Partition of India

Postcolonial Legacies

Amit Ranjan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429750526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Partition of British India in 1947 set in motion events that have had far-reaching consequences in South Asia – wars, military tensions, secessionist movements and militancy/terrorism. This book looks at key events in 1947 and explores the aftermath of the Partition and its continued impact in the present-day understanding of nationhood and identity. It also examines the diverse and fractured narratives that framed popular memory and understanding of history in the region.

The volume includes discussions on the manner in which regions such as the Punjab, Sindh, Kashmir, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh (Lucknow) and North-East India were influenced. It deals with issues such as communal politics, class conflict, religion, peasant nationalism, decolonization, migration, displacement, riots, the state of refugees, women and minorities, as well as the political relationship between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Drawing on major flashpoints in contemporary South Asian history along with representations from literature, art and popular culture, this book will interest scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, international relations, politics, sociology, literature and South Asian studies.

Chapter 1
Partition of India

A reaction against ‘differences’?

Amit Ranjan

The partition of India in 1947 is one of the most intriguing subjects in the history of modern South Asia. Scholars have presented many narratives, interpretations, examinations and analyses to discuss and examine the reasons for Partition, yet every such study has not ‘absolutely’ convinced those who have worked or are currently working on the issue. The available literature on the partition of India can be categorized based on Partition historiography, which looks into its history from various dimensions, including high politics, provincial politics and subaltern politics.¹ One of the works on high politics is The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan by Ayesha Jalal. Jalal has basically argued that Mohammad Ali Jinnah used Pakistan as a means to achieve equal social and political status for the Indian Muslims.² A more recent publication reflecting the role of provinces in the Partition is Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India by Venkat Dhulipala. Dhulipala’s argument is that the demand for Pakistan was, mainly, raised in 1930s in the Muslim minority United Province (UP) (present Indian state of Uttar Pradesh).³ He has brought religion back into the partition debate. Many other works focusing on high politics and the provinces, published between and prior to these two texts, populate the list of Partition literature. Contrary to them, most of the subaltern scholars have focussed on social, political and economic structures and related tensions in colonial society.

Success in high politics was impossible without the support of those living at the margins and who faced all forms of discrimination due to ‘differences.’ Some of those ‘differences’ were constructed and then communalised to make political benefits out of them. More than the power elites, it was the Muslim middle class intelligentsia that significantly highlighted, and in certain cases successfully constructed, the ‘differences’ between the Hindus and Muslims. However, some of the writings, practices and activities by the Hindu religious groups proved support to such constructions. Hence, it is this Muslim middle class that spearheaded the political movement for Pakistan. But a few members of the Muslim middle class and some of their leaders did not accept the arguments of proponents of a separate land for Indian Muslims. They also pointed out ‘differences’ within the Muslim community, where everyone is supposed to be equal. This has been well examined in a few past writings, and in recent times Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Eaton Robb’s edited Muslims against the Muslim League sheds light on it.⁴

‘Differences’: religious, social and economic

Demographically, according to the last census of British India in 1941, the country had a population of 389 million, comprising 255 million Hindus (including the members of Schedule Castes), 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.6 million Sikhs and a number of other communities. There were Muslim majority areas (in the north-east and the north-west) and Hindu majority areas, but no part of India was exclusively inhabited by any one community,⁵ except in some areas where the communities used to live in separate localities.

Religiously, for the majority of Hindus, Islam remains an outsider’s religion despite having centuries of interaction and cultural assimilation between people following Hinduism and Islam in India. As a religion, Islam was born in the present-day Middle East and then spread throughout the subcontinent in many ways and for different reasons. The first connection between South Asia and Islam was made through trade and commerce. Arab traders came first, and their religion followed. Trade brought them to India’s southern sea coasts and the coasts of Sri Lanka, where small Muslim communities were established at least by the early eighth century. These traders played key economic roles and were patronised by non-Muslim kings, like the Zamorin of Calicut (Kozhikode) who welcomed diverse merchant communities.⁶ In many kingdoms Arab and Jewish merchants not only sojourned on the Arabian Sea littoral of the subcontinent, but some were even granted special protection to practise their faiths and were relieved of taxation.⁷

Afterwards, once connected through land, when the situation in the Arab peninsula worsened and a race began to spread Islam by the power of the sword, the subcontinent could not remain aloof.⁸ Repeated attacks on the subcontinent were made by Central Asians and Arab invaders. History textbooks at the graduate level in Pakistan consider the ideological foundation of Pakistan to have formed with the attack of Mohammad bin Qasim in around AD 711.⁹ In reality, bin Qasim’s conquest had been taken for granted at the time and in no sense turned into a watershed moment in the subcontinent’s history. Instead, it was the Turko-Afghans invaders who began to establish settled kingdoms in the northern heartlands of the subcontinent in the early thirteenth century by contract and inaugurated an era of continuous Muslim rule in the region.¹⁰ Hence, Muslim rule in India began with advancements made by Turko-Afghan rulers and ended when the British took charge of Delhi after crushing the rebellion of 1857.¹¹

