Decolonization in South Asia

Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134018239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This book explores the meanings and complexities of India's experience of transition from colonial to the post-colonial period. It focuses on the first five years – from independence on 15th August 1947 to the first general election in January 1952 – in the politics of West Bengal, the new Indian province that was created as a result of the Partition.

The author, a specialist on the history of modern India, discusses what freedom actually meant to various individuals, communities and political parties, how they responded to it, how they extended its meaning and how in their anxiety to confront the realities of free India, they began to invent new enemies of their newly acquired freedom. By emphasising the representations of popular mentality rather than the institutional changes brought in by the process of decolonization, he draws attention to other concerns and anxieties that were related to the problems of coming to terms with the newly achieved freedom and the responsibility of devising independent rules of governance that would suit the historic needs of a pluralist nation.

Decolonization in South Asia analyses the transitional politics of West Bengal in light of recent developments in postcolonial theory on nationalism, treating the 'nation' as a space for contestation, rather than a natural breeding ground for homogeneity in the complex political scenario of post-independence India. It will appeal to academics interested in political science, sociology, social anthropology and cultural and Asian studies.

1
The arrival of freedom

Celebrations, anxieties and realities

Arrival, celebrations and anxieties

For all Indians the arrival of independence on the midnight of 14–15 August 1947 was an exhilarating moment that remained forever ingrained in their memories. But that moment also arrived with the pain of Partition, as well as enormous challenges of an uncertain future. Some felt inspired and empowered,¹ others felt daunted and anxious, as the afterglow of celebrations faded away, and the stark realities of freedom began to stare at their faces. But let us begin with the celebrations.

On the 15th of August 1947, Calcutta was in an extraordinary festive mood. At 1 a.m., the new Governor Chakravarti Rajagopalachari took the oath of office, followed by Dr Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, the Congress Prime Minister,² and the other members of his first cabinet of the newly created province of West Bengal. During the day, tricolour national flags, along with wooden and iron poles to hang them, and white cotton Gandhi caps with ‘Jai Hind’ (victory to India) inscribed on them – the new icons of a free nation – were sold in thousands on the pavements of Calcutta. The main flag hoisting ceremony of the day was scheduled to be held at the Governor’s House. Thousands gathered at the gates in the morning. The policemen tried to block them for some time, but soon the locks gave way, with the crowd rushing in to the lawn where the Governor was giving his speech. When he finished and retired to his residence, the crowd followed him inside the building. And then, for the next few hours, thousands of ordinary Calcuttans, many of them from a working-class background, roamed freely through the building, and when they left, they took away pieces of furniture and other memorabilia as souvenirs of a period of their history, which they thought now truly belonged to the past.³ The Governor’s House was no longer the residence of a living Governor, it had become the archaeological remains of a past regime. According to unofficial sources, about 200,000 people entered the Governor’s House on that day.⁴

The Governor’s House was not their only destination, as this story of breaking barriers continued. The crowd then moved on to the adjacent Assembly House, where once again police tried to block their entry, but later gave in, and thousands of citizens of the new nation-state rushed into the debating chamber and greeted the Governor, then in the middle of his speech, with loud slogans of ‘Jai Hind’.⁵ The new citizens of the city were now reclaiming their right to participate in the governance of their country. And Calcutta was not the exception, as similar scenes of exuberance could be seen almost everywhere in India. In Bombay, the government Secretariat Building was taken over by the crowd. Jim Masselos has argued that such incidents signified that no space was sacrosanct anymore, as the crowd established their right to enter the most secure and restricted of all spaces during the days of the Raj.⁶ These were, therefore, the symbolic acts of reclaiming lost territory as their illegitimate occupants had now retreated. Like other cities, Calcutta and its suburbs also witnessed numerous celebrations, where national flags were hoisted, patriotic songs were sung and fiery speeches were delivered.⁷ There were also some token gestures of national integration across class and caste lines. At some places the hungry poor were fed; at a local hospital an elderly sweeper woman and at a District Congress office a harijan girl were given the privilege of hoisting the national flag. These acts of coming together no doubt pleased Mahatma Gandhi, then stationed in Calcutta.⁸

