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1. Some Partition Experiences
2. A Momentous Marker
2.1 Partition or holocaust? 2.2 The power of stereotypes
3. Why and How Did Partition Happen?
3.1 Culminating point of a long history?
3.2 The provincial elections of 1937 and the Congress ministries
3.3 The “Pakistan” Resolution
3.4 The suddenness of Partition
3.5 Post-War developments
3.6 A possible alternative to Partition
3.7 Towards Partition
4. The Withdrawal of Law and Order
4.1 The one-man army
5. Gendering Partition
5.1 “Recovering” women 5.2 Preserving “honour”
6. Regional Variations
7. Help, Humanity, Harmony
8. Oral Testimonies and History
Introduction
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➔ This chapter will examine the history The Partition of British India:
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➔ Why and how it happened?
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➔ Experiences of ordinary people during the period 1946-50 and beyond.
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➔ the history of these experiences can be reconstructed by talking to people and interviewing them, that is, through the use of oral history.
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➔ At the same time, it will point out the strengths and limitations of oral history.
1. Some Partition Experiences
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➔ The informants were Pakistanis
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➔ The researcher was Indian
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➔ The job of this researcher was to understand how those who had
lived more or less harmoniously for generations inflicted so much violence on each other in 1947“I am simply returning my father’s karz,his debt”
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➔ The Indian researcher visited to the History Department Library of Punjab University, Lahore, Pakistan in the winter of 1992
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➔ The librarian, Abdul Latif, helped him a lot
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➔ Researcher asked “Latif Sahib, why do you go out of your way to
help me so much? -
➔ Abdul latif replied that
• His family belonged to Hindu dominated village of Jammu
Three
incidents narrated by people to a researcher in
1993(oral history)
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Incident 1 |
: researchers first story
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Muslims were massacred by Hindu ruffians in August 1947(during partition)
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His father was only Muslim youth left alive
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A neighbouring Hindu old lady saved his father
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a group of armed Hindu hoodlums appeared in the night
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His father lied down as if dead among other dead bodies
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Hindu lady already dumped a number of bodies on him
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His father managed to escape to Siyalkot in the morning
➔ Abdul latif said to researcher “I help you because that Hindu mai helped my father. I am simply returning my father’s karz, his debt”
“For quite a few years now, I have not met a Punjabi Musalman”
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➔ The Indian researcher visited a youth hostel in Lahore, Pakistan for accommodation
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➔ The youth hostel manager Iqbal Ahmed told a story related to India
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➔ In the early 1950s he(manager) was posted at Delhi as a clerk at the Pakistani High Commission
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➔ He had been asked by a Lahori friend to deliver a rukka (a short handwritten note) to his erstwhile neighbour who now resided at Paharganj in Delhi.
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➔ One day he rode out on bicycle towards Paharganj and met a Sikh cyclist he asked him in Punjabi, ‘Sardarji, the way to Paharganj, please?
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➔ After understanding that he was a Panjabi Musalman from Pakistan the Sikh gave him a mighty hug.
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➔ Sikh said, ‘For quite a few years now, I have not met a Punjabi Musalman. I have been longing to meet one but you cannot find Punjabi-speaking Musalmans here.’
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Incident 2: |
researcher’s second story |
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Incident 3 |
:researcher’s third story |
“No, no! You can never be ours”
➔ The researcher met a pakistani citizen in Lahore in 1992.
➔ He mistook researcher to be a Pakistani studying abroad.
➔Once researcher revealed his Indian citizenship
➔All of a sudden his tone changed
➔“Oh Indian! I had thought you were Pakistani.”
➔ Researcher tried his best to impress upon him that he always
see himself as South Asian.
➔ “No, no! You can never be ours. Your people wiped out my entire village in 1947, we are sworn enemies and shall always remain so.”
2.1 Partition or holocaust?
➔Several hundred thousand people were killed and innumerable women raped and abducted.
➔Millions were uprooted, transformed into refugees in alien lands.
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➔ Estimate of casualties vary from 200,000 to 500,000 people.
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➔ Some 15 million had to move across hastily constructed
frontiers separating India and Pakistan.
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➔ The boundaries between the two new states were not officially known until two days after formal independence
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➔ They were rendered homeless
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➔ Suddenly lost all their immovable property and most of their movable assets
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➔ Separated from many of their relatives and friends as well, from their houses, fields and fortunes, from their childhood memories.
