And India Goes On

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Sam Dalrymple. HarperCollins Publishers. Pages: 519. Price: INR 799.

For the past millennium, India has been the land of tragedies. Around a million died in the Great Partition of India. The scattered remnants are still being put together. All seems like a distant memory, and to many, it is nothing more than an unpleasant dream. Hundreds of romantic stories and poems centred around the event have been penned down. However, India goes on. Whether this is a curse or a blessing, it is for philosophers to think. But the fault lines have been exacerbating, and every effort in furthering a cohesive idea of nationhood is meeting Russian winters.

To one, the idea of partition may take us back to the imagery of people helplessly crossing the borders, much before even Radcliffe would define them, Gandhi walking in Noakhali,  Congress leaders delivering speeches, and Khushwant Singh's poignant Train to Pakistan. To some, ideas of partition may be blurred with the images of New Delhi rejoicing in the independence. However, it was not so parochially confined to the North-Western provinces of India. Sam Dalrymple's first is not just another, but a remarkable attempt at studying such fissures that caused not merely one but five partitions of India.

The Overture

The high noon of the British Raj saw princely states and provinces from Aden to the dense jungles of Southeast Asia subordinate to the Indian Empire. One may be astounded to hear that places like Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Bhutan, were a part of the administration of the Indian Empire as late as the implementation of the Government of India Act, 1935. At the overture, we meet an exuberant ‘Simon's Seven Dwarfs’, reaching Bombay at the RMS Mooltan. Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister at the time of Indian independence, was another such commissioner who was a “soggy nervous wreck” and “was so helplessly flabbergasted by the volley of questions that his hand began to shiver as he tried to light his pipe” (pp. 10-11).

Sam's prose is so vibrant and evocative that the reader may find themselves as the silent, helpless watcher. One may wish to put their hands around Jinnah's shoulder to empathise with Ruttie's unfortunate death and to forewarn Sarojini Naidu, a close friend of his, of what was to become of him. Gandhi was concerned about a constitution parallel to what the Simon Commission would suggest, and he threw all his weight behind the Nehru Report. That was the point of aperture for Jinnah that further led the Islamic radicalisation of the “one of the best dressed men of the British Empire”. The transformation of the “whisky drinker, chain smoker, pork eater” (p. 12), Jinnah into the leader of the Muslims, declaring Direct Action on Hindus, further exacerbating the religious fault lines in the subcontinent, is something that would continue to baffle readers and historians.

The Fall of Burma and Aden

The Simon Commission, on reaching Rangoon, realised that “including Burma in the Indian Empire was a mistake.” U Ottama, popularly known as Mahatma Ottama, led the non-violent protests against any separation and believed that Burma was an integral part of India. He was met with equally stronger resistance for separation from his contemporary in the northern plains of India, Mahatma Gandhi, who “identified India with Bharat.” When Ottama tried to publish his rebuttal to Gandhi in the former's magazine, Gandhi rejected his proposal and wrote, “The Burmese should certainly have my sympathy if they wished to secede.” Later, Ottama became the president of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1935 and after four years, met a sorrowful close. But nonviolence was not the norm in 1930s Burma. A violent uprising broke out against the Indians, led by Saya San, causing instability in the political system that continues even today. The subsequent migration and the refugee crises are often overshadowed by the events of 1947. (pp. 40-45)

A similar sentiment was there in Aden, where ideas of separation were brewing, but there were not many who saw themselves attached to the Indian nationhood, as was the case in Burma. Bombay Presidency saw several protests against the declaration of the Prince of Wales to separate Aden from British India. But it was of no avail. However, such a separation of provinces would set an unpleasant precedent for the years to come.

The third partition of India was the division between India and Pakistan, which has been analysed and narrated in a nuanced manner. Sam uses the personal dynamics of Mountbatten and Pandit Nehru to study the predictable nature of decisions. Parallely, he runs the plot of Aung San's unfortunate assassination that sent shock waves across the country. The book is an encyclopaedia of anecdotes; it is a treasure trove for quizzing aficionados. The author moves away from the standard history writing centred around the Congress and goes on to talk of the Naval Mutiny of 1946. He writes (p. 142), “...Indian sailors aboard HMS Talwar rebelled, pulling down the Union Jack and flying ‘three entwined flags: the tricolour of the Congress, the Green of the Muslim League, and the Red of the Communist Party.’ Twenty thousand sailors mutinied over five days aboard seventy-eight ships across the Indian Ocean.” This was spread as far as Malaya amongst the Indians who had supported the Indian National Army, to an extent where Lord Wavell requested Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to travel there to calm the situation (p. 143).

