bengal

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The refugees come to Behala

The truce did not last long. On 24 August The Times special correspondent was sending to his paper messages which were printed with the headlines, 'Massacres in Punjab,' 'Muslims butchered, by armed mobs of Sikhs,' 'Breakdown of civil administration'; and later, Tour million on the move in Northern India,' 'Minorities in a state of panic,' 'Economic life dislocated,' 'Danger of famine'. Soon an Indian paper was writing, 'More human blood has flowed in the last four months than through 200 years of British rule'. And so trouble also came to Behala. Bengal was cut in two, part was in India and part was in Pakistan. The Hindus in East Bengal, now Pakistan, were in terror and they fled from their homes, leaving land and cattle.

The little village of Barisa was swollen out of all recognition. Many of the refugees were of the educated classes, and the numbers in the Barisa High School, which prepared boys for the University Matriculation, rose from 300 to 1,200 boys. Father D. wrote that it was 'a constant nightmare' to him that he could do so little for them.

Friends of Father Douglass, Missionaries and Charity workers in Behala, Calcutta, 1947.

(Source: Father Douglas of Behala. London, 1952 / Reproduced by courtesy of Oxford University Press)

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Fleeing form West-Bengal

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Uncle had gone

This [death of her grandfather] was not the only change to which I returned after my nine months in Darjeeling. The house in Ranchi had been sold and the whole family were in two rooms in Calcutta. My Uncle had gone, he said to safeguard his father's estates in the Punjab but he never came back and after partition I do not think it was possible for him to come back in the terrible days of rioting and killing which followed.

Elizabeth James (nee Shah), AngloIndian schoolgirl. Calcutta, 1947

(source: page 40-41 Elizabeth James: An Anglo Indian Tale: The Betrayal of Innocence. Delhi: Originals, 2004 / Reproduced by courtesy of Elizabeth James (nee Shah))

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The Refugees Arrive

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‘Dark and Dreary’

The Bazaar which we had to go through presented a different picture. I just cannot remember seeing anything worse than this terrible place of squalid, proverty stricken broken down bustees all huddled close together, the foul drains smelling to high heaven. At the end f this bazaar was a level crossing over which we had to cross before we could reach the compound. Often there would be a railway engine baring our way, which we suspected was done deliberately, and we were forced to sit and wait until it was the driver’s pleasure to move away and allow us to get through. Once while waiting in the car , glancing casually around, II was stricken by the pitiful sight of a small boy sitting on the side of the road, close to a pile of refuse where lay a dead dog. He was scraping the inside of a banana skin an licking his fingers, but on another day I fond some consolation on seeing a very old man, sitting apart from the fetid garbage, surrounded b a group of small children to whom he appeared to be telling story. The earnest eyes of the children, listening with rapt attention , and the kindly face of the old man presented a poignant and unforgettable scene that rose above the surrounding squalor. .

The name of the Bazaar was Dakhindari, renamed ‘Dark and Dreary’ by the jute wallahs.

Eugenie Fraser, wife of a jute mill manager, Titaghur, 1948

(source:page 151 of Eugenie Fraser: “A home by the Hooghly. A jute Wallahs Wife” .Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing 1989)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Eugenie Fraser)

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Aid for and by Refugees

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The Refugees Settle

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December 1949 - Communal Riots break out in Khulna

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30th January, 1948– Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

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Gandhi Gone

NUMB with sudden tragedy, the people of India mourn their dead leader whom they lately hailed as Father of the Nation. They seem conscious as yet mainly of their loss and of the love they bore him. Hearts overflow. But on many lips are questions. What does this calamity portend ? He who in many past crises has been there to interpret, to counsel, to lead, is gone.

