theme understanding partition fourteen politics, …...my father’s karz, his debt.” “but i am...

THEMES IN INDIAN HISTORY – PART III376

We know that the joy of our country’s independence fromcolonial rule in 1947 was tarnished by the violence andbrutality of Partition. The Partition of British India into thesovereign states of India and Pakistan (with its western andeastern wings) led to many sudden developments. Thousandsof lives were snuffed out, many others changed dramatically,cities changed, India changed, a new country was born, andthere was unprecedented genocidal violence and migration.

This chapter will examine the history of Partition: why andhow it happened as well as the harrowing experiences ofordinary people during the period 1946-50 and beyond. It will

Understanding PartitionPolitics, Memories, ExperiencesPolitics, Memories, ExperiencesPolitics, Memories, ExperiencesPolitics, Memories, ExperiencesPolitics, Memories, Experiences

Fig. 14.1Partition uprooted millions, transforming them into refugees, forcing them to beginlife from scratch in new lands.

THEME

FOURTEEN

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also discuss how the history of theseexperiences can be reconstructed by talking topeople and interviewing them, that is, throughthe use of oral history. At the same time, it willpoint out the strengths and limitations of oralhistory. Interviews can tell us about certainaspects of a society’s past of which we may knowvery little or nothing from other types of sources.But they may not reveal very much about manymatters whose history we would then need tobuild from other materials. We will return tothis issue towards the end of the chapter.

1. Some Partition ExperiencesHere are three incidents narrated by people whoexperienced those trying times to a researcherin 1993. The informants were Pakistanis, theresearcher Indian. The job of this researcher wasto understand how those who had lived more orless harmoniously for generations inflicted somuch violence on each other in 1947.

“I am simply returning my father’s karz, his debt”

This is what the researcher recorded:

During my visits to the History Department Library of PunjabUniversity, Lahore, in the winter of 1992, the librarian, Abdul Latif, apious middle-aged man, would help me a lot. He would go out of hisway, well beyond the call of duty, to provide me with relevant material,meticulously keeping photocopies requested by me ready before myarrival the following morning. I found his attitude to my work soextraordinary that one day I could not help asking him, “Latif Sahib,why do you go out of your way to help me so much?” Latif Sahibglanced at his watch, grabbed his namazi topi and said, “I must go fornamaz right now but I will answer your question on my return.”Stepping into his office half an hour later, he continued:

“Yes, your question. I … I mean, my father belonged to Jammu, toa small village in Jammu district. This was a Hindu-dominated villageand Hindu ruffians of the area massacred the hamlet’s Muslimpopulation in August 1947. One late afternoon, when the Hindumob had been at its furious worst, my father discovered he wasperhaps the only Muslim youth of the village left alive. He had alreadylost his entire family in the butchery and was looking for ways of

Source 1

Fig. 14.2Photographs give us a glimpse ofthe violence of that time.

UNDERSTANDING PARTITION


escaping. Remembering a kind, elderly Hindu lady, a neighbour, he imploredher to save him by offering him shelter at her place. The lady agreed to helpfather but said, ‘Son, if you hide here, they will get both of us. This is of nouse. You follow me to the spot where they have piled up the dead. You liedown there as if dead and I will dump a few dead-bodies on you. Lie thereamong the dead, son, as if dead through the night and run for your lifetowards Sialkot at the break of dawn tomorrow.’

“My father agreed to the proposal. Off they went to that spot, father lay onthe ground and the old lady dumped a number of bodies on him. An houror so later a group of armed Hindu hoodlums appeared. One of them yelled,‘Any life left in anybody?’ and the others started, with their crude staffs andguns, to feel for any trace of life in that heap. Somebody shouted, ‘There isa wrist watch on that body!’ and hit my father’s fingers with the butt of hisrifle. Father used to tell us how difficult it was for him to keep his outstretchedpalm, beneath the watch he was wearing, so utterly still. Somehow hesucceeded for a few seconds until one of them said ‘Oh, it’s only a watch.Come let us leave, it is getting dark.’ Fortunately, for Abbaji, they left and myfather lay there in that wretchedness the whole night, literally running for his lifeat the first hint of light. He did not stop until he reached Sialkot.

“I help you because that Hindu mai helped my father. I am simply returningmy father’s karz, his debt.”

“But I am not a Hindu,” I said. “Mine is a Sikh family, at best a mixed Hindu-Sikh one.”

“I do not know what your religion is with any surety. You do not wearuncut hair and you are not a Muslim. So, for me you are a Hindu and I do mylittle bit for you because a Hindu mai saved my father.”

“For quite a few years now, I have notmet a Punjabi Musalman”

The researcher’s second story is about the manager of a youth hostel in Lahore.

I had gone to the hostel looking for accommodation and had promptlydeclared my citizenship. “You are Indian, so I cannot allot you a room but Ican offer you tea and a story,” said the Manager. I couldn’t have refused sucha tempting offer. “In the early 1950s I was posted at Delhi,” the Manager began.I was all ears:

“I was working as a clerk at the Pakistani High Commission there and Ihad been asked by a Lahori friend to deliver a rukka (a short handwrittennote) to his erstwhile neighbour who now resided at Paharganj in Delhi.One day I rode out on my bicycle towards Paharganj and just as I crossedthe cathedral at the Central Secretariat, spotting a Sikh cyclist I asked himin Punjabi, ‘Sardarji, the way to Paharganj, please?’

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(1) What do each of thesesources show about theattitudes of the men whowere talking with each other?

(2) What do you think thesestories reveal about thedifferent memories that peoplecarried about Partition?

(3) How did the men identifythemselves and one another?

Discuss...Assess the value of suchstories in writing aboutPartition.

‘Are you a refugee?’ he asked.‘No, I come from Lahore. I am Iqbal Ahmed.’‘Iqbal Ahmed … from Lahore? Stop!’“That ‘Stop!’ sounded like a brute order to me and I instantly

thought now I’ll be gone. This Sikh will finish me off. But there wasno escaping the situation, so I stopped. The burly Sikh came runningto me and gave me a mighty hug. Eyes moist, he said, ‘For quite afew years now, I have not met a Punjabi Musalman. I have beenlonging to meet one but you cannot f ind Punjabi-speakingMusalmans here.’”

