In 1969 WH Auden, the celebrated British poet published ‘Partition’, a poem which is a tragic reminder of when riots, rapes, atrocities, massacres and savagery raise high the bar of inhumanity in our land: “Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day / Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away, / He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate / Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date / And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect, But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect / Contested areas.

The weather was frightfully hot, / And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot, / But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, / A continent for better or worse divided.” The man in question was Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer by training and a confidante of the Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten. The mansion was in New Delhi where Sir Radcliffe redrew the map now dividing the sub-continent into India and Pakistan, with a West Pakistan and East Pakistan or East Bengal as its territories. The Radcliffe Line on the map is immortalised in contemporary history through the Partition in 1947; it mutilated, mauled and scarred an ancient land, the repercussion of which continue in modern Pakistan, East Bengal, now the nation of Bangladesh, and India that is Bharat.

“Never before in South Asian history did so few people decide the fate of so many in northern India,” wrote Prof Mushirul Hasan of Jamia Millia Islamia, aptly summing up of the Partition. The lives and experiences of people who lived through the horror of those times, their identities and uncertainties created, reinforced by the Partition continue to be invoked not just in history books but in literature and poetry, theatre and films, political circles and in public memory. The traumas and trage dies of migration in north India came to symbolize the Partition, becoming a socio-cultural stereotype, a metaphor in itself. Undoubtedly the Partition saw the largest single bilateral flow of people with about six to seven million Muslims moving from the minority provinces of India to Pakistan, and nearly a million Hindus and Sikhs moving from Pakistan to India in 1947, though by 1951 the numbers had risen substantially. India and Pakistan kept their borders open till 1951. It was Dr Papiya Ghosh, professor of history in Patna University, who in an essay ‘Reinvoking the Pakistan of 1940s: Bihar’s Stranded Muslims’, shifted the focus from the traumatized northwestern provinces of Punjab, Sindh to the equally devastated eastern India: the provinces of Bihar and Bengal from where almost 700,000 refugees who were Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslims headed towards East Pakistan.

These were the mujahirs as refugees came to be called, a term which has continued to define as well as degrade them. Dr Ghosh, in her scholarly essays titled ‘Community and Nation’, highlighted the migration of Muslims from Bihar to escape the ‘dread of the Hindu majority’, and the unprecedented scale of the 1946 riots that made it a turning point. She wrote: “Between August and mid-October 1946 communal tensions had been brewing due to the Calcutta riots and the formation of the interim government by Nehru. In Bihar the riot was triggered by rioting following a hartal in Patna on 25 December which was observed as the Noakhali Day. On 26 December, Hindus from villages north of Chapra attacked Muslim tolas, killing 20 persons. The riot spread to the Jehanabad division of Gaya and into Munger on 27 and the following day to Bhagalpur. In almost a week of rioting 7 out of 16 districts, and about 750 out of 18869 villages were affected. The number of Muslims killed in the riot became a point of dispute, with the Congress maintaining initially that it was about 2000 and then 5400.

The Muslim League figures varied from 40-50,000. According to the government more than 20 Muslims were killed in about 69 Bihar villages of which 46 were in Patna district alone, where killings totalled about 4062. Other districts affected were Saran, Gaya, Munger, Saharsa, Bhagalpur and Santal Parganas.” After two days of touring which he found ‘full of horror’, Pandit Nehru wrote that though the Muslim League accounts had exaggerated here and there the real picture was quite as bad, and sometimes even worse than anything they had suggested. There had been a definite attempt by Hindu mobs to ‘exterminate’ the Muslims. Men, women and children were killed indiscriminately. A madness seemed to have seized the people. What Dr Ghosh underscored is the importance of understanding the way in which a corporate identity was thrust on the Muslims.

It was a hegemonic identity created by the Muslim League; far removed from class, regional or linguistic differences within the vast and diverse Muslims spread across the sub-continent. “The organisation of Muslims as a religious community was based on false assumptions,” she wrote, adding that since 1937, both the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha were working in tandem to generate monolithic constructions of Muslims and Hindus. The Congress, in turn, avoided confronting communalism. In the aftermath of the Bhagalpur riots, leaders like Pt Rajendra Prasad focussed the party’s attention on Muslim League while blaming the Hindu Mahasabha as the lesser evil. A month after the Partition had become a reality, Prime Minister Nehru said in the press statement on 16 September 1947, “When the current turmoil ends, the two states (of India and Pakistan) might unite by the free will of their peoples.” Nehru believed that the division of India was a short-term political solution which could not override cultural affinities and economic compulsions.

The Government of India disavowed any intention of harming Pakistan or treating it as an enemy. Similar were the views of Mahatma Gandhi, who writing in the Harijan on 5 October 1947 said, “It is true that there should be no war between the two Dominions. They have to live as friends or die as such. The two will have to work in close co-operation. Inspite of being independent of each other, they will have many things in common. If they are enemies, they can have nothing in common. If there is genuine friendship, the people of both the States can be loyal to both. They are both members of the same commonwealth of nations. How can they become enemies of each other?” The horrors, public traumas and communal violence during the months of July to December 1947 were unparalleled in their scale. “It is a human earthquake,” said Nehru, in his speech in Lahore on 8 December 1947, referring to this violence and chaos which engulfed the divided Punjab.

The Prime Minister was witness to the migrations of millions of non-Muslims from what was to become West Pakistan and his helplessness is apparent in letters and official notes. Nehru’s biographers, especially Sarvepalli Gopal, have chronicled the collapse of the non-League government and the way communal tensions had grown as the administration could do little to prevent or stem the tide of violence and hatred.

Yet no one, neither the Government of lndian or the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League, had paid much attention to this gathering potential of tragedy. There was surprise and a sense of helplessness in the new government. Undoubtedly the political turmoil, migrations, killings, and massacres were unprecedented. Added to it was the attitude of the law enforcement agencies who, it was believed, had also participated in the massacres on both sides.

“It is the bounden duty of the majority in Pakistan, as of the majority in the Union, to protect the small minority whose honour and life and property are in their hands….” Mahatma Gandhi’s words from the pages of Harijan were making these heart-rending pleas. “To drive every Muslim from India and to drive every Hindu and Sikhs from Pakistan will mean war and eternal ruin for the country,” he wrote on 28 September 1947.

End note: Time, geography and history has made it possible for the author, a third generation Sindhi Hindu refugee, to pay homage to those who suffered Partition traumas; and to his former teacher Dr Papiya Ghosh who spent a lifetime writing about the turbulent decades till miscreants in Patna put an end to her brilliant life in 2006. Murder most meaningless and foul, almost like a rerun of the riots, looting and deaths she wrote about when the continent was divided.

(The writer is author on history and heritage issue, and former deputy curator of Pradhamantri Sangharalaya)