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➔ Tripped of their local or regional cultures
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➔ They were forced to begin picking up their life from scratch. Other expression instead of simply ‘partition’
The following are terms used instead of ‘partition’➔‘a more or less orderly constitutional arrangement’ ➔‘an agreed-upon division of territories and assets’ ➔‘a sixteen- month civil war’
➔The survivors themselves have often spoken of 1947 through other words: “maashal-la” (martial law), “mara-mari’ (killings), and “raula”, or “hullar” (disturbance, tumult, uproar).
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Is this usage appropriate?➔ “Holocaust” means destruction or slaughter on a mass scale.
➔ Speaking of killings in 1947 the term holocaust was used
➔The term “holocaust” in a sense captures the gravity of what happened in the subcontinent in 1947, something that the mild term “partition” hides.
➔It also helps to focus on why Partition, like the Holocaust in Germany, is remembered and referred to in our contemporary concerns so much.
Was partition incidents a
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“holocaust |
Why it is not a holocaust as in Nazi Germany?
➔In 1947-48, the subcontinent did not witness any state-driven extermination as was the case with Nazi Germany
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➔ In Nazi Germany various modern brutal techniques of control and organisation had been used.
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➔ The “ethnic cleansing” in India was carried out by self- styled representatives of religious communities rather than by state agencies
2.2 The power of stereotypes
Partition generated memories, hatreds, stereotypes and identities that still continue to shape the history of people on both sides of the border.
a stereotype is an over-generalized belief about a particular category of people
Examples of stereotypes1)India-haters in Pakistan
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2) Pakistan-haters in India
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3) Some Indians believe Muslims are cruel, bigoted, unclean, descendants of invaders, while Hindus are kind, liberal, pure, children of the invaded.
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4) Some Pakistanis feel that Muslims are fair, brave, monotheists and meat-eaters, while Hindus are dark, cowardly, polytheists and vegetarian. (R.M. Murphy journalist)
➔Every myth in these constructions has been systematically critiqued by historians.
➔The relationship between Pakistan and India has been profoundly shaped by this legacy of Partition.
➔Perceptions of communities on both sides have been structured by the conflicting memories of those momentous times.
3. Why and How Did Partition Happen? 3.1 Culminating point of a long history?
➔ Some historians, suggest that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s two nation theory can be projected back into medieval history connected to the long history of Hindu-Muslim conflict throughout medieval and modern times.
What is the problem with this argument?
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➔ 1 Such an argument does not recognise that the history of conflict between communities has coexisted with a long history of sharing, and of mutual cultural exchange.
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➔ 2 It also does not take into account the changing circumstances that shape people’s thinking.
➔ They suggest that separate electorates for Muslims, created by the colonial government in 1909 and expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics.
Argument 1
There Was long history of Hindu-Muslim conflict
Argument 2
Partition is a culmination of a communal politics
Role of separate electorates
➔Separate electorates meant that Muslims could now elect their own representatives in designated constituencies.
➔This created a temptation for politicians working within this system to use sectarian slogans and gather a following by distributing favours to their own religious groups.
Congress accepted separate electorates in The Lucknow Pact 1916
was it a wrong step?
➔The Lucknow Pact of December 1916 was an understanding between the Congress and the Muslim League (controlled by
the UP-based “Young Party”)
➔ The Congress accepted separate electorates.
➔The pact provided a joint political platform for the Moderates, Radicals and the Muslim League
, the cow protection movement, shuddhi
➔Music-before-mosque : The playing of music by a religious procession outside a mosque at the time of namaz could lead
to Hindu-Muslim violence
➔ Muslims were angered by “music-before-mosque”, by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi )those who had recently converted to Islam.
➔ Arya Samaj:- A North Indian Hindu reform organisation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly
“music-before-mosque”
movement after 1930s
active in the Punjab, which sought to revive Vedic learning and combine it with modern education in the sciences.
Spread of tabligh (propaganda)and tanzim (organisation)after 1923
➔ Hindus were angered by the rapid spread of tabligh (propaganda) and tanzim (organisation) after 1923.
➔Every communal riot deepened differences between communities, creating disturbing memories of violence.
Conclusion
➔As the protagonist of Garm Hawa, a film on Partition, puts it, “Communal discord happened even before 1947 but it had never led to the uprooting of millions from their homes”.
