August 22, 2022 • 28 mins
Description: In this week’s episode, Neha discusses Direct Action Day, a major event that planted one of the seeds for Partition. She also discusses some other key events and people that were integral to this moment in history. Later, Neha is joined by David Gilmartin to break down some of these events in further detail. She also talks about the way Partition is taught in schools, and interviews two former students from The University of Texas at Austin.
Sources/Links:
Follow Neha on Instagram and Twitter
Follow Partition on Instagram and Twitter
Cyril Radcliffe: The man who drew the partition line - BBC Video
The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia
The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan
Midnight’s Furies by Nisid Hijari
https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/gilmarti/ - David Gilmartin site
Voiceover for Nisid Hijari is provided by Ravi Guru Singh
Voiceover for Yasmin Khan is provided by Priya Kiran
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Warning. The following episode contains stories of extreme violence. Have
you ever walked the streets of a city or town
the day after a parade or some other large event
took place. You may see a cleanup crew or an
overflowing trash can, maybe some stray balloons, no matter how
joyous the occasion may have been. The next day, those
(00:24):
areas tend to look a little apocalyptic, but you know
they'll be as good as new in no time. Now,
imagine this scenario, but instead of remnants of confetti and decorations,
the streets are littered with corpses and blood is heavily
drenched in the soil. Last week, you heard me talk
a little bit about what happened when the people of
(00:46):
India found out their country was going to be divided.
But what about some of the events that took place
before that? Many communal fights and riots broke out, most
notably on August seventeenth, ninety six, a day known as
Direct Action Day. What started out as a pressure tactic
against the British ended up in absolute carnage. From I
(01:11):
Heart Radio, I'm Nehasis and this is partition a podcast
that will take a closer look into this often forgotten
part of history. The idea behind Direct Action Day, an
event that took place exactly a year before the boundary
line was announced, came from Mohammad Ali Jinna, the future
founder of Pakistan. Jinna wanted to ensure the British knew
(01:35):
that the Muslim League wanted a separate country and the
transfer of power took place. He called for all Muslims
to close their shops and take part in demonstrations. However,
it was never quite clear what those demonstrations should be,
and in the end, massive looting and destruction transpired. Author
Nasidha Jari paints the grewsome picture in Midnight's Furies m
(02:00):
hm m h. None the Law first noticed something was
wrong when the cows sleeping in the middle of the
road struggled to their feet to avoid an early morning
street car. The normally packed tram that clanged past was
completely empty. Nobody was heading to work instead. A half
(02:22):
dozen trucks followed, filled with angry bearded men carrying brick
bats and bottles. For a moment, None the Law watched,
frozen in place as the thugs piled out and ransacked
a nearby furniture store owned by a Hindu like himself.
They tossed mattresses and chairs into the street and set
(02:43):
them on fire. Then a hill of stones came pelting
up the road towards him. Law turned and left. The
violence seemed to have subsided by the evening, but when
the clock struck midnight, a different story unfolded. Gangs of
(03:04):
killers materialized, wielding machetes, torches, and even revolvers and shotguns
with ruthless efficiency, they hunted down members of the opposite community.
Where a lane of Muslim shanties crossed through a Hindu area,
or a few threadbare hovels inhabited by Hindu families sat
amid a sea of Muslim homes, the shrieking mobs woke
(03:24):
the inhabitants, slaughtered them and set their cramped, flimsy huts alight.
The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight.
Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, seventeen August,
and photographs they looked like mannikins, near naked and beginning
to bloat, Their limbs tangled like rope. It was a
(03:48):
kill or be killed situation. It wasn't just the Gunda's
or low level criminals who are wreaking havoc, but regular
citizens as well. One horrified Britain recounted how his butcher
had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the
street and using the same knife to slip the throat
(04:08):
of a Hindu passersby. These days of bloodshed have another
name as well, the Great Calcutta Killings. Negotiation after negotiation
took place, different iterations of plans took place, and when
it looked like progress was at the end of a
long and winding road, it quickly dissolved as soon as
(04:29):
it appeared. Jenna felt as though he was being ignored
and that no one was listening to the wants and
needs of the people who wanted a Muslim majority dominion
Neary wanted to ensure that India wouldn't disintegrate. To shed
more perspective on these riots and other aspects of partition,
I spoke to David Gilmartin, a professor from North Carolina
State University, to understand direct Action Day. There's a really
(04:56):
important act to this and to Jenna's calling for protests
on that day. I mean, I think it's very important
to stress that Jenna did not call for open violence
on this, but there are questions about the relative responsibility
of different groups for the violence that broke out, and
(05:18):
one could certainly say, you know, Jenna is not completely
free from a case that there were certain things that
he did which may have contributed to the violence. But again,
what I want to stress is the backdrop to this
had to do with the failure of the last major effort,
(05:42):
through negotiations by the British and by the Indian National
Congress and by the Muslim League, to produce a plan
for India's independence which would keep India united as a
single country and avoid a partition between two separate countries.
