Midnight’s children and the fetishisation of the word “now”
“You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it”
- Punjab official to young social worker from Oxford, August 1947.
On the stroke of midnight between August 14 and 15 1947, India and Pakistan became independent, after nearly 200 years of British colonial rule ( under, first, the British East India Company and then the ‘Raj’).
But what should have been the crowning moment for anti-colonial campaigners and Indian nationalists, proved to be a bitter disappointment and tragedy. Even Mahatma Gandhi, the universally acknowledged “father” of the new nation, refused to be interviewed, saying that he had “run dry”. He marked the moment of independence with a 24-hour fast.
The reason for Gandhi’s (and many other anti-colonialists’) despair was partition (between nominally secular India and Muslim Pakistan) and the million men, women and children who died in the sectarian violence that accompanied it – not to mention the sixteen million people who fled their homes in both directions between India and Pakistan to escape real and imagined communal violence.
The blame for this lies at the feet of several protagonists: the British Raj (obviously), which had deliberately stoked up sectarian hostilities between Hindus and Muslims (generally favouring Muslims) as part of a ‘divide and rule’ policy; Ghandi and his “socialist” Hindu sidekick Jawaharlal Nehru, who had misjudged the force of Muslim particularism and arrogantly underestimated the Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah; Jinnah himself, whose personal ambition, opportunism and hypocrisy (while campaigning for an Islamic state he personally enjoyed whisky, ham sandwiches and many other aspects of the non-religious good life) led him to deliberately stoke up religious passions; but most culpable of all was the British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, whose deliberate delay of the boundary award and whose ordering of precipitate withdrawal fuelled the rumours and panic that led to the massacres and displacement. It was a conscious policy on his part: he commented (about the delay in publishing the award): “Without question, the earlier it was published, the more the British would have to bear responsibility for the disturbances which would undoubtably result. The later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British”.
Mountbatten also brought forward the planned date of the British departure from June 1948 to August 1947: this meant that the two new Dominions had no time to train or put in place personnel to supervise a more orderly and peaceful transfer of populations. He did this in defiance of the advice of his predecessor Sir Cyril Radcliffe, and of most people who knew anything about the situation in India: Dennis Judd (in the present issue of the BBC’s History magazine) speculates that, “Sixty years after the event, however, there is a vociferous body of opinion that seriously doubts whether Mountbatten deserves much credit for the final ending of British rule, and indeed, whether his vanity and notorious desire for acclaim led to a quick newsworthy fix which in turn resulted in the shocking post-partition communal massacres in which at least a million Indians died”.
Gandhi was not alone in his despair. The veteran Indian politician Khizr Hayat, across the border in Lahore, wrote: “It is heartbreaking to see what is happening…It is all due to the policy of liquidating and quitting before any real agreement has been arrived at…The fixing of a date for transferance of power ruled out any adjustment and vivisection was the only course left…We will have to start afresh (but) there is hardly any hope of building things on old lines as communal hatred and mutual destruction are now uppermost in everybody’s mind”.
The experience of the irresponsible, domestically-motivated, precipitate withdrawal from India sixty years ago, should give pause for thought to all those who think that the slogan “Troops Out Now” (with the emphasis on “Now”), is some sort of matter of principle. That relatively recent (from the Vietnam war) slogan, does not take account of the complexity of the real world, or of the responsibility that invaders and colonialists have to the peoples whose countries they have occupied.
I wish to thank and acknowledge Ramachandra Guha, whose article in the August 2007 edition of the BBC’s History magazine (www.bbchistorymagazine.com) provided me with the basis for this piece, and from which I also obtained all the quotes -JD.
NB: Sunny and his chums are discussing India, Pakistan, partition, colonialism and all related matters here: well worth a vist.
Ryan said,
August 16, 2007 at 4:24 pm
“nominally secular India”
Nominally?
Jim Denham said,
August 17, 2007 at 7:34 am
Point taken, Ryan. I was lapsing tnto Trotspeak, slipping in a qualifying adjective (the eqivalent of scare-quotes round words like “democracy” or “terror”, so beloved of sections of the left). India, despite its many faults (see, for instance, Sunny over at Pickled Politics), always was and remains, a secular state. On reflection, I would like to remove the word from the article but that would (a) make your comment look weird and (b) might be interpreted as me trying to cover up a mistake. So I’ll leave “nominally” in there, as a standing reproach to myself and a reminder to be more careful in my use of English in future.