Source 3

“No, no! You can never be ours”

This is the third story the researcher related:

I still vividly remember a man I met in Lahore in 1992.He mistook me to be a Pakistani studying abroad. Forsome reason he liked me. He urged me to return homeafter completing my studies to serve the qaum (nation).I told him I shall do so but, at some stage in theconversation, I added that my citizenship happens tobe Indian. All of a sudden his tone changed, and muchas he was restraining himself, he blurted out,

“Oh Indian! I had thought you were Pakistani.”I tried my best to impress upon him that I always seemyself as South Asian. “No, no! You can never be ours.Your people wiped out my entire village in 1947, weare sworn enemies and shall always remain so.”

Fig. 14.3Over 10 million peoplewere uprooted fromtheir homelands andforced to migrate.



2. A Momentous Marker2.1 Partition or holocaust?The narratives just presented point to the pervasiveviolence that characterised Partition. Severalhundred thousand people were killed andinnumerable women raped and abducted. Millionswere uprooted, transformed into refugees in alienlands. It is impossible to arrive at any accurateestimate of casualties: informed and scholarlyguesses vary from 200,000 to 500,000 people. In allprobability, some 15 million had to move acrosshastily constructed frontiers separating Indiaand Pakistan. As they stumbled across these“shadow lines” – the boundaries between the twonew states were not officially known until two daysafter formal independence – they were renderedhomeless, having suddenly lost all their immovableproperty and most of their movable assets, separatedfrom many of their relatives and friends as well,torn asunder from their moorings, from their houses,fields and fortunes, from their childhood memories.Thus stripped of their local or regional cultures, theywere forced to begin picking up their life from scratch.

Fig. 14.4On carts with families andbelongings, 1947

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Was this simply a partition, a more or less orderlyconstitutional arrangement, an agreed-upon divisionof territories and assets? Or should it be called a sixteen-month civil war, recognising that there were well-organised forces on both sides and concerted attemptsto wipe out entire populations as enemies? The survivorsthemselves have often spoken of 1947 through otherwords: “maashal-la” (martial law), “mara-mari’ (killings),and “raula”, or “hullar” (disturbance, tumult, uproar).Speaking of the killings, rape, arson, and loot thatconstituted Partition, contemporary observers andscholars have sometimes used the expression“holocaust” as well, primarily meaning destruction orslaughter on a mass scale.

Is this usage appropriate?You would have read about the German Holocaust

under the Nazis in Class IX. The term “holocaust” in asense captures the gravity of what happened in thesubcontinent in 1947, something that the mild term“partition” hides. It also helps to focus on why Partition,like the Holocaust in Germany, is remembered andreferred to in our contemporary concerns so much. Yet,differences between the two events should not beoverlooked. In 1947-48, the subcontinent did not witnessany state-driven extermination as was the case withNazi Germany where various modern techniques ofcontrol and organisation had been used. The “ethniccleansing” that characterised the partition of India wascarried out by self-styled representatives of religiouscommunities rather than by state agencies.

2.2 The power of stereotypesIndia-haters in Pakistan and Pakistan-haters in Indiaare both products of Partition. At times, some peoplemistakenly believe that the loyalties of Indian Muslimslie with Pakistan. The stereotype of extra-territorial,pan-Islamic loyalties comes fused with other highlyobjectionable ideas: Muslims are cruel, bigoted,unclean, descendants of invaders, while Hindus arekind, liberal, pure, children of the invaded. Thejournalist R.M. Murphy has shown that similarstereotypes proliferate in Pakistan. According to him,some Pakistanis feel that Muslims are fair, brave,monotheists and meat-eaters, while Hindus are dark,cowardly, polytheists and vegetarian. Some of thesestereotypes pre-date Partition but there is no



doubt that they were immensely strengthenedbecause of 1947. Every myth in these constructionshas been systematically critiqued by historians. Butin both countries voices of hatred do not mellow.

Partition generated memories, hatreds,stereotypes and identities that still continue to shapethe history of people on both sides of the border.These hatreds have manifested themselves duringinter-community conflicts, and communal clashesin turn have kept alive the memories of past violence.Stories of Partition violence are recounted bycommunal groups to deepen the divide betweencommunities: creating in people’s minds feelingsof suspicion and distrust, consolidating the powerof communal stereotypes, creating the deeplyproblematic notion that Hindus, Sikhs and Muslimsare communities with sharply defined boundaries,and fundamentally opposed interests.

The relationship between Pakistan and India hasbeen profoundly shaped by this legacy of Partition.Perceptions of communities on both sides have beenstructured by the conflicting memories of thosemomentous times.

Discuss...Recall some stories ofPartition you may have heard.Think of the way these haveshaped your conception aboutdifferent communities.Try and imagine how the samestories would be narrated bydifferent communities.

Fig. 14.5People took with them only whatthey could physically carry.Uprooting meant an immense senseof loss, a rupture with the placethey had lived in for generations.

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3. Why and How Did PartitionHappen?

3.1 Culminating point of a long history?Some historians, both Indian and Pakistani, suggestthat Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s theory that the Hindusand Muslims in colonial India constituted twoseparate nations can be projected back into medievalhistory. They emphasise that the events of 1947were intimately connected to the long history ofHindu-Muslim conflict throughout medieval andmodern times. Such an argument does not recognisethat the history of conflict between communities hascoexisted with a long history of sharing, and ofmutual cultural exchange. It also does not take intoaccount the changing circumstances that shapepeople’s thinking.

Some scholars see Partition as a culmination ofa communal politics that started developing in theopening decades of the twentieth century. Theysuggest that separate electorates for Muslims,created by the colonial government in 1909 andexpanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature ofcommunal politics. Separate electorates meant thatMuslims could now elect their own representatives indesignated constituencies. This created a temptationfor politicians working within this system to usesectarian slogans and gather a following by distributingfavours to their own religious groups. Religiousidentities thus acquired a functional use within amodern political system; and the logic of electoralpolitics deepened and hardened these identities.Community identities no longer indicated simpledifference in faith and belief; they came to mean activeopposition and hostility between communities.However, while separate electorates did have aprofound impact on Indian politics, we should becareful not to over-emphasise their significance or tosee Partition as a logical outcome of their working.