With the establishment of Muslim rule in the subcontinent, some people converted to Islam because of its egalitarian principles. In certain places, it was the religion of victors, imposed upon the vanquished, while some converted to Islam to gain political patronage from the local Muslim rulers. There were also regional variations.¹² In the south and the east, Muslim rule was relatively benign and inclusivist. In Hyderabad-Deccan and Bengal, Muslim rulers presided over vast Hindu populations and conversion was extensive and peaceful. However, some regions experienced the militant and exclusivist side of Islam where Hindu temples like those in Multan and Somnath¹³ were attacked and Hindus were killed, their property looted and their women raped by the invaders.¹⁴

Despite closer interactions among individuals, a few real differences between the two religions remained because of their respective religious rituals. But a few significant differences were constructed, primarily by the Hindu and Muslim revival groups. The British supported such constructions and exploited the ‘differences’ to maintain their imperial rule in India. Most of such constructions glorified their respective religion’s past and focused on achieving a better future. G.D. Khosla writes that

in the desire to recapture self-esteem, Indian minds harked back to ancient Hindu and Muslim cultures. The Hindu minds sought solace in the memory of the Golden Age of Hindu imperialism and the Vedas…. The Hindu mind, in trying to rehablitate its lost pride, sought an escape in glorifying its ancient achivements towards which the Muslims had made no contribution, and Hindu revivalism, therefore, took a religious and communal form. By a similar psychological process, the Muslims took recourse to the glory of the Prophet, the Khilafat and the Muslim conquest of the countries around Mediterranean.¹⁵

The Muslim elites chose divisive rather than composite symbols to represent themselves because, as Paul Brass writes, they ‘did not recognise a common destiny with the Hindus, because they saw themselves in danger of losing their privileges as a dominant community.’¹⁶ The myth versus reality of the Muslim backwardness in North India, especially in UP is at the core of the debate between Francis Robinson and Paul Brass as well as among many other scholars. Communal tones were also used to degrade people from other communities at that time. Imagining the character of Muslims, analysing Saratchandra Chattopadhya’s Bartman Hindu-Muslim Samasya, Joya Chatterji writes,

it is their [Muslims] basic lack of “culture” that, Saratchandra argues, accounts for brutality, barbarism and fanaticism of Muslims. These are the age-old universal and unchanging attributes of the Muslim community, as much as in evidence among the first Ghaznavite conquerors, who “were not satisfied merely with looting-they destroyed temples, they demolished idols, they raped women”, as any present-day Bengali Muslims….¹⁷

On the basis of religion, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan determined that Hindus and Muslims were two different nations. Later, the All India Muslim League (AIML) accepted this as a basis for their demand for Pakistan. At the Lahore session of 1940 where Pakistan resolution was passed by the AIML, Mohammad Ali Jinnah in his presidential address insisted that both Hindus and Muslims were two different people belonging to different nations and had irreconcilable aspirations that could not be fulfilled by living together. Along similar lines, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, founder of the Hindu Mahasabha, accepted Hindus from across the regions of India as a part of a nation while, he found, Muslims identifying themselves with the outside world.¹⁸ These two versions of nationalism were accepted not only by the Hindu and Muslim communal groups but also by a number of members from the INC.¹⁹

Based on religious identity, differences were constructed and promoted in other spheres. It was popularised that Hindus and Muslims had different dietary habits, spoke different languages, admired different heroes, etc. For example, in July 1933 the All Bengal Urdu Association declared, ‘Bengali is a Hinduised and Sanskritised language,’ and so ‘in the interests of the Muslims themselves it is necessary that they should try to have one language which cannot but be Urdu.’²⁰ On the other hand, the Hindu groups since the decline of Mughal power were trying to replace Urdu with Hindi. They claimed Hindi as a language of Hindus while labelling Urdu a foreign language spoken by the Muslims.²¹ This constituted the negation of theoretical and practical aspects of language, which has nothing to do with religion as such. It was the cultural aspects of language that led to the tension between East and West Pakistan beginning in 1948 and that eventually contributed to the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.²²

Although some attempts were made to settle the differences between the two religious groups, they failed. As Bhim Rao Ambedkar writes:

Just as attempts were made to bring about unity on political questions, attempts were also made to bring about unity on social and religious questions such as:- 1. Cow slaughter²³ 2. Music before Mosque and 3. Conversions. The first attempt in this direction was made in 1923 when the Indian National Pact was proposed. It failed. At that time Mahatma Gandhi was in jail. He was released from jail on the 5th February 1924. Stunned by the ...