Tony Maher said,
August 17, 2007 at 10:40 am
I thought the date was brought forward because Wavell (Mountbattens predecessor )told him that the Raj had already lost ontrol and the sectarian pot could explode at any time. Mountbatten therefore didn’t have any choice over leaving early.
Good Post – it was a tragic divorce.
chjh said,
August 17, 2007 at 12:30 pm
So the British administration which had deliberately stoked up sectarian hostilities between Hindus and Muslims (generally favouring Muslims) as part of a ‘divide and rule’ policy should have stayed on because…they would have had a miraculous change of heart?
Jim Denham said,
August 17, 2007 at 6:55 pm
With respect, chjh, I think you’re missing the point. It is not necessary to ascribe any historically progressive role to British colonialism to recognise that their irresponsible, precipitate withdrawal made the sectarian massacres almost inevitable. Had they stayed on another ten months or a year, a more orderly, and probably more limited, transfer of populations could have been organised and thousands of lives might well have been saved. I think that would have been worthwhile, and far more important than making some sort of principle (which the left and the Indain nationalist movement *didn’t* at the time) of “immediate” withdrawal. As I said in the article, the fetishisation of “troops out NOW” and “IMMEDIATE withdrawal”, etc, is a relatively recent phenomenon, since Vietnam.
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 1:24 pm
This is a quite incredible misuse and distortion of history. The British spent fifty years claiming that they were staying in India in order to help with a ‘transition’. The demand for a seperate Pakistan was first raised in the early 1930’s by students in Cambridge and there is considerable evidence that Jinnah right up until the last minute saw the demand as simply a bargaining chip in arguments about the balence of power within the new state. If the British had left in 1920 it is very doubtful that there would have been partition. The one lesson that is directly applicable to Iraq is that if the British and the US had simply walked away in the immediate aftermath of the invasion its very likely that the situation today would be much better then it actually is. They are not there for the security of Iraqi’s for goodness sake. They are there to try and ensure that the regime is a regime which suits them. Our own troops are there simply to show that we’re good allies of the US and George Bush. The catspaws of imperialism strike again. Its simply beyond belief. Your arguments are the arguments which were used to justify the prolongation of the British Empire. How do socialists come to such a pass. For Gods sake just go!!!! is the only proper response.
modernityblog said,
August 19, 2007 at 2:16 pm
JohnG,
do you have the titles of some reputable and scholarly books on the partition of India and in particular Jinnah?
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Plenty as you can imagine modernity. But why should I give them to you?
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Christ I never can resist can I. Jinnah the solespokesman by Ayesha Jalal is generally thought very good.
modernityblog said,
August 19, 2007 at 3:16 pm
JohnG,
thanks
politics aside, you know something about India and I am happy for you to prove it
and one on the partition itself?
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 3:39 pm
thats a less easy one. the partition also meant a partitioning of scholarship and its only relatively recently that one see’s scholarship that moves beyond either partition as the culmination of a historical quest for nationshood (ie the pakistani narrative) or on the other hand partition as a rather uncomfortable blemish on the national movement (ie the Indian narrative). Its one of those historical events that has proved extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with, both for ordinary people and for scholars. A not too bad contextualization of this can be found in an anthology: India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization edited by Mushiral Hasan published in the early ’90s.
One of the very odd things about partition is that despite its scale for a very long time people preferred not to talk about it (except perhaps in fictional accounts: I like ice candy man by bapsi sidwha). more recently attempts have been made to look at the much murkier realities at ground level, both in terms of how it was experianced by ordinary people and how the actual as opposed to the mythical two emerging states actually behaved. Gynandra Pandey’s book on Partition and Memory is I think very good on this. Its a neccessary part of the story.
modernityblog said,
August 19, 2007 at 5:03 pm
JohnG
so you suggesting there is little in common historiography and that it gets bogged down as part of the nationalists myths in Indian and Pakistani (leaving aside Ms. Jalal’s work, for the moment, which seems revisionist and has taken flak from either side, or so the reviews that I scanned suggested)?
how does more contemporary British history and foreign office papers add to it??
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Included in the anthology I suggested are a number of the most important contributions from British historians: these tend to focus on high politics. Indian histortians of course use foreign office papers just as much as British historians do. Jalal’s work, whilst considered controversial is nevertheless a central text on any reading list on the subject. Her Phd on which the book was based was supervised by Anil Seale who was one of the leading figures in what came to be known as ‘the Cambridge school’ and which itself was the subject of some controversy at the time. But it represented a broader revisionism based around the dominant trend within British historiography but departing from it in important respects. Anil Seale helped found the tradition of modern British historiography on South Asia at Cambridge. The Sole Spokesman is an important example of this tradition.
