Evaluating Partition

I prepared these extra excerpts for students. I assigned them according to their essay topics. There are excerpts that focus on the role of the British, on violence, and on international response to partition. 

British Role Extra Sources

Rudyard Kipling, a British writer wrote many stories that took place in India and when asked about the future self-governance in India he answered, 

“Oh no! They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it to them straight.” 

Interview in Adelaide Adcertiser, November 1891, quoted in the “N.B.” column of The Times Literary Supplement, 9 March 2001 

In 1934, a cricket and tea planter insisted, after forty years here: 

“Chaos would prevail in India if we were ever so foolish to leave the natives to run their own show. Ye gods! What a salad of confusion of bungle, of mismanagement, and far worse, would be the instant result. These grand people will go anywhere and do anything if led by us. Themselves they are still infants as regards governing or statesmanship. And their so-called leaders are the worst of the lot.” 

E.H.D. Sewell, An Outdoor Wallah (London: Stanley Paul, 1945), p.110 

While speaking to Albert Hall on “Our Duty to India”, Winston Churchill, the future prime minter of England, argued that “to abandon India to the rule of the Brahmans [who in his opinion dominated the Congress Party] would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence.” If the British left, he predicted, then the entire gamut of public services created by them- the judicial, medical, railway, and public works departments – would perish, and India would “fall back quiet rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages.” 

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy p. 5 

J.E. Welldon, former bishop of Calcutta, wrote in 1915: 

The disappearance of the British Raj in India at present, and must for a long time be, simply inconceivable. That it should be replaced by a native Government or Governments is the wildest of wild dreams…As soon as the last British soldier sailed from Bombay or Karachi, India would become the battlefield of antagonistic radical and religious forces…[and] the peaceful and progressive civilization, which Great Britain has slowly but surely brought into India, would shrivel up in a night. 

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy p.19

Leonard Woolf, writing in 1967: 

I have no doubt that if British governments had been prepared to grant in 1900 what they refused in 1900 but granted in 1920; or to grant in 1920 what they refused in 1920 but granted in 1940 what they refused to 1940 what they refused to 1940 but granted in 1947 then nine-tenths of the misery, hatred, and violence, the imprisoning, terrorism, the murders, flogging, shootings, assassinations, even the racial massacres would have been avoided; the transference of power might well have been accomplished peacefully even possibly without Partition. 

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy p.19

Viceroy Linlithgow's record for the British Cabinet of his conversation with Gandhi, 5th February 1940 

Future Status of India

Mr. Gandhi proceeded that he had noted in regard to the future status of India that in my speech at the Orient Club at Bombay I guaranteed Dominion Status of the Statute of Westminster variety. He did not think it necessary or even wise for me to give any such guarantee. It was for India to choose her status-not for us to make a limited offer. Australia, Canada, and the other Dominions were one thing. India was another. India could never be a daughter State, for her roots did not lie in England. Furthermore, I must understand the difficulty, which Indians felt in accepting the phrase "full partnership in the Commonwealth." What about the position of Indians in South Africa?

Mr. Gandhi enlarged at very considerable length on the grossly unjust treatment of Indians in that Dominion. He went on to repeat that it was not for us to limit our offer. It should be an offer to India to choose what she wanted. Let the Constituent Assembly settle the whole question of status.

Thanks to his impressive gift for public relations, the end of an empire was presented as the purpose of the empire: India was like a well nurtured fattened chick, raised to fly from the imperial nest, while Britain, the indulgent parent, looked with pride. And so the British were able to celebrate their loss alongside the Indians, who celebrated victory. Comforting fictions were established that happy night: that the British left India with dignity, having seen the errors of their ways through Gandhi’s soft but compelling persuasion; that the Indian Independence campaign won its prize by non-violence and civil disobedience; that the departure of the British was completed with enough goodwill to pave the way for a genuine friendship between India and the West, and separately between Pakistan and the West; that the end of the British Empire in India was a triumph for freedom. 

Tunzelmann, Alex Von Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire. p8

Violence During Partition 

The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly, Swatantra. He wrote of seeing: 

an empty refugee special streaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform – all but two bogies [carriages] were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies laying pools of blood in a third class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight. 

There is another site I am not likely to easily forget. A five mile-long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snails pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bullock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wretched little tin trunks on their heads. Twenty thousand men, women and children trekking into the promised land – not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot State and the interior of Ferzopur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and made life impossible for the rest. 

Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy p.31 

Ten million refugees were on the move, by foot, by bullock cart and by train, sometimes traveling under army escort, at other times trusting to fate and their respective gods. Jawaharlal Nehru flew over one refugee convoy that had 100,000 people and stretched for 10 miles. It was traveling from Jalandhar to Lahore, and had to pass through Amritsar, where there were 70,000 refugees from West Punjab "in an excited state." Nehru suggested bulldozing a road around the town, so that the two convoys would not meet.

This was without question the greatest mass migration in history. "Nowhere in known history had the transfer of so many millions taken place in so few days." They fled, wrote an eyewitness, 

“Through heat and rain, flood and bitter Punjab cold. The dust of the caravans stretched low across the Indian planes and mingled with the scent of fear and sweat, human waste and putrefying bodies. When the cloud of hate subsided the role of the dead was called and 500,000 names echoed across the dazed land – dead of gunshot wounds, sword, dagger and knife slashes and others of epidemic diseases. While the largest number died of violence, there were tired, gentle souls who looked across their plundered gardens and then lay down and died. For what good is life when reason stops and then run wild? Why pluck your baby from the spike or draw your lover from the murky well?” 

Donald F. Ebright, Free India: The First Five Years: An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief, and Rehabilitation (Nashville, Tenn.:Parthenon, 1954) p. 28