The suffering of ordinary people during the partition of India was not limited to spectacular acts of violence, as displaced minorities, both Hindus and Muslims, were subjected to significant levels of bureaucratic violence.
There is no other event in the history of South Asia that has so decisively been transformed by the impetus to tell a people’s history. Both scholarly and popular accounts of the Partition of British India have long moved away from an investigation of the motives and calculations of great men — be it Jinnah, Nehru or Mountbatten — to focus on the tremendous toll it took on ordinary people. Yet, the language used to describe people’s experiences of Partition obscures as much as it reveals.
In popular narratives, such as films, documentaries, poems, and most scholarship, the Partition of India is largely portrayed as a singular and sudden catastrophe. It was ‘the day India burned’, a ‘night-bitten dawn’, an event that turned neighbours into unwelcome minorities ‘overnight’. This sense of partition as an unforeseen and sudden calamity is further enhanced by the sheer scale of the tragedy.
As neighbourhoods degenerated into battlefields of communal violence, religious minorities fled, generating at least 15 million refugees. This familiar and oft-repeated narrative, while by no means false, is a poor representation of the scale of historical change wrought by the partition of British India. The texture of this partition narrative — its violence, the nature and scale of displacement and the sense of being caught off-guard — all represent the specific historical experience of the partitioned province of Punjab.
The raison de etre of Partition — the promise of having safe homelands as Hindu or Muslim majorities — ran aground on economic realities that saw refugees as burdens.
It was in divided Punjab that ethnic violence assumed the proportions of civil war. This is also where trapped minorities had to be rescued by the Indian and Pakistani armies launching mutually coordinated Military Evacuation Operations into rival territory. This generated the refugee kafilas (convoys) immortalised by Margaret Bourke-White’s photography. Perhaps it is the stark brutality of the suffering of Punjab that has given it the paradigmatic position in histories of Partition of British India, so that when we speak of the Partition, in the singular, we are almost certainly speaking of Punjab’s partition.
This habit of history, while understandable, has bred a dangerous kind of historical myopia. Other patterns in which partition unfolded, across the varied geography of South Asia, have either been forgotten or marginalised as some deviation from the norm. Today, this historical myopia feeds a shameless abuse of history, where narrow and selective versions of this historic watershed are evoked to serve political ends. In the following sections, I touch upon three oft-ignored aspects of the Partition of India that cannot be contained in partisan histories.
Trapped Minorities of South Asia
The creation of Pakistan was directly linked to the demand for a homeland for British India’s minority Muslim population. Therefore, Partition was explicitly justified by the departing British authorities as a solution to the thorny problem of minority rights. In reality, the so-called solution of Partition disenfranchised minority religious populations everywhere, subjecting them to allegations of disloyalty at best, and genocidal violence at worst.
The population displacement in Punjab starkly illustrated this dynamic, as minorities were forced to become refugees in order to survive exclusionary politics unleashed by Partition. However, the solution of migration was neither available to all minorities, nor did it always solve the problem of belonging. This could be most starkly seen in Sindh, where Hindu and Muslim minorities found themselves trapped, albeit in different ways.
The province of Sindh, which was allocated to Pakistan, is often not even included in histories of partition as it was not subjected to a territorial division. Yet, every aspect of life in Sindh was transformed fundamentally by the impact of Partition. Refugees from India poured into urban areas of Sindh, especially Karachi, fundamentally transforming the social fabric and politics of the province.
A largely urban and educated population, these refugees coalesced into a singular socio-political identity of muhajirs. The muhajir Identity articulated a special claim to belong to Pakistan as Muslim refugees, as it evoked the history of the handful of faithful who had accompanied the Prophet Muhammad on the Hijra to Medina. But it also articulated a sense of marginalisation as an Urdu-speaking minority in Sindh. Paradoxically, Muslim’s who fled India to avoid the fate of being marginalised as minorities within the Indian nation-state found themselves minoritised in new ways in their new chosen homeland of Pakistan.
While Muslim refugees found themselves trapped in a minoritised identity, Hindu minorities from Sindh who sought to migrate to India found themselves geographically trapped by a state unwilling to let them go. In the aftermath of Partition, it quickly became evident that the out-migration of religious minorities, though in theory more aligned to the concept of a Muslim homeland, could have debilitating economic consequences.
The flight of Hindu minorities soon came to be seen as an undesirable flight of capital and of workers who provided essential services. The emigration of sweepers and sanitation workers, who almost without exception were depressed caste Hindus or Dalits, was viewed with particular alarm. Caste taboos made it hard to find replacement workers, so their departure threatened public health.
The Government of Pakistan brought in an Essential Services Ordinance in 1947, which was reaffirmed as an Act in 1952. The Act prohibited anyone classed as an ‘essential worker’ from leaving Pakistan. As a result, thousands of Dalit sweepers found themselves geographically trapped in Pakistan — ‘bonded’ to the state – and unable to migrate to India.
This dynamic, where economic considerations of the state trumped religious belonging, was not confined to Sindh. It unfolded in diverse and contradictory ways, across the length and breadth of the partitioned landscape.
Bengal’s Unwanted Refugees
The direct opposite of Punjab’s experience of partition is in many ways provided by the suffering of refugees in partitioned West Bengal. Unlike Punjabi refugees, Hindus who crossed into West Bengal received no state assistance to migrate. There were no military escorts. Any aid from the state came late and seldom amounted to more than paltry maintenance grants in disease-ridden and overcrowded camps.