Communal identities were consolidated by a hostof other developments in the early twentieth century.During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grewaround a number of issues. Muslims were angeredby “music-before-mosque”, by the cow protectionmovement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samajto bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi ) thosewho had recently converted to Islam. Hindus were

The Lucknow PactThe Lucknow Pact of December1916 was an understandingbetween the Congress and theMuslim League (controlled bythe UP-based “Young Party”)whereby the Congress acceptedseparate electorates. Thepact provided a joint politicalplatform for the Moderates,Extremists and the MuslimLeague.

Arya SamajA North Indian Hindu reformorganisation of the latenineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, particularly activein the Punjab, which soughtto revive Vedic learningand combine it with moderneducation in the sciences.


Music-before-mosque : Theplaying of music by a religiousprocession outside a mosqueat the time of namaz could leadto Hindu-Muslim violence.Orthodox Muslims saw this asan interference in their peacefulcommunion with God.


angered by the rapid spread of tabligh (propaganda)and tanzim (organisation) after 1923. As middle classpublicists and communal activists sought to buildgreater solidarity within their communities, mobilisingpeople against the other community, riots spread indifferent parts of the country. Every communal riotdeepened differences between communities, creatingdisturbing memories of violence.

Yet it would be incorrect to see Partition as theoutcome of a simple unfolding of communal tensions.As the protagonist of Garm Hawa, a film on Partition,puts it, “Communal discord happened even before1947 but it had never led to the uprooting of millionsfrom their homes” Partition was a qualitativelydifferent phenomenon from earlier communal politics,and to understand it we need to look carefully at theevents of the last decade of British rule.

What is communalism?There are many aspects to our identity. You are a girl or a boy, all of you are youngpersons, you belong to a certain village, city, district or state and speak certainlanguages. You are Indians but you are also world citizens. Income levels differfrom family to family, hence all of us belong to some social class or the other. Mostof us have a religion, and caste may play an important role in our lives. In otherwords, our identities have numerous features, they are complex. There are times,however, when people attach greater significance to certain chosen aspects oftheir identity such as religion. This in itself cannot be described as communal.

Communalism refers to a politics that seeks to unify one community around areligious identity in hostile opposition to another community. It seeks to define thiscommunity identity as fundamental and fixed. It attempts to consolidate this identityand present it as natural – as if people were born into the identity, as if the identitiesdo not evolve through history over time. In order to unify the community,communalism suppresses distinctions within the community and emphasises theessential 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 Hinducommunalism. This hatred feeds a politics of violence.

Communalism, then, is a particular kind of politicisation of religious identity, anideology that seeks to promote conflict between religious communities. In thecontext of a multi-religious country, the phrase “religious nationalism” can cometo acquire a similar meaning. In such a country, any attempt to see a religiouscommunity as a nation would mean sowing the seeds of antagonism against someother religion/s. M.A. Jinnah saw the Muslims of British India as a nation and desiredthat they obtain a nation-state for themselves.

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3.2 The provincial elections of 1937 andthe Congress ministries

In 1937, elections to the provincial legislatures wereheld for the first time. Only about 10 to 12 per centof the population enjoyed the right to vote. TheCongress did well in the elections, winning anabsolute majority in five out of eleven provinces andforming governments in seven of them. It did badlyin the constituencies reserved for Muslims, but theMuslim League also fared poorly, polling only 4.4per cent of the total Muslim vote cast in this election.The League failed to win a single seat in the NorthWest Frontier Province (NWFP) and could captureonly two out of 84 reserved constituencies in thePunjab and three out of 33 in Sind.

In the United Provinces, the Muslim Leaguewanted to form a joint government with the Congress.The Congress had won an absolute majority in theprovince, so it rejected the offer. Some scholars arguethat this rejection convinced the League that if Indiaremained united, then Muslims would find it difficultto gain political power because they would remain aminority. The League assumed, of course, that onlya Muslim party could represent Muslim interests,and that the Congress was essentially a Hindu party.But Jinnah’s insistence that the League berecognised as the “sole spokesman” of Muslims couldconvince few at the time. Though popular in theUnited Provinces, Bombay and Madras, socialsupport for the League was still fairly weak in threeof the provinces from which Pakistan was to be carvedout just ten years later – Bengal, the NWFP and thePunjab. Even in Sind it failed to form a government.It was from this point onwards that the Leaguedoubled its efforts at expanding its social support.

The Congress ministries also contributed to thewidening rift. In the United Provinces, the party hadrejected the Muslim League proposal for a coalitiongovernment partly because the League tended tosupport landlordism, which the Congress wishedto abolish, although the party had not yet taken anyconcrete steps in that direction. Nor did the Congressachieve any substantial gains in the “Muslim masscontact” programme it launched. In the end, thesecular and radical rhetoric of the Congress merelyalarmed conservative Muslims and the Muslim landedelite, without winning over the Muslim masses.

The Muslim LeagueInitially floated in Dhaka in1906, the Muslim Leaguewas quickly taken over bythe U.P.-based Muslim elite.The party began to makedemands for autonomy forthe Muslim-majority areas ofthe subcontinent and/orPakistan in the 1940s.

Hindu MahasabhaFounded in 1915, the HinduMahasabha was a Hindu partythat remained confined to NorthIndia. It aimed to unite Hindusociety by encouraging theHindus to transcend the divisionsof caste and sect. It soughtto define Hindu identity inopposition to Muslim identity.



Moreover, while the leading Congress leaders inthe late 1930s insisted more than ever before onthe need for secularism, these ideas were by nomeans universally shared lower down in the partyhierarchy, or even by all Congress ministers.Maulana Azad, an important Congress leader,pointed out in 1937 that members of the Congresswere not allowed to join the League, yetCongressmen were active in the Hindu Mahasabha–at least in the Central Provinces (present-dayMadhya Pradesh). Only in December 1938 did theCongress Working Committee declare that Congressmembers could not be members of the Mahasabha.Incidentally, this was also the period when theHindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh (RSS) were gaining strength. The latterspread from its Nagpur base to the United Provinces,the Punjab, and other parts of the country in the1930s. By 1940, the RSS had over 100,000 trainedand highly disciplined cadres pledged to an ideologyof Hindu nationalism, convinced that India was aland of the Hindus.