Yet his advice is not far to seek. Ten days earlier, an attempt was made on him. Many heads are bowed today in awareness of this. Was it not the duty of all who could to protect more thoroughly this precious life which .he was always ready to lay down in India's service ? But against such reproaches the Mahatma's own words are on record, full of charity. After the bomb explosion he pleaded, that there should be no malice, only understanding, and doubtless would have repeated that on Friday had he been able. That the Government should take new precautions, though belatedly, is proper. But their efforts must be directed to prevent vengeance, as well as merely to avert what may be further developments in a conspiracy which thus can be made to defeat itself. "None of us dare misbehave now that we are angry". Pandit Nehru has declared.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, February 1, 1948)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

A Great Man Goes

BORN in turmoil, India and Pakistan have, in the thirteen months of their separate existence, suffered one grievous blow after another. Now death has again taken its toll and removed Pakistan's, greatest man, her Governor-General, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Frequent denials notwithstanding, it had been widely known for some time that the Quaid-i-Azam was in declining health, and at his considerable age the end seemed unlikely to be far off. Even so, the news has come as a shock. To Pakistan it is as if the roots of national life have been pulled up. Despite recent bitterness, India sympathises.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, September 13,1948)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

Killer Killed

THE murder of Mr Liaquat Ali Khan has filled both India and Pakistan with sorrow, which in neither country is feigned. India remembers old associations, but also, despite recent appearances in which he appeared to play the part of chief formentor of hostility towards this country, has regarded him as fundamentally a moderating influence. It seems likely that it was for this reason that he was shot down by somebody whose motives cannot be certainly known since he too was killed by an incensed crowd.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, October 17, 1951)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

Gandhi & the End of Forever

On a turf-covered plain near Delhi, a splendid assemblage gathered Jan. 1, 1877. The High Officers and Ruling Chiefs of India took their seats behind a gilt railing in an amphitheater of blue, white, gold and red, to hear Queen Victoria proclaimed first Empress of India. They rose to their feet as a flourish of trumpets announced the arrival, across 800 feet of red carpet, of His Excellency the Viceroy, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Second Baron Lytton. The proclamation was read, the Royal Standard was hoisted, and artillery fired a grand salute of 101 salvos. Mixed bands played God Save the Queen, then trumpeted the blaring march from Tannhduser. Richly caparisoned elephants trumpeted too, and rushed wildly about with trunks erect when they heard the roll of musketry.

His Highness the Maharaja Sindia was first to congratulate (in absentia) the new Empress: "Shah-en-Shah Padishah [Queen of Queens], May God bless you. The Princes of India bless you and pray that your sovereignty and power may remain steadfast forever."

Bleats of a Goat. "Forever" might have been a longer time if it had not been for a scrawny, timid schoolboy then in the northwest India town of Porbandar on the Arabian Sea, 700 miles away. Mohandas Kamarchand Gandhi was eight years old at the time of the Great Durbar at Delhi. He was already sensitive about his British rulers. His schoolmates used to recite a bit of doggerel:

Behold the mighty Englishman! He rules the Indian small, Because being a meat eater He is five cubits* tall.

Although his parents were pious Vaishnavas (a Hindu sect which strictly abstains from meat eating), Gandhi was goaded a few years later into sampling goat meat to emulate the British. "Afterwards," he reported, "I passed a very bad night. . . . Every time I dropped off to sleep, it would seem as though a live goat were bleating inside me; and I would jump up full of remorse."

Gandhi's frail body never grew beyond no pounds, but the youthful conscience matured into a towering spirit that laid the meat eaters low, five cubits or not. Winston Churchill had once called Gandhi "a half-naked, seditious fakir. . . . These Indian politicians," he said in 1930, "will never get dominion status in their lifetimes." But 70 years after the Great Durbar both Gandhi and Churchill were still alive, and freedom was only 50 days away.

Froth of a Flood. Last week in New Delhi, Queen-Empress Victoria's great-grandson, Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, was working hard to get out of India as fast as he could. To Hindu and Moslem politicos responsible for setting up two new dominions in India before mid-August he sent memos reminding them "only 62 more days," "only 55 more days." The British did not rely on Hindu and Moslem leaders' continuing to work together. The British wanted to clear out before India blew up in their faces.

On the outskirts of New Delhi, in the dingy, dungy Bhangi (untouchable) Colony, Gandhi was not jubilant, although the British were leaving at last. To him, the violence and disunity of India were a personal affront. To Gandhi, ahimsa (nonviolence) is the first principle of life, and satyagraha (soul force, or conquering through love), the only proper way of life. In the whitewashed, DDT-ed compound which serves him as headquarters, Gandhi licked his soul wounds: "I feel [India's violence] is just an indication," he told his followers, "that as we are throwing off the foreign yoke, all the dirt and froth is coming to the surface. When the Ganges is in flood the water is turbid."

