70 years of Partition: A particular kind of melancholy in South Asia

It feels uneasy to talk about events so extraordinary, and after such a long time. But it really should not.

While it is true that the vast majority of people now inhabiting South Asia did not experience the 1947 partition of India, it is naïve to believe that these nations have somehow outlived what was one of history’s largest migrations.

The communal heart that set about the destruction of as many as two million people of this land in riots 70 years ago is still unchecked.

The sad failure of not being able to lay to rest such an old hate appears in national politics -- where patience runs low and rhetoric goes unbalanced in the treatment of minorities.

How far back in history should an Indian, a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi travel to find solace? Is it at all possible to know what would have been had India, the land of milk and honey, not been colonised?

A Muslim refugee camp in Karachi.

In the absence of answers, historians have called India, due to its castes and dispiriting divisions, a predetermined prey to subjugation, and of the many European nations who came to it in shoals, Britain chanced to profit from it.

But what made this latest foreign invader different from the Mughals was its refusal to be absorbed into the receptive fiber of Indian society, as pointed out by Karl Marx. 

So their arrival in the 18th century did not have an output that was of any use to the native Indian. The British could not have like the Mughals, create an Indo-Islamic culture, to sustain the pride of the people.

Instead it broke down the entire framework of Indian society, “without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing”, wrote Marx in one of his famous letters on India.

“The loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history.”

After riots in Ahmedabad.

Strange how this emotion, described in a letter written on Jun 10 of 1853, is familiar to the people living in the three nations of the subcontinent in 2017.

Born as a result of heroic opposition to imperial rule, the journey of these nations after all began in hatred and bloodshed.

It is due to the failure to grasp the “complicated truth”, says Kamila Shamsie, the Pakistani novelist. Partition intertwined with long-sought independence.

And to think it was all decided in a matter of months.

Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy who, prioritising European lives, moved up the partition date to Aug 15 by a whole year.  

It had been just two and half months since the decision was taken to divide the subcontinent. The maps of the boundary commission headed by barrister Cyril Radcliffe were prepared on Aug 12, and made public two days after partition.  

A textbook case of power vacuum, it led to a mutual genocide with Hindus and Sikhs up against the Muslims, and vice versa, in a massive spectacle of sectarian violence.

Up to 15 million people left their homes to begin a new life in India or Pakistan.

There were more than 600 refugee camps all over the subcontinent; 70,000 women had suffered savage sexual attacks.

So who were the killers? People who refused to accept ‘the other’ and be ‘othered’ in an unfamiliar land, Yasmin Khan, a historian based at Oxford University, wrote for the Guardian.    

Refugees line up for water in Delhi.

“Much evidence points not to the crazy and inexplicable actions of mad, uneducated peasants with sticks and stones, but to well-organised and well-motivated groups of young men, who went out – particularly in Punjab – to carry out ethnic cleansing.”

“Ultimately, it remains a history layered with absence and silences, even while many mourn and talk about their own trauma.”

A new phase in divide and rule, it is difficult to forgive how Indian rulers distrusted each other, instead of the plan by Britain, which never meant to serve independence or unity.

But how often does mainstream narrative try to meet this dark past in Bengal, which was one of the epicentres of partition?

The geographic entity known as Bangladesh came about in 1947. But limited attempt is made to understand the movements prior to the 1971 Liberation War, and sometimes not even that.

A news map from 1946. Source: Columbia University. Via Wikimedia Commons.

So that was that. The subcontinent, suffering a million other afflictions, continues to live in denial of history.

The Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, the political wing of the RSS, to which Gandhi’s killer belonged, is now in power. 

Not long ago, the Bengali collaborators who joined the Pakistan army in committing genocide of their own people, became part of a government in Bangladesh.

All the while, some things are retained. The majority of people in these three nations live at a low enough level of subsistence. The faces of the poor appear close to what they did a century ago.

The enduring messiness makes encountering the past uneasy. But it is necessary to grieve over the present. It is equally important to identify the emotions that provide contentment.

It lies in attempts of unification - holidays shared by Hindus and Muslims, the kind witnessed during the festivities of the Bangla new year.

The sentiment finds ways to Bollywood films, which have sometimes spectacularly depicted to the masses a rare unity of people across the Pak-India border, against the all-powerful villains that are governments.

It is the same emotion that prompts news media to report on heart-warming stories of people, separated by Radcliffe’s line, who share sweets over the Indian-Bangladesh land border when some pockets of it are opened for their union during major festivals every year.

On a subconscious level, these act as a temporary reversal of the principle of partition, which was based on an oversimplification of identity, religion over nationalities.

That unwanted stamp remains on everything that has happened since that manner of independence was won from the British. It stems from the shame of not being able to form one proud nation.

The betrayal is captured in the words of the Congress leader Abul Kalam Azad, who in his memoire documented how Mountbatten, “as a soldier not civilian”, had assured him of using the sternest measures to stop communal disturbances.

Armies and tanks would nip any attempts in the bud, the Indians were told.

“The whole world knows the sequel to Lord Mountbatten’s brave declaration …Rivers of blood flowed in large parts of the country … Nothing effective was done to stop the murder of innocent Hindus and Muslims.”

Seven decades have passed and self-hate is still the subcontinent’s struggle. Not much can be done without the light of history.

In the absence of closure, people have periodically descended into chaos, be it by lynching cattle farmers in India or torching temples in Bangladesh, or blowing up churches in Pakistan.

But the one who manages to tow in even a fragment of the vastness that is the subcontinent’s past, and somehow bridge the temporal divide, feels that inclusion, above everything else, is their birthright.