n August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British

finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent

nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human
history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the
latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs
headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never
made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for

almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of
sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims
on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was
unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s
borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was
especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass
abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand
women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or
dismembered.

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his

fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes,
“Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and
children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped.
Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi
death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant
women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies;
infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen

million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million
were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched
as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian
subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded
painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost
unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha
Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth
century South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither
beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples
and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and
future.”

After the Second World War, Britain simply no longer had the
resources with which to control its greatest imperial asset, and its exit
from India was messy, hasty, and clumsily improvised. From the
vantage point of the retreating colonizers, however, it was in one way
fairly successful. Whereas British rule in India had long been marked
by violent revolts and brutal suppressions, the British Army was able
to march out of the country with barely a shot fired and only seven
casualties. Equally unexpected was the ferocity of the ensuing
bloodbath.

The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly

syncretic culture unravelled so quickly has spawned a vast literature.
The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple
of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it
was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was
impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together
peacefully. Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy
years of nationalist mythmaking. There has also been a widespread
attempt to record oral memories of Partition before the dwindling
generation that experienced it takes its memories to the grave.

The first Islamic conquests of India happened in the eleventh century,

with the capture of Lahore, in 1021. Persianized Turks from what is
now central Afghanistan seized Delhi from its Hindu rulers in 1192.
By 1323, they had established a sultanate as far south as Madurai,
toward the tip of the peninsula, and there were other sultanates all the
way from Gujarat, in the west, to Bengal, in the east.

Today, these conquests are usually perceived as having been made by

“Muslims,” but medieval Sanskrit inscriptions don’t identify the
Central Asian invaders by that term. Instead, the newcomers are
identified by linguistic and ethnic affiliation, most typically as
Turushka—Turks—which suggests that they were not seen primarily
in terms of their religious identity. Similarly, although the conquests
themselves were marked by carnage and by the destruction of Hindu
and Buddhist sites, India soon embraced and transformed the new
arrivals. Within a few centuries, a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization
emerged, along with hybrid languages—notably Deccani and Urdu—
which mixed the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of India with Turkish,
Persian, and Arabic words.

Eventually, around a fifth of South Asia’s population came to identify

itself as Muslim. The Sufi mystics associated with the spread of Islam
often regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired. Some even
took on the yogic practices of Hindu sadhus, rubbing their bodies with
ashes, or hanging upside down while praying. In village folk
traditions, the practice of the two faiths came close to blending into
one. Hindus would visit the graves of Sufi masters and Muslims
would leave offerings at Hindu shrines. Sufis were especially
numerous in Punjab and Bengal—the same regions that, centuries
later, saw the worst of the violence—and there were mass conversions
among the peasants there.

The cultural mixing took place throughout the subcontinent. In

medieval Hindu texts from South India, the Sultan of Delhi is
sometimes talked about as the incarnation of the god Vishnu. In the
seventeenth century, the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh had the
Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the central text of Hinduism, translated into
Persian, and composed a study of Hinduism and Islam, “The
Mingling of Two Oceans,” which stressed the affinities of the two
faiths. Not all Mughal rulers were so open-minded. The atrocities
wrought by Dara’s bigoted and puritanical brother Aurangzeb have
not been forgotten by Hindus. But the last Mughal emperor,
enthroned in 1837, wrote that Hinduism and Islam “share the same
essence,” and his court lived out this ideal at every level.
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In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions,
languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where
people did not define themselves primarily through their religious
faith. A Sunni Muslim weaver from Bengal would have had far more
in common in his language, his outlook, and his fondness for fish with
one of his Hindu colleagues than he would with a Karachi Shia or a
Pashtun Sufi from the North-West Frontier.

Many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of
these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her
history “Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define
‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political
representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity
of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the
boxes they belonged.” Indeed, the British scholar Yasmin Khan, in
her acclaimed history “The Great Partition,” judges that Partition
“stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community
evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state
formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—
and unknowable—paths.”
“I’m kind of a big deal at my mom’s house.”

 

Other assessments, however, emphasize that Partition, far from

emerging inevitably out of a policy of divide-and-rule, was largely a
contingent development. As late as 1940, it might still have been
avoided. Some earlier work, such as that of the British historian
Patrick French, in “Liberty or Death,” shows how much came down
to a clash of personalities among the politicians of the period,
particularly between Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim
League, and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most
prominent leaders of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party. All three
men were Anglicized lawyers who had received at least part of their
education in England. Jinnah and Gandhi were both Gujarati.
Potentially, they could have been close allies. But by the early
nineteen-forties their relationship had grown so poisonous that they
could barely be persuaded to sit in the same room.

At the center of the debates lies the personality of Jinnah, the man
most responsible for the creation of Pakistan. In Indian-nationalist
accounts, he appears as the villain of the story; for Pakistanis, he is
the Father of the Nation. As French points out, “Neither side seems
especially keen to claim him as a real human being, the Pakistanis
restricting him to an appearance on banknotes in demure Islamic
costume.” One of the virtues of Hajari’s new history is its more
balanced portrait of Jinnah. He was certainly a tough, determined
negotiator and a chilly personality; the Congress Party politician
Sarojini Naidu joked that she needed to put on a fur coat in his
presence. Yet Jinnah was in many ways a surprising architect for the
Islamic Republic of Pakistan. A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey,
rarely went to a mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring
beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose
to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi
businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for once
bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day.