Ironically, Gandhi himself, who has spent a lifetime trying to direct the waters into disciplined channels, had helped to roil his people into turbulence. What he had called the "dumb, toiling, semi-starving millions," who revered (and sometimes worshiped) Gandhi, could understand him when he cried for their freedom; they could not always understand him when he told them they must not use violence to win that freedom. "To inculcate perfect discipline and nonviolence among 400,000,000," he once said, "is no joke."

A Young Bird Knows. Gandhi seriously began his own self-discipline when he went to South Africa as a London-educated vakil (barrister) at the age of 23. There he first felt the full weight of the white man's color bar. More & more he neglected a lucrative law practice to lead his fellow Indians in a fight against local anti-Indian laws.

A British friend lent him Count Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You. The Russian Christian's doctrine of nonviolent resistance to unjust rule gripped the Hindu lawyer's mind. "Young birds," wrote Tolstoy, ". . . know very well when there is no longer room for them in the eggs. ... A man who has outgrown the State can no more be coerced into submission to its laws than can the fledgling be made to re-enter its shell."

Gandhi broke his shell. He decided manual labor was essential to the good life; he still thinks Indians will find peace only through making their own clothes on the charka (spinning wheel). So he gave up a legal practice bringing in about £5,000 a year, moved to a farm settlement where his helpers worked the ground, and began to get out a newspaper, Indian Opinion.

Gandhi mobilized local Indians for his first civil disobedience campaign. They won repeal of some anti-Indian laws from an obstinate South African Government. In 1915, aged 45, he returned to Bombay, the hero of India.

Colossal Experiment. The first year after his return Gandhi toured much of India. The gentle ascetic in loincloth, walking among the villages, won the hearts of millions of Indians. "Gandhi says" became synonymous with "The truth is," for many a peasant and villager. When simple peasants crowded round to see him (many tried to kiss his feet), Gandhi tried to stop "the craze for darshan" (beholding a god).

The Mahatma (Great Soul), as he came to be called, insisted he was a religious leader, not a politician. "If I seem to take part in politics," he said, "it is only because politics today encircle us like the coils of a snake from which one cannot get out no matter how one tries. I wish to wrestle with the snake. ... I am trying to introduce religion into politics."

Applied to India, that meant to Gandhi that people could not be pure in thought, word and deed unless they were their own masters. So he began to work for Indian independence. He found India's "struggle" for independence in the hands of a few well-educated Indians. The Indian National Congress,* was a polite debating society, pledged to win dominion status for India by "legitimate" means. Gandhi converted it into a mass movement. Indian peasants did not worry about independence until Gandhi told them to.

British repressive measures after World War I convinced Gandhi that the British would never willingly give India dominion status. So he organized satyagraha. This first campaign came near to unseating the British Raj. "Gandhi's was the most colossal experiment in world history, and it came within an inch of succeeding," admitted the British governor of Bombay.

Himalayan Miscalculation. But passive resistance always erupted into violence. When he saw the bloodshed that followed his call for resistance, Gandhi was overwhelmed with remorse. He called off his campaign in 1922, admitted himself guilty of a "Himalayan miscalculation." His followers were not yet self-disciplined enough to be trusted with satyagraha. To become a "fitter instrument" to lead, Gandhi imposed on himself a five-day fast.

The pattern repeated itself in later years. The ways of passive action—the sari-clad women lying on railway tracks, the distilling of illicit salt from the sea, the boycotting of British shops, the strikes, the banner-waving processions—would lead to shots in the streets, to burning and looting. Gandhi always punished himself for his followers' transgressions by imposing a fast on himself.

With each fast, each boycott, and each imprisonment (by a British Raj which feared to leave him free, feared even more that he would die on their hands and enrage all India), Gandhi came closer to his goal of a free India. With the same weapons he got in some blows at his favorite social evils—untouchability, liquor, landlord extortions, child marriages, the low status of women.