3.3 The “Pakistan” ResolutionThe Pakistan demand was formalised gradually.On 23 March 1940, the League moved a resolutiondemanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent. This ambiguousresolution never mentioned partition or Pakistan.In fact Sikandar Hayat Khan, Punjab Premier andleader of the Unionist Party, who had drafted theresolution, declared in a Punjab assembly speechon 1 March 1941 that he was opposed to a Pakistanthat would mean “Muslim Raj here and Hindu Rajelsewhere ... If Pakistan means unalloyed MuslimRaj in the Punjab then I will have nothing to do withit.” He reiterated his plea for a loose (united),confederation with considerable autonomy for theconfederating units.

The origins of the Pakistan demand have alsobeen traced back to the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal,the writer of “Sare Jahan Se Achha HindustanHamara”. In his presidential address to the MuslimLeague in 1930, the poet spoke of a need for a “North-West Indian Muslim state”. Iqbal, however, was notvisualising the emergence of a new country in thatspeech but a reorganisation of Muslim-majority

Confederation – in modernpolitical language it refers to aunion of fairly autonomous andsovereign states with a centralgovernment with delimitedpowers

The name “Pakistan”The name Pakistan or Pak-stan(from Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir,S ind and Baluchistan) wascoined by a Punjabi Muslimstudent at Cambridge, ChoudhryRehmat Ali, who, in pamphletswritten in 1933 and 1935,desired a separate nationalstatus for this new entity. No onetook Rehmat Ali seriously inthe 1930s, least of all the Leagueand other Muslim leaders whodismissed his idea merely as astudent’s dream.

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areas in north-western India into an autonomousunit within a single, loosely structured Indianfederation.

3.4 The suddenness of PartitionWe have seen that the League itself was vagueabout its demand in 1940. There was a very shorttime – just seven years – between the first formalarticulation of the demand for a measure of autonomyfor the Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinentand Partition. No one knew what the creation ofPakistan meant, and how it might shape people’slives in the future. Many who migrated from theirhomelands in 1947 thought they would return assoon as peace prevailed again.

Initially even Muslim leaders did not seriouslyraise the demand for Pakistan as a sovereign state.In the beginning Jinnah himself may have seenthe Pakistan idea as a bargaining counter, usefulfor blocking possible British concessions to theCongress and gaining additional favours for theMuslims. The pressure of the Second World War onthe British delayed negotiations for independencefor some time. Nonetheless, it was the massive QuitIndia Movement which started in 1942, and persisteddespite intense repression, that brought the BritishRaj to its knees and compelled its officials to open adialogue with Indian parties regarding a possibletransfer of power.

3.5 Post-War developmentsWhen negotiations were begun again in l945, theBritish agreed to create an entirely Indian centralExecutive Council, except for the Viceroy and theCommander-in-Chief of the armed forces, as apreliminary step towards full independence.Discussions about the transfer of power broke downdue to Jinnah’s unrelenting demand that the Leaguehad an absolute right to choose all the Muslimmembers of the Executive Council and that thereshould be a kind of communal veto in the Council,with decisions opposed by Muslims needing a two-thirds majority. Given the existing political situation,the League’s first demand was quite extraordinary,for a large section of the nationalist Muslimssupported the Congress (its delegation for thesediscussions was headed by Maulana Azad), and inWest Punjab members of the Unionist Party were

The Muslim Leagueresolution of 1940

The League’s resolution of1940 demanded:

that geographically contiguousunits are demarcated intoregions, which should beso constituted, with suchterritorial readjustments asmay be necessary, that theareas in which the Muslims arenumerically in a majority asin the north-western andeastern zones of India shouldbe grouped to constitute“Independent States”, in whichthe constituent units shallbe autonomous and sovereign.

What was the Leaguedemanding? Was itdemanding Pakistan aswe know it today?

Source 4



largely Muslims. The British had no intention ofannoying the Unionists who still controlled thePunjab government and had been consistently loyalto the British.

Provincial elections were again held in 1946. TheCongress swept the general constituencies, capturing91.3 per cent of the non-Muslim vote. The League’ssuccess in the seats reserved for Muslims was equallyspectacular: it won all 30 reserved constituencies inthe Centre with 86.6 per cent of the Muslim vote and442 out of 509 seats in the provinces. Only as late as1946, therefore, did the League establish itself as thedominant party among Muslim voters, seeking tovindicate its claim to be the “sole spokesman” ofIndia’s Muslims. You will, however, recall that thefranchise was extremely limited. About 10 to 12 percent of the population enjoyed the right to vote in theprovincial elections and a mere one per cent in theelections for the Central Assembly.

Fig. 14.6Mahatma Gandhi with MohammadAli Jinnah before a meeting with theViceroy in November 1939

Unionist PartyA political party representingthe interests of landholders –Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – inthe Punjab. The party wasparticularly powerful duringthe period 1923-47.

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3.6 A possible alternative to PartitionIn March 1946 the British Cabinet sent a three-member mission to Delhi to examine the League’sdemand and to suggest a suitable political frameworkfor a free India. The Cabinet Mission toured thecountry for three months and recommended a loosethree-tier confederation. India was to remain united.It was to have a weak central government controllingonly foreign affairs, defence and communicationswith the existing provincial assemblies beinggrouped into three sections while electing theconstituent assembly: Section A for the Hindu-majority provinces, and Sections B and C for theMuslim-majority provinces of the north-west and thenorth-east (including Assam) respectively. Thesections or groups of provinces would comprisevarious regional units. They would have thepower to set up intermediate-level executives andlegislatures of their own.

Initially all the major parties accepted this plan.But the agreement was short-lived because it wasbased on mutually opposed interpretations of theplan. The League wanted the grouping to becompulsory, with Sections B and C developing intostrong entities with the right to secede from theUnion in the future. The Congress wanted thatprovinces be given the right to join a group. It wasnot satisfied with the Mission’s clarification thatgrouping would be compulsory at first, but provinceswould have the right to optout after the constitution hadbeen finalised and newelections held in accordancewith it. Ultimately, therefore,neither the League nor theCongress agreed to the CabinetMission’s proposal. This wasa most crucial juncture,because after this partitionbecame more or less inevitable,with most of the Congressleaders agreeing to it, seeingit as tragic but unavoidable.Only Mahatma Gandhi andKhan Abdul Ghaffar Khan ofthe NWFP continued to firmlyoppose the idea of partition.

Secede means to withdrawformally from an associationor organisation.