The other major impact of these celebrations on the arrival of freedom was the disappearance of communal tension that had plagued the city of Calcutta, as well as adjacent industrial areas of Howrah for the last few months, bringing Gandhi to Calcutta. As a mark of penance, Gandhi decided to spend the first Independence Day in fasting and spinning.⁹ But on that day, almost like magic, all tension disappeared. In Calcutta, in the suburbs where communal violence had been endemic over the past year, Muslims and Hindus with small national flags stuck on their dresses came out on the streets from midnight and began to embrace each other with slogans like ‘Bande mataram’ (Hail mother)‘ Jai Hind’, ‘Hindu Muslim ek ho’ (Hindus and Muslims unite) and ‘Allah ho Akbar’ (God is great), chanted in the same breath.¹⁰ In a letter to the editor in The Statesman, a Muslim citizen of Calcutta wrote: ‘That night in Calcutta we ceased to be Hindus and Muslims, we became Indians.’¹¹ The Superintendent of Police in Howrah wrote to his superior:

On the 15th [of] August the whole town looked very festive and gay. [The n]ational flag was hoisted [o]n all the government buildings as well as at all public places and in almost all the important localities. Trams and buses were very … crowded with people who went on shouting ‘Jai Hind’. People greeted one another both Hindus and Muslims. As if by … magic, all the differences of the people were composed overnight, and they all looked happy and cheerful.¹²

Indeed, that was the harmonious spirit of 15 August 1947. This situation in the industrial areas of Howrah, one of the worst affected by communal violence in recent months, is also corroborated in the memoirs of Annada Sankar Roy, then a Judicial Magistrate in the district.¹³ In Calcutta there was not a single incident of communal violence during the whole period between 15 and 30 August and there were scenes of celebration where the Hindus and Muslims participated and hugged each other, with national flags in their hands. There was a massive peace procession in Calcutta on 26 August, in which thousands of Hindus and Muslims participated chanting slogans like ‘Hindu–Muslim zindabad’(Long live Hindu–Muslim [unity].¹⁴ The Muslims of Upper Chitpore Road donated Rs 1,001 to Gandhi for the repairing of Hindu temples damaged in the riots of August 1946.¹⁵ This new public mood of reconciliation pleased Gandhi very much, as in his post-prayer speech on 15 August he expressed his hope that the example of Calcutta would show the way to the rest of India.¹⁶ In another speech at a civic reception on 24 August at Calcutta Maidan (literally ‘open field’; the Calcutta Maidan is a large park and venue for many events), attended by about 200,000 people, he described the situation as neither a miracle nor an accident, but an act of God.¹⁷

But this outburst of goodwill was temporary, as troubles broke out again on the night of 31 August–1 September. Whether or not it was in response to the announcement of the decision of the Boundary Commission on 17 August it is difficult to ascertain, as the Hindus had a lot of resentment against the award.¹⁸ The outbreak of violence forced Gandhi to fast from 1 September, this time with H.S. Suhrawardy, the man widely believed to be the spirit behind the riots of 1946, by his side. The riots stopped soon, as there were all-out efforts to restore peace – including a two-mile-long students’ peace procession in Calcutta on 3 September¹⁹– and Gandhi broke his fast with a glass of fruit juice from the hands of Suhrawardy in an overt gesture of reconciliation.²⁰ Five leaders of Bengal – two Bengali Hindus, one Bengali Muslim, one Punjabi Hindu and a Sikh – in a ceremonial pledge assured the Mahatma that they ‘shall never again allow communal strife in the city and shall strive unto death to prevent it.’²¹ At a mammoth rally of the Hindus and Muslims of Calcutta on 7 September Gandhi appealed for maintaining peace in Bengal and announced his decision to leave for Punjab. If Calcutta remained peaceful, the rest of the country would follow her example. Gandhi expressed his optimism in his departing message.²²

An uneasy peace indeed resided in West Bengal for some time, despite some political outfits, allegedly financed by Marwari businessmen, complaining loudly about Congress appeasement of the Muslims and the police intelligence reports apprehending a fresh outbreak of communal violence shortly after the departure of Gandhi.²³ There were also reports of some renegade elements of the Muslim League and the Muslim National Guard creating trouble in the border district of Murshidabad.²⁴ But despite all that and the continuous refugee influx from East Pakistan, no major communal violence occurred until February–March 1950. Then it reappeared with a vengeance, leading to the large-scale flight of Muslims from Calcutta and the neighbouring industrial districts. We will discuss that story later in detail (Chapter 2), but it is important to mention it here to bring home the point that freedom’s magic touch was temporary and Partition had not resolved the issue of Hindu–Muslim relations in this province, or defined with any amount of certitude the place of the minorities within the new nation-state.

