Clash Between Two Notions of Purity: India’s Partition

Some Summations from India’s Partition Story

My engagement with partition and separatism is largely confined, I must confess, to South Asia, where I have studied the India/Pakistan question, the break-up of Pakistan into two, and the Sinhala/Tamil issue in Sri Lanka.

In my research I have focused also on India’s freedom movement, the movement for Pakistan, and the protagonists of the two movements. In addition, I have spent time on the history of Punjab, once an independent kingdom, later a large northern province of British-ruled India, and since 1947 divided between Pakistan and India. Recently I have begun exploring the story, from about 1600, of the large South India region.

The engagements indicated above have formed the perspective for what is being offered below. It is certainly a weakness that I am unable to offer a comparative analysis of partition involving also the Middle East and Ireland. Hoping nonetheless that my summations would be of some interest, I offer them for what they are worth.

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Though it did not use the name “Pakistan,” the Muslim League resolution of March 1940, passed in Lahore in what then was northwestern India, was a major milestone on the journey to Partition. Moved by Fazlul Huq, prime minister of Bengal, India’s large eastern province, the resolution declared that the League, which was headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), would accept nothing short of “separate and sovereign Muslim states, comprising geographically contiguous units… in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the northwestern and eastern zones of India.”^[1]
 
Though not a member of the Muslim League, Huq led a Bengal peasants’ party which was in alliance with the League. The “contiguous units” mentioned in his resolution were not specified, their boundaries were not defined, and there was also a clear suggestion (soon to be dismissed as a typing error) of more than one Muslim-majority state being demanded.
 
The resolution asked not for a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims, nor for removing all of them to the subcontinent’s northwestern or eastern zone, but for the separation from India of Muslim-majority areas. In their stump rhetoric during provincial elections held in the winter of 1945-6, Muslim League leaders indeed spoke of “a Muslim homeland,” and the vast post-1940 literature on India’s partition is replete with that phrase, but the Lahore resolution refrained conspicuously from asking for it. This usually forgotten fact is worth recalling.

If we leave out Assam, in terms of borders India’s partition was essentially the partition of Punjab and Bengal, a partition tragically accompanied by upheaval, which in Punjab became carnage as well. East Bengal’s carnage would come 25 years later, when Pakistan split and Bangladesh came into being.

 
Also not well remembered about the 1947 partition is that it broke up only two of India’s numerous provinces: Bengal in the east and Punjab in the northwest. The borders of every other province remained intact, even as some provinces became part of Pakistan and many remained part of India. This statement should be qualified: occupying the subcontinent’s northeast, the large Assam province, which stayed with India, lost to Pakistan a Muslim-majority segment called Sylhet, in area about one-twentieth of pre-1947 Assam, following a referendum there.
 
If we leave out Assam, in terms of borders India’s partition was essentially the partition of Punjab and Bengal, a partition tragically accompanied by upheaval, which in Punjab became carnage as well. East Bengal’s carnage would come 25 years later, when Pakistan split and Bangladesh came into being.
 
Regions other than Punjab also saw large-scale violence in 1947 or in the months preceding, notably Bihar and UP in November 1946, Calcutta in August 1946, east Bengal’s Noakhali district in October 1946, and the Northwest Frontier Province in the summer of 1947.
 
However, Punjab’s large-scale killings, which began in March 1947 and rose to an immense level in August and September 1947, comprised a category by itself, with anything between half a million and a million killed in the province, the western half of which went to Pakistan, and the eastern half to India.
 
Also in a category of their own were Punjab’s migrations, with around 6 million Muslims crossing into west Punjab in 1947 and about the same number of Hindus and Sikhs into east Punjab. As a result, West Punjab became purely Muslim, and East Punjab purely non-Muslim, except for a small pocket called Malerkotla, most of whose Muslims did not leave.
 
In the Frontier province, almost all its non-Muslims, a very small percentage of the population, left for India. In Sindh, probably more than half of its Hindus moved to western and central India, but a great many remained in Sindh, which today has roughly 4 million Hindus, about 8 percent of the province’s population.
 
There were significant cross-migrations in Bengal too.
 