Fig. 14.7Mahatma Gandhi in the NWFP,October 1938 with Khan AbdulGhaffar Khan (who came to beknown as Frontier Gandhi),Sushila Nayar and Amtus Salem



“A voice in the wilderness”

Mahatma Gandhi knew that his was “a voice in thewilderness” but he nevertheless continued to oppose theidea of Partition:

But what a tragic change we see today. I wish the daymay come again when Hindus and Muslims will donothing without mutual consultation. I am day and nighttormented by the question what I can do to hasten thecoming of that day. I appeal to the League not to regardany Indian as its enemy … Hindus and Muslims are bornof the same soil. They have the same blood, eat the samefood, drink the same water and speak the same language.

SPEECH AT PRAYER MEETING, 7 SEPTEMBER 1946,CWMG, VOL. 92, P.139

But I am firmly convinced that the Pakistan demand asput forward by the Muslim League is un-Islamic and Ihave not hesitated to call it sinful. Islam stands for theunity and brotherhood of mankind, not for disruptingthe oneness of the human family. Therefore, those whowant to divide India into possible warring groups areenemies alike of Islam and India. They may cut me topieces but they cannot make me subscribe to somethingwhich I consider to be wrong.

HARIJAN, 26 SEPTEMBER 1946, CWMG, VOL. 92, P.229

Source 5

Map 1The Cabinet Mission proposal for anIndian federation with three sections

Muslim-majority areas of 1941

Hindu-majority areas of 1941

Princely states not specificallyprovided for in the proposal

Sketch map not to scale

What are the argumentsthat Mahatma Gandhi offers inopposing the idea of Pakistan?

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3.7 Towards PartitionAfter withdrawing its support to the Cabinet Missionplan, the Muslim League decided on “Direct Action”for winning its Pakistan demand. It announced16 August 1946 as “Direct Action Day”. On this day,riots broke out in Calcutta, lasting several days andleaving several thousand people dead. By March 1947violence spread to many parts of northern India.

It was in March 1947 that the Congress highcommand voted for dividing the Punjab into twohalves, one with Muslim majority and the otherwith Hindu/Sikh majority; and it asked for theapplication of a similar principle to Bengal. By thistime, given the numbers game, many Sikh leadersand Congressmen in the Punjab were convinced thatPartition was a necessary evil, otherwise they wouldbe swamped by Muslim majorities and Muslimleaders would dictate terms. In Bengal too a sectionof bhadralok Bengali Hindus, who wanted politicalpower to remain with them, began to fear the“permanent tutelage of Muslims” (as one of theirleaders put it). Since they were in a numericalminority, they felt that only a division of theprovince could ensure their political dominance.

Discuss...It is evident from a readingof section 3 that a number offactors led to Partition. Whichof these do you think were themost important and why?

Fig. 14.8Rioters armed with iron rods andlathis on the streets of Calcutta,August 1946



4. The Withdrawal of Law andOrder

The bloodbath continued for about a year fromMarch 1947 onwards. One main reason for thiswas the collapse of the institutions of governance.Penderel Moon, an administrator serving inBahawalpur (in present-day Pakistan) at the time,noted how the police failed to fire even a singleshot when arson and killings were taking place inAmritsar in March 1947.

Amritsar district became the scene of bloodshedlater in the year when there was a completebreakdown of authority in the city. British officialsdid not know how to handle the situation: they wereunwilling to take decisions, and hesitant tointervene. When panic-stricken people appealed forhelp, British officials asked them to contactMahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabh BhaiPatel or M.A. Jinnah. Nobody knew who couldexercise authority and power. The top leadership ofthe Indian parties, barring Mahatma Gandhi, wereinvolved in negotiations regarding independencewhile many Indian civil servants in the affectedprovinces feared for their own lives and property.The British were busy preparing to quit India.

Problems were compounded because Indiansoldiers and policemen came to act as Hindus,Muslims or Sikhs. As communal tension mounted,

“Without a shotbeing fired”

This is what Moon wrote:

For over twenty-fourhours riotous mobs wereallowed to rage throughthis great commercialcity unchallenged andunchecked. The f inestbazaars were burnt to theground without a shotbeing f ired to dispersethe incendiaries (i.e. thosewho stirred up conflict). The… Distr ict Magistratemarched his (large police)force into the city andmarched it out againwithout making anyeffective use of it at all …

Fig. 14.9Through those blood-soaked monthsof 1946, violence and arson spread,killing thousands.

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the professional commitment of those in uniformcould not be relied upon. In many places not onlydid policemen help their co-religionists but they alsoattacked members of other communities.

4.1 The one-man armyAmidst all this turmoil, one man’s valiant effortsat restoring communal harmony bore fruit. The77-year-old Gandhiji decided to stake his all in abid to vindicate his lifelong principle of non-violence,and his conviction that people’s hearts could bechanged. He moved from the villages of Noakhali inEast Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) to the villagesof Bihar and then to the riot-torn slums of Calcuttaand Delhi, in a heroic effort to stop Hindus andMuslims kill each other, careful everywhere toreassure the minority community. In October 1946,Muslims in East Bengal targeted Hindus. Gandhijivisited the area, toured the villages on foot, andpersuaded the local Muslims to guarantee the safetyof Hindus. Similarly, in other places such as Delhihe tried to build a spirit of mutual trust and

Fig. 14.10Villagers of Noakhali hope for aglimpse of Mahatma Gandhi



confidence between the twocommunities. A Delhi Muslim,Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi, compelledto flee to a dirty, overcrowdedcamp in Purana Qila, likenedGandhiji’s arrival in Delhi on9 September 1947 to “the arrivalof the rains after a particularlylong and harsh summer”. Dehlavirecalled in his memoir howMuslims said to one another:“Delhi will now be saved”.

On 28 November 1947, onthe occasion of Guru Nanak’sbirthday, when Gandhiji went toaddress a meeting of Sikhs at

Gurdwara Sisganj, he noticed that there was noMuslim on the Chandni Chowk road, the heart ofold Delhi. “What could be more shameful for us,”he asked during a speech that evening, “than thefact that not a single Muslim could be found inChandni Chowk?” Gandhiji continued to be in Delhi,fighting the mentality of those who wished to driveout every Muslim from the city, seeing them asPakistani. When he began a fast to bring about achange of heart, amazingly, many Hindu and Sikhmigrants fasted with him.

