The Partition of British India Into India and Pakistan
What Academic Scholarship Says
Anyone who grows up in India and Pakistan ends up hearing dozens of versions of the 1947 Partition story by the time they reach adulthood. As someone who heard his share of these stories and then went on to study and write history professionally, I can vouch that almost all the versions we heard as kids and teenagers were… well, wrong. The gargantuan accumulation of fake and bad history around this crucial historical event has ensured that it hardly ever gets discussed dispassionately in its right historical context. However hard it is, it still needs to happen. This essay is an attempt to move in that direction.
Perhaps the single most damaging theme of popular discourse around Partition is the obsession with laying blame on someone. In India that is usually one person or a shared responsibility among Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Louis Mountbatten, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But focusing on “who” is responsible for something like the partition of British India, which was a process and not exactly a one-off event, is bound to create a huge heap of misconceptions and fake “facts” to justify that reasoning. No single individual or group of people can be said to primarily be “responsible” for the process of Partition. A more useful way to look at this is to understand what kind of stimuli over time ultimately led to Partition, especially so that we can use the lessons from such an understanding to help resolve current crises and prevent future ones.
[This essay is about the political process of Partition, and not the violence that accompanied it. For the violence, it is perhaps easier to assign blame: the bigoted “leaders” and the small and big religious organizations of all the three major parties involved in the violence — Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.]
My intention here is not to tell “the truth” about Partition, but to provide some useful information which readers can then think about in association with the other stuff they already have read or heard. Partition is something that profoundly affects our lives and politics in India and Pakistan even now. So it is important for us to acknowledge that this is an insanely complex topic. It is high time we stopped furiously blaming one or the other past politician to slake our contemporary political/religious frustrations. We also need to abandon the juvenile belief that we can, by just reading tweets and WhatsApp forwards, claim to completely understand what it meant to be a political leader of millions of struggling, colonized human beings in the stressful years of the 1940s.
Much of what follows derives heavily from a talk I attended some years back, titled “The History and Context of Partition.” It was presented by Professor Sunil Amrith, a historian of South Asia then at Harvard University and now at Yale. Professor Amrith provided a compact and updated overview of the major changes and events that led to the final Partition moment, starting from the 1920s when communal (in the South Asian context this word generally means “religiously divisive”) politics gradually began to dominate the social and cultural spheres of life in the subcontinent. (You can find the audio recording of Prof Amrith’s talk here.)
Before I delve into the details, here’s a one-paragraph summary:
Dozens of factors worked together, since the 1920s, to gradually create a nationwide political and social atmosphere of mistrust among Hindus and Muslims in British India, a mistrust which ultimately transformed into a real fear among many Muslims that in a future India dominated by Hindu leaders, they will be discriminated against and will have to suffer (many will say this fear has proven to be perfectly valid). This social and cultural fear, much of it real and some of it exaggerated, became highly politically-charged in the 1940s, and demands for a separate Muslim state began gaining ground. There were indeed efforts by all involved parties to salvage the situation, but these efforts were, for several reasons, a political failure. Partition, then, became inevitable.
1920s: The rise of communally-charged politics
● Although in the early 1920s the joint Hindu-Muslim Non Co-operation Movement was a powerful display of friendly relations between India’s Muslims and Hindus, the subsequent years saw several local incidents of riots and communal tensions across the country. However, at no stage until the 1940s did this become a generalized national communal conflict.
● Along with communally charged incidents, religiously toned language and ideas also started gaining a wider audience and readership, especially through modes of mass communication like print and radio. During the same period, Europe saw the formation of new, smaller, nation-states, and international political discussions came to be increasingly dominated by ideas of nationalism and nationalistic aspirations. These ideas permeated into South Asia as well.
Early 1930s: The concept of “Pakistan”
● Consequent to such developments, the Two-Nation theory — the theory that British India was not one but two separate nations, a Hindu nation and a Muslim nation — started to gain prominence in the Indian subcontinent in the mid to late 1930s.
● While the term “Pakistan” was coined by a student Rahmat Ali in 1933, what it exactly meant and entailed remained a flexible, open idea. Pakistan meant different things for different people for many years until the mid-1940s. For example, the maps that were imagined by its advocates in the 1930s differed from one person to the next, and also look very different to the final outcome that came about in 1947.