(06:07):
After all my research, I kept coming back to the
same conclusion. The whims and personal agendas of men constantly
got in the way when creating a well thought out solution.
I asked David what he thought about this. It's one
of these questions that one can argue about. But I
know this is a wishy washy answer, but I come
(06:28):
back to it kind of yes and no, because there's
no doubt that individual politicians had their own agendas, and
in the riots in Calcutta, that's really clear. So I mean,
a lot of the argument about that particular riot that
followed Direct Action Day has to do with the role
that was played by HS suro Worthy. So who was
(06:52):
Hussaint Sahed sugar Worthy, the Chief Minister of Bengal under
the Muslim League. And again there's a lot of controversy
about this. You know, whether he restrained the police from
moving in earlier to try to control the violence. Some
people say yes, but that's contested. Some people say no,
(07:15):
that he didn't. But one thing is very clear, quite
apart from conflict with Hindus, Sarti was a Muslim leader
in Bengal whose political base was in cal cut and
the partition of Bengal while it was a negative thing
one could say for many Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike,
(07:39):
but for Sarroarty the partition of Bengal would have been
political suicide. And in fact, in a certain sense it
was because he had no significant political base in East Bengal,
the part that ultimately went to bucket Stan. I tried
very hard not to roll my eyes as David was
(08:00):
telling me this, and I did not succeed in this task.
I literally had to interject when he was speaking to
Note that my iy roll was not directed towards him,
but the incredibly frustrating information I was hearing. So he
continued as a prominent politician, but actually largely by shifting
(08:23):
his focus to the national level, to the Pakistani level.
So there isn't any doubt he had his own agenda
in this. But the other part of your question is
can one explain what happened by this? Well? Maybe, but
had there not been a leader like Sir Worthy, it's
(08:44):
not clear that exactly the same thing wouldn't have happened,
because there were very significant underlying questions that go beyond
his particular agenda. I then asked where was everyone? Jenna
and a Route were not physically in Calcutta, But what
about the police? Why did this unrest go on for
(09:05):
as long as it did. The question about the role
of the police and the army is in part tied
to the kinds of things you're implying in your question
that a lot of these political leaders had their own
goals but were in a certain way not ready to
(09:27):
sacrifice those or sacrificed their own standing to to take
an active role in trying to stop the violence. I
am not naive. I understand the demand to be a
politician and the complexities of having a difficult job, but
behaviors like the ones David mentioned truly have me scratching
(09:48):
my head. Is the death of our people worth political gain?
Jenna certainly did not call for violence, but there is
a certain sense in which, of course, even though the
evidence I've seen suggests that the Muslims in Calcutta probably
suffered higher casualties than Hindus did, but largely because the
(10:11):
Muslim population was generally poor and less able to defend itself.
But you know, the riot itself, no doubt, did make
clear on a national stage that the question of coercing
Muslims into any kind of arrangement that didn't take account
(10:31):
of the Muslim demand for Pakistan was going to be
a very difficult proposition, and that message actually got across,
I mean, to both Congress and to the British. So
I mean, in that sense one could say this did
to a certain degree served part of Jenna's purposes. Now
(10:54):
for the British, the British governor was very wary of
trying to bring the British in and to cut out
the elected Chief Minister of the province at this particular time,
which would have brought the British in for huge criticism,
and a lot of the British actions throughout this whole
(11:16):
period leading up to partition one can explain by efforts
of the British to avoid getting blamed for, you know,
having been the cause of what happened, though of course
they have been blamed, but nevertheless, you know, the idea
was that they wanted to create the position, the image
(11:37):
that this is something that different Indian groups need to
work out. They're the ones who are responsible for partition.
We are kind of above the fray. This is the
standard kind of British argument they used to justify that
they didn't in fact maintain order above the fray. The
(11:58):
British who made the decision to colonize us and desecrated
India and its economy basically said, this is above our paygrade. Certainly,
there's plenty one can say about the role of British
in this whole operation, which is not to say the
British weren't in a somewhat difficult situation. But on the
(12:21):
other hand, you know, they were in charge, you know,
I mean who else was there too? I mean This
is like this example that I was just gimming about
what happened on direct Action Day and what followed, and
you know, the the politicians, people like Sara Worthy, were
under huge pressures and they did have their own agendas.
(12:44):
But yet at the same time, you know, even if
they were committed to a trying to control violence, they
didn't have the means to do it that the British did.
