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print versionMore than a million were killed and many millions more displaced by Indian partition. Authors consider its bloody legacy and the crises now facing their countries
- A train carrying Muslims passes through the north Indian town of Kuinkshaha on its way from Delhi to Lahore, 1947. Photograph: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum
Pankaj Mishra
To think about partition on its 70th anniversary is to think, unavoidably, about the extraordinary crisis in India today. The 50th and 60th anniversaries of one of the 20th century’s biggest calamities were leavened with the possibility that India, liberal-democratic, secular and energetically globalising, was finally achieving the greatness its famous leaders had promised. In contrast to India’s grand and imminent tryst with destiny, Pakistan’s fate seemed to be obsessive self-harm.
The celebrations of a “rising†India were not much muted in 1997 and 2007, even as hands were dutifully wrung about the imperialist skulduggery and savage ethnic cleansing that founded the nation states of India and Pakistan, defined their self-images and condemned them to permanent internal and external conflict. Today, as the portrait of a co-conspirator in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi hangs in the Indian parliament, it is the scale and ferocity of India’s mutation that haunts our thoughts.
But should it really be so shocking? Were we too beguiled by the intellectual complacencies of historians and journalists, who turned liberal democracy, secularism, globalisation and economic growth into articles of a new faith?
It is of course easy to ignore the malign and enduring potency of partition. Many of our everyday experiences of pluralist identities comprehensively negate it. My own life has been enriched by Pakistani writers, musicians, cricketers and friendships across borders. Yet the Hindu fanatic who murdered Gandhi for being soft on Muslims and Pakistan exemplified early the lethal logic of nation-building. So did many avowedly secular Indian leaders who used brute force to hold on to Kashmir.
In many ways, Narendra Modi and his mob are completing the unfinished business of partition: the unification of a political community through identification and persecution of internal and external enemies. In conforming to this grimly familiar historical pattern, India has outpaced Pakistan, where regional differences serve to check a ruthlessly homogenising nationalism (and Islamism), and no single ideological movement is able to colonise all key institutions of the state and civil society.
We persuaded ourselves that India was somehow exceptional, immune to the political pathologies that have infected almost every nation on earth, and entered its bloodstream at birth. It is frightening to contemplate on this 70th anniversary what lies ahead for nuclear-armed south Asia. No illusions of a liberation from history, of a rising or emerging India, comfort us today. And we – Indians as well as Pakistanis – are forced to acknowledge the partition as the great atrocity that decisively shapes our brutish present.
Pankaj Mishra’s most recent book is Age of Anger: A History of the Present (Allen Lane).
Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children was published a few months before the 34th anniversary of Indian independence in 1981, and another 36 years have elapsed since then. The novel now feels like a half-time report. The second half deserves its own novel, although I am not the right person to write it.
When my novel was published, some people criticised it for ending too gloomily. It’s true that much of the novel was written during the mid-70s “Emergency†, Indira Gandhi’s shameful 21-month suspension of democracy, and it bears the marks of that dark moment. But in the novel, as in real life, India emerged from the Emergency into a new day, and the narrator Saleem’s son Aadam represented the hope of a new generation. That new generation has grown up to inherit the world of midnight’s children, and India is becoming a different country. When I look at the last pages of my novel now, they feel almost absurdly optimistic.
The country is rapidly being pulled in the direction decreed by the proponents of “Hindutva†, Hindu nationalism, and away from the secular ideals of the founding fathers. To criticise this movement, in the age of the political Twitter troll, is to be branded “sickular,†or, even worse, a “sickular libtard†. Meanwhile, in the land of the sacred cow, people are being lynched for the “crime†of allegedly possessing or eating beef. History textbooks are being rewritten as Hindutva propaganda. The government’s control over a largely acquiescent news media (there are a couple of honourable exceptions) would be envied by the president of the United States, if he happened to concern himself with such faraway matters. The “world’s largest democracy†feels more authoritarian and less democratic than it should.
But the Modi government is popular. It’s very popular. This is the greatest difference between the India of Indira’s Emergency and the India of today. Back then, Mrs Gandhi called an election, wrongly believing she would win, and by doing so would legitimise the excesses of the Emergency years. But she was voted down resoundingly and driven from office. There is no sign that the Indian electorate will turn against the present government any time soon. Midnight’s grandchildren seem content with what’s happening. And that’s the pessimistic conclusion to volume two of the Indian story.
Salman Rusdhie’s latest novel, The Golden House, is published by Jonathan Cape in September.