Many Muslims from UP, Bihar, Delhi and elsewhere in northern and central India moved to Pakistan and especially to Karachi, which from a Sindhi city became an Urdu city. Some Muslims from Bombay and southern India also shifted to Pakistan. However, except for East Punjab, the vast majority of India’s Muslims stayed where they were.
 
This very brief summary highlights the fact that Pakistan’s emergence in 1947 did not mean, and was not intended to mean, the herding of the subcontinent’s Muslims into a Muslim homeland. It also indicates that the 1947 Partition impacted different parts of the subcontinent in different ways.
 
In other words, regions within the two newly freed nations appeared to be as significant as the two nations, a point to which I will return.
 
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Reasons usually given for the 1947 Partition include, firstly, a Muslim fear that with British departure the subcontinent’s Hindu majority would want to avenge perceived injustices under the long Muslim rule that preceded British conquest; secondly, imperial divide-and-rule; and, thirdly, the failure of two large all-India parties, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, to reach a compromise on how a free India should be run.
 
Each of these is a credible if also partial explanation. Students of the subcontinent’s history will likely run into all of them. But a fourth reason is also worth looking at: a clash, starting very early, between two notions of purity.
 
Islam’s arrival in India is of course an ancient story. In the south, Muslims coming as traders settled on both coasts from the 8^th century onwards. In the west, an Arab commander occupied Sindh early in the 8^th century.  In the north, Islam arrived with invading armies from the 11^th century. From the 12^th century to the 19^th, Muslim monarchs sat on Delhi’s throne and from there ruled much or most of India.

An ideological/social clash was visible from the start. An arriving Islamic scholar seemed certain of the purity of his monotheistic faith and the impurity of what he saw as the polytheistic faith of the Hindus.

 
An ideological/social clash was visible from the start. An arriving Islamic scholar seemed certain of the purity of his monotheistic faith and the impurity of what he saw as the polytheistic faith of the Hindus.

There were exceptions. The scholar Alberuni, who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni into India in the 11^th century, stayed ten years in the country, interviewed numerous Pandits, and found that some Hindu philosophers were ‘entirely free from worshipping anything but God alone.’[2] However, a majority of Islamic clerics, including those employed by the ruling court in Delhi, spoke of the purity of Islam and the impurity of Hinduism, thereby offending the Hindu psyche.
‘Purity of faith’ was even used to promote the notion that killing adherents of an ‘impure’ religion was a pious deed.

On the other hand, a caste Hindu encountering the invading armies, or civilians in their wake, was certain that these newcomers were impure by birth. Only someone born into a Hindu high caste could be pure. Others, including all foreigners, were not.
 
At the top, descendants of conquering Muslim rulers made India their home, marrying Hindu women, embracing much of the local culture, and in some cases trying to improve the condition of all their subjects.
 
They thought of themselves as Indians. Hindostan was the name of their kingdom or empire, and many of their subjects accepted these rulers as Indians. This was also true for regional principalities. For instance, to the people of Mysore in the last four decades of the 18^th century, Haidar and Tipu were Indians or Mysoreans. Disliked or liked, they were not foreigners.
 
Similarly, to the people of Punjab, a majority of whom were Muslims, their Sikh ruler in the first quarter of the 19^th century, Ranjit Singh, was not an alien but a Punjabi chief.
 
At the grassroots, coexistence and interdependence became the norm, especially among the ‘lower’ classes, who formed the majority. However, the birth/belief tension was never removed, even though most people put it to one side and lived their modest lives. But coexistence and frequent participation in each other’s festivals did not lead to fusion. A single community capable of breaking bread together was not created.
 
We encounter the purity question in a story related by Mark Wilks (1759-1831), who arrived in southern India in 1777 as an 18-year-old soldier for the East India Company and joined the war against Tipu-ruled Mysore. After Tipu’s defeat and death in 1799, Wilks served as the Resident of Mysore, and wrote a history of Mysore. Later he was made governor of St. Helena, a south Atlantic island owned by the East India Company, where Napoleon was interned at the time, so that Wilks became, in effect, Napoleon’s jailor.

Writing of one Khan Jehan Khan as ‘a brave, able and interesting officer under Tippoo’ (590), Wilks says that this Jehan Khan

was born a bramin and [was] at the age of seventeen a writer in the service of [a Muslim chief] at Bednore, when [Bednore] surrendered to a British general.