Accountability this is a characteristic that seems to be lacking
throughout many of the issues that arose before and after
(13:05):
a partition. No one wants to claim responsibility. It's like
when you see something amiss when you're walking and you
don't know if help is on the way. Most people
assume the problem is being taken care of and go
about their day. David said it himself. The lack of
confronting the violence from all sides was due to the
fact that there was confusion of who exactly was in
(13:28):
charge at the time. There wasn't this idea of see something,
say something. Direct Action day to me comes off as
a fur the greater good argument that the destruction was
a small price to pay in order to ensure that
the politicians got the chance to get what they want.
(14:11):
On February, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time,
Clement at Lee, made a statement that the British would
leave India by June of but as we all know,
that is not what happened. Like many characteristics of partition,
we cannot pinpoint in exact reason why the date became August,
(14:32):
almost an entire year earlier than expected. Was an ongoing
unrest in patience, greed, and honestly probably is a combination
of all these things and more. Here is another excerpt
from Midnight's Furies. Mystery and misinformation still cloud the most
(14:54):
pivotal decision in the partition process, to rush forward the
date of the British departure by ten months. Mount Batten
is typically blamed for the acceleration of the handover so
the British would not be held responsible for the blood
bath to come. Mountbatten did himself no favors by boasting
(15:15):
in later years that he had plucked the date out
of thin air at a press conference, choosing the anniversary
of the Japanese surrender, simply because it's sprang to mind.
If that were true, hundreds of thousands of dead and
millions of displaced Pakistani's and Indians would indeed have been
victims of one man's whimsical addicted You all may remember
(15:42):
from last week that Lord Mountbatten was a royal representative
whose job it was to oversee the separation of India.
What a gentleman. On July, the British Parliament passed the
Indian Independence Bill. The bill was made up of several
committees to deal with different aspects of partition for the British.
(16:04):
Some included assets and liabilities, economic relations, and armed forces.
Care to guess how many committees were created to help
the people of India and Pakistan. If you guessed zero,
you would be correct. Politicians took a very lazy, fair approach,
after all, what could go wrong? You've heard me say
(16:25):
that June three was the date independence was announced, but
how many people actually found out on this day? Remember
this was the nineties. People were not getting news alerts
and push notifications on their smartphones. While this information was
on the radio and in the papers. The vast majority
of residents lived in quiet, rural areas where this vital
(16:46):
intel did not reach them. For weeks, the British hardly
went door to door giving denizens an f y I.
So how exactly was India going to be separated in
a new country formed? Mount Batton and his team brought
in a man named Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer. Radcliffe was
(17:07):
literally chosen because he had absolutely no knowledge of what
was happening in India. According to the British, this would
allow him to do the job without a bias. To
add insult to injury, Radcliffe had never been to India before.
Do you think he bothered to visit the communities that
would soon be split up? He didn't. Do you think
he asked the United Nations for guidance? He didn't. The
(17:31):
United Nations was deliberately left out of the conversation to
avoid any delays. Did he make sure that all of
the information and plans he had for the country were
updated and accurate. He didn't. No map specialists or geography
professionals were involved in the making of this decision. Radcliffe
created these new territories in five weeks. The fate of
(17:54):
millions of people was left up to a man who
threw together a plan in five weeks. He left right
after his task was complete, burning all of the documents
before he left, or more truthfully, fled. Radcliffe wrote the
following to his nephew, Nobody in India would love me
(18:16):
for the award about the Punjab and Bengal, and there
will be roughly eighty million people, with their grievance who
will begin looking for me. I do not want them
to find me. As Rackcliffe understood it, people were going
to suffer no matter what. How nice to know we
were nothing more than collateral damage. Rackcliffe ended up not
(18:37):
accepting his fee for the job, hardly an atonement for
his sin. Naturally, when we're turning back to Britain, he
received one of the highest honors from the Queen the
night of the Grand Cross. You may recall my grandfather
talking about how he celebrated on the street as a
teenager when independence was granted. However, the celebration and excitement
(19:02):
was short lived because even though the British have left,
the official boundary lines have yet to be made public.
No one knew what land now belonged to what country. Remember,
this announcement came out on auguste The borderline cuts through
Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west. And
because Radcliffe made his decision on religious grounds, Muslims found
(19:23):
themselves on the Hindu side, and Hindus found themselves on
the Muslim side. Suddenly, even without moving, people were on
the wrong side of the border, and just like that,
we were in a state of genocide. A passage from
Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition states a whole village might
(19:44):
be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned
in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls
by impromptu firing squads using machine guns. Children, the elderly,
and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and
conversions from one faith to another occurred alongside systemic looting
(20:07):
and robbery, clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives.
It seems that the aim was not only to kill,
but to break people over and over again. I think
about these horrific facts and stories. These are stories that
determined much of my life, but not once did this
(20:27):
information come to play in my pre college education. I
graduated high school in two thousand eight, fourteen years ago.