➔Partition was a qualitatively different phenomenon from earlier communal politics
➔ To understand it we need to look carefully at the events of the last decade of British rule
What is communalism?
➔There are many aspects to our identity.
Identities we have(identities are dynamic or no fixed
identity)
1 Gender
2 Language
3 Locality
4 Economic status poor or rich
5 Occupation
6 Caste
7 Religion
8 Nation
9 as world citizens
➔ Communalism refers to a politics that seeks to unify one community around a religious identity in hostile opposition to another community.
➔It seeks to define this community identity as fundamental and fixed.
➔It attempts to consolidate this identity and present it as natural – as if people were born into the identity, as if the identities do not evolve through history over time.
➔In order to unify the community, communalism suppresses distinctions within the community and emphasises the essential unity of the community against other communities.
➔One could say communalism nurtures a politics of hatred for an identified “other”– “Hindus” in the case of Muslim communalism, and “Muslims” in the case of Hindu communalism.
➔Communalism, then, is a particular kind of politicisation of religious identity, an ideology that seeks to promote conflict between religious communities.
➔In the context of a multi-religious country, the phrase “religious nationalism” can come to acquire a similar meaning.
3.2 The provincial elections of 1937 and the Congress ministries How election result led to communal thought?
➔In 1937, elections to the provincial legislatures were held for the first time.
➔Only about 10 to 12 per cent of the population enjoyed the right to vote.
➔ The Congress did well in the elections, winning an absolute majority in 5 out of 11 provinces and forming governments in seven of them.
➔It did badly in the constituencies reserved for Muslims, but the Muslim League also fared poorly, polling only 4.4 per cent of the total Muslim vote cast in this election.
➔The League failed to win a single seat in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and could capture only two out of 84 reserved constituencies in the Punjab and three out of 33 in Sind.
Congress denies Muslim League’s demand
➔In the United Provinces, the Muslim League wanted to form a joint government with the Congress.
➔The Congress had won an absolute majority in the province, so it rejected the offer.
➔Some scholars argue that this rejection convinced the League that if India remained united, then Muslims would find it difficult to gain political power because they would remain a minority.
➔ The League assumed, that only a Muslim party could represent Muslim interests, and that the Congress was essentially a Hindu party.
➔It was from this point onwards that the League doubled its efforts at expanding its social support.
➔ Later the Congress did not achieve any substantial gains in the “Muslim mass contact” programme it launched.
Why Congress denied League’s demand?
➔In the United Provinces, the party had rejected the Muslim League proposal for a coalition government partly because the League tended to support landlordism, which the Congress wished to abolish.
Secularism of Congress questioned League calls it a ‘Hindu Party’
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➔ The leading Congress leaders in the late 1930s insisted need for secularism
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➔ But these ideas were by no means universally shared lower down in the party hierarchy, or even by all Congress ministers.
➔Maulana Azad, an important Congress leader, pointed out in 1937 that members of the Congress were not allowed to join the League, yet Congressmen were active in the Hindu Mahasabha– at least in the Central Provinces (present-day Madhya Pradesh).
➔Only in December 1938 did the Congress Working Committee declare that Congress members could not be members of the Mahasabha.
Hindu Mahasabha➔Founded in 1915, the Hindu Mahasabha was a Hindu party that remained confined to North India.
➔It aimed to unite Hindu society by encouraging the Hindus to transcend the divisions of caste and sect.
➔It sought to define Hindu identity in opposition to Muslim identity
Role of RSS
➔The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) spread from its Nagpur base to the United Provinces, the Punjab, and other parts of the country in the 1930s.
➔By 1940, the RSS had over 100,000 trained and highly disciplined cadres pledged to an ideology of Hindu nationalism, convinced that India was a land of the Hindus.
3.3 The “Pakistan” Resolution
The Muslim League
➔Initially floated in Dhaka in 1906, the Muslim League was quickly taken over by the U.P.-based Muslim elite.
➔The party began to make demands for autonomy for the Muslim- majority areas of the subcontinent and/or Pakistan in the 1940s
The name “Pakistan”
➔The name Pakistan or Pak-stan (from Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir,Sind and Baluchistan) was coined by a Punjabi Muslim student at Cambridge, Choudhry Rehmat Ali, who, in pamphlets written in 1933 and 1935, desired a separate national status for this new entity.