Jinnah, far from wishing to introduce religion into South Asian

politics, deeply resented the way Gandhi brought spiritual sensibilities
into the political discussion, and once told him, as recorded by one
colonial governor, that “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion
the way he had done.” He believed that doing so emboldened
religious chauvinists on all sides. Indeed, he had spent the early part
of his political career, around the time of the First World War,
striving to bring together the Muslim League and the Congress Party.
“I say to my Musalman friends: Fear not!” he said, and he described
the idea of Hindu domination as “a bogey, put before you by your
enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from cooperation and
unity, which are essential for the establishment of self-government.”
In 1916, Jinnah, who, at the time, belonged to both parties, even
succeeded in getting them to present the British with a common set of
demands, the Lucknow Pact. He was hailed as “the Ambassador of
Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

But Jinnah felt eclipsed by the rise of Gandhi and Nehru, after the
First World War. In December, 1920, he was booed off a Congress
Party stage when he insisted on calling his rival “Mr. Gandhi” rather
than referring to him by his spiritual title, Mahatma—Great Soul.
Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the mutual dislike
grew, and by 1940 Jinnah had steered the Muslim League toward
demanding a separate homeland for the Muslim minority of South
Asia. This was a position that he had previously opposed, and,
according to Hajari, he privately “reassured skeptical colleagues that
Partition was only a bargaining chip.” Even after his demands for the
creation of Pakistan were met, he insisted that his new country would
guarantee freedom of religious expression. In August, 1947, in his
first address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he said, “You
may belong to any religion, or caste, or creed—that has nothing to do
with the business of the State.” But it was too late: by the time the
speech was delivered, violence between Hindus and Muslims had
spiralled beyond anyone’s ability to control it.
Hindus and Muslims had begun to turn on each other during the chaos
unleashed by the Second World War. In 1942, as the Japanese seized
Singapore and Rangoon and advanced rapidly through Burma toward
India, the Congress Party began a campaign of civil disobedience, the
Quit India Movement, and its leaders, including Gandhi and Nehru,
were arrested. While they were in prison, Jinnah, who had billed
himself as a loyal ally of the British, consolidated opinion behind him
as the best protection of Muslim interests against Hindu dominance.
By the time the war was over and the Congress Party leaders were
released, Nehru thought that Jinnah represented “an obvious example
of the utter lack of the civilised mind,” and Gandhi was calling him a
“maniac” and “an evil genius.”

From that point on, violence on the streets between Hindus and
Muslims began to escalate. People moved away from, or were forced
out of, mixed neighborhoods and took refuge in increasingly
polarized ghettos. Tensions were often heightened by local and
regional political leaders. H. S. Suhrawardy, the ruthless Muslim
League Chief Minister of Bengal, made incendiary speeches in
Calcutta, provoking rioters against his own Hindu populace and
writing in a newspaper that “bloodshed and disorder are not
necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.”

The first series of widespread religious massacres took place in

Calcutta, in 1946, partly as a result of Suhrawardy’s incitement. Von
Tunzelmann’s history relays atrocities witnessed there by the writer
Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri described a man tied to the connector
box of the tramlines with a small hole drilled in his skull, so that he
would bleed to death as slowly as possible. He also wrote about a
Hindu mob stripping a fourteen-year-old boy naked to confirm that he
was circumcised, and therefore Muslim. The boy was then thrown
into a pond and held down with bamboo poles—“a Bengali engineer
educated in England noting the time he took to die on his Rolex
wristwatch, and wondering how tough the life of a Muslim bastard
was.” Five thousand people were killed. The American
photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, who had witnessed the
opening of the gates of a Nazi concentration camp a year earlier,
wrote that Calcutta’s streets “looked like Buchenwald.”
As riots spread to other cities and the number of casualties escalated,
the leaders of the Congress Party, who had initially opposed Partition,
began to see it as the only way to rid themselves of the troublesome
Jinnah and his Muslim League. In a speech in April, 1947, Nehru
said, “I want that those who stand as an obstacle in our way should go
their own way.” Likewise, the British realized that they had lost any
remaining vestiges of control and began to speed up their exit
strategy. On the afternoon of February 20, 1947, the British Prime
Minister, Clement Atlee, announced before Parliament that British
rule would end on “a date not later than June, 1948.” If Nehru and
Jinnah could be reconciled by then, power would be transferred to
“some form of central Government for British India.” If not, they
would hand over authority “in such other way as may seem most
reasonable and in the best interests of the Indian people.”

“These pills will cure your O.C.D., but first I wonder if you could
organize my shelves.”

 

In March, 1947, a glamorous minor royal named Lord Louis

Mountbatten flew into Delhi as Britain’s final Viceroy, his mission to
hand over power and get out of India as quickly as possible. A series
of disastrous meetings with an intransigent Jinnah soon convinced
him that the Muslim League leader was “a psychopathic case,”
impervious to negotiation. Worried that, if he didn’t move rapidly,
Britain might, as Hajari writes, end up “refereeing a civil war,”
Mountbatten deployed his considerable charm to persuade all the
parties to agree to Partition as the only remaining option.

