The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

One of the more sizeable holes in my knowledge of twentieth-century history concerns the partitioning of the British Raj -- the dividing up of the British colonial territory on the Indian subcontinent into two countries, Pakistan and India (and, later, yet a third, Bangladesh). To address my ignorance, I turned to this book, THE GREAT PARTITION: THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN, written by a professor at Oxford. I learned a lot, but can't say that I am wholly satisfied with the book.THE GREAT PARTITION contains the basic facts: In 1946 and 1947, Great Britain, worn out and broke after World War II, abandoned the Raj; it cut its losses and ran. On June 3, 1947, it announced that the Raj would be partitioned and the constituent parts would be given their independence ten weeks hence, on August 15, 1947. As matters developed the lines of partition were not released until August 17, two days after the independence (and simultaneous birth) of India and Pakistan. Before partition, there had been widespread violence, primarily Muslims against Hindus and vice versa, but some of it involved Sikhs. That violence intensified after August 15th, and ethnic cleansing was conducted in many areas. One of the largest migrations in history ensued -- Muslims within the territory of India fleeing to East or West Pakistan, and Hindus fleeing from the two areas of Pakistan to India. About twelve million people were displaced. Hundreds of thousands died, in some accounts as many as a million.Britain's drawing of national boundaries, on both the east and west of what became India (a total of 3,800 miles of border determination), was hasty and arbitrary. The imperial mapmaker, Cyril Radcliffe, had never been to India before he arrived on July 8th, and in six weeks he and his assistants had finished the job. Their line drawing was done remotely, working with maps and dubious census figures. It seems farcical.One might naturally wonder whether an alternative to Partition was ever explored. The answer, as I learned from the book, is yes. In May 1946, a high-level British "Cabinet Mission" presented a plan that would have devolved power to Muslims within a united India. There would have been a central government to handle matters of foreign affairs and defense, but otherwise individual provinces would have enjoyed considerable autonomy, including the ability to join together on certain matters, thereby allowing large Muslim blocs to act in concert within the Indian Union. But diehards and extremists on both sides of the Muslim/Hindi religious divide rejected the plan, after which the more moderate leaders didn't fight against partition. As Nehru later admitted: "The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years . . . The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it."The book covers all the above and considerably more factual territory. In a way, it packs quite a bit of history into its 210 pages of text. Supplementing that text are a glossary, a timeline, four maps, and about two dozen photographs.Nonetheless, I am not enthusiastic about the book. First, there are problems with the written presentation. Khan's prose is very smooth, but the text seems to have been written in discrete paragraphs, almost as if each was envisioned to stand alone. As a result, there is a choppiness to the presentation and, worse, considerable repetition of many points.Second, I would like to have been given some idea of how things might have been handled differently. Near the end of the book, Khan writes that "[t]here was nothing inevitable * * * about the way that Partition unfolded." But never in the course of the book does she discuss how the former Raj could have become self-governing without hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of people transplanted, and a continuing state of religiously-based tension and hostility between abutting nations.