But as he wrestled, India and Indian politics changed along the road. The Indian National Congress, which claimed to represent Indians of every religious community, finally had to admit that Mohamed Ali Jinnah spoke for the Moslems. Left-wing groups left the Congress, Communists led by Puran Chandra Joshi threatened the placid order of the agricultural, home-industrial India which Gandhi strove for. The Congress leadership (since 1941 Gandhi has ruled only from the sidelines) passed more & more to a group of well-to-do conservatives bossed by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

The only outstanding exception was socialistic Jawaharlal Nehru. Indian independence was certain to be followed by a struggle for economic power. For all these bewildering problems Gandhi had an answer: hurt no living thing; live simply, peacefully, purely. But fewer & fewer listened to that part of his advice. Just as Gandhi had outgrown the shell of the British Raj, so Indian nationalism, Hindu and Moslem, showed signs of outgrowing Gandhi's teachings.

Horse Trading. The India of New Delhi politicians was little concerned with soul force. Old (70), rabble-rousing Mohamed Ali Jinnah, head of the Moslem League, was greeted by followers with shouts of "Shah-en-Shah Zindabad" (Long live the King of Kings). His birthplace, Karachi, would probably be capital of the new Pakistan, possibly be renamed Jinnahabad.

Jinnah was already using his new power to disrupt India further. In the face of Jawaharlal Nehru's blunt warning to the Indian princes ("We will not recognize the independence of any state in India"), Jinnah began courting them. Most princes had already decided to join Hindu India (see map), but the Nizam of Hyderabad (a Moslem) and Maharaja of Travancore (a Hindu) had each said he would go it alone. Jinnah dangled alliance-bait before them: "If states wish to remain independent ... we shall be glad to discuss with them and come to a settlement." Big Kashmir, still on the fence, was ruled by a Hindu, but its 76% Moslem population would probably bring it into Pakistan sooner or later.

Last week Harry St. John B. Philby, Briton-turned-Moslem, familiar intriguer in the Arab world and intimate of Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud, arrived in India "to buy tents." He went into a huddle with Moslem Leaguers and Hyderabad officials. Delhi was sure Jinnah was angling for the support of Moslem states in the Middle East.

His Pakistan would be strong agriculturally (with a wheat surplus in the rich Punjab, 85% of the world's jute an eastern Bengal), but weak industrially.

Pakistan would begin its career with no cotton mills, jute mills, iron or steel works,† copper or iron mines. Jinnah hoped to compensate for this weakness with foreign support, might keep Pakistan a British dominion even if Hindu India declared complete independence.

What Will Happen? But these maneuverings were remote from the India of mud and dung and (endless toil, which wondered in bewilderment what was happening to it. The little man in India had never asked for Pakistan or Hindustan or even for independence, except when his leaders told him. He was scarcely aware who ruled him. Recently a tattered Hindu peasant helped to repair a blowout on a car in the Punjab. Asked what he thought of the Government in New Delhi (now a temporary, joint Hindu-Moslem Cabinet, operating under viceregal veto), he replied, "I never heard of it."

If the symbol of unity at New Delhi was remote, the communal hatred that had forced the partition now faced was real enough. On both sides of the new dividing line, between Pakistan and Hindu India, minority groups wondered what to do. A Moslem tonga (two-wheeled carriage) driver, who had lived 20 years in Delhi, thought of moving to the Punjab. "I will wait and see what happens," he said. "If there is any trouble, I will send for my mother, my sister and my two buffalo, on my farm in the United Provinces." But it would cost him $50 to move to the Punjab—and the meager amount he collects in fares barely pays for food on the black market. Besides, he was still paying off a $200 debt incurred when he had tried vainly to save the life of a typhoid-stricken son.

A Hindu milkman in Bombay thought of moving his 68-year-old father from the Lahore district (which will go to Pakistan). "We own half a dozen cows and bullocks and three-quarters of an acre of land. My father would hate to leave our village and breathe the foul air of Bombay. I, my wife and five children are sharing a one-room apartment with another couple with three children. How can I accommodate my father? But I must bring him down. I cannot abandon him to Pakistan."