The effect of the fast was “electric”, wrote MaulanaAzad. People began realising the folly of the pogromthey had unleashed on the city’s Muslims but it wasonly Gandhiji’s martyrdom that finally ended thismacabre drama of violence. “The world veritablychanged,” many Delhi Muslims of the time recalled later.

5. Gendering Partition5.1 “Recovering” womenIn the last decade and a half, historians have beenexamining the experiences of ordinary people duringthe Partition. Scholars have written about theharrowing experiences of women in those violenttimes. Women were raped, abducted, sold, often manytimes over, forced to settle down to a new lifewith strangers in unknown circumstances. Deeplytraumatised by all that they had undergone, somebegan to develop new family bonds in their changed

Fig. 14.11Villagers of a riot-torn villageawaiting the arrival of MahatmaGandhi

Discuss...What did the British do tomaintain peace when theywere quitting India? Andwhat did Mahatma Gandhi doin those trying times?

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circumstances. But the Indian and Pakistanigovernments were insensitive to the complexities ofhuman relationships. Believing the women to be onthe wrong side of the border, they now tore themaway from their new relatives, and sent them backto their earlier families or locations. They did notconsult the concerned women, undermining theirright to take decisions regarding their own lives.According to one estimate, 30,000 women were“recovered” overall, 22,000 Muslim women in Indiaand 800 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan, in anoperation that ended as late as 1954.

What “recovering” women meant

Here is the experience of a couple, recounted by PrakashTandon in his Punjabi Century, an autobiographical socialhistory of colonial Punjab:

In one instance, a Sikh youth who had run amuckduring the Partition persuaded a massacring crowdto let him take away a young, beautiful Muslim girl.They got married, and slowly fell in love with eachother. Gradually memories of her parents, who hadbeen killed, and her former life faded. They werehappy together, and a little boy was born. Soon,however, social workers and the police, labouringassiduously to recover abducted women, began totrack down the couple. They made inquiries in theSikh’s home-district of Jalandhar; he got scent of itand the family ran away to Calcutta. The socialworkers reached Calcutta. Meanwhile, the couple’sfriends tried to obtain a stay-order from the courtbut the law was taking its ponderous course. FromCalcutta the couple escaped to some obscure Punjabvillage, hoping that the police would fail to shadowthem. But the police caught up with them and beganto question them. His wife was expecting again andnow nearing her time. The Sikh sent the little boy tohis mother and took his wife to a sugar-cane field. Hemade her as comfortable as he could in a pit while helay with a gun, waiting for the police, determined notto lose her while he was alive. In the pit he deliveredher with his own hands. The next day she ran highfever, and in three days she was dead. He had notdared to take her to the hospital. He was so afraid thesocial workers and the police would take her away.

Source 7

Fig. 14.12Women console each other as theyhear of the death of their familymembers.Males died in larger numbersin the violence of rioting.



5.2 Preserving “honour”Scholars have also shown how ideas of preservingcommunity honour came into play in this period ofextreme physical and psychological danger. This notionof honour drew upon a conception of masculinitydefined as ownership of zan (women) and zamin (land),a notion of considerable antiquity in North Indianpeasant societies. Virility, it was believed, lay in theability to protect your possessions – zan and zamin –from being appropriated by outsiders. And quitefrequently, conflict ensued over these two prime“possessions”. Often enough, women internalised thesame values.

At times, therefore, when the men feared that“their” women – wives, daughters, sisters – wouldbe violated by the “enemy”, they killed the womenthemselves. Urvashi Butalia in her book, The OtherSide of Silence, narrates one such gruesome incidentin the village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district.During Partition, in this Sikh village, ninety womenare said to have “voluntarily” jumped into a wellrather than fall into “enemy” hands. The migrantrefugees from this village still commemorate theevent at a gurdwara in Delhi, referring to the deathsas martyrdom, not suicide. They believe that menat that time had to courageously accept the decisionof women, and in some cases even persuade thewomen to kill themselves. On 13 March every year,when their “martyrdom” is celebrated, the incidentis recounted to an audience of men, women andchildren. Women are exhorted to remember thesacrifice and bravery of their sisters and to castthemselves in the same mould.

For the community of survivors, the remembranceritual helps keep the memory alive. What such ritualsdo not seek to remember, however, are the stories ofall those who did not wish to die, and had to endtheir lives against their will.

Discuss...What ideas led to the death and suffering of somany innocent women during the Partition?Why did the Indian and Pakistani governmentsagree to exchange “their” women?Do you think they were right in doing so?

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6. Regional VariationsThe experiences of ordinary people we have beendiscussing so far relate to the north-western partof the subcontinent. What was the Partition like inBengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Central India and theDeccan? While carnages occurred in Calcutta andNoakhali in 1946, the Partition was most bloodyand destructive in the Punjab. The near -totaldisplacement of Hindus and Sikhs eastwards into Indiafrom West Punjab and of almost all Punjabi-speakingMuslims to Pakistan happened in a relatively shortperiod of two years between 1946 and 1948.

Many Muslim families of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradeshcontinued to migrate to Pakistan through the 1950sand early 1960s, although many chose to remain inIndia. Most of these Urdu-speaking people, known asmuhajirs (migrants) in Pakistan moved to the Karachi-Hyderabad region in Sind.

In Bengal the migration was even more protracted,with people moving across a porous border. This alsomeant that the Bengali division produced a process ofsuffering that may have been less concentrated butwas as agonising. Furthermore, unlike the Punjab, theexchange of population in Bengal was not near-total.Many Bengali Hindus remained in East Pakistan whilemany Bengali Muslims continued to live in West Bengal.Finally, Bengali Muslims (East Pakistanis) rejectedJinnah’s two-nation theory through political action,breaking away from Pakistan and creating Bangladeshin 1971-72. Religious unitycould not hold East andWest Pakistan together.

There is, however, a hugesimilarity between the Punjaband Bengal experiences. Inboth these states, women andgirls became prime targetsof persecution. Attackerstreated women’s bodies asterritory to be conquered.Dishonouring women ofa community was seen asdishonouring the communityitself, and a mode of takingrevenge.

Fig. 14.13Faces of despairA massive refugee camp wasset up in Purana Qila in 1947as migrants came pouring infrom different places.