Kamila Shamsie
When I was growing up, partition was not so much a historical event as a family story. Partition had made half my family Pakistani and the other half Indian; partition meant my grandmother couldn’t get a visa to visit her dying mother; partition meant that while I cheered on Pakistan’s triumph against India in the 1987 Test series, my great-uncle, who was then visiting his sister/my grandmother, in Karachi, was despondent that his cricket team had lost. Partition also meant that I grew up in Karachi, multi-ethnic city of migrants, which I loved fiercely enough to make the loss of half a family seem like a price worth paying in a child’s black and white way of seeing the world.
But at the level of official and national conversation in Pakistan, 1947 was a year to which the word “independence†rather than “partition†was attached. It was in British text books and British Raj revival films that “partition†almost always trumped independence. Of course it did. To talk about the independence of Pakistan and India is to acknowledge the yoke of colonial rule. Far easier to talk about “partition†, with its implication of everything falling apart as the British left, as though the falling apart wasn’t the direct result of a policy of divide and rule. And so I’ve always been uneasy – and continue here to be uneasy – when I’m asked to talk about partition rather than independence in Britain.
But the complicated truth is that the entwined nature of independence and partition must be acknowledged. These were nations born as a result of a heroic opposition to imperial rule, but their birth was also marked by hatred and bloodshed. Contemporary conversations often focus on what that bloodshed means for India and Pakistan’s relationship to each other, but increasingly as I look at both nations, now so mired in violence towards their own minorities, I wonder what it means for each nation’s relationship to its own history, its own nature. There was never a reckoning for the violence of partition; that would have got in the way of the narrative of a glorious independence. Instead it became easier to blame the other side for all the violence, and pretend that at the moment of inception both India and Pakistan didn’t wrap mass murder in a flag and hope no one would notice the blood stains.
Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Home Fire (Bloomsbury), has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
Mohsin Hamid
Seventy years after partition, the old hatreds are alive and well. India is descending into an intolerant Hindu nationalism, apparently intent on imitating the religious chauvinism and suppression of dissent that have served Pakistan so poorly. In Pakistan, a moment where it seemed that the press might finally become free and elected civilian rulers might regularly complete their terms has passed.
We are back in the murk of the unsaid, the unacknowledged, the undemocratic. Soldiers of both sides are firing across the line of control in Kashmir. Nuclear stockpiles grow. Rhetoric is unmeasured, indeed often unhinged. A person brought forward in time from the murderous slaughter of 70 years ago would probably look around and say, yes, this is what I expected.
What a failure. A failure for all of us, who live in south Asia. And for all of you, who live abroad, in countries whose governments see only market sizes and geopolitical advantage, and turn a blind eye to the great and mounting danger your angry brothers and sisters pose to each other.
Mohsin Hamid’s most recent novel, Exit West, published by Hamish Hamilton, has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker prize.
Kiran Desai
Every Saturday I suffer from a depression I call my Saturday depression. The main symptom of this is that when I look in the mirror I don’t see myself, I see a ghost. The sight of this ghost fills me with fear. I know this spectre is merely the cumulative result of one more week in one more year of many years of self-imposed isolation for the sake of a book I have been working on a long while.
Last Saturday to avoid my unavoidable depression I went to the Rubin Museum in New York to see the Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs of India. One section of the exhibition displays the photographs – I almost wrote paintings – that Cartier-Bresson took during the last days of Gandhi’s life and the days following his assassination. The photographs are painterly. Rather than emphasising a passing event, they have a staying presence; while the days they were taken were chaotic, they have a composed stillness; while it was surely noisy, the photographs are overcome by a hush – as if violence has blasted the scene still and all the millions of people in the crowds have been condemned to an eternal moment. The quantity of people is important here, and the fact that every individual in this crowd of millions appears to be missing his or her face. You cannot see the person for an emotion more primal than our human selves has consumed their individual natures to make them part of a whole catastrophic betrayal. Pandit Nehru wears the same loss as Brij Krishna, Gandhi’s secretary, as a man who has clambered up a tree for a view of the funeral pyre, as a refugee on a train leaving Delhi for Lahore.
I was glad to be alone for I found my face was wet with tears. But I wasn’t weeping over the past, I was grieving for the present. The political wing of the RSS, the organisation to which Gandhi’s assassin was once a member, is the party that runs the country now, and it exults in the same vocabulary of violence now as then. The faces of the poor are the same now as they were then. An exhausted labourer sleeps on the street beside his cracked shoes in the same way. The footage of a Muslim dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, begging for his life before a Hindu mob, one of many such attacks this year – link back to these photographs as if the nation is condemned to forever return to the time of its conception. Perhaps India will never overcome this moment photographed here. Everything that has happened since feels fateful, cyclical, endless and pre-determined.