A Pathan watchman from the North-West Frontier Province thought he might have to go back to the barren soil of his native district. "The Hindu who owns the firm where I work has given me notice, saying he cannot trust foreigners to guard his shop. Who will give me jobs now? What will happen to my family?"

Who Will Pay? A Hindu chaprasi (office boy) in a Delhi Government office, who owned three acres of land in a Pakistan district, thought he had better bring his wife and family to Delhi. But then he would have to sell his land. "Who will pay a good price for my property?" he asked. "I tried to sell it recently, but some Moslems who were originally prepared to purchase it now say they will get it anyway, once Pakistan comes into being, for little or no money."

All along the prospective border between Pakistan and Hindu India, minorities were on the move. From little villages in the Moslem Punjab, Hindu and Sikh traders and moneylenders trekked to Delhi or the United Provinces. Among them were men who had been in charge of rationing food and clothing during the war, and men who profited by high wartime prices.

Returning Punjabi soldiers last year had turned in hate against the moneylenders, merchants and all their coreligionists. In Bengal it had been the same. While 1½ million died of famine, landowners and food dealers, Moslem and Hindu alike, had reaped profits of 1½ billion rupees. "Every death in the famine," estimated the Woodhead Famine Enquiry Commission two years ago, "was balanced by roughly a thousand rupees of excess profit." The economic grievance of peasants against landlords and profiteers became a religious fight.

In the cities, as always, the warnings of conflict and disorder were sharpest. Throngs of wartime jobholders were idle. In sweltering Calcutta, it took but the flick of a Moslem cigaret butt against the flanks of a sacred Hindu cow, or a Hindu tonga driver's bumping a Moslem child, to start a fight that would engulf the city. Last week Calcutta was still divided into "Pakistan" and "Hindustan" quarters, with strong points bristling with .barbed wire and machine guns. A Hindu driver dared not cross into a Moslem quarter, nor a Moslem into "Hindustan." In Bombay, where Hindus and Moslems had formerly lived mixed in together, streetcar signs now said "Pakistan Bombay," meaning the Moslem quarter.

"Are You Happy?" With the political leaders' agreement to partition India had come a lull in communal fighting. But last week it flared again at Lahore in the Punjab. In the Gurgaon district near Delhi, Moslem and Hindu-Sikh tribes still burned and looted each other's villages. There, for the first time in communal riots, firearms were used on a big scale by each side. The embattled tribes had been turning out homemade wooden rifles, six feet long. In a divided India, where 38 million Moslems are still within the borders of Hindu India, 18 million Hindus and two million Sikhs within Pakistan, few supposed that political deals in Delhi could really repair the breach between religious communities.

One Moslem, who had lost his leather works in riots at Amritsar, no longer cared whether he was in Pakistan or Hindustan. Unshaven and ragged, Chaudhri Ahmen Hasan wandered aimlessly among the ruins of his property, carrying a big framed photograph of Jinnah. From time to time Hasan paused and addressed the picture: "Are you happy now, Qaid-e-Azam [Great Leader]? You have at last achieved Pakistan."

One Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, still hoped to bring Hindus and Moslems together in a united India. If, in spite of divisive forces, India's 400 million really form themselves into a nation in the modern sense, Gandhi will have brought off (almost as a by-product of his larger purpose) a revolution greater than Danton's, bigger than Lenin's. The subcontinent had never been a nation; its separate peoples had, however, tolerated each others' very different ways of life. As both a politician and a Great Soul. Gandhi knew that if tolerance was replaced by permanent hatred, there would be not just two Indias, but no India. For India's future, nonviolence was not a philosopher's dream, but a political necessity.

Far closer than Queen Victoria's little isle was the Soviet Union which might, like Britain before it, exploit the weakness of a divided India to win hegemony. Already Puran Chandra Jpshi, India's grinning Communist leader,' and other Russian agents had a small (50,000), growing, tightly organized machine within India. If dissension grew in India, Joshi's grin (and Russia's chance) would grow with it.

