The Partition of India: Aftermath

Partition killed perhaps a million people in 1947 and has not stopped killing since. The 10 to 15 million who crossed the new borders that August and September entered a wound that has bled into every aspect of South Asian politics for the best part of a century. The argument of this article is that the violence of 1947 was not a transient spasm but the founding condition of three new states whose relations with their own citizens, and with each other, have been shaped by what happened in the districts of Amritsar, Lahore, Gurdaspur, Lyallpur, Noakhali, and Calcutta between March 1946 and the closing of the borders at the end of 1948. Gyanendra Pandey’s Remembering Partition (2001) put the matter plainly: the violence was not the failure of partition, it was partition working exactly as the communal arithmetic intended.

The Migrations

The migrations dwarfed any precedent in British imperial history and most precedents in world history. Punjab bore the worst of it: perhaps ten million people crossed the new boundary in a matter of weeks, and the death toll in the Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim villages of the central districts has never been reliably counted. The two Punjabs — West going to Pakistan, East to India — were ethnically and religiously intermixed in ways that the new boundary treated as a problem to be solved by population transfer. Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition (2007) is unsparing on what that “solution” looked like on the ground: refugee columns of sixty thousand making their way on foot, with the men carrying swords and the women carrying children, and the trains arriving on the other side of the border full of the dead.

The Bengal delta, divided into West Bengal and East Bengal (later East Pakistan), saw a more orderly but no less bitter migration of perhaps three million people. The death toll was lower, the violence less concentrated, and the movement more drawn out — partly because the Congress and Muslim League politicians in Calcutta had established a more functional working relationship than their counterparts in Lahore. But the migrants of the delta, like those of Punjab, were never properly resettled; the squatter colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta and Dhaka became permanent features of the post-partition city.

The kidnapping of women was the most brutal of the partition’s instruments. The official figure — between 75,000 and 100,000 women abducted across Punjab and Bengal — is almost certainly an underestimate. Many of the women were recovered in the joint operations of the early 1950s, but recovery often meant being returned to a family that no longer existed, or being sent back to a husband who had remarried in their absence. As Urvashi Butalia argued in The Other Side of Silence (1998), the recovery programme was itself a form of violence.

The Communal Violence

The Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946 — three days of street murder that left perhaps 5,000 dead — announced what was coming. The Noakhali massacres of October 1946, in which perhaps 5,000 Hindus were killed in the rural districts of eastern Bengal, showed that the violence would not be contained in the cities. The anti-Muslim pogroms in Delhi, Bihar, and the United Provinces in the autumn of 1947, in which perhaps 20,000 Muslims were slaughtered in the new Indian capital alone, completed the picture. The pattern was not random: it tracked the political geography of the Muslim League’s support and the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS’s organising.

The violence was not a spontaneous riot, and the older “communal passions” explanation, in which the populations simply lost their heads, has been substantially abandoned. Pandey’s Remembering Partition showed, district by district, that the killing was preceded by lists, by meetings of local notables, and by the deliberate distribution of weapons. Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer (2007) is more explicit about the political responsibility: the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day in August 1946, the Congress’s refusal to discipline its Hindu-nationalist allies, and the British acquiescence in the whole process as the price of an orderly withdrawal. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Descendants (2014) extends the analysis into the decades after, showing how the violence of 1947 has been the load-bearing wall of every subsequent communal crisis on the subcontinent.

The Resettlement

The new governments in Delhi and Karachi faced an immediate problem of state survival: the absorption of perhaps seven million refugees on each side of the border. The Indian response, masterminded principally by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, was politically more impressive. The refugees were settled in the new Indian states of East Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh; the princely states of Rajasthan, Hyderabad, and Travancore were persuaded to make land available; the urban camps, of which Kingsway Camp in Delhi was the largest, were gradually converted into permanent housing.

The Pakistani response was harder. The refugees in the Punjab and Sind were, in the first years, inadequately housed; the camps around Karachi and Lahore became permanent features of the cities. The Pakistani state’s more limited bureaucratic capacity, and the smaller amount of urban land available for redistribution, meant that the refugees were absorbed more slowly and more painfully. The difference in the two states’ capacity to absorb the migration is one of the explanations, often overlooked, of the divergent political trajectories of India and Pakistan in the 1950s.