I was curious to find out if others had similar
experiences to me, or by some miracle, this history hasn't
been erased from textbooks. My alma mater, the University of
Texas at Austin, is home to one of the most
distinguished South Asian programs in the country. I interviewed two
(20:51):
different students from UT, both of whom took an entire
course devoted to partition top by professor in any chater
g Did either of them know about it before taking
this class? Here's what they had to say. I didn't
know basically anything about partition before the class. That's Christine.
(21:14):
I just found the way the professor just made the
past come alive and really like reinforced the idea, like
that the past isn't even past. Um That made me
want to take more classes. Christine observed that while some
students were in this class to fulfilling requirement, others were
there for a very different reason. So I was one
(21:37):
of a handful of nonsalth Asian students in the class.
So at the beginning she was like, why are you here,
like asking people, and a lot of people were there
because they had never taken history classes before. They weren't
even liberal arts majors. They were just wanting to explore
family history or learn more about their heritage. And I
was like I'm just taking a history class. I felt
(22:00):
sort of like I was really missing something I didn't know.
I guess what the big deal at the time was,
because yes, my understanding and this is from like high
school history classes of partition was just kind of a
natural process of the independence movement and like a byproduct
of getting rid of British colonial rule was that these
(22:23):
two states had to form like it was almost inevitable,
which was something that was completely broken down in UM
the class. And one thing I come away with UM
is that it was definitely not inevitable and it was
a huge product of the British Rutha is a South
(22:44):
Asian like myself. She also immigrated to the United States
as a baby, so I was especially keen to know
if our experiences mirrored my own. My family didn't talk
about partition much, so are at all like the sentiment was,
you know, Pakistan an idea at one point where the
same country and then they split and now there's you know,
(23:05):
animosities one against the other. For me, it was just
kind of like this accepted thing that had happened. There
was no debate about if it was the right or
wrong thing to do. There was no Um, there was.
There just wasn't much like critical thought put towards it.
And I think what I learned in class was this
is a shared experience that people part of our generation
(23:28):
think have and it's because that history is really painful.
A lot of people's relatives experienced it firsthand and they
can speak to how it was more of an atrocity
than you know, the political gain. She recalls her first
time finding out about partition as a teenager. It was
(23:49):
actually kind of funny. Um, in my ninth grade World
Geography class, we talked about partition for I think like
a few lessons. It was like two were three lessons,
and um, the way it was talked about was so
surface level tangential. And now looking back on it after
(24:09):
taking the classes that I have, it's almost offensive the
way that it was taught, Like, you know, they were
just they were just like, yeah, God, he was this
wonderful person who did so much great work to bring
peace to South Asia. And I just think about it now,
like as if that was a big joke. If you
remember from last week's episode, learning about Gandhi was also
(24:31):
the only aspect associated with partition I was taught as well.
Dr Gunita Singhbala, founder of the Oral History Project Partition Archive,
mentioned her education or lack there of, on this topic.
When we were children, the history that we were learning
in school, the official history was so disconnected from folk history,
(24:55):
and not just the history, even the news, like what
we would hear on National team me at the time,
there was only you know, one channel in India and
Pakistan as well at the time, the Indian channel was
called Dooders and um the news we would hear about
the job versus what we were seeing. There was such
a disconnect. And similarly in history, the folk history that
our grandparents and our communities carried and told through folklore
(25:20):
versus um you know what we lived in school, I
always knew that that gap needed rebridged and that would
solve a lot of the misunderstandings, a lot of the
problems we were having, a lot of the conflict that
resulted in real lives lost. So that thought was in
the back of my mind for a very long time.
Fast forward to high school. Um, I learned about, you know,
(25:43):
the independence movement in India and how India freedom uh
India and Pakistan and you know, the it was like
a one liner in our two books. Basically, Gandhi walked
to peaceful march the British left and it was like
a peaceful trance for a power and I was like, well,
that's just not what I heard growing up. Here's David
(26:05):
again with his experience as an educator. Mostly the students
know very little about partition. Some I've never heard of it.
Others sort of say, oh, yeah, there was something in
a school textbook about that, but you know, they can't
(26:26):
remember very much. But but of course other students know
much more about it, and particularly students who you know,
as you've been describing, have some family connections to partition,
and you know, their grandparents were involved in some way
or they've heard about it, and so they don't know
(26:49):
all of the details, but they do have real questions
tied to it, which puts them in a somewhat different
perspective from the other students. So yeah, I mean, among
the students who hadn't sort of heard at all about
partition before, some get really quite interested, you know, and
people of course are always amazed to discover important things
(27:11):
in history that they ever heard of. You know. We
talked about the people whose lives are affected by this
event in a general sense, but for the next two
episodes I will specifically talk about women and their treatment.
During Partition, I spoke to our survivor who wrote a
(27:35):
book as a way to cope with her trauma and
use the women in her life as inspiration for her characters.