➔No one took Rehmat Ali seriously in the 1930s, least of all the League and other Muslim leaders who dismissed his idea merely as a student’s dream
The Pakistan demand
➔On 23 March 1940, the League moved a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim- majority areas of the subcontinent.
➔This resolution never mentioned partition or Pakistan.
➔In fact Sikandar Hayat Khan, Punjab Premier and leader of the Unionist Party, who had drafted the resolution, declared in a Punjab assembly speech on 1 March 1941 that he was opposed to a Pakistan
➔He reiterated his plea for a loose (united), confederation with considerable autonomy for the confederating units.
The origins of the Pakistan demand
➔The origins of the Pakistan demand have also been traced back to the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal, the writer of “Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara”.
➔In his presidential address to the Muslim League in 1930, the poet spoke of a need for a “North- West Indian Muslim state”.
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➔ Iqbal, was not visualising the emergence of a new country in that speech but a reorganisation of Muslim-majority areas in north-western India into an autonomous unit within a single, loosely structured Indian federation
Unionist Party -
➔ A political party representing the interests of landholders – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – in the Punjab.
➔The party was particularly powerful during the period 1923- 47.
3.4 The suddenness of Partition
The Muslim League resolution of 1940➔The League’s resolution of 1940 demanded:
Geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions, which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, thatas in the north- western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to
constitute “Independent States”, in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign
the areas in which
the Muslims are numerically in a majority
Sad outcome
➔ The League itself was vague about its demand in 1940. ➔There was a very short time – just seven years – between the
first demand and Partition.
➔No one knew what the creation of Pakistan meant, and how it might shape people’s lives in the future.
➔Many who migrated from their homelands in 1947 thought they would return as soon as peace prevailed again.
➔In the beginning Jinnah himself may have seen the Pakistan idea as a bargaining counter, useful for blocking possible British concessions to the Congress and gaining additional favours for the Muslims.
3.5 Post-War developments
➔ In l945,the British agreed to create an entirely Indian central Executive Council, except for the Viceroy and the Commander -in-Chief
Discussions about the transfer of power
➔Discussions about the transfer of power broke down due to Jinnah’s demand
➔Jinnah’s demands
1) League had an absolute right to choose all the Muslim
members of the Executive Council
2)that there should be a kind of communal veto in the Council, with decisions opposed by Muslims needing a two- thirds majority.
Why Jinnah’s first demand is considered as extraordinary?
(Demand-League to choose all Muslim members)
➔ Large section of the nationalist Muslims supported the Congress (its delegation for these discussions was headed by Maulana Azad)
➔West Punjab members of the Unionist Party were largely Muslims.
➔So leagues demand considered extraordinary
Provincial elections 1946
The League’s success in the seats reserved for Muslims
➔Provincial elections were again held in 1946.
➔The Congress swept the general constituencies, capturing 91.3
per cent of the non-Muslim vote.
➔The League’s success in the seats reserved for Muslims was equally spectacular
➔it won all 30 reserved constituencies in the Centre with 86.6 per cent of the Muslim vote and 442 out of 509 seats in the provinces.
➔Only as late as 1946, therefore, did the League establish itself as the dominant party among Muslim voters, seeking to vindicate its claim to be the “sole spokesman” of India’s Muslims.
➔About 10 to 12 per cent of the population enjoyed the right to vote in the provincial elections and a mere one per cent in the elections for the Central Assembly
3.6 A possible alternative to Partition
Cabinet mission plan 1946
➔In March 1946 the British Cabinet sent a three- member mission to Delhi
➔The Cabinet Mission toured the country for three months and recommended a loose three-tier confederation.
Recommendation of Cabinet mission
1)India was to remain united.
2)It was to have a weak central government controlling only
foreign affairs, defence and communications
3) The existing provincial assemblies being grouped into three sections while electing the constituent assembly:
Section A for the Hindu- majority provinces
Sections B and C for the Muslim-majority provinces of the
north-west and the north-east (including Assam) respectively.
4)The sections or groups of provinces would comprise various regional units.
5)They would have the power to set up intermediate-level executives and legislatures of their own.
Neither the League nor the Congress agreed to the Cabinet
Mission’s proposal
➔The League wanted the grouping to be compulsory, with Sections B and C developing into strong entities with the right to secede from the Union in the future.