I thought for a guilty moment that I had no right to feel this for I had not been there to share it. But when I looked at these photographs, I didn’t see them from a foreign distance.
I remembered the story of a grand uncle jailed by the British — when he came out of prison he never left his room, he had been so damaged he stayed inside spinning khadi. He shared a special bond with my German grandmother who had sailed with a trunk full of china to marry the engineering student from East Bengal she had met in Berlin. She made a home in a country that would soon fight Germany alongside the British, became part of a family that was meanwhile fighting for Independence from the British. Everything a contradiction in ideologies, but not in the one thing that could undo it all, the personal story against all this history, all these wars.Gandhi’s funeral train leaves Delhi for Allahabad, the ancestral home of Nehru, reminding me of my childhood visits to my grandparents for my grandfather was a judge at the Allahabad high court. They were also Gujarati like Gandhi, and like millions of others had made a harsh journey away from their landscape, language, religion, their notion of caste for a secular ideal of India. My parents, born in British India, saw their childhood landscapes of Delhi and Allahabad alter beyond recognition as half the population departed for Pakistan. By the time I was born, things must have seemed comparatively quiet, although it was a year in which India and Pakistan went to war, but I too growing up had witnessed Delhi burning in another incarnation of violence. I remember the disabled Sikh gentleman down the road from us who was carried out of his house by a mob and never seen again.
I thought of my father who taught himself to read Urdu and took pleasure in reciting Faiz and Ghalib on his rooftop on a summer night. I thought of my mother’s book, In Custody, about a professor of Hindi literature trying to record the poetry of an Urdu poet. That India, the inclusive India, my natural birthright, is once again under threat, and it has always been so.
As I composed myself in the cool darkness of the museum before I stepped back into the bright summer day, I felt a private gratitude to Cartier-Bresson, for his example of an artist who erased himself becoming a ghost behind his little 35mm Leica in order to memorialise the erasure of others. While the pictures depict violence, looking at them restores one to a place of humanity.
Kiran Desai is the author of the Booker prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss.
Siddhartha Deb
Baniachang, the village in Sylhet from which my father’s family came, became part of East Pakistan in 1947. Today, after the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, it is in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there. How difficult was it, I thought when hearing my family talk about leaving Baniachang, for them to choose one kind of identity over another, in this case religion over language and culture? Partition, as books in recent years by Yasmin Khan and Vazira Zamindar have shown, was a different process depending on which part of it you were caught up in. The British and Indian elites making their new nations – men exemplified by the British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, the future Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his hardline Hindu nationalist deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian industrialist and Gandhi patron GD Birla – were all in a hurry to force the process through. Mountbatten insisted on 15 August 1947 as the date for partition, just two and a half months after the decision to divide the subcontinent had been made. The boundary commission headed by the barrister Cyril Radcliffe finished preparing their maps only on 12 August, although these maps would not be made public until 17 August, two days after partition.
By then, the ethnic cleansing was well under way. Over a million were killed, thousands raped and abducted, and between 12 and 20 million displaced in the process. Trains criss-crossed the landscape with carriages filled with corpses. Those escaping on foot travelled in columns that were sometimes 45 miles long. None of this violence and pain has really worked its way into the official histories of Britain, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. This is surely one reason why the partition shows an uncanny ability to replicate itself through the decades, in mini partitions, mini pogroms and the steady marginalisation and brutalisation of minorities that has become the governing spirit of nationalism in south Asia.
The Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who reluctantly moved to Pakistan from Bombay after partition and found himself utterly disillusioned in his new nation, captured the situation best in his short story about patients in a Lahore asylum being divided up as assets for the new countries. The Sikh protagonist, named Toba Tek Singh after the village he comes from, is taken to the border to be sent to India, although his village happens to be on the other side, in what is now Pakistan. Lying down on “a bit of land that belonged to neither India nor Pakistan†, he refuses to take part in this process of exchange that has already blighted so many lives. Seventy years after Partition, Toba Tek Singh’s defiant madness evokes freedom better than anything achieved by the supposedly rational nations that came out of that bloody process.
Siddhartha Deb is the author of The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India, published by Penguin. An excerpt from his new novel, set in part against the backdrop of partition, will be published in the autumn issue of N+1.
Fatima Bhutto
India takes its name from the Indus, which flows through Sindh, my hometown in Pakistan. The mighty river is a force that animates the legends of India and Pakistan. Mohenjo-daro, the seat of that ancient river culture, is shared – no matter modern partitions – between our two countries.