Late 1930s: Fear begins to dominate
● The 1936–37 provincial election results have great historical significance. Despite separate electorates based on religion, the Muslim League (the major opposition party to Nehru’s Indian National Congress) fared badly even in Muslim majority provinces — a consequence of the fact that other than religion, it was considerations like class and language which defined identities for many Indian voters then. The Congress Party gained power in most provinces. Thus, one can say that even as late as in 1937, the majority of Muslims in India did not favor the Muslim League.
● However, for many of India’s Muslims, the subsequent experience of being ruled by Congress politicians (we should be careful not to confuse the colonial-era Congress party with its post-Independence avatar) who frequently behaved in ways that failed to inspire confidence in the Muslim population, struck a new fear of a “Hindu Raj.” In other words, even though prominent Congress leaders like Nehru, Patel, and Bose were broadly secular in their outlook, many other leaders nurtured regressive ideas regarding Hindu supremacy and were dismissive of the appeals of tolerance and religious harmony in the country. The words and actions of such bigoted leaders continued to make many Muslims fearful of their fate once the British left, a fear that was expressed politically by the Muslim League.
1940s: The failure of political negotiations
● With Congress deciding in 1939 to resign from the provincial governments to protest Britain’s decision of dragging India into the Second World War, and later with most of its leaders being out of action (jailed) during the Quit India movement of 1942, the Muslim League — which had badly lost the 1937 elections — was revived by its leaders, especially Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as an important political party to negotiate with the departing British.
● However, even in 1940, when the Muslim League passed the Lahore Resolution, Pakistan was still an ambiguous idea and was not thought of in terms of an independent territory. As Prof. Amrith said, “there was no sense of where, let alone what, Pakistan would be.” In other words, it was simply imagined as a territory (not exactly even a ‘nation’) for India’s Muslims where they would not have to “suffer from the dominance” of Hindus — a feeling that also had its origins in the extreme propaganda of right-wing Hindu organizations existing then [one of those, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has now increasingly come under the radar even in the US].
● In 1945, as the war ended, negotiations for the transfer of power from British to Indian hands began. Congress leaders were released from jail, but the Congress no longer remained the party that spoke for the whole of India: the Muslim League now projected itself as the only legitimate political voice of the large Muslim populace of India. It was not, however, talking about a completely separate nation yet.
● Thus began a political tug-of-war between the two parties, each desiring the terms of transfer of power from the British to be sympathetic to their demands. The Cabinet Mission was sent by the British govt to try to reach an acceptable plan for transferring power. However in mid-1946, after the failure of the Cabinet Mission to strike any sort of consensus between the League and the Congress, it finally became clear that British India might have to be divided.
It is also important to note here that though tensions between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia were centuries-old, British colonial policies — often made to aggressively preserve their domination over India — were largely responsible for these tensions acquiring political significance in the twentieth century. Anyway, it was only after the failure of the Cabinet Mission talks in 1946 that Partition became a concrete possibility. Despite attempts to avoid Partition, the inability of the involved parties — primarily the Congress, the Muslim League, and the British administration — to reach a mutually agreeable consensus was the immediate reason for the decision.
So now, who do we blame from among these actors? As a historian, it is clear to me that Partition was a decision made amidst very broad-based and powerful social pressures on political individuals, and thus if I had to blame, I would blame circumstances, not persons. After all, in most political dealings, there are no perfect decisions — there are only compromises.
Perhaps Partition would have been avoided if the negotiating parties in Delhi were more flexible, tactful, and willing to compromise. Perhaps. In any case, seeing how in India and Pakistan ordinary politicians and religious organizations have hardly been inclusive and tolerant of their compatriots, one can well imagine the constrained realities in which the 1947 negotiating parties — prominent national politicians, that is — were carrying out their deliberations. These people were, after all, humans, and had their limitations. When we look back at them now, we expect them to be some kind of superhumans who “should have been able to” make the “right” decisions. But alas, it was not that simple. A good analogy would be when people watch a sport comfortably at home and constantly criticize the captain and other players on their choices — as if watching from thousands of miles away on TV provided them full knowledge of the circumstances and the conditions on the ground.
In any case, instead of ad hominem dissecting what politicians in the past did, it is much more important to look at what we ourselves are doing now with the challenges we have in our midst. It all depends upon our choices after all: Do we want to use history to keep going back to the same events and blaming the same set of people over and over again, or do we want to use history to make a better, more humane, more tolerant future by learning from those events and those people’s actions?