The controversy around Ayesha Jalal largely focuses around claims that she is not patriotic enough by Pakistani’s and that its a bit of a cheek for a Pakistani to write about Indian politics from Indians (there is also suspician that its all a bit ‘British’). I’m not greatly impressed by these arguments. I’m also not greatly impressed by the pop books which have recently come out. These are largely regurgitated versions of more academic schools. The anthology I suggested contains diverse views as well as source documents and allows you to make up your own mind, despite being edited by a leading representative of the Muslim secular tradition in India, often taxed for being too pro-Congress.
modernityblog said,
August 19, 2007 at 6:36 pm
JohnG,
Thank you, I had not appreciate the wide range of views on this topic and implication for national myths, which I suppose, when you think about it, is a bit obvious
this is an informative web page:
“Select Research Bibliography on the Partition of India
Compiled by Vinay Lal, Department of History, UCLA”
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Independent/partition_bibliography.html
johng said,
August 19, 2007 at 6:43 pm
some selected online stuff:
The most famous short story ever written on partition:
http://www.sacw.net/partition/tobateksingh.html
misc stuff.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/2002/10/06/stories/2002100600210400.htm
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1890688.cms
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/MHASAN.pdf
Very interesting account of partition in Bengal revealing some of the social complexity on the ground:
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/asianstudies/publications/working/changingBorders.html
Tony Maher said,
August 20, 2007 at 8:38 am
In terms of the outcome an earlier withdrawal might have spared the disaster of Partition but a counterfactual of this kind is often rose tinted.
Until Ghandhi made nationalism a mass movement in the 20’s the nationalist threat to the Raj was fairly marginal. Urban middle class discontent and sporadic terrorist attacks.
The British response to Ghandhi’s mass action was initial repression followed fairly swiftly by proposals for “dyarchy” i(this is from memory) n which local/ provincial government was to be Indianised and democratised as a platform for the ultimate democratisation and Indianisation of the centre. A sort of full “dominion status being the end point.
These concessions were accepted although the principle of gradualidsation was rejected by Congress and replaced with the demand for “Swaraj” – full independence.
Nonetheless after 35 Congress and the Muslim league both competed and co-operated in provincial government throughout India. The divide between them was widened by the war and their differing response to it. Gandhi opposed the war and in 1940 commenced the “quit India” campaign that saw him and the Congress leadership back in prison and Congress governments walk out of provincial office. The Muslim League opportunistically supported the British and retained and even gained government places.
To abandon India in 1940 was never a practical possibility and the British were always going to jettison conciliation in that great emergency.
The ‘44 Cripps mission attempted to resurrect dialogue and negotiation and included a pledge of withdrawal although it lacked a timeframe and was rejected by Congress.
By ‘47 the position had deteriorated to the point that the British felt that they were within a whisker of a complete loss of control. Additionally they feared a mutiny in India of not only Indian but British troops (the Indian Navy did in fact mutiny). British troops had refused to stay in Java to help the Dutch re-establish control in ‘45. Mountbatten would have had this very much in mind as he had been allied C. in C. South East Asia in ‘45.
Perfidious Albion were not entirely to blame for the division nor were they uniformly ruthless in their dealings with the Nationalists. During the war Ia settlement in India was a second order priority to the winning of the war against Germany and Japan. A fact that Nehru, at least, always accepted despite his loyalty to Gandhi.
Tony
johng said,
August 20, 2007 at 11:03 am
The divide in Congress between moderates and extremists dates to the first decade of the twentieth century and the resistance to British attempts to partition Bengal, largely in response to the growing nationalist agitation led by a largely Hindu middle class. Tilak on the other side of the continent at about this time coined the phrase ‘Swaraj is my birthright’ rejecting the notion of pre-conditions or timetables (an essential moment in the formation of nationalist consiousness). ‘Extremists’ in both Bengal and Maharashtra split the Congress and the move from ‘mendicant’ nationalism to full blown anti-colonial nationalism produced a crisis within ‘native’ politics. Gandhi (not Ghandi) steps into this breach combining loyalty to the moderate liberal tradition represented by lawyers and politicians like Gokhale who had pioneered the economic critique of colonialism, combining this with mendicant politics, with a project of building a genuinely mass movement.