Today Hindus and Muslims gather to pray together to the saint Udero Lal, a form of the beloved Jhulelal, in the complex where both a temple and a mosque stand together. Jhulelal has many avatars: for Sindhi Muslims he is a manifestation of Qalandar, a Sufi mystic who travelled from the Middle East to our shores to bring the faithful closer to God; for Hindus, he is an incarnation of a Varuna, a Vedic god who ruled the oceans. Across the border, the holy city Varanasi is named partly in his honour.
I spent many days in my childhood among the bricks of Mohenjo-daro. My brother spent his teenage years journeying to Udero Lal. Both of us have driven hours from our home in Karachi to sit under the golden dome of the Sufi shrine of Sehwan Sharif, where rose petals are offered to the tomb of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar by all faiths. Last year, the shrine was bombed by Isis because of what it stood for – a refuge, a site of adoration and love, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Sehwan, the name of the town where Pakistani Sufism’s most cherished shrine stands, is believed by many to be derived from the name of the god Shiva.
Sindh’s syncretic culture, its centuries of tolerant co-existence and even its turbulent present defy the sectarian logic of partition. And I have faith that it will survive the disasters designed to flow from it, even 70 years on.
Fatima Bhutto’s most recent book, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, is published by Penguin.
Nayantara Sahgal
I am the daughter of parents who fought for freedom under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, and my father died of his fourth imprisonment during British rule. Gandhi overturned the imperial diktat of divide and rule by creating a national movement that forged a political unity, one that rose above regions, religions and languages and recognised India’s cultural and religious diversity as the meaning of India. The demand for a separate country for Muslims was, on the other hand, in keeping with the divisions laid down by colonial rule.
The bizarre imperial approach to partition has been best illustrated by WH Auden in his caustic poem, “Partition†, in which he savagely lampoons the Englishman, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in India and was flown in to draw a line marking his idea of a boundary. The partition was an unimaginable disaster of bloodshed and suffering that uprooted helpless millions from both sides of the border and still haunts the subcontinent’s memory. The shock and grief live on in a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a story by Saadat Hasan Manto, a painting by Satish Gujral and in the minds of families torn apart. At the time, Nehru and many others, Muslim and Hindu, believed it would be temporary. For years after the event the belief persisted that this unreality would end. A centuries-old history could not thus be unwritten by a line drawn thoughtlessly between its sharers.
Its wounds are partially healed when Indians and Pakistanis meet to celebrate their joint heritage of music and dance, language and literature, and there is an emotional content to a movement in India that rejects war and calls for peace for all time with Pakistan.
But the menace of partition is again upon Indians, this time through the intention to impose Hindu nationhood on us and declare all other Indians outsiders who are here on sufferance. To foist a Hindu identity on a secular republic, one that is the world’s third largest Muslim country and has been home (as Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez said of his country) to the human race, is senseless beyond belief. The mentality that murdered Gandhi now relentlessly pursues this agenda, punishing writers, rationalists, dalits, churches and all forms of dissent. Lynch mobs kill Muslims, reminiscent of the lynching of blacks in America’s deep south. On this anniversary of the partition of India, another partition stares us in the face.
Nayantara Sahgal edited Nehru’s India: Essays on the Maker of a Nation, published by Speaking Tiger.
Amit Chaudhuri
When I started writing, then publishing, fiction, partition (the word always came with a capital P) was considered a major – even defining – theme for the Indian novel in English. The same was true of independence. Part of this was, of course, the legacy of Midnight’s Children. Rushdie had done a terrifically funny job of demonstrating how each one of us might potentially be the author of modern India’s history, not unlike the way Spike Milligan had revealed his role in history in Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall.
I began by ignoring history and writing about a family – much like my uncle’s family – that lived in south Calcutta. I described a visitor to this family’s house: a 10-year-old boy from Bombay. I didn’t date the story, but it would have been the early 1970s I was writing of. All the main characters in A Strange and Sublime Address had been displaced, and their present-day lives engendered, by partition. So it was with my family. My parents had grown up in Sylhet, which became part of East Pakistan in 1947, and Bangladesh in 1971. I’ve never seen Sylhet. My parents never went back. We were in Bombay, and my uncle in Calcutta, because of movements in history. I was instinctively interested in the new lives these people were making for themselves. I didn’t want to dwell too long on the epiphany of partition because their lives were composed of various other epiphanies.
