Echoes of the past

There are a lot of books on the causes behind Partition. INDIVAR KAMTEKAR reviews a book that looks at what 1947 caused to the people of the subcontinent.

DESPITE the astonishing inclusion of an essay on the Qutb Minar and adjacent mosque, and the obvious omission of any essay on Kashmir, this is an interesting volume on the results of the 1947 partition of India. The eight articles published here are all original pieces of research; fresh, stimulating and unavailable elsewhere.

Suvir Kaul's introduction sketches how the project began - with a desire to recognise the continuing effects of the Partition in the policies of the governments of India and Pakistan and on the psychology of their people. So far, he says, most works have looked at the causes of the Partition. Although Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya's book, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, was published by Routledge last year, this statement is on the whole true. The contributors to Kaul's volume do not ask what caused the Partition; instead, they ask what the Partition caused.

Mukulika Banerjee's article, opening the collection, relies heavily on interviews with Pathan followers of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan in the Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province. Pathans were stereotyped in the rest of India as violent and unruly. The Red Shirts or Khudai Khidmatgars organised by Khan formed, however, a movement that was disciplined, non-violent and pro- Congress. Nevertheless, when the British departure became imminent, the Congress agreed - without consulting the Khudai Khidmatgars - to a referendum on whether their area should join Pakistan. Banerjee's interviews record the Khudai Khidmatgars' deep sense of betrayal. Taunted as cowardly before independence, they were denigrated as unpatriotic afterwards by the Pakistani government which raided their homes and burnt their personal papers. This is the story of orphans, whom no state would adopt.

Joya Chatterji's powerful essay examines the rhetoric of refugee rehabilitation in Bengal. Writing with angry clarity, and backed by impressive evidence, she demonstrates that the government looked on refugee relief as a matter of charity, while the refugees increasingly demanded such relief as a matter of right. On August 15, 1950, a refugee organisation even celebrated "Anti- Independence day" at Hazra Park in Calcutta. The government, on the other hand, remained cruel and self-congratulatory. Chatterji shows this, but it may have another dimension. Are these government documents better read as an example of straightforward class prejudice? Did the lower-level personnel of the State, who dealt with the refugees daily, share the attitudes of their superiors? Even if a few words were common, State and people, according to Chatterji, spoke different languages from which the dialects (if not the dialectics) of modern West Bengal's politics evolved. The general sense of rights among the public, according to Chatterji, was considerably strengthened by refugee struggles. This is a debatable matter in our society where (despite much talk couched in the language of rights) a sense of entitlement is still weak. Even today, it depends more on political power and social connections, than on notions of citizenship.

Chatterji's piece is followed by Ramnarayan Rawat's pathbreaking article on Dalit politics in these years. Rawat refuses to accept that Dalit politics were swallowed and digested by the Congress. To show that this did not happen, he cites the example of Dalit satyagrahis in Utter Pradesh marching to the Legislative Assembly in the middle of 1946 carrying placards and raising slogans saying: "Down with British Imperialism", "Down with Congress", and "Scrap the Poona Pact".

Elsewhere, Dalit activists burnt khadi clothes and Gandhi caps. The leaders of the Scheduled Castes Federation interacted regularly with the leaders of the Muslim League. The Scheduled Castes Federation of UP, which called the Pakistan demand anti- national in 1944, supported the Pakistan demand in 1946. Some Dalits requested that they be made part of Pakistan. Rawat bases his work primarily on the Police Abstracts of Intelligence prepared in the United Provinces. His conclusion is that new forms of Dalit activism emerged in these years, and a new, and separate, Dalit identity was outlined.

There are also essays by Richard Murphy, Priyamvada Gopal and Sunil Kumar. Murphy writes about sunset ceremonies at Wagah border, and on Basant celebrations in Lahore - the latter involve much kite-flying (as does much academic work). Priyamvada Gopal discusses Manto's celebrated story "Thanda Gosht", examining the "gendered dichotomies in his output", mentioning "hyper- heterosexuality", and seeing the story as "an attempt to critically realign masculinity with both humanity and humanism". Sunil Kumar's speculations on the motivations behind the Qutb are fascinating medieval history, but appallingly ungendered.

Urvashi Butalia examines refugee petitions to men in authority. These petitions are available in the records of the All-India Congress Committee. The refugees ask for jobs, housing, money and to be rehabilitated together with their own kind. Butalia argues that the petitions show that people fleetingly held great hopes of the Indian State. Such hopes were not in evidence among the refugees she interviewed decades later. She therefore concludes that hopes of a paternalistic benevolence soon evaporated, leaving a popular disillusionment with the State.

Though plausible, her case will remain unproven till these petitions are actually contrasted with those from other periods. The letter-writers were younger than the people Butalia interviewed. Perspectives on a paternalistic State, like perspectives on a parent, may well change with age.

The last word in the book is left to Nita Kumar, who leaves middle-class locales to interview children of Muslim weavers in Benares about their knowledge of history. The results can be as follows:

Shahzad does not know what happened in 1947. Shahzad cannot remember any episode or personality from Indian history. Furthermore, he cannot make up, improvise or just invent anything ...

In Calcutta, the daughter of more well-off Bengali refugee parents, studying in Loreto House, tells Dr. Kumar that Hindus are people who speak Hindi. Indian education in history, Dr. Kumar muses, "points to a weak relationship between the subject as studied and the child's sense of the self". A melancholy thought, perhaps, but then the two children are only 10 years old.

Varied in theme and quality, the articles in this book, taken together, succeed remarkably well in broadening the treatment of the Partition of India. Scholars will, as usual, flesh out some of the ideas and flush away others. But the originality of these articles will ensure that the book becomes essential reading for specialists, as well as providing entertainment to the general reader who enjoys listening to echoes of the past.

The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, edited by Suvir Kaul, Permanent Black, 2001, p.301, Rs. 595.

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