As there was no exchange of minority populations, there was also no official exchange of properties. Refugees who needed help were instead saddled with loans that they struggled to repay. Yet, refugees kept crossing the porous borders in fits and starts, peaking with cycles of violence in 1950 and 1964, leading to what has been portrayed as an ‘unending trail’ of refugees that destabilised the economy and politics of West Bengal.
Many contemporary observers believed that a quasi-racialised disdain for Bengalis led a north-Indian national leadership to formulate discriminatory policies that saw Bengali refugees starved of state aid. However, my own research suggests that the real reasons had little to do with ethnic or religious identity. The main difference between partitioned Bengal and Punjab lay in the arithmetic of population distribution. While in divided Punjab, the total number of displaced Hindus did not significantly exceed the number of displaced Muslims, in partitioned Bengal, Hindu minorities living in Eastern Pakistan exceeded Muslim minorities living in India by 8 million.
This led the authorities to view Bengali Hindu refugees with dread — the thousands who came by 1949 were seen as harbingers of 8 million ‘extra mouths’ to feed that could cripple the economy. The authorities denied refugee status to Bengali migrants, encouraged voluntary repatriation through the Nehru-Liaquat Ali pact, and systematically neglected those who came in the hope of deterring the millions more who could come.
When all else failed, the authorities of West Bengal simply stopped officially registering new arrivals unless they agreed to be dispersed from West Bengal. The vast majority refused dispersal and simply disappeared into the larger population once refugee camps were shut down.
These short-sighted policies of deliberate neglect created a large population of migrants in the eastern region who did not have proper documentation. This strategy backfired in later decades. Undocumented refugees integrated into the social fabric of the state but could not be included in schemes of economic development. Entrenched poverty, rising unemployment and desperate attempts to obtain documentation, by means fair and foul, became the lot of these families and their descendants.
A Pan-Indian Diaspora of Refugee Settlers
While the exchange of minority populations in divided Punjab saw refugees resettled on the lands evacuated by fleeing minorities, in all other parts of India and Pakistan, the arrival of refugees led to a crisis of resettlement. Local governments across the partitioned landscape scrambled to deal with urban overcrowding as refugees flocked to the cities in search of jobs. However, the most radical solution to the problem of unwanted refugees was devised in West Bengal.
The Indian government recruited destitute and semi-starved Bengali refugees, stuck in disease-ridden camps, as agents of national development for a range of projects flung across the length and breadth of India. They were recruited to grow jute in the Terai region, build a dam in Odhisha, and extend agricultural colonisation into tribal territories in Madhya Pradesh (now Chhattisgarh), Odhisha and the Andaman Islands, which were characterised as ‘empty lands’.
The refugees recruited to these projects more often than not came from depressed caste or Dalit backgrounds and had little choice but to accept the role of settling tribal lands due to their poverty and their dependence on the state for rehabilitation. While many, particularly those settled in the Dandakaranya Development Project in central India, saw their resettlement as a form of exile from Bengal, others, such as those settled in the Andaman Islands, embraced a new identity of pioneering settlers.
In sum, the true geography of the impact of the Partition of India stretched far beyond the partitioned provinces. On the back of dispersed Bengali refugees, partition’s social and political fallouts spread into India’s tribal hinterlands in ways that are yet to be fully studied or understood.
The Politics of Historical Amnesia
These three patterns of people’s experience of Partition cannot be contained within the dominant Punjab-centric narrative, which focuses on spectacular violence and romanticises refugee resilience. Even as research into these patterns proliferates, there is a curious habit of othering these histories as marginal or regional patterns. The national imagination in India and Pakistan, and an international vocabulary for discussing the Partition of India that has percolated into popular culture and even inspired an episode of Dr Who, continues to be dominated by the Punjab experience. The problem with this dominance of the Punjab-centric narrative is not simply that it represents a partial history as a national whole. It also creates room for dangerous levels of historical amnesia, which has very real consequences in contemporary politics.
It is clear from the above narrative that the suffering of ordinary people during the partition of India was not limited to spectacular acts of violence committed by the other community. Displaced minorities, both Hindus and Muslims, were subjected to significant levels of bureaucratic violence by the new nation-states that sought to restrict their mobility, deny them documentation and disperse them to remote locations. The raison de etre of Partition — the promise of having safe homelands as Hindu or Muslim majorities — ran aground on economic realities that saw refugees as burdens.
Today, official policies, such as NRC and CAA, that demand a range of documents from all residents to prove their belonging are designed in complete denial of the history of porous borders in the eastern region. The Indian state takes no responsibility for its historic inability to police borders, and its deliberate refusal to register migrants. These policies are driven by BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda of denying citizenship to Bengali-speaking Muslims by reframing them as illegal immigrants.
But ultimately, they rely on historical amnesia regarding the actual patterns of post-partition migration in partitioned Bengal, where undocumented residents are more likely to be descendants of the hundreds and thousands of Hindu refugees deliberately denied official registration. This historical reality has to be forgotten for the state to justify placing the burden of documentation on vulnerable citizens. The result is an alarming rise in statelessness in India, where thousands of vulnerable citizens, both Hindus and Muslims, fail to prove their citizenship.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