How was the transformation of women possible through this kind
of carnage and trauma that women went through. My father
till my mother's dying day would say well, you know,
(27:57):
your mother saved our lives And I'd say how And
my mother she didn't want to live through the trauma
again until next week. I'm ness and this is Partition.
Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up
initiative created by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Median. Partition
(28:21):
is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becka Ramos.
It is edited by Rory Gagan, with original score composed
by Mark Hadley.
Warning. The following episode contains stories of extreme violence. Have
you ever walked the streets of a city or town
the day after a parade or some other large event
took place. You may see a cleanup crew or an
overflowing trash can, maybe some stray balloons, no matter how
joyous the occasion may have been. The next day, those
(00:24):
areas tend to look a little apocalyptic, but you know
they'll be as good as new in no time. Now,
imagine this scenario, but instead of remnants of confetti and decorations,
the streets are littered with corpses and blood is heavily
drenched in the soil. Last week, you heard me talk
a little bit about what happened when the people of
(00:46):
India found out their country was going to be divided.
But what about some of the events that took place
before that? Many communal fights and riots broke out, most
notably on August seventeenth, ninety six, a day known as
Direct Action Day. What started out as a pressure tactic
against the British ended up in absolute carnage. From I
(01:11):
Heart Radio, I'm Nehasis and this is partition a podcast
that will take a closer look into this often forgotten
part of history. The idea behind Direct Action Day, an
event that took place exactly a year before the boundary
line was announced, came from Mohammad Ali Jinna, the future
founder of Pakistan. Jinna wanted to ensure the British knew
(01:35):
that the Muslim League wanted a separate country and the
transfer of power took place. He called for all Muslims
to close their shops and take part in demonstrations. However,
it was never quite clear what those demonstrations should be,
and in the end, massive looting and destruction transpired. Author
Nasidha Jari paints the grewsome picture in Midnight's Furies m
(02:00):
hm m h. None the Law first noticed something was
wrong when the cows sleeping in the middle of the
road struggled to their feet to avoid an early morning
street car. The normally packed tram that clanged past was
completely empty. Nobody was heading to work instead. A half
(02:22):
dozen trucks followed, filled with angry bearded men carrying brick
bats and bottles. For a moment, None the Law watched,
frozen in place as the thugs piled out and ransacked
a nearby furniture store owned by a Hindu like himself.
They tossed mattresses and chairs into the street and set
(02:43):
them on fire. Then a hill of stones came pelting
up the road towards him. Law turned and left. The
violence seemed to have subsided by the evening, but when
the clock struck midnight, a different story unfolded. Gangs of
(03:04):
killers materialized, wielding machetes, torches, and even revolvers and shotguns
with ruthless efficiency, they hunted down members of the opposite community.
Where a lane of Muslim shanties crossed through a Hindu area,
or a few threadbare hovels inhabited by Hindu families sat
amid a sea of Muslim homes, the shrieking mobs woke
(03:24):
the inhabitants, slaughtered them and set their cramped, flimsy huts alight.
The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight.
Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, seventeen August,
and photographs they looked like mannikins, near naked and beginning
to bloat, Their limbs tangled like rope. It was a
(03:48):
kill or be killed situation. It wasn't just the Gunda's
or low level criminals who are wreaking havoc, but regular
citizens as well. One horrified Britain recounted how his butcher
had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the
street and using the same knife to slip the throat
(04:08):
of a Hindu passersby. These days of bloodshed have another
name as well, the Great Calcutta Killings. Negotiation after negotiation
took place, different iterations of plans took place, and when
it looked like progress was at the end of a
long and winding road, it quickly dissolved as soon as
(04:29):
it appeared. Jenna felt as though he was being ignored
and that no one was listening to the wants and
needs of the people who wanted a Muslim majority dominion
Neary wanted to ensure that India wouldn't disintegrate. To shed
more perspective on these riots and other aspects of partition,
I spoke to David Gilmartin, a professor from North Carolina
State University, to understand direct Action Day. There's a really
(04:56):
important act to this and to Jenna's calling for protests
on that day. I mean, I think it's very important
to stress that Jenna did not call for open violence
on this, but there are questions about the relative responsibility
of different groups for the violence that broke out, and
(05:18):
one could certainly say, you know, Jenna is not completely
free from a case that there were certain things that
he did which may have contributed to the violence. But again,
what I want to stress is the backdrop to this
had to do with the failure of the last major effort,
(05:42):
through negotiations by the British and by the Indian National
Congress and by the Muslim League, to produce a plan
for India's independence which would keep India united as a
single country and avoid a partition between two separate countries.
(06:07):
After all my research, I kept coming back to the
same conclusion. The whims and personal agendas of men constantly
got in the way when creating a well thought out solution.