Fiction, Poetry, FilmsAre you familiar with any short stories, novels, poems or filmsabout Partition? More often than not, Partition literature andfilms represent this cataclysmic event in more insightful waysthan do the works of historians. They seek to understand masssuffering and pain by focusing on an individual protagonist orsmall groups of ordinary people whose destinies were shapedby a big event over which they seemed to have no control.They record the anguish and the ambiguities of the times, theincomprehensible choices that many were confronted with.They register a sense of shock and bewilderment at the scaleand magnitude of the violence, at human debasement anddepravity. They also speak of hope and of the ways in whichpeople overcame adversity.

Saadat Hasan Manto, a particularly gifted Urdu short-storywriter, has this to say about his work:

For a long time I refused to accept the consequences ofthe revolution which was set off by the partition of thecountry. I still feel the same way; but I suppose, in the end,I came to accept this nightmarish reality without self-pityor despair. In the process I tried to retrieve from this man-made sea of blood, pearls of a rare hue, by writing aboutthe single-minded dedication with which men had killedmen, about the remorse felt by some of them, about thetears shed by murderers who could not understand whythey still had some human feelings left. All this and more, Iput in my book, Siyah Hashiye (Black Margins).

Partition literature and films exist in many languages, notablyin Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Assamese andEnglish. You may want to read writers such as Manto,Rajinder Singh Bedi (Urdu), Intizar Husain (Urdu), BhishamSahni (Hindi), Kamaleshwar (Hindi), Rahi Masoom Raza(Hindi), Narain Bharati (Sindhi), Sant Singh Sikhon(Punjabi), Narendranath Mitra (Bengali), Syed Waliullah(Bengali), Lalithambika Antharjanam (Malayalam), AmitavGhosh (English) and Bapsi Sidhwa (English). Amrita Pritam,Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Dinesh Das have written memorablepoems on Partition in Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali respectively.You may also want to see films directed by Ritwik Ghatak(Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha), M.S. Sathyu (GaramHawa), Govind Nihalani (Tamas ), and a play, Jis LahoreNahin Vekhya O Jamya-e-nai (He Who Has Not SeenLahore, Has Not Been Born) directed by Habib Tanvir.

Discuss...Was your state or anyneighbouring stateaffected by Partition?Find out how itaffected the lives ofmen and women inthe region and howthey coped with thesituation.

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A small basket of grapes

This is what Khushdeva Singhwrites about his experienceduring one of his visits to Karachiin 1949:

My friends took me to aroom at the airport wherewe all sat down and talked… (and) had lunchtogether. I had to travelfrom Karachi to London …at 2.30 a.m. … At 5.00 p.m.… I told my friends that theyhad given me so generouslyof their time, I thought itwould be too much forthem to wait the wholenight and suggested theymust spare themselves thetrouble. But nobody leftuntil it was dinner time …Then they said they wereleaving and that I musthave a litt le rest beforeemplaning. … I got up atabout 1.45 a.m. and, whenI opened the door, I saw thatall of them were still there …They all accompanied meto the plane, and, beforeparting, presented me witha small basket of grapes. Ihad no words to expressmy gratitude for theoverwhelming affectionwith which I was treatedand the happiness thisstopover had given me.

7. Help, Humanity, HarmonyBuried under the debris of the violence and pain ofPartition is an enormous history of help, humanityand harmony. Many narratives such as Abdul Latif’spoignant testimony, with which we began, revealthis. Historians have discovered numerous storiesof how people helped each other during the Partitionperiod, stories of caring and sharing, of the openingof new opportunities, and of triumph over trauma.

Consider, for instance, the work of KhushdevaSingh, a Sikh doctor specialising in the treatmentof tuberculosis, posted at Dharampur in present-day Himachal Pradesh. Immersing himself in hiswork day and night, the doctor provided that rarehealing touch, food, shelter, love and security tonumerous migrants, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu alike. Theresidents of Dharampur developed the kind of faithand confidence in his humanity and generosity thatthe Delhi Muslims and others had in Gandhiji. Oneof them, Muhammad Umar, wrote to KhushdevaSingh: “With great humility I beg to state that I donot feel myself safe except under your protection.Therefore, in all kindness, be good enough to grantme a seat in your hospital.”

We know about the gruelling relief work of thisdoctor from a memoir he entitled Love is Strongerthan Hate: A Remembrance of 1947. Here, Singhdescribes his work as “humble efforts I made todischarge my duty as a human being to fellow humanbeings”. He speaks most warmly of two short visitsto Karachi in 1949. Old friends and those whom he

Source 8

Fig. 14.14The refugee camps everywhereoverflowed with people who needednot just food and shelter, but alsolove and compassion.



had helped at Dharampur spent a few memorablehours with him at Karachi airport. Six policeconstables, earlier acquaintances, walked him to theplane, saluting him as he entered it. “I acknowledged(the salute) with folded hands and tears in my eyes.”

8. Oral Testimonies and HistoryHave you taken note of the materials from which thehistory of Partition has been constructed in thischapter? Oral narratives, memoirs, diaries, familyhistories, first-hand written accounts – all these helpus understand the trials and tribulations of ordinarypeople during the partition of the country. Millionsof people viewed Partition in terms of the sufferingand the challenges of the times. For them, it was nomere constitutional division or just the party politicsof the Muslim League, Congress and others. For them,it meant the unexpected alterations in life as itunfolded between 1946 and 1950 and beyond,requiring psychological, emotional and socialadjustments. As with the Holocaust in Germany, weshould understand Partition not simply as a politicalevent, but also through the meanings attached to itby those who lived it. Memories and experiencesshape the reality of an event.

One of the strengths of personal reminiscence –one type of oral source – is that it helps us graspexperiences and memories in detail. It enableshistorians to write richly textured, vivid accountsof what happened to people during events such asPartition. It is impossible to extract this kind ofinformation from government documents. Thelatter deal with policy and party matters andvarious state-sponsored schemes. In the case ofPartition, government reports and files as well asthe personal writings of its high-level functionariesthrow ample light on negotiations between theBritish and the major political parties about thefuture of India or on the rehabilitation of refugees.They tell us little, however, about the day-to-dayexperiences of those affected by the government’sdecision to divide the country.