➔The Congress wanted that provinces be given the right to join a group.
➔It was not satisfied with the Mission’s clarification that grouping would be compulsory at first, but provinces would have the right to opt out after the constitution had been finalised and new elections held in accordance with it.
➔ After the failure of cabinet mission partition became more or less inevitable, with most of the Congress leaders agreeing to it, seeing it as tragic but unavoidable.
➔Only Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the NWFP continued to firmly oppose the idea of partition
3.7 Towards Partition
“Direct Action” and communal riots
➔ The Muslim League decided on “Direct Action” for winning its Pakistan demand.
➔It announced 16 August 1946 as “Direct Action Day”.
➔On this day, riots broke out in Calcutta, lasting several
days and leaving several thousand people dead.
➔By March 1947 violence spread to many parts of northern India.
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➔ In March 1947 that the Congress high command voted for dividing the Punjab into two halves, one with Muslim majority and the other with Hindu/Sikh majority
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➔ It asked for the application of a similar principle to Bengal.
➔By this time, given the numbers game, many Sikh leaders and Congressmen in the Punjab were convinced that Partition was a necessary evil, otherwise they would be swamped by Muslim majorities and Muslim leaders would dictate terms.
➔ In Bengal too a section of bhadralok Bengali Hindus, who wanted political power to remain with them, began to fear the “permanent tutelage of Muslims” (as one of their leaders put it). Since they were in a numerical minority, they felt that only a division of the province could ensure their political dominance.
4. The Withdrawal of Law and Order the collapse of the institutions of governance.
➔The bloodbath continued for about a year from March 1947 onwards.
➔One main reason for this was the collapse of the institutions of governance.
Police failure➔ Penderel Moon, an administrator serving in Bahawalpur (in present-day Pakistan) at the time, noted how the police failed to fire even a single shot when arson and killings were taking place in Amritsar in March 1947.
➔Amritsar district became the scene of bloodshed later in the year when there was a complete breakdown of authority in the city.
Failure of British officials
➔British officials did not know how to handle the situation: they were unwilling to take decisions, and hesitant to intervene.
➔When panic-stricken people appealed for help, British officials asked them to contact Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabh Bhai Patel or M.A. Jinnah.
➔Nobody knew who could exercise authority and power.
➔ The top leadership of the Indian parties, were involved in
negotiations regarding independence
➔ Many Indian civil servants in the affected provinces feared for their own lives and property.
➔The British were busy preparing to quit India. Failure of army and police
➔Problems were compounded because Indian soldiers and policemen came to act as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs.
➔As communal tension mounted the professional commitment of those in uniform could not be relied upon.
➔In many places not only did policemen help their co- religionists but they also attacked members of other communities
4.1 The one-man army Gandhi
➔ The77-year -old Gandhiji moved from the villages of Noakhali in East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) to the villages of Bihar and then to the riot-torn slums of Calcutta and Delhi, in a heroic effort to stop Hindus and Muslims kill each other, careful everywhere to reassure the minority community.
➔In October 1946, Muslims in East Bengal targeted Hindus.
➔Gandhiji visited the area, toured the villages on foot, and persuaded the local Muslims to guarantee the safety of Hindus.
➔Similarly, in other places such as Delhi he tried to build a spirit of mutual trust and confidence between the two communities.
➔A Delhi Muslim, Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi, compelled to flee to a dirty, overcrowded camp in Purana Qila, likened Gandhiji’s arrival in Delhi on 9 September 1947 to “the arrival of the rains after a particularly long and harsh summer”.
➔Dehlavi recalled in his memoir how Muslims said to one another: “Delhi will now be saved”.
➔On 28 November 1947, on the occasion of Guru Nanak’s birthday, when Gandhiji went to address a meeting of Sikhs at Gurdwara Sisganj, he noticed that there was no Muslim on the Chandni Chowk road, the heart of old Delhi.
➔“What could be more shameful for us,” he asked during a speech that evening, “than the fact that not a single Muslim could be found in Chandni Chowk?”
➔Gandhiji continued to be in Delhi, fighting the mentality of those who wished to drive out every Muslim from the city, seeing them as Pakistani.
➔When he began a fast to bring about a change of heart, amazingly, many Hindu and Sikh migrants fasted with him.