On the recapture of that place by Tippoo, this youth (Wilks continues) was forcibly converted to Islam and highly instructed in its doctrines. He was soon distinguished as a soldier and invested with high command.

On the other hand, a caste Hindu encountering the invading armies, or civilians in their wake, was certain that these newcomers were impure by birth. Only someone born into a Hindu high caste could be pure. Others, including all foreigners, were not.


In 1799, [Jehan Khan] fell, desperately wounded, in attempting to… repel the British assault at Seringapatam. He recovered and was appointed to the command of the infantry of the Hindu raja [appointed by the Company].

This raja belonged to the family of the Wadiyars who had ruled Mysore before power was seized by Haidar Ali, Tipu’s father. After Tipu’s fall and the restoration of the Wadiyars (says Wilks), Jehan Khan ‘made advances… to be readmitted to his rank and cast as a bramin’. ‘A select conclave’ of Brahmin priests held that Jehan Khan could be readmitted but ‘with certain reservations to mark a distinction between him and those who had incurred no lapse from their original purity.’ Continues Wilks:
[B]ut the khan would have all or none. ‘I prefer,’ said he, in conversing with me on the subject, ‘the faith of my ancestors, but the fellows wanted to shut up my present road to a better world, and would not fairly open the other… I feel myself more respectable with the full privileges of a Mussulman than I should as a half-outcaste bramin (590-91fn).[3]

In a speech in March 1948 in Chittagong, now part of Bangladesh, Muhammad Ali Jinnah would provide what, coming from him, was a rare non-political justification for the Pakistan call. ‘I reiterate most emphatically,’ said Jinnah, ‘that Pakistan was [fought for] because of the danger of complete annihilation of human soul in a society based on caste.’[4] In this remark, Jinnah was giving expression to the injury received by many of the subcontinent’s Muslims from the notion of caste superiority.
In July 2005, when my wife Usha and I interviewed over two dozen persons in Pakistan on their memories of 1947, some interviewees recalled the belief of their Hindu friends and acquaintances that their home would be polluted if a Muslim ate there.
 
Thus Md Saeed Awan, who told us in Lahore (on July 24, 2005) that he was born in 1925 in village Khanpur in sub-tehsil Makerian in tehsil Dasooba in Hoshiarpur district in east Punjab, and that his father was headmaster of a junior-level school in Khanpur village, added:
 
I went to Arya High School in Makerian. I led a campaign in the school after a Hindu mithai-seller shook off a Muslim boy who had touched his tray of sweets, saying, ‘Bharasht kar diya’ – ‘You have polluted [these sweets].’… Dogs were licking his cooking vessels but a Muslim boy could not be allowed to come close. .. The headmaster, Agya Ram Bhalla, got the mithai-seller to apologize in front of the whole school.

Chaudhry Muhammad Hayat, a retired Squadron Leader from Pakistan who had played for the joint services cricket team, spoke to us of his boyhood as a Jat in village Sook Khurd, not far from the town of Gujrat, which lies between Lahore and Rawalpindi. He recalled:
North of [Sook Khurd] was the village of Nichra where many [Muslim] Jats lived. [In Nichra] there was [also] one dera where five or six Hindu families lived, some of whose men were educated and served in Rawalpindi. Everyone lived in aman and chayn and took part in each other’s joys and sorrows.

One boy of my age [from the Hindu dera], Chunni Lal, studied with me. I used to visit his home and well remember his father Haveli Ram…. Chunni Lal and I sometimes ate in each other’s homes.
With that last sentence, Hayat was pointing out the unusualness of ‘eating in each other’s homes’.

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(The author, an eminent historian and writer recently presented this as a Paper at the University of Illinois- Partition in South Asia, Palestine and Ireland at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in September 2016. We are grateful that he has shared this with us for publication on Sabrangindia/Communalism Combat. We have carried the Paper in Two Parts for the convenience of our readers-Editors)

References
Saying No to Partition: Muslim leaders from 1940-1947
Indian Nationalism v/s Hindu Nationalism
Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Scathing Attacks on Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra
Mahatma Gandhi: 'My Ramrajya means Khuda ki Basti... but a Secular State'
Indian Nationhood after Weathering Partition