This is a short history of South Asia's partition, written in 2007 by Yasmin Khan, a young Oxford history professor born in Britain. At slightly over 200 pages of text, it focuses on the years 1945-1950. As the British retreated, India and Pakistan were formed. Framed as a social history, there are many passages about both private and public individuals. There is a lesser look at political history, chiefly on the machinations of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. It works well as an introduction to a topic where mountains of specialized material can be climbed.Khan maintains the brevity of this book by giving little background material leading up to 1947. The history of the Congress party is taken forward from the release of Gandhi and his associates from prison, at the end of WWII. If you want know about Jinnah and earlier League politics you also won't find it here. As independence approached the Congress party had grown to a great size, and more members joined to take part in the future leadership. Competing factions had ideas that varied from Gandhi's ideals, and he had less ability to avert communal rioting and deaths.In the spring of 1946 a delegation was sent from Britain to negotiate with the independence leaders and plan British withdrawal from the rapidly dissolving empire. Khan makes a point that if the resulting Cabinet Mission Plan had succeeded, Pakistan as a separate country may not have existed. Opinion was divided on all sides whether a strong central government or a loose confederation of Hindu and Muslim states was the goal. It wasn't a foregone conclusion that only separate sovereign nations would suffice. After the plan collapsed street violence exploded.Although the mayhem that ensued is described in some detail, I still have difficulty grasping how it happened. Perhaps simple revenge and retribution played the greatest role in the escalation. Ultimately between 500,000 to 1,000,000 lives would be lost, on the scale of a civil war although an unorganized one. None of the parties would remain free of guilt. As a scholar of the British empire, Khan delves into the disorganized and deficient way the former colony was turned over for self rule. Crippled at the end of WWII, Britain hadn't the means nor the will to help.Much of this book was culled from previously published primary and secondary sources. Khan doesn't indicate new material was researched from archives or agency reports. This isn't an intrinsic fault. Written material on the subject is vast, and to present it succinctly is a worthwhile effort. However the book's structure is a problem. It is organized chronologically, but moves randomly between locations and topics. Personal anecdotes and stories describe the dislocation, violence, famine and disease. The chaos of the events seems reflected in their analysis.'Midnight's Furies' by American journalist Nisid Hajari (2015) covers much of the same ground in a somewhat more expansive and gripping way. Both books provide a balanced overview of a politically fraught period. Perhaps of interest to some, Hajari is from a Hindu-Indian and Jewish-American family, while Khan is of Pakistani and Anglo-Irish ancestry. I mention this as aspersions are often cast at the background and agenda of anyone who writes on the subject. 'The Great Partition' takes an unbiased approach, but the focus on vignettes falls short of a theme.

Events, in particular in 1946 and 1947, are described, culminating in British withdrawal and establishment of the new states of India and Pakistan. The book runs to 210 pages, plus maps, a list of abbreviations, a glossary, monochrome photographs, notes, a bibliography and index. For £12 it is good value.The book records both the negotiation of regime change and those affected by the resulting mess. It is a work of narrative history, from which important lessons should have been learnt. First the actors didn’t know what they were seeking to achieve. The Second World War and Partition bled into one another. The Moslem League had grown in influence amongst Muslims. However League supporters did not think of their call for Pakistan primarily as for a territorial unit. If they did, they hoped it would include large tracts of what had been Mogul India, larger and without the separation between what became East and West Pakistan. Jinnah, leader of the League and now thought of as father of Pakistan, sought a federal solution in which the Moslems would have regional and communal checks on majority power. He accepted Partition and the creation of Pakistan only as second best.Second, bringing about regime change was always going to be difficult, attempting to effect it within an unrealistic time frame, meant it failed. The Radcliffe Commission was given a quite inadequate time to establish and document the land border between India and Pakistan. On Independence some 48% of the land area and 28% of the population remained within princely states, which had not yet been integrated into the new states of India and Pakistan. This further complicated the process. The Moslem ruler of Hyderabad sought a separate independence. In 1948 Hyderabad was forcibly annexed to India. In the North of Bengal the princely state of Cooch Behar included a checkerboard of territory reflecting historic land holdings between it and Mogul territory. This had not been sorted out by 1949 when Cooch Behar, bordering East Pakistan, joined India, As a result there were 123 tiny enclaves of East Pakistan, now Bangla Desh, in India and 74 enclaves, legally Indian territory, in Bangla Desh.Third violence portrayed as random thuggery was not. It was routine, timetabled ethnic cleansing. It wasn’t disruptive background noise to constitutional decision making, but intended to influence the process, preventing reconciliation. There was no longer the appetite for Gandhian non-violence, instead an increasingly violent nationalism on both sides. Rape was used on both sides as a weapon, encouraging the "other" to flee. The British were shipping troops out, India and Pakistan dividing the Indian Army up between them, just when a disciplined military could have assisted in overseeing Independence and Partition. All this, and the uncertainty about where a border would be and what it would mean, created a perfect storm of ethnic violence. The leadership of both new states whilst washing their hands of the violence, to various extents, were complicit in it.Fourth the actual outcome was very different from that intended. A functioning Raj was fraying. The British, exhausted by their war effort, sought a quick withdrawal, and a successor, with whom to negotiate and to whom to hand over power. If Congress and the Moslem League wouldn’t work together, Partition was intended by the British so power could be handed to Congress in India and the Moslem League in Pakistan. In 1946 there were serious intercommunal riots in Calcutta followed by the massacre of Hindus, largely the landlords, by tenant Moslems in East Bengal. Partition was seen as preventing further violence. In fact it became the source of new calamities, with some 80,000 women abducted and up to a million people killed.No one expected, or planned for, the scale of population movement. Both new governments intended to protect minorities in their new states. If Pakistan protected minority Hindu and Sikh populations in Pakistan, this would help guarantee the rights of Moslems in India and vice versa. It was considered inconceivable that some 12m people would move between the new states. However with mass movement of population underway, both new governments reversed their plans, so population exchange became official policy and cover for further ethnic cleansing. The refugee crisis became a tragedy both for the refugees themselves and for the new states.Finally, Partition is an example of application of the founder principle from biology and linguistics to history. What happened at the beginning, however unintentionally, disproportionately influenced what followed. A temporary solution became a permanent division, a border, thrown up in haste, fixed and impermeable. The two new states, which in many ways are very similar, created in violence, continued to view each other through a prism of violence. Both the Pakistan and India they ended up with were very different from those they had hoped for. Pakistan’s fragility when created means it became a largely militarised state, which, after further tragedies, split between Pakistan and Bangla Desh.Writing this review now, it is hard not to see lessons which have not been learnt. In Myanmar ethnic cleansing of the Moslem Rohingyas has been followed by their flight to Bangla Desh, which lacks the space or resources to accommodate them. Brexit, whose meaning and implications were barely understood by those voting for it, is being implemented by parties who never intended, nor planned for, it over a quite impractical timetable. Brexit, like Partition, may well lead to permanent acrimonious rift.