Oral history also allows historians to broaden theboundaries of their discipline by rescuing fromoblivion the lived experiences of the poor and thepowerless: those of, say, Abdul Latif’s father; thewomen of Thoa Khalsa; the refugee who retailed

Discuss...Find out more about ways inwhich people supported oneanother and saved livesduring Partition.

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wheat at wholesale prices, eking out a paltry living byselling the gunny bags in which the wheat came; amiddle-class Bengali widow bent double over road-layingwork in Bihar; a Peshawari trader who thought it waswonderful to land a petty job in Cuttack upon migratingto India but asked: “Where is Cuttack, is it on the upperside of Hindustan or the lower; we haven’t quite heardof it before in Peshawar?”

Thus, moving beyond the actions of the well off andthe well known, the oral history of Partition hassucceeded in exploring the experiences of those menand women whose existence has hitherto been ignored,taken for granted, or mentioned only in passing inmainstream history. This is significant because thehistories that we read often regard the life and workof the mass of the people in the past as inaccessibleor unimportant.

Yet, many historians still remain sceptical of oralhistory. They dismiss it because oral data seem to lackconcreteness and the chronology they yield may beimprecise. Historians argue that the uniqueness ofpersonal experience makes generalisation difficult: a largepicture cannot be built from such micro-evidence, andone witness is no witness. They also think oral accountsare concerned with tangential issues, and that the smallindividual experiences which remain in memory areirrelevant to the unfolding of larger processes of history.

However, with regard to events such as the Partitionin India and the Holocaust in Germany, there is no dearthof testimony about the different forms of distress thatnumerous people faced. So, there is ample evidence tofigure out trends, to point out exceptions. By comparingstatements, oral or written, by corroborating whatthey yield with findings from other sources, and by beingvigilant about internal contradictions, historians canweigh the reliability of a given piece of evidence.Furthermore, if history has to accord presence to theordinary and powerless, then the oral history of Partitionis not concerned with tangential matters. Theexperiences it relates are central to the story, so muchso that oral sources should be used to check other sourcesand vice versa. Different types of sources have to betapped for answering different types of questions.Government reports, for instance, will tell us of thenumber of “recovered” women exchanged by the Indianand Pakistani states but it is the women who will tellus about their suffering.



We must realise, however, that oral data on Partition arenot automatically or easily available. They have to beobtained through interviews that need to combine empathywith tact. In this context, one of the first difficulties isthat protagonists may not want to talk about intenselypersonal experiences. Why, for instance, would a womanwho has been raped want to disclose her tragedy to atotal stranger? Interviewees have to often avoid enquiringinto personal traumas. They have to build considerablerapport with respondents before they can obtain in-depthand meaningful data. Then, there are problems of memory.What people remember or forget about an event when theyare interviewed a few decades later will depend in parton their experiences of the intervening years and on whathas happened to their communities and nations duringthose years. The oral historian faces the daunting task ofhaving to sift the “actual” experiences of Partition from aweb of “constructed” memories.

In the final analysis, many different kinds of sourcematerials have to be used to construct a comprehensiveaccount of Partition, so that we see it not only as anevent and process, but also understand the experiencesof those who lived through those traumatic times.

Fig. 14.15Not everyone could travel bycart, not everyone could walk...

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timeline

1930 The Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal speaks of the need for a“North-West Indian Muslim state” as an autonomous unitwithin a single, loose Indian federation

1933 The name Pakistan or Pak-stan is coined by a Punjabi Muslimstudent at Cambridge, Choudhry Rehmat Ali

1937-39 Congress ministries come to power in seven out of 11 provincesof British India

1940 The Muslim League moves a resolution at Lahore demanding ameasure of autonomy for the Muslim-majority areas

1946 Elections are held in the provinces. The Congress wins massivelyin the general constituencies. The League’s success in the Muslimseats is equally spectacular

March to June The British Cabinet sends a three-member Cabinet Missionto Delhi

August The Muslim League decides on “Direct Action” for winning Pakistan

16 August Violence breaks out between Hindus-Sikhs and Muslims in Calcutta,lasting several days and leaving several thousand people dead

March 1947 The Congress high command votes for dividing the Punjab intoMuslim-majority and Hindu/Sikh-majority halves and asks forthe application of a similar principle to Bengal; the Britishbegin to quit India

14-15 August Pakistan is formed; India gains independence. Mahatma Gandhi1947 tours Noakhali in East Bengal to restore communal harmony

1. What did the Muslim League demand through its resolutionof 1940?

2. Why did some people think of Partition as a very suddendevelopment?

3. How did ordinary people view Partition?

4. What were Mahatma Gandhi’s arguments against Partition?

5. Why is Partition viewed as an extremely significant markerin South Asian history?


ANSWER IN 100-150 WORDS


6. Why was British India partitioned?

7. How did women experience Partition?

8. How did the Congress come to change its viewson Partition?

9. Examine the strengths and limitations of oralhistory. How have oral-history techniquesfurthered our understanding of Partition?

10. On an outline map of South Asia, mark outSections A, B and C of the Cabinet Missionproposals. How is this map different from thepolitical map of present-day South Asia?

11. Find out about the ethnic violence that led tothe partition of Yugoslavia. Compare yourfindings with what you have read about Partitionin this chapter.

12. Find out whether there are any communitiesthat have migrated to your city, town, village orany near-by place. (Your area may even havepeople who migrated to it during Partition.)Interview members of such communities andsummarise your findings in a report. Ask peopleabout the place they came from, the reasons fortheir migration, and their experiences. Also findout what changes the area witnessed as a resultof this migration.

If you would like to knowmore, read:

Jasodhara Bagchi andSubhoranjan Dasgupta (eds.). 2003.The Trauma and the Triumph:Gender and Partition inEastern India.Stree, Kolkata.

Alok Bhalla (ed.). 1994.Stories About the Partition of India,Vols. I, II, III.Indus (Harper Collins), New Delhi.

Urvashi Butalia. 1998.The Other Side of Silence:Voices from the Partition of India.Viking (Penguin Books),New Delhi.

Mushirul Hasan, ed. 1996India’s Partition.Oxford University Press,New Delhi.

Gyanendra Pandey. 2001.Remembering Partition:Violence, Nationalism andHistory in India.Cambridge University Press,Cambridge.

Anita Inder Singh. 2006.The Partition of India.National Book Trust, New Delhi.

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