This project produced further crisis. Both the older extremist tradition represented by those like Tilak and the older moderate tradition were horrified by the vast social churning of new rising social forces which constantly threatened to escape the boundaries of the respectable classes and castes on the one hand, and constitutional boundaries on the other. But Gandhi moved from being a threat to the only figure seen as capable of controlling these forces once they had been unleashed. The British as well vacillated on the question of Gandhi for precisely the same reasons. The implicit threat of disorder and violence was always a large part of the effectiveness of Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence something which by turns worried him and by turns he fairly explicitly utilized. So the big bourgoisie in India it was said would reach for ‘God and Gandhi’ at moments of distress.
The respectable groups representing different ‘communities’ were horrified not simply by the involvement of the rustic and unlettered but by the sense of being by-passed in Gandhi’s campaign. Thus both the Hindu Nationalist current and the Muslim League current under Jinnah reacted with horror to the new forms of politics. Gandhi’s first large scale campaign involved working with Islamic organisations around the issue of the protection of the Khalifat, involving vast mobilisations through the mosque and Islamic organisations and the involvement of equally vast numbers of the non-Muslim peasentry building on traditions of co-operation and milenial fervour across north India. This involvement with the ‘primitive’ and ‘incohate’ politics (scarcely comprehensible, one gets a sense of both alienation and excitement in Nehru’s autobiography, a sense of someone deeply moved and shaken by what he saw, a vast movement which he hardly understood but as Orwell might have put it, he would be prepared to die for) of the masses was the beginning of Jinnah’s disenchantment with Congress and the beginnings of the Hindu Nationalist split: both were in fact threatened by forces within their own communities being mobilised that by-passed them, but attempted to turn ideologically on the ‘other’ to mask this.
Gandhi however, whilst prepared to involve himself in mass politics was also deeply hostile to any form of class politics (something which frustrated the Nehru of the 1920’s and 30’s enourmously) and whenever the kind of social polarisation developed which might have sealed the unity that he had succeded in building occured he would call off the movement. Its possible to argue that the growing communal violence of the 1920’s and 30’s and 40’s was the essential product of Gandhi’s politics of class collaberation which created setback after setback in the movement (again if you read Nehru’s autobiography in the 1930’s he is close to spitting with rage at points). Gynandra Pandey wrote a seminal study of this process in UP in the 1930’s where he demonstrates the very close connection between this politics of demobilisation and the rise of communal politics.
Communal politics was also connected more explicitly to class interests. Wherever one looked it was the landlord interest that favoured partition. Thus in Bengal it was the Hindu’s who demanded the partition of the province leading to splits with the Congress High Command (see Joya Chatterjee Bengal Divided). The old Hindu Nationalist campaign of the early part of the 20th century against the partition of Bengal was forgotten as they demanded partition vociferously. Who would want to live in a united democratic state were the majority of the voting population were your peasentry. In Punjab precisely the reverse equation held. Again the issues involved here were closely tied to the power of the landlord interest on the one hand, assiduously fostered by the British, and the timerousness of Congress in challenging these vested interests on the other (despite Nehru’s talk).
This involves a much larger historical canvass then simply the events of the 1940’s and when Marxists discuss issues of ‘responsibility’ they do not simply look at the behaviour of individuals, or examine the impact of particular policies, they look at their interaction with larger social processes and structures. The British by the time of the late 1940’s favoured some kind of orderly transition and probably did not want partition. But everything not only that they had done but also the system that they had established, conspired against them. They were responsible for this despite it not being their intention if one adopts a Marxist view. Its important as well that we are not simply talking about the relationship between ‘British’ policy and ‘India’. We are talking about a Colonial polity which had its own distinct ways of functioning and the very distinctive kinds of colonial society that resulted from this, as distinctive in its own way as the kinds of society that emerge from the industrial revolution.
One interesting feature. At no point did more then 12 per cent of the population in any given province vote for partition. Those without property (the vast majority of the Indian population) had no say whatsoever in the matter. Partition for them, in the effected areas, was like a nightmare suddenly visited on them, coming from god knows where. The debates about centralisation versus federalization etc would have meant absolutely nothing to them. They were never to be consulted on what the future held for them and many till today do not really understand what happened to them or why. Its a very deep wound. Hence the popularity about the short story about the lunatic asylum by Manto, one of the great figures of Urdu literature who could never accept the division either of languages or of States.
