1947 was uniquely tragic

Salil Misra

INDIA’S Partition is an important reminder of the curious relationship between a historical phenomenon and how it is subsequently remembered. The Partition, after it occurred in August 1947, met with a virtual silence from both the social scientists and creative writers. This was true for both India and Pakistan. It was as if they were still searching for an idiom, medium and a vantage point from where to look at Partition.

Curiously, the vantage point was provided by London, of all the places, in the 1960s. A conference was organised on the Partition of India to which they invited scholars and journalists from the three countries. Bangladesh till then was still a part of Pakistan. The conference was also attended by some politicians who had been active during the movement for Pakistan.

Some young Indian historians such as BR Nanda and SR Mehrotra represented the Indian viewpoint. They looked upon Partition as a self-evident catastrophe which should not have occurred. Their enquiry focused on the question whether Partition could somehow have been averted. To their amazement, the Indian historians found that the Pakistani historians looked at Partition from an entirely different vantage point. For them, the making of Pakistan was not a tragic avoidable moment, but one of glory and fulfilment. It was their ‘tryst with destiny’. The question, whether Partition could have been prevented, obviously did not figure for them and had no meaning. It was not an important question. All the violence and bloodshed that accompanied Partition was indeed unfortunate. But this was a price that had to be paid for the achievement of Pakistan. Big transformative moments and revolutionary breakthroughs can hardly be achieved without some bloodshed!

The approach of the Pakistani historians should not have surprised Indian historians. The birth of a new nation-state was certainly a moment of reckoning in Pakistan’s history. It was not a tragic partition, but the successful culmination of what they saw as a ‘national movement’ for the achievement of Pakistan. One man’s partition was another man’s freedom struggle.

The Pakistani historians were surprised at the response of their Indian counterparts and may well have wondered why their historical imagination did not extend beyond the Indian boundaries to include the Pakistani point of view. Why did physical national boundaries determine the conceptual boundaries of historians’ imagination? Their puzzle was answered, not by Indian historians, but by the historical events of subsequent years. Within a few years’ time, the people of East Pakistan launched their own freedom struggle against the rulers of Pakistan, eventually culminating in the creation of Bangladesh. The Pakistani establishment, media and the scholars looked upon the making of Bangladesh as a tragic avoidable partition. But for the people of Bangladesh, it was a moment of triumph. A new nation-state was created on the map of the world. Once again one man’s partition became another man’s freedom struggle. One country’s villain was another country’s martyr.

Was the Indian Partition unique, as claimed by the Indian historians? On the face of it, it does not appear to be even remotely so. The 20th century has been replete with partitions of all kinds. Ireland, Cyprus and Palestine are only some examples. Partition (and later unification) of Germany, separation of Kuwait from Iraq, the making of Israel, and partitions of former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would suggest that if anything, partitions appear to be the norm in the 20th century. From this perspective, it is possible to designate the 20th century as the century of partitions. The number of actual partition struggles would be even higher. For one partition that happened, there were easily 10 that wanted to happen but could not. What then is so unique about India’s Partition?

For one, India’s Partition was uniquely tragic, no matter from which side of the border one looked at it. Consider the following facts. It is estimated that anything between two lakh and 20 lakh people were killed in Partition violence. Those who participated in the orgy of violence were often not professional killers but ordinary people. Sometimes they killed simply to save their own lives, and not out of any passion or hatred. They killed because in their perception, the only alternative to killing was getting killed. Between killing and getting killed, they preferred to kill. In many instances, the killers were not outside enemies, but family members. Patriarchs killed the women of their families to save them from ‘dishonour’. Killing the women of their own families appeared to be the only ‘honourable’ option before them.

Around 70,000 women were captured, abducted and raped. Abducting a woman from the other religion became the standard way of taking revenge on the other religious community. Often these women were ‘married’ to their abductors. When these women had settled down in their new homes and surroundings, the governments of the two countries decided to take back their women through exchange. This exchange of abducted women was very similar to the exchange of prisoners of war. Thus, these women were uprooted twice over, once from their original homes, and then again from their adopted surroundings. With the stigma of having been abducted and raped, many such women found it difficult to adjust to their original homes. In many cases, they were not accepted. Several such stories are still unknown. It is unlikely that we will ever know the full extent of the human tragedy that was involved in India’s Partition.

This was not all. Over 1.2 crore people migrated from one country to the other. This is perhaps the largest migration in the entire human history around a single event and in a short span of time. The important thing about this migration was that unlike many other migrations in human history, it was not driven by opportunity, but by despair and desperation. Those who migrated did so not in search of new opportunities, but merely to save their lives. Often they left behind a life of comfort to settle for a life of deprivation.

All this indeed makes India’s Partition very unique. It was uniquely tragic. It was also irrational. If one were to examine all the justifications — social, political, moral, legal, economic — that were provided by the leaders of the Pakistan movement, the absurdity of Partition emerges in all its starkness. Its absurdity — defiance of logic and experience — was quite evident before Pakistan was made. The last seven decades of the history of South Asia have also served as a grim reminder of the absurdity of India’s Partition.

— The writer is Professor of History at Ambedkar University, Delhi 

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