➔The effect of the fast was “electric”, wrote Maulana Azad. ➔People began realising the folly of the violence they had
unleashed on the city’s Muslims
➔ But it was only Gandhiji’s martyrdom that finally ended this macabre drama of violence.
➔“The world veritably changed,” many Delhi Muslims of the time recalled later.
5. Gendering Partition 5.1 “Recovering” women
the experiences of ordinary people during the Partition
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➔ During partition and violence Women were raped, abducted, sold, often many times over
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➔ They were forced to settle down to a new life with strangers in unknown circumstances.
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➔ But later the Indian and Pakistani governments took steps to recover women
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➔ Many were sent them back to their earlier families or locations.
➔They did not consult the concerned women, undermining their right to take decisions regarding their own lives.
➔According to one estimate, 30,000 women were “recovered” overall, 22,000 Muslim women in India and 8000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan, in an operation that ended as late as 1954
the experience of a couple related to recovering women
by Prakash Tandon in’Punjabi Century’,
an autobiographical social history of colonial Punjab
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➔ A Sikh youth took away a young, beautiful Muslim girl from a massacring crowd during partition
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➔ They got married, and slowly fell in love with each other.
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➔ Gradually memories of her parents, who had been killed, and
her former life faded.
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➔ A little boy was born.
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➔ Soon, however, social workers and the police, to recover abducted women, began to track down the couple.
➔They made inquiries in the Sikh’s home-district of Jalandhar;
➔The social workers reached Calcutta.
➔Meanwhile, the couple’s friends tried to obtain a stay-order from the court but the law was taking its ponderous course.
➔From Calcutta the couple escaped to some obscure Punjab village.
➔But the police caught up them and began to question them.
➔ His wife was pregnant.
➔The Sikh sent the little boy to his mother and took his wife to a sugar-cane field.
➔He made her as comfortable as he could in a pit while he lay with a gun, waiting for the police, determined not to lose her while he was alive.
➔In the pit he delivered her with his own hands.
➔The next day she ran high fever, and in three days she was dead.
➔He had not dared to take her to the hospital.
➔He was so afraid the social workers and the police would take
her away.
5.2 Preserving “honour”
➔ Ideas of preserving community honour came into play in this period of extreme physical and psychological danger.
➔This notion of honour drew upon a conception of masculinity defined as ownership of zan (women) and zamin (land), a notion of considerable antiquity in North Indian peasant societies.
➔Virility, it was believed, lay in the ability to protect your possessions – zan and zamin – from being appropriated by outsiders.
➔ The men feared that “their” women – wives, daughters, sisters – would be violated by the “enemy”, they killed the women themselves.
The Other Side of Silence
➔Urvashi Butalia in her book, The Other Side of Silence, narrates one incident in the village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district.
➔During Partition, in this Sikh village, ninety women are said to have “voluntarily” jumped into a well rather than fall into “enemy” hands.
➔The migrant refugees from this village still commemorate the event at a gurdwara in Delhi, referring to the deaths as martyrdom, not suicide
➔ On 13 March every year, when their “martyrdom” is celebrated, the incident is recounted to an audience of men, women and children.
➔ What such rituals do not seek to remember, are the stories of all those who did not wish to die, and those who had to end their lives against their will
6. Regional Variations
➔The near -total displacement of Hindus and Sikhs eastwards into India from West Punjab and of almost all Punjabi- speaking Muslims to Pakistan happened between 1946 and 1948.
➔Many Muslim families of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh continued to migrate to Pakistan through the 1950s and early 1960s, although many chose to remain in India.
➔Most of these Urdu-speaking people, known as muhajirs (migrants) in Pakistan moved to the Karachi- Hyderabad region in Sind.
➔In Bengal the migration was more protracted
➔Bengali division produced a process of suffering that may
have been less concentrated but was as agonising.
➔ Unlike the Punjab, the exchange of population in Bengal was not near-total.
What was the Partition like in Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,
Central India and the Deccan?
➔Many Bengali Hindus remained in East Pakistan while many Bengali Muslims continued to live in West Bengal.
➔Finally, Bengali Muslims (East Pakistanis) rejected Jinnah’s two-nation theory through political action, breaking away from Pakistan and creating Bangladesh in 1971-72.
➔A common religion could not hold East and West Pakistan together.
➔There is, a huge similarity between the Punjab and Bengal experiences.