I asked David what he thought about this. It's one
of these questions that one can argue about. But I
know this is a wishy washy answer, but I come
(06:28):
back to it kind of yes and no, because there's
no doubt that individual politicians had their own agendas, and
in the riots in Calcutta, that's really clear. So I mean,
a lot of the argument about that particular riot that
followed Direct Action Day has to do with the role
that was played by HS suro Worthy. So who was
(06:52):
Hussaint Sahed sugar Worthy, the Chief Minister of Bengal under
the Muslim League. And again there's a lot of controversy
about this. You know, whether he restrained the police from
moving in earlier to try to control the violence. Some
people say yes, but that's contested. Some people say no,
(07:15):
that he didn't. But one thing is very clear, quite
apart from conflict with Hindus, Sarti was a Muslim leader
in Bengal whose political base was in cal cut and
the partition of Bengal while it was a negative thing
one could say for many Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike,
(07:39):
but for Sarroarty the partition of Bengal would have been
political suicide. And in fact, in a certain sense it
was because he had no significant political base in East Bengal,
the part that ultimately went to bucket Stan. I tried
very hard not to roll my eyes as David was
(08:00):
telling me this, and I did not succeed in this task.
I literally had to interject when he was speaking to
Note that my iy roll was not directed towards him,
but the incredibly frustrating information I was hearing. So he
continued as a prominent politician, but actually largely by shifting
(08:23):
his focus to the national level, to the Pakistani level.
So there isn't any doubt he had his own agenda
in this. But the other part of your question is
can one explain what happened by this? Well? Maybe, but
had there not been a leader like Sir Worthy, it's
(08:44):
not clear that exactly the same thing wouldn't have happened,
because there were very significant underlying questions that go beyond
his particular agenda. I then asked where was everyone? Jenna
and a Route were not physically in Calcutta, But what
about the police? Why did this unrest go on for
(09:05):
as long as it did. The question about the role
of the police and the army is in part tied
to the kinds of things you're implying in your question
that a lot of these political leaders had their own
goals but were in a certain way not ready to
(09:27):
sacrifice those or sacrificed their own standing to to take
an active role in trying to stop the violence. I
am not naive. I understand the demand to be a
politician and the complexities of having a difficult job, but
behaviors like the ones David mentioned truly have me scratching
(09:48):
my head. Is the death of our people worth political gain?
Jenna certainly did not call for violence, but there is
a certain sense in which, of course, even though the
evidence I've seen suggests that the Muslims in Calcutta probably
suffered higher casualties than Hindus did, but largely because the
(10:11):
Muslim population was generally poor and less able to defend itself.
But you know, the riot itself, no doubt, did make
clear on a national stage that the question of coercing
Muslims into any kind of arrangement that didn't take account
(10:31):
of the Muslim demand for Pakistan was going to be
a very difficult proposition, and that message actually got across,
I mean, to both Congress and to the British. So
I mean, in that sense one could say this did
to a certain degree served part of Jenna's purposes. Now
(10:54):
for the British, the British governor was very wary of
trying to bring the British in and to cut out
the elected Chief Minister of the province at this particular time,
which would have brought the British in for huge criticism,
and a lot of the British actions throughout this whole
(11:16):
period leading up to partition one can explain by efforts
of the British to avoid getting blamed for, you know,
having been the cause of what happened, though of course
they have been blamed, but nevertheless, you know, the idea
was that they wanted to create the position, the image
(11:37):
that this is something that different Indian groups need to
work out. They're the ones who are responsible for partition.
We are kind of above the fray. This is the
standard kind of British argument they used to justify that
they didn't in fact maintain order above the fray. The
(11:58):
British who made the decision to colonize us and desecrated
India and its economy basically said, this is above our paygrade. Certainly,
there's plenty one can say about the role of British
in this whole operation, which is not to say the
British weren't in a somewhat difficult situation. But on the
(12:21):
other hand, you know, they were in charge, you know,
I mean who else was there too? I mean This
is like this example that I was just gimming about
what happened on direct Action Day and what followed, and
you know, the the politicians, people like Sara Worthy, were
under huge pressures and they did have their own agendas.
(12:44):
But yet at the same time, you know, even if
they were committed to a trying to control violence, they
didn't have the means to do it that the British did.
Accountability this is a characteristic that seems to be lacking
throughout many of the issues that arose before and after
(13:05):
a partition. No one wants to claim responsibility. It's like
when you see something amiss when you're walking and you
don't know if help is on the way. Most people
assume the problem is being taken care of and go
about their day. David said it himself. The lack of
confronting the violence from all sides was due to the
fact that there was confusion of who exactly was in
(13:28):
charge at the time. There wasn't this idea of see something,
say something. Direct Action day to me comes off as
a fur the greater good argument that the destruction was
a small price to pay in order to ensure that
the politicians got the chance to get what they want.