Road to Noalchali. Across the northern frontier, in the Tajik Socialist Soviet Republic, loomed Mt. Stalin (24,590 ft.) and Mt. Lenin (23,386 ft.), mightiest peaks of the U.S.S.R. Gandhi's thoughts last week turned to the lowest part of India, the mushy flats of Noakhali at the mouth of the Ganges. That part of Bengal, where Moslems and Hindus are mixed, will become part of Pakistan.

Noakhali was the first place Gandhi visited last spring in his tour of India's riot areas. Barefoot, staff in hand, leaning on his grandniece Manu, he had padded through the water-soaked fields and the mixed Moslem-Hindu villages, preaching peace. Last week Gandhi planned a symbolic return. "My work is in Noakhali," he said. "Nobody will prevent me from going there." For Gandhi considered himself a citizen of both new Indian states. "I will go freely to all parts of India . . . without a passport." The question was, would other Indians be able to do the same?

^{*Length of biblical (and British) cubit: 18 inches. David's Goliath towered six cubits and a span (9 ft. 9 in.).}

^{*Allan Octavian Hume, a British theosophist and retired civil servant, founded the Congress in 1885. He persuaded the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, that the best way to combat growing unrest in the villages was to let Indian leaders discuss political development.}

^{†The great 1,2500,000-ton plant at Jamshedpur is owned by the Parsi Tata clan and manned mostly by Hindus.}

(source: TIME Magazine, New York, Jun. 30, 1947)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)

_____Memories of 1940s Calcutta_________________________

Gandhi Gone

NUMB with sudden tragedy, the people of India mourn their dead leader whom they lately hailed as Father of the Nation. They seem conscious as yet mainly of their loss and of the love they bore him. Hearts overflow. But on many lips are questions. What does this calamity portend ? He who in many past crises has been there to interpret, to counsel, to lead, is gone.

Yet his advice is not far to seek. Ten days earlier, an attempt was made on him. Many heads are bowed today in awareness of this. Was it not the duty of all who could to protect more thoroughly this precious life which .he was always ready to lay down in India's service ? But against such reproaches the Mahatma's own words are on record, full of charity. After the bomb explosion he pleaded, that there should be no malice, only understanding, and doubtless would have repeated that on Friday had he been able. That the Government should take new precautions, though belatedly, is proper. But their efforts must be directed to prevent vengeance, as well as merely to avert what may be further developments in a conspiracy which thus can be made to defeat itself. "None of us dare misbehave now that we are angry". Pandit Nehru has declared.

(source: The Statesman. Calcutta/Delhi, February 1, 1948)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)

Patel and Gandhi’s death

Patel's indifference before Gandhiji's death was so marked that people had noticed it. There was naturally a wave of anger once the tragedy took place. Some people openly accused Sardar Patel of inefficiency or worse. Jayaprakash Narayan showed considerable courage in raising this issue. In the meeting which was held in Delhi to express our sense of horror and sorrow at Gandhiji's death, Jayaprakash Narayan said clearly that the Home Minister of the Government of India could not escape the responsibility for this assassination. He demanded an explanation from Sardar Patel as to why no special measures had been taken when there was open propaganda inciting people to murder Gandhiji and a bomb had actually been thrown at him.

Mr Profulla Chandra Ghosh of Calcutta raised the same issue. He also condemned the Government of India for its failure to save Gandhiji's precious life. He pointed out that Sardar Patel owed his political status to Gandhiji and was reputed to be a strong and efficient Home Minister. How could he explain why no effort had been made to save Gandhiji's life?

Sardar Patel met these charges in his own characteristic way. He was no doubt deeply shocked but he also resented the way in which people were openly accusing him. When the Congress Parliamentary Party met, he said that enemies of the Congress were trying to divide the organisation by bringing these charges against him. He reiterated his loyalty to Gandhiji and said that the party should not be affected by these charges but stand firm and undivided in the dangerous situation which had been created by Gandhiji's death. His appeal was, not without effect. Many members of the Congress party assured him that they would stand by him.

Maulana Azad, president of Indian National Congress. Calcutta, 1948

(source page 244 Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad: “India Wins Freedom” London: Orient Longman, 1988.)

(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Orient Longman 1988)

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