➔In both these states, women and girls became prime targets of persecution.
➔Attackers treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered.
7. Help, Humanity, Harmony
➔Historians have discovered numerous stories of how people helped each other during the Partition period, stories of caring and sharing, of the opening of new opportunities, and of triumph over trauma.
➔Khushdeva Singh, a Sikh doctor specialising in the treatment of tuberculosis, posted at Dharampur in present- day Himachal Pradesh.
➔ The doctor provided that rare healing touch, food, shelter, love and security to numerous migrants, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu alike.
➔Muhammad Umar, wrote to Khushdeva Singh: “With great humility I beg to state that I do not feel myself safe except under your protection.
The work of Khushdeva Singh and his visits to Karachi after
partition (in 1949)
➔ Khushdeva Singh wrote ‘’Love is Stronger than Hate: A Remembrance of 1947’’.
➔Here, Singh describes his work as “humble efforts I made to discharge my duty as a human being to fellow human beings”.
➔He speaks most warmly of two short visits to Karachi in 1949. ➔Old friends and those whom he had helped at Dharampur spent a
few memorable hours with him at Karachi airport.
➔Six police constables, earlier acquaintances, walked him to the plane, saluting him as he entered it.
➔“I acknowledged (the salute) with folded hands and tears in my eyes.”
8. Oral Testimonies and History
Importance of Oral history
➔ History of Partition constructed in this chapter on narratives, memoirs, diaries, family histories, first-hand written accounts
➔ Millions of people viewed Partition in terms of the suffering and the challenges of the times.
Why oral testimony relevant?
1.Memories and experiences shape the reality of an event.
2.One of the strengths of personal reminiscence – one type of oral source – is that it helps us grasp experiences and memories in detail.
3.It enables historians to write richly textured
4.It gives vivid accounts of what happened to people during
events such as Partition.
5.It gives the day-to-day experiences of people
(It is impossible to extract this kind of information from
government documents. In the case of Partition, government
reports and files tell us little, about the day-to-day
experiences of those affected by the government’s decision to
divide the country).
6.Oral history also allows historians to broaden the boundaries of their discipline
7.It gives experiences of the poor and the powerless: Example
A Abdul Latif’s father
B The women of Thoa Khalsa
C The refugee who retailed wheat at wholesale prices, eking out a paltry living by selling the gunny bags in which the wheat came
D A middle-class Bengali widow bent double over road-laying work in Bihar
E A Peshawari trader who thought it was wonderful to land a
petty job in Cuttack upon migrating to India but asked:
“Where is Cuttack, is it on the upper side of Hindustan or the lower; we haven’t quite heard of it before in Peshawar?”
What are the drawbacks of oral history?
➔ Many historians still remain sceptical of oral history.
1)Oral data seem to lack concreteness
2)Lack of chronology.
3)Personal experience is unique
4)generalisation difficult in oral history
5)oral accounts are concerned the small individual
experiences
6)Loss of memory over time
7)Oral data on Partition are not automatically or easily available.(eg; women experience during ‘recovering’
8)protagonists may not want to talk about intensely personal
experiences (a raped woman would not disclose it to to a
stranger)
9)The oral historian faces the daunting task of having to sift the “actual” experiences of Partition from a web of “constructed” memories
Fiction, Poetry, Films Related to
partition
Fiction
➔Saadat Hasan Manto,Urdu short story writer book, Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins)
➔Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi (Urdu) Intizar Husain (Urdu)
➔Bhisham Sahni (Hindi)
➔Kamaleshwar (Hindi)
➔Rahi Masoom Raza (Hindi)
➔Narain Bharati (Sindhi)
➔Sant Singh Sikhon (Punjabi)
➔Narendranath Mitra (Bengali)
➔Syed Waliullah (Bengali)
➔Lalithambika Antharjanam (Malayalam)
➔Amitav Ghosh (English) and Bapsi Sidhwa (English).
Poetry
➔Amrita Pritam, (Punjabi) Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Urdu) and Dinesh Das (Bengali)
➔Films Ritwik Ghatak (Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha), M.S. Sathyu (Garam Hawa ),
Govind Nihalani ( Tamas ),
➔ Play Jis Lahore Nahin Vekhya O Jamya-e-nai (He Who Has Not Seen Lahore, Has Not Been Born) directed by Habib Tanvir