(14:11):
On February, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time,
Clement at Lee, made a statement that the British would
leave India by June of but as we all know,
that is not what happened. Like many characteristics of partition,
we cannot pinpoint in exact reason why the date became August,
(14:32):
almost an entire year earlier than expected. Was an ongoing
unrest in patience, greed, and honestly probably is a combination
of all these things and more. Here is another excerpt
from Midnight's Furies. Mystery and misinformation still cloud the most
(14:54):
pivotal decision in the partition process, to rush forward the
date of the British departure by ten months. Mount Batten
is typically blamed for the acceleration of the handover so
the British would not be held responsible for the blood
bath to come. Mountbatten did himself no favors by boasting
(15:15):
in later years that he had plucked the date out
of thin air at a press conference, choosing the anniversary
of the Japanese surrender, simply because it's sprang to mind.
If that were true, hundreds of thousands of dead and
millions of displaced Pakistani's and Indians would indeed have been
victims of one man's whimsical addicted You all may remember
(15:42):
from last week that Lord Mountbatten was a royal representative
whose job it was to oversee the separation of India.
What a gentleman. On July, the British Parliament passed the
Indian Independence Bill. The bill was made up of several
committees to deal with different aspects of partition for the British.
(16:04):
Some included assets and liabilities, economic relations, and armed forces.
Care to guess how many committees were created to help
the people of India and Pakistan. If you guessed zero,
you would be correct. Politicians took a very lazy, fair approach,
after all, what could go wrong? You've heard me say
(16:25):
that June three was the date independence was announced, but
how many people actually found out on this day? Remember
this was the nineties. People were not getting news alerts
and push notifications on their smartphones. While this information was
on the radio and in the papers. The vast majority
of residents lived in quiet, rural areas where this vital
(16:46):
intel did not reach them. For weeks, the British hardly
went door to door giving denizens an f y I.
So how exactly was India going to be separated in
a new country formed? Mount Batton and his team brought
in a man named Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer. Radcliffe was
(17:07):
literally chosen because he had absolutely no knowledge of what
was happening in India. According to the British, this would
allow him to do the job without a bias. To
add insult to injury, Radcliffe had never been to India before.
Do you think he bothered to visit the communities that
would soon be split up? He didn't. Do you think
he asked the United Nations for guidance? He didn't. The
(17:31):
United Nations was deliberately left out of the conversation to
avoid any delays. Did he make sure that all of
the information and plans he had for the country were
updated and accurate. He didn't. No map specialists or geography
professionals were involved in the making of this decision. Radcliffe
created these new territories in five weeks. The fate of
(17:54):
millions of people was left up to a man who
threw together a plan in five weeks. He left right
after his task was complete, burning all of the documents
before he left, or more truthfully, fled. Radcliffe wrote the
following to his nephew, Nobody in India would love me
(18:16):
for the award about the Punjab and Bengal, and there
will be roughly eighty million people, with their grievance who
will begin looking for me. I do not want them
to find me. As Rackcliffe understood it, people were going
to suffer no matter what. How nice to know we
were nothing more than collateral damage. Rackcliffe ended up not
(18:37):
accepting his fee for the job, hardly an atonement for
his sin. Naturally, when we're turning back to Britain, he
received one of the highest honors from the Queen the
night of the Grand Cross. You may recall my grandfather
talking about how he celebrated on the street as a
teenager when independence was granted. However, the celebration and excitement
(19:02):
was short lived because even though the British have left,
the official boundary lines have yet to be made public.
No one knew what land now belonged to what country. Remember,
this announcement came out on auguste The borderline cuts through
Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west. And
because Radcliffe made his decision on religious grounds, Muslims found
(19:23):
themselves on the Hindu side, and Hindus found themselves on
the Muslim side. Suddenly, even without moving, people were on
the wrong side of the border, and just like that,
we were in a state of genocide. A passage from
Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition states a whole village might
(19:44):
be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned
in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls
by impromptu firing squads using machine guns. Children, the elderly,
and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and
conversions from one faith to another occurred alongside systemic looting
(20:07):
and robbery, clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives.
It seems that the aim was not only to kill,
but to break people over and over again. I think
about these horrific facts and stories. These are stories that
determined much of my life, but not once did this
(20:27):
information come to play in my pre college education. I
graduated high school in two thousand eight, fourteen years ago.
I was curious to find out if others had similar
experiences to me, or by some miracle, this history hasn't
been erased from textbooks. My alma mater, the University of
Texas at Austin, is home to one of the most
distinguished South Asian programs in the country. I interviewed two
(20:51):
different students from UT, both of whom took an entire
course devoted to partition top by professor in any chater
g Did either of them know about it before taking
this class? Here's what they had to say. I didn't
know basically anything about partition before the class. That's Christine.