johng said,
August 20, 2007 at 11:31 am
Its worth adding that whilst Nehru remained a determined opponent of Fascism and Nazism he supported the quit India movement and indeed was jailed for doing so. Whilst in Jail he wrote ‘The discovery of India’. The failure of the Communists to support the quit India movement on the basis of popular frontism and orders from Moscow was a complete and utter disaster alienating them from the vast upheavels of the time and ensuring that Congress retained complete hegenomy and the Communists were marginalised in the post-independence period. In Bengal millions died in a famine that should rank as a war crime alongside the Nazi ones.
johng said,
August 20, 2007 at 12:31 pm
George Orwell put this rather nicely when he pointed out that the Second World War was only a war for freedom and democracy as long as one added ‘except for niggers’. (his words not mine). Churchill fought the Nazies to defend the British Empire. Non-Stalinist Marxists would not have supported the argument that in order to oppose the Nazies you had to support the British Empire. Part of the success of Japanese fascism and their expansion involved being able to utilize the basically undemocratic and racist nature of the world order in the Pacific and South Asia despite their own brutally undemocratic and racist fascism. The war between the great powers in that region had nothing whatsoever to do with a fight for democracy. The speed with which the US dropped its talk of democracy in the region following the end of the second world war being evidence of this.
http://modernityblog.wordpress.com/ said,
August 20, 2007 at 2:13 pm
JohnG,
Tony Maher raised some interesting points, why not address a few of them?
johng said,
August 20, 2007 at 4:40 pm
I did. I think he underestimates the growth of nationalism in the period before Gandhi somewhat and also presents a rosetinted view of British concessions to Congress. He also underestimates the extent to which dyarchy was compatible with Empire and the controversies underlying this (the endless debates within Congress between those prepared to collaberate with this and those not).
However uses of terms like ‘abandon’ India have a rather curious ring to them (negotiations broke down because the British were not prepared to concede independence after the war, and therefore as Gandhi said ‘do or die’). I don’t understand the use of language like ‘perfidious albion’ and the sarcasm about this. There are two reasons why the reputation of British historiography on South Asia is in decline. The first is simply that in terms of funding it can’t compete. The second is that there is a persistant attempt to endlessly rehearse the debate about Empire in a defensive way. In the US they don’t do this so thats where the best historians go.
johng said,
August 20, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I also notice the use of terms like ‘realistic’. The question of what it was realistic for ‘Britain’ to do is surely not a central question in Indian history anymore that it will be central question for Iraqi historians in ten years time. They had no right to be there in the first place.
modernityblog said,
August 20, 2007 at 9:22 pm
fair enough
an interesting topic I must read more on it
Jim Denham said,
August 22, 2007 at 12:02 am
It’s good to read John G commenting upon a subject he actually knows someting about – India (in contrast to his ignorance and prejudice when commenting on the Middle East). And I don’t disagree with much of what he says about India and related matters. But the comment “The question of what it was ‘realistic’ for Britain to do is surely not a central question…they had no right to be there”, marks him out as a liberal moralist, and most certainly *not* a Marxist in any sense. For Marxists, the reality of the historical process (ie “what is possible”), is indeed, crucial.
But never mind, John: your idealism (in both senses of the word) is quite touching. Us Marxists don’t despise you utopian/idealist reactionaries in principle: it’s just when you support ultra- reaction like the Iraqi so-called “resistance” that we are obliged to correct you.
Tony Maher said,
August 22, 2007 at 7:47 am
Johng,
thanks for your informative posts.
you say that I underestimate the pre Ghandi strength of the nationalist movement but you do so after yourself explaining how transformative Ghandi’s mass action campaigns were in the twenties. You record Jinnah and the elite recoiling in horror and describe even Nehru as a terrified loyalist. I suggest that this substantiates my original point i.e. that until the mid twenties the British occupation had not been fundamentally challenged by the Nationalist movement.
from 1922 – 1947 is only 25 years (the last six of which had been war years). The repression/ negotiation cycle was therefore a relatively short one and it is in my view not a serious counterfactual to suggest that an earlier British departure was realistic. Entitlement to rule has nothing to do with it – the legitimacy of British rule had nothing whatsoever to do with the existing fact of British rule.
Furthermore you outline a case of “institutional responsibility” on the part of the British Raj which makes it unintentionally responsible for the carnage of Partition. At the risk of being accused of un American defensiveness I should point out that the Indian landlord class and their role as tax farmers was an inheritance of the pre colonial era. It persists in modern Pakistan also.
If your view is that the Raj should have had a more transformative role then it in fact had then you aren’t supporting your own contention that it was necessarily and absolutely illegitimate and reactionary.
Tony