It's great to see a new edition that actually does add new, important reflections in the Preface and takes into account the more recent literature on the subject. No need to summarise the book- this is done admirably by Peter Hargreaves' review on Amazon. However, it is not a conventional narrative history of Independence and Partition. Rather, it deliberately breaks with the assumptions of dominant imperial and nationalist histories and does not assume any pattern of inevitability about the outcome. It is critical of both the British rulers who wanted to leave India as quickly as possible with little commitment to a longer-term outcome and by implication of the nationalist leaders of both India and Pakistan for accepting this process with its unworkable timetable and lack of practical protections for minorities. The story is told not from the perspective of the elites, who were in any case left floundering by what took place, but from the perspective of ordinary citizens. It uncovers the impetus behind the processes of ethnic cleansing with which we are so familiar today. A very important contribution to Partition studies.

Having been to India many times and listened to very biased accounts about Muslims, it was great to read historical facts creating unintended consequences of such proportions, no-one expected. Atrocities, often encouraged or even planned by people who saw their opportunity to gain from such conflicts, rapidly descending into mob rule. The impact of post war events, including poverty, hunger and lack of leadership as the British left in haste, left a void which others with vested interest willing filled. The role of caste, class and a desire for Independence, not just from GB but also from oppressed Minorities, played a huge part in the chaos and mass migration and not just impacting on Muslims and Hindu’s but on everyone

The Great partition is a good account of the causes of the partition of India. It does however completely ignore the the role of Kashmir and Hyderabad in partition. The massacres of the Punjab are well documented but the 90-400k dead in Hyderabad are ignored.Khan also plays down Bangladesh and it's 1971 partition from Pakistan. Partition has never ended, it is played out in Kashmir to this day.I only give the book 4 stars as it is a must read for anyone who wants to try and Understand India or Pakistan. (And to a lesser extent Bangladesh)

This book is fantastic as its one of those rare one that includes the storied of ordinary citizens in the partition of India. The book focuses primarily on the partition of Punjab and Bengal but also covers a lot of the violence in places such as Delhi, Bombay, Nagpur, UP, etc. A very balanced opinion is given where Hindu's Muslims and Sikhs are blamed for the violence. Not even in their wildest nightmares could the British have imagined what was to come when date for British withdrawal was announced. As you would expect there are many stories of savagery and acts that can only be classed as evil. But in amonst those are also stories of people who protected and saved communities from another religion. The interesting thing to come out quite clearly in this book was that muslims were glad the partition had been agreed but those who lived on the wrong side of the border never imagined for a moment that their area wouldn't be in the newly create Pakistan. Up until that point the border was imagined by most to include vast expanses of land which never materialised. The distrust of Congress and the Muslim League comes through very clearly and goes to show that partition was inevitable once the trust had vanished.