(21:14):
I just found the way the professor just made the
past come alive and really like reinforced the idea, like
that the past isn't even past. Um That made me
want to take more classes. Christine observed that while some
students were in this class to fulfilling requirement, others were
there for a very different reason. So I was one
(21:37):
of a handful of nonsalth Asian students in the class.
So at the beginning she was like, why are you here,
like asking people, and a lot of people were there
because they had never taken history classes before. They weren't
even liberal arts majors. They were just wanting to explore
family history or learn more about their heritage. And I
was like I'm just taking a history class. I felt
(22:00):
sort of like I was really missing something I didn't know.
I guess what the big deal at the time was,
because yes, my understanding and this is from like high
school history classes of partition was just kind of a
natural process of the independence movement and like a byproduct
of getting rid of British colonial rule was that these
(22:23):
two states had to form like it was almost inevitable,
which was something that was completely broken down in UM
the class. And one thing I come away with UM
is that it was definitely not inevitable and it was
a huge product of the British Rutha is a South
(22:44):
Asian like myself. She also immigrated to the United States
as a baby, so I was especially keen to know
if our experiences mirrored my own. My family didn't talk
about partition much, so are at all like the sentiment was,
you know, Pakistan an idea at one point where the
same country and then they split and now there's you know,
(23:05):
animosities one against the other. For me, it was just
kind of like this accepted thing that had happened. There
was no debate about if it was the right or
wrong thing to do. There was no Um, there was.
There just wasn't much like critical thought put towards it.
And I think what I learned in class was this
is a shared experience that people part of our generation
(23:28):
think have and it's because that history is really painful.
A lot of people's relatives experienced it firsthand and they
can speak to how it was more of an atrocity
than you know, the political gain. She recalls her first
time finding out about partition as a teenager. It was
(23:49):
actually kind of funny. Um, in my ninth grade World
Geography class, we talked about partition for I think like
a few lessons. It was like two were three lessons,
and um, the way it was talked about was so
surface level tangential. And now looking back on it after
(24:09):
taking the classes that I have, it's almost offensive the
way that it was taught, Like, you know, they were
just they were just like, yeah, God, he was this
wonderful person who did so much great work to bring
peace to South Asia. And I just think about it now,
like as if that was a big joke. If you
remember from last week's episode, learning about Gandhi was also
(24:31):
the only aspect associated with partition I was taught as well.
Dr Gunita Singhbala, founder of the Oral History Project Partition Archive,
mentioned her education or lack there of, on this topic.
When we were children, the history that we were learning
in school, the official history was so disconnected from folk history,
(24:55):
and not just the history, even the news, like what
we would hear on National team me at the time,
there was only you know, one channel in India and
Pakistan as well at the time, the Indian channel was
called Dooders and um the news we would hear about
the job versus what we were seeing. There was such
a disconnect. And similarly in history, the folk history that
our grandparents and our communities carried and told through folklore
(25:20):
versus um you know what we lived in school, I
always knew that that gap needed rebridged and that would
solve a lot of the misunderstandings, a lot of the
problems we were having, a lot of the conflict that
resulted in real lives lost. So that thought was in
the back of my mind for a very long time.
Fast forward to high school. Um, I learned about, you know,
(25:43):
the independence movement in India and how India freedom uh
India and Pakistan and you know, the it was like
a one liner in our two books. Basically, Gandhi walked
to peaceful march the British left and it was like
a peaceful trance for a power and I was like, well,
that's just not what I heard growing up. Here's David
(26:05):
again with his experience as an educator. Mostly the students
know very little about partition. Some I've never heard of it.
Others sort of say, oh, yeah, there was something in
a school textbook about that, but you know, they can't
(26:26):
remember very much. But but of course other students know
much more about it, and particularly students who you know,
as you've been describing, have some family connections to partition,
and you know, their grandparents were involved in some way
or they've heard about it, and so they don't know
(26:49):
all of the details, but they do have real questions
tied to it, which puts them in a somewhat different
perspective from the other students. So yeah, I mean, among
the students who hadn't sort of heard at all about
partition before, some get really quite interested, you know, and
people of course are always amazed to discover important things
(27:11):
in history that they ever heard of. You know. We
talked about the people whose lives are affected by this
event in a general sense, but for the next two
episodes I will specifically talk about women and their treatment.
During Partition, I spoke to our survivor who wrote a
(27:35):
book as a way to cope with her trauma and
use the women in her life as inspiration for her characters.
How was the transformation of women possible through this kind
of carnage and trauma that women went through. My father
till my mother's dying day would say well, you know,
(27:57):
your mother saved our lives And I'd say how And
my mother she didn't want to live through the trauma
again until next week. I'm ness and this is Partition.
Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up
initiative created by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Median. Partition
(28:21):
is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becka Ramos.
It is edited by Rory Gagan, with original score composed
by Mark Hadley.
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