Now, with the death of my parents in the last three years, I feel a sense of loss about their beginnings in the milieux that gave them their personalities. I think of it partly in the terms of two great languages: the near-loss of Urdu in the west; the bifurcation of Bengali in the east. Partition is not only about religion or the land that went to one side or the other; it signifies an irrevocable cultural shift. As with Europe after the second world war, what was damaged irreparably in 1947 was a modern civility that possessed a remarkable delicacy. I encountered this civility in my parents. There will be little evidence of its legacy after those who embody it, and still live in countries across the world, have vanished.
Amit Chaudhuri’s latest novel, Friend of My Youth, is out this month.
Mirza Waheed
In the seven decades since partition, the empire-made cataclysm that consumed millions and sowed seeds of acrimony among millions more, there’s been one source of animus between the two states that refuses to lie still. Kashmir.
It’s also been seven decades since India’s first prime minister, Nehru, promised: “We have declared that the fate of Kashmir is ultimately to be decided by the people. That pledge we have given not only to the people of Kashmir but to the world. We will not and cannot back out of it.†He’d also announced: “It is an obvious fact that … no country is going to hold onto Kashmir against the will of Kashmiris.â€
In the decades since these promises (and UN resolutions), speeches to India’s constituent assembly and broadcasts to the nation, the Indian state, including the original Nehruvian version, has done exactly that – held a people as subjects against their will, and then some. And when the people have risen and exerted their voices in the parliament of the street or on the funeral ground, the state has unleashed unspeakable terror on the long-suffering people of Kashmir.
Yes, the conflict is complex, with layers of intractability, with the Kashmiri body politic battered and febrile after the will of the people – in the face of chronic denial and betrayal by successive Indian regimes – turned insurrectionary with devastating consequences for all involved but primarily for Kashmiris. Yes, there is the other party (as Nehru noted in his letters to his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan), the next-door twin who holds a third of Kashmir and who has tried to force the issue via primarily selfish machinations since, well, since forever. And yes, there exist schisms and perennial tensions within the historical movement for self-determination as mandated by the UN, which India itself brought on board, but which political struggle in history hasn’t.
Today, as India and Pakistan celebrate their 70th, the Kashmiri people remain colonised, killed, exiled, raped, tortured, incarcerated and, in an ignominious addition to the catalogue, blinded by nasty little lead pellets sprayed on protesters crying for freedom.
Mirza Waheed’s most recent novel is The Book of Gold Leaves, published by Penguin.
Tahmima Anam
A few years ago, I went to Calcutta to find my great-grandfather’s house. My grandmother, who had been born there, could only give me a vague idea of where it was. She named random Calcutta landmarks, none of which yielded the vast, four-storeyed villa she remembered from her childhood. In any case, her family’s tenure there was short: my grandfather squandered his fortune and ended up moving into a far more modest house which he shared with relatives. That house, on 36 Marsden Street, was easy to find. My mother and I peered through the gate and I surreptitiously took photographs of the upper floors. We thought about ringing the bell, but shied away.
I came away with a profound sense of loss. It was one thing that my family had migrated after partition as Calcutta fell, by the map-maker’s command, to India, but another to sense, acutely, that there was a history there that couldn’t be found. Places that had literally disappeared, stories that would never be told. After 1947, one half of my grandmother’s family moved west, to Karachi, and the other half went east, to Dhaka. It’s a strange historical irony that both sets of migrants went to the same country, only divided by one thousand miles of the one they were forced to leave behind. Those who migrated west remained Pakistanis; the other branch of the family, the ones who came to Dhaka, became citizens of the newly formed nation of Bangladesh after the 1971 war of independence. Hence, one family, from one city, became citizens of three separate nations, all in the span of a few decades. With such fracturing, history is obliterated; no one can know what happened in the past when everyone has fled the very land on which it occurred.
My father’s family similarly vanished from Calcutta. While they survived the violence of the partition, it soon became clear to them that they could not remain. The rioting and killing hadn’t stopped after independence; in the small Muslim enclave in which they lived, they had few remaining neighbours; from their windows, they would occasionally see smoke rising in the distance, and they would know that another neighbourhood had gone up in flames. My uncle Manzur, a few years older than my father, was plagued by terrible nightmares of the horrors he had witnessed. Thus, in 1950, my grandfather decided to move the family east. Because of the tense relationship between Pakistan and India, he was barred from bringing over the Ittehad, the newspaper he had founded in Calcutta just a few years earlier.
Forty-three years later, however, my father started his own newspaper, this time in independent Bangladesh after a popular movement had ousted a dictator and restored democracy. Another paper, founded in a moment filled with protean possibility. I suppose that, while the homes and institutions didn’t survive, somehow the desire to tell stories endured.
Tahmima Anam’s latest novel is The Good Muslim, published by Canongate.