The fourth partition was that of the princely states. More than five hundred and fifty states that were subordinate to the British Empire had the option to either accede to India and its newly carved state, Pakistan, or to remain independent. Sam writes on V.P. Menon, Sardar Patel, and how the proximity to Mountbatten helped Nehru through many new negotiations, too. The majestic Operation Polo and the Kashmir trouble have been structurally narrated by the author, where the ancient Hindu heritage of Kashmir has been acknowledged, too. The accounts also present a comprehensive description of the much rumoured relationship between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. However, what may be interesting to one is the sympathy of Sardar Patel for the Hindu cause. Contrary to the Nehruvian stance, Sardar Vallabhbhai had Hindutva in his heart. But both being the fine statesmen they were, they collaborated well without much chaos in the cabinet on issues concerning the interests of India.

We come across an evocative portrait of the greatest loss in this partition, which one often ignores. The Indian traditions of dance, music, craft, and various forms of art had found their last refuge in the patronage of princely states. He writes (p. 280), “When all these royal families were paid off by ‘privy purses’ and abolished, thousands of bards, artists, courtesans, camel trainers, and courtly cooks found themselves unemployed. Hundreds of ancient art forms vanished.” The newly formed Republic of India failed to preserve and provide refuge for its ancient culture.

Salman Rushdie would later write of Pakistan (p. 206), “...the newly born nation was a fantastic bird of a place, two wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God.” The other wing was destined to be cut off in the fifth partition. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman had won the elections, but Zulfikar Ali Bhutto refused to cooperate with a prime minister from the East. Despite Ayub Khan’s pleas, neither could reach any compromise. Operation Searchlight (p. 362) was a brutal, violent response from the Pakistan Army to the tensions emerging in the East. With India’s intervention, the artificial state of Pakistan was divided, and Bangladesh was liberated. Similar to the parallel Burmese plot next to the Indian independence, the reader comes across the Naxal movements in West Bengal and the separationist tendencies in Nagaland and Mizoram of the 1970s.

Concluding Takes

In the introduction to Subhas Chandra Bose, one comes across factual and analytical errors, which may be ignored given the vast extent of the book, but it makes one question and refer to the notes in such subsequent analyses, too. Sam writes (p. 104), “Subhas Chandra Bose remains one of the most polarising figures in Indian history, revered as a secular liberator by some and reviled as a Nazi collaborator by others.” The statement appears to be written from the perspective of someone with very little firsthand experience of the Indian populace, as there is no national political party that would risk criticising Bose due to his widespread popularity across the country. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a second grader dressing up as Bose for a fancy dress competition will be able to justify his seeking help from Nazi Germany. Thus, to call him polarising is quite a misinformed analysis.

Another such inaccuracy with no primary citation is Sam writing that Bose had married Emilie Schenkl in 1937, much before he escaped from Calcutta in 1941. To put up a disputed claim that has evidence against it in the latest biography of Subhas Chandra Bose by Chandrachur Ghose, Bose (pp. 549-551), without any footnote, is quite perplexing. One can only wish that the author would look into such aspects in the revised editions of the copy.

Shattered Lands is methodologically rigorous and researched in various languages with immense archival depth. Although it is unfair to compare him with his father and acclaimed writer of grand empires, a reader cannot help but point out the differences and similarities in writing. The research that has been put in is more lucid and thoroughly structured than In Xanadu, William Dalrymple's first. We see glimpses of his father's research when there is a throwback to City of Djinns (p. 35), in reference to Delhi. Nothing was more prophetic than the Persian couplet that “whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: The Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroze Shah Tughlak, Shah Jehan…”. And so, when British India finally shifted their capital entirely to New Delhi, twenty years after the royal announcement, it was also the beginning of its disintegration.