As a protest against Partition, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Communist Party of India (CPI) did not participate in the celebrations of 15 August. Sarat Bose, the brother of Subhas Chandra Bose and a believer in a united Bengal, also spent the day in solitude at his Calcutta residence; two weeks earlier he had resigned from the Congress and formed his own party, the Socialist Republican Party.²⁵ Referring to the Partition and its aftermath of hatred and violence, a columnist in the Bengali literary magazine Masik Basumati wrote in a rather pensive tone: ‘India has become free. But this is not the freedom that we struggled for.’²⁶

The whole atmosphere of jubilation and celebrations, therefore, had a significant amount of ambivalence and uncertainty in it, and this created anxiety in the minds of many, particularly the middle-class Bengalis. Their anxiety originated partly from the high hopes generated by independence and partly from the realities of divided Bengal. As Annada Sankar Roy writes in his memoirs: ‘The fifteenth of August was not a day of undiluted joy. It was a day mixed with plenty of tears, blood and blemishes.’ On the one hand, there was tremendous optimism: ‘that wonderful day appeared other-worldly. Everything seemed possible. As if freedom was the land where people could get all they desired. The citizens of this country could achieve whatever they wanted.’ But on the other, freedom also had different meanings for different people – it did not only mean freedom from British rule; it came with Partition, which meant freedom from the dominance of the majorities, that is, the Hindus in undivided India, and the Muslims in undivided Punjab and Bengal. This had important political ramifications. The day also indicated that the concept of freedom needed to be expanded, from its political manifestation to its social and economic expectations, from its narrower connotation of political sovereignty to its wider meaning of citizenship that entailed the equal right to enjoy prosperity and happiness. The presence of Gandhi, Roy further writes, reminded everyone that what we wanted was not just political freedom, but also social and economic freedom, which we could now strive to attain.²⁷

A leftist intellectual, Gopal Haldar shared the same concerns when he wrote just before the formal attainment of freedom that the meaning of the term swaraj had profoundly changed over the years as the freedom struggle made progress. Today it did not merely mean Home Rule or just taking control of the administrative machinery, but an empowerment of the people and a revolutionary change of social and economic forces.²⁸ A resonance of the same meanings of freedom could also be heard in the statements of the Gandhian leader Ajoy Mukherjee, the hero of the Midnapur national government of 1942. He warned his countrymen on the eve of independence that the real swaraj would come only when the Gandhian ideal of ‘krishak-praja-mazdoor raj’ (the rule of the peasants, tenants and workers) would be realized in this country.²⁹ But this would not be an easy task. The real implications of freedom would be clear in a few days, because the British had left a ‘bankrupt zamindari estate’, historian Jadunath Sarkar reminded his countrymen in a radio speech, referring to problems like sterling balance, inflation and food shortages.³⁰ In other words, behind the celebrations and jubilation there were expectations and a lurching anxiety about the difficult tasks ahead of fulfilling the expectations of the people and looking after one’s own house amidst the mess left behind by the previous colonial regime. An article in Masik Basumati cautioned the new citizens that freedom was not an immovable property that you could acquire and enjoy. You would have to strive continually to make it deliver its promises.³¹ A local newspaper Millat noted in the same tune as the metropolitan intellectuals that fighting for freedom was one thing, constructing the architecture of freedom was yet another.³²

This was a sentiment also shared by the Congress and its leaders who now held the reins of power in the province and could see the burdens of responsibility. In a message to the nation on 15 August the Congress President J.B. Kripalani assuaged the nation: ‘Let us not be disheartened because freedom has not come in the full glory of a united India.’ But Congress would strive to ‘ensure individual liberty, equality of opportunit...