Delhi was the worst single crisis. Perhaps 500,000 Muslim refugees, mostly from the rural Punjab, arrived in the city in the autumn of 1947, and the city’s Muslim population was almost entirely displaced. The Indian government’s response — the rehabilitation programme, the urban renewal of the walled city, the eventual grant of property rights to the refugees — was a deliberate act of nation-building. The historian Sunil Amrith, in The Why of Things and elsewhere, has argued that the partition was constitutive of the new Indian state in ways that the official nationalist narrative has preferred to forget.

The India-Pakistan Wars

Partition produced four wars in the seventy-five years that followed. The first, fought from October 1947 to the UN-brokered ceasefire of 1 January 1949, was the war for Kashmir, and the ceasefire line it produced has held — with one major exception in 1965, and many smaller ones — ever since. The second, in September 1965, was provoked by Pakistan’s attempt to seize the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir and ended in a stalemate that the Tashkent Declaration of January 1966 papered over. The third, in December 1971, was the war over Bangladesh, in which India intervened decisively in the Bengali war of independence and produced the disintegration of Pakistan as a united state.

The fourth war has not been declared, and is being fought, intermittently, in the mountains of Kashmir and along the Line of Control. The 1998 nuclear tests in both countries raised the cost of a fifth war; the 2019 Indian revocation of Article 370 and the reorganisation of the state into two Union Territories raised the cost of the status quo. The wars, and the ceaseless military preparation for them, are the most direct political consequence of the partition: India and Pakistan now devote a higher proportion of their national product to defence than almost any other pair of countries in the world, and the military establishments in both states have a degree of political autonomy that would be unthinkable in countries without the partition legacy.

The Kashmir Conflict

Kashmir has been the most dangerous of the partition’s inheritances. The Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh on 26 October 1947 was conditional: the Indian government undertook that the accession would be confirmed by a plebiscite, which was never held. The United Nations, having passed its resolution of 13 August 1948 calling for a plebiscite, was never able to agree on the conditions under which one could be held. The plebiscite, in the form in which it was promised in 1947, became politically impossible in India long before it became diplomatically impossible in the United Nations. The ceasefire line became the Line of Control in 1972, by the terms of the Simla Agreement, and the Line of Control has been, ever since, a working border that neither side can afford to cross.

The 1989 insurgency changed the character of the conflict. The Indian state’s response — the deployment of perhaps 700,000 troops, the mass detention of Kashmiri men, the legal architecture of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act — produced a casualty toll of perhaps 100,000 since 1989, by the more careful estimates. The 2019 revocation of Article 370 was the most consequential Indian act in Kashmir since the accession, and it was a unilateral assertion of the position that the accession was unconditional. Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (2003) is the best single account of why the conflict has proved so durable; Victoria Schofield’s Kashmir in Crossfire (2000) is the best introduction to the political history.

The Communal Memory

Partition is the founding trauma of three modern literatures. The most acute witness was Saadat Hasan Manto, whose short stories of the late 1940s and early 1950s — Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do, Thanda Gosht — are still the standard against which partition fiction is measured. Manto’s position was simple: the madness of the year of partition was not a deviation from the norm but a revelation of it. The Punjabi novelist Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1974), the Bengali novelist Syad Shamsul Haq’s Nawab Sirajuddaulah and the work of the Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai extended the record on the other side of the new border.

The cinema has done its own work. M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hava (1973), which follows a Muslim family in Agra deciding whether to stay or leave in the year of partition, was banned in some Indian states for two decades after its release. Govind Nihalani’s Tamas (1986) brought Sahni’s novel to television. Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998) and the Pakistani director Shoaib Mansoor’s Bol (2011) extended the partition story into the second generation. The memory of partition, in the words of Pandey, is “the wound that does not heal,” and the literature of partition is the principal way in which the wound is kept open in the public culture of the three new states.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of partition has been transformed since the 1990s. The older tradition — Indian and Pakistani nationalist histories, the early official accounts of the British withdrawal, the work of the Indian Civil Service memoirists — treated partition as the consequence of the British failure to manage the transition. The revisionist work of the 1980s and 1990s, of which Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman (1985) and The Struggle for Pakistan (2014) are the most distinguished examples, restored the agency of the Muslim League and, in particular, of Jinnah. The most recent generation — Khan, Pandey, von Tunzelmann, Hajari, Butalia, Bose — has produced a more integrated picture in which the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, the Sikh Akali Dal, the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, and the provincial political bosses of the Punjab and Bengal are all treated as participants in a process whose outcome was not predetermined. The current debate is over the question of inevitability: was partition the only realistic outcome of the post-war British withdrawal from India, or was it the consequence of specific decisions, by specific people, that could have been taken differently? The consensus has moved, in the last twenty years, towards the second answer.

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