In early June, Mountbatten stunned everyone by announcing August

15, 1947, as the date for the transfer of power—ten months earlier
than expected. The reasons for this haste are still the subject of debate,
but it is probable that Mountbatten wanted to shock the quarrelling
parties into realizing that they were hurtling toward a sectarian
precipice. However, the rush only exacerbated the chaos. Cyril
Radcliffe, a British judge assigned to draw the borders of the two new
states, was given barely forty days to remake the map of South Asia.
The borders were finally announced two days after India’s
Independence.

None of the disputants were happy with the compromise that

Mountbatten had forced on them. Jinnah, who had succeeded in
creating a new country, regarded the truncated state he was given—a
slice of India’s eastern and western extremities, separated by a
thousand miles of Indian territory—as “a maimed, mutilated and
moth-eaten” travesty of the land he had fought for. He warned that the
partition of Punjab and Bengal “will be sowing the seeds of future
serious trouble.”
On the evening of August 14, 1947, in the Viceroy’s House in New
Delhi, Mountbatten and his wife settled down to watch a Bob Hope
movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” A short distance away, at the bottom
of Raisina Hill, in India’s Constituent Assembly, Nehru rose to his
feet to make his most famous speech. “Long years ago, we made a
tryst with destiny,” he declaimed. “At the stroke of the midnight hour,
when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

But outside the well-guarded enclaves of New Delhi the horror was
well under way. That same evening, as the remaining British officials
in Lahore set off for the railway station, they had to pick their way
through streets littered with dead bodies. On the platforms, they found
the railway staff hosing down pools of blood. Hours earlier, a group
of Hindus fleeing the city had been massacred by a Muslim mob as
they sat waiting for a train. As the Bombay Express pulled out of
Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab
was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village.

What followed, especially in Punjab, the principal center of the

violence, was one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth
century. As Nisid Hajari writes, “Foot caravans of destitute refugees
fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants
trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops
that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains,
filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along
the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence,
blood seeping from under their carriage doors.”

Within a few months, the landscape of South Asia had changed

irrevocably. In 1941, Karachi, designated the first capital of Pakistan,
was 47.6 per cent Hindu. Delhi, the capital of independent India, was
one-third Muslim. By the end of the decade, almost all the Hindus of
Karachi had fled, while two hundred thousand Muslims had been
forced out of Delhi. The changes made in a matter of months remain
indelible seventy years later.

More than twenty years ago, I visited the novelist Ahmed Ali. Ali was
the author of “Twilight in Delhi,” which was published, in 1940, with
the support of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, and is probably still
the finest novel written about the Indian capital. Ali had grown up in
the mixed world of old Delhi, but by the time I visited him he was
living in exile in Karachi. “The civilization of Delhi came into being
through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim,”
he told me. Now “Delhi is dead. . . . All that made Delhi special has
been uprooted and dispersed.” He lamented especially the fact that the
refinement of Delhi Urdu had been destroyed: “Now the language has
shrunk. So many words are lost.”

Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the
creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. The
tragedy of Partition, he wrote, was not that there were now two
countries instead of one but the realization that “human beings in both
countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry . . . slaves of religious
passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.” The madness he
witnessed and the trauma he experienced in the process of leaving
Bombay and emigrating to Lahore marked him for the rest of his life.
Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short
story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and
journalist of varying artistic attainment. Afterward, during several
years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of
comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he
translated and adopted as models. Although his work is still little
known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by
Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him
a wider audience.

As recently illuminated in Ayesha Jalal’s “The Pity of Partition”—

Jalal is Manto’s great-niece—he was baffled by the logic of Partition.
“Despite trying,” he wrote, “I could not separate India from Pakistan,
and Pakistan from India.” Who, he asked, owned the literature that
had been written in undivided India? Although he faced criticism and
censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that
accompanied Partition. “When I think of the recovered women, I
think only of their bloated bellies—what will happen to those
bellies?” he asked. Would the children so conceived “belong to
Pakistan or Hindustan?”
The most extraordinary feature of Manto’s writing is that, for all his
feeling, he never judges. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what
is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as
the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped. In the short story
“Colder Than Ice,” we enter the bedroom of Ishwar Singh, a Sikh
murderer and rapist, who has suffered from impotence ever since his
abduction of a beautiful Muslim girl. As he tries to explain his
affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of
discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:

“I could have slashed her throat, but I didn’t. . . . I thought she had gone into a
faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside
the city. . . . Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and . . . first I
thought I would shuffle her a bit . . . but then I decided to trump her right away. . . .
”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I threw the trump . . . but, but . . . ”

His voice sank.

Kalwant Kaur shook him violently. “What happened?”

Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. “She was dead. . . . I had carried a dead body . . . a
heap of cold flesh . . . jani, [my beloved] give me your hand.”
“Wait, what if we convinced the jury that, while they’re wasting their time
with me, the real Socrates is still at large?”


Kalwant Kaur placed her hand on his. It was colder than ice.