The three partitions
Subaltern theorist Gyanendra Pandey aptly describes the three different partitions that took place in 1947 and have been prevalent in South Asia ever since. The first was the concept of Pakistan, thought of by the Muslim League and declared in Lahore on 23rd March 1940. What this envisaged was autonomy or independence for Muslim majority regions so that the ideals of Islam would be upheld. The plan entailed a minimal disturbance of the demography of Hindu and Muslim communities and their social, political, and economic ties.
Hassan Suherwardy in November 1942 stated that,
The Pakistan movement, as envisaged by Mr. Jinnah, (does not) require any uprooting of ties of homeland which have existed for generations by an interchange of populations from the Hindu majority provinces to the Muslim majority provinces.
Nobody thought in terms of migration those days. Moreover, the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan was aimed at safeguarding ‘true freedom’ as opposed to ‘Hindu capitalism and fascism’. Thus, their paradoxical calls for ‘divide to unite’ became a slogan targeted at backward castes and other ‘minorities’.
In April 1947, Jinnah pleaded with Mountbatten not to touch the provinces of Punjab and Bengal as both provinces had a unified history, culture, and in the words of the time could even be termed ‘nations’. Hence the demand for a ‘separate homeland' for Indian Muslims was as an ideological concept bereft of a concrete spatial plan. Pakistan's foremost historian Ayesha Jalal went as far as saying, “The most striking fact about Pakistan is how it failed to satisfy the interests of the very Muslims who were supposed to have demanded its creation.”
The second partition was that of Punjab and Bengal, two provinces that were split in half, divided between Pakistan and India. Interesting here, was the fate of the Sikhs in Punjab, who suffered from the partition of their divine province. In July 1947, Sikh religious leader Master Tara Singh stated:
We fear that the notational division of the Punjab will cut our community into two and thus threaten our existence and may lead to very grave consequences. We want to avoid it.
Once the realities of migration began to surface, and the two states took shape, the Sikhs were left in a dire situation. They were robbed of an identity that they continue to search for today, through organisations like the Khalistan Movement in Canada.
It was the third partition that became known as communalism. It played out from village to village, neighbour to neighbour, divided families, destroyed communities, and led to outbreaks of violence throughout the subcontinent. Mass migration, churning the cyclical tide of violence, was both a direct cause and consequence of violence and terror. The summer of 1947, as independence came closer, was a testing time for India.
Violence had a strong impact on the idea of ‘nation’ that emerged as the first partition. The truth, unfortunately, was that migrants were not welcome in Pakistan by the inhabitants of the provinces that comprised it. Neither Punjabis nor Sindhis welcomed them with open arms as the romanticised narrative of the time had projected. Even for those who thought outside communal lines, this struggle of belonging, where the ideological home shifted its bearings to another spatial reality, forced people to question their identity in their own historical homeland.
‘The other side of silence’
This is well highlighted by the case of author Urvashi Butalia’s uncle, who stayed back in Pakistan despite most of his Sikh family leaving for Delhi. Upon meeting her uncle decades after 1947, Bhutalia discovered that he had accepted Islam on the exterior, married a Muslim woman, and projected an illusion of assimilation to society. During Partition, he decided to stay on in Pakistan only because due to his lack of education he would not have found a job in India, a land alien to him. Interestingly, however, Bhutalia’s uncle never felt at home in Pakistan. He had a mystical conception of India; he supported their cricket team over Pakistan’s, and felt the unseen other as ‘home’.
Whereas he occupied the land of his history, he had never seen the ideological state that was created for him. This was not a unique case. The idea of watan or nation is something all Indians and Pakistanis can relate to. It comes with a sense of belonging but also of loss. He had lost India. Paradoxically, his sister, Bhutalia’s mother, who moved to Delhi during Partition, felt loss for the land she had historically known. India, whatever its ideological standing, was new to her, and she remained a Lahori Sikh forever.
Lasting divide is a theme of partition. It is never over, and as a product of colonial divisions that manifested in political movements, it questioned the identity not of the native or settler, but of both fabricated conceptions.
The stateless
During the decade surrounding Partition, over 230 individuals were declared ‘stateless’, mostly those who could not make up their minds and were deported one way or another.
Saadat Hasan Manto, in his short story Toba Tek Singh, highlighted the ridiculous nature of Partition by drawing on an analogy with an insane asylum. As everyone in the asylum was made to choose which country they would belong to, one Sikh man, perplexed by it all, was simply caught in the middle. As Manto put it,
There, behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here, behind the same kind of wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.
A particularly striking case of these stateless individuals was the story of a man named Ghulam Ali. After receiving training as a Havelidar Lamb Fitter for the army, Ghulam was adamant on his employment in this domain only. When asked to decide between Pakistan and India, he said he would migrate depending on where he found employment. After venturing in and out of both the Pakistani and Indian armies, and having been arrested on both borders, he was placed in a Hindu camp in Lahore (Pakistan) in 1957. No one believed or seemed to care that he was Muslim. After writing several letters to both national governments, his case was eventually taken up. The courts even decreed that Ghulam Ali’s fate had been no fault of his own. The government enquiry in 1961 declared: "He has been allowed to come to India on a restricted Indian passport as a stateless person."
Ghulam Ali was placed under constant surveillance and asked to report to authorities yearly. He had ceased to be a citizen in his own country, victimised by the uncertainty and fear surrounding Partition. Thus, the schism between community and ideology, personified through the fate of this homeless man, was not only restricted to the physical realities people faced. It also contributed to the formation of identity for generations to come.