In the Punjab the riots and killing that continued through the months before and after partition were marked by military precision and unbelievable sadism: in some cases whole train loads of innocents were burned alive or disembowelled. The British boundary force policing the division ordained by Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s commission was too small and ineffective to make much difference. The pattern was different to the east in Bengal and Assam. The region had its share of brutal communal killings and fear had been ever present since the Calcutta and Noakhali riots of 1946, but the dismemberment of Bengal took much longer and was less dramatic than the events in the Punjab. Between mid 1946 and 1955 7–8 million people moved from east to west or vice versa. Many of these became refugees in the squalid shanty-town bustees of Calcutta, Dacca and other cities, putting a terrible strain on the fragile economies of the emerging dominions. These movements were like regular tidal flows rather than the abnormal waves of brutalized humanity in the west. The political repercussions were also complex. Quite apart from the simmering tension on the borders of West Bengal and East Pakistan, the peoples of northeastern India, members of recently armed and self-aware minorities such as the Nagas, Lushai and Chin, sought autonomy and looked with suspicion on the new nation-states. Local politicians agonized over the fate of what had come to be called India’s ‘Mongolian fringe’.27 Hindu politicians in Assam felt they had a ‘refugee problem’ as poor Muslim squatters from eastern Bengal grew in numbers, allegedly enticed into the province by the local Muslim League to bolster its case for Assam to be incorporated into East Pakistan.28 Burmese Arakan suffered not only separatist and communist movements, but also the attempts of Muslim parties to annex their populations to East Pakistan. Nowhere down the length of the crescent did relinquished or devolved British authority pass quietly into the hands of homogeneous nation-states. The divisions of colonial politics were to scarify the region for two generations.
In Bengal people came only slowly to understand the imminence of partition and even after the event most could not believe that their homeland had been irrevocably sundered into a crazy geographer’s nightmare, preferring instead to believe that their Hindu or Muslim leaders would see their error and help to unite the region again. This was not entirely fanciful. In May 1947 two very different leaders had come forward to try to preserve the province’s unity. Sarat Bose had always been a Bengal patriot as much as an Indian nationalist. As a young man, he had applauded the great and ultimately successful movement to reverse Lord Curzon’s partition of the province into Hindu-dominated and Muslim-dominated regions. He continued to believe that partition was an imperialist ploy and promulgated a plan for a united, autonomous Socialist Republic of Bengal. Exactly what this entity’s relationship was to be with the Union of India or the putative Pakistan remained unclear. But in Bose’s view this was to be decided by the popular democractic assembly that would be elected after independence. Somewhat surprisingly, support for this sort of idea came from the leader of the local Muslim-dominated ministry, H. Suhrawardy. The chief minister, the local Muslim League and allied politicians were acutely aware that millions of Muslim peasants would suffer if partition actually came about. They feared, correctly, that any ‘East Pakistan’ without Calcutta would be an economic disaster area. The partition agitation, asserted Suhrawardy, was a move by the ‘propertied classes’ to serve their own interests.29 He even managed to prevail on Jinnah to moderate his demands that Pakistan should include the whole of Bengal to see whether the unity plan got off the ground.
Bose and Suhrawardy were both to be disappointed. The majority of the middle-class Hindu politicians opposed any move that would maintain a Muslim preponderance in Bengal’s politics. Their most vocal leader, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, denounced the ‘ten year communal raj’ that the Muslims were said to have imposed since the 1935 constitutional reforms. Throughout the early part of 1947 the Hindu middle classes presented petitions and held public meetings to demand partition. The main Hindu organization, Hindu Mahasabha, the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, and the vast majority of local associations in which Hindus predominated pressed for separation. Mookherjee characterized the Bengali ‘paradise to come’ promised by Suhrawardy as simply more of the ‘hell that exists in Bengal today’, the result, he argued, of the chief minister’s well-documented maladministration and the Muslim League’s ‘campaign of hatred’.30 Bengal indeed remained a kind of hell. If the conditions of ordinary people had not been so desperate it is possible that the Bengal assembly might not have voted for partition later in the summer. By now, though, even the representatives of the poor, low-caste Hindu peasants of the east of the province who had previously shared interests with the Muslim peasantry were alarmed and apprehensive. Communist organizers tried to persuade the peasantry that it was an alliance of bosses, imperialists and landlords who were fomenting the communal rioting. They had some success in northeast Bengal.31 Here peasants had traditionally been forced to surrender half their crop as rent to rural bosses, who often then added interest and other charges and sequestered the whole lot. A large agitation (the Tebagha movement) was fighting against this system of exploitation, provoking some clashes between peasant demonstrators and the police. Yet the dominant ideology remained that of religious difference. Communal suspicion did not dissipate. Muslim peasants were asked by lecturing clerics: ‘Why agitate for a larger share of the crop when under Pakistan you would have it all?’ Hindu peasants were reminded of the Noakhali killings.
On the surface the city of Calcutta looked normal. David Lean’s Great Expectations with the young John Mills was playing at the Lighthouse. Burt Lancaster starred in The Killers at the Regal. But these markers of post-war cinema belied the fact that the war seemed to continue out in the side streets and bustees. The supply of wartime weaponry had not yet been exhausted. A score of people were murdered every other day. Arson and attacks on shops and houses with homemade bombs occurred every night. On 7 July, just six weeks before Independence, twenty-five people were stabbed to death in the city and a bomb was thrown in its main thoroughfare, Chowringee. Curfews were regularly imposed on Calcutta and other cities while magistrates banned groups marching in shirts of ‘a certain colour’, presumably a reference to the green and saffron hues favoured by Muslim and Hindu agitators, respectively. The refugee problem worsened. Sixty thousand Muslim refugees had fled from the revenge riots in Bihar that had followed Noakhali the previous autumn. The fear of back-street disturbances drove the poor, many of them already refugees, from their slums onto the pavements of central Calcutta. Public security was so bad that no one could be persuaded to collect the city’s garbage. A photograph in the newspapers showed mounds of rubbish silting up the doors of the Calcutta Stock Exchange, the most important commercial site in Asia. At the beginning of May 7,000 tons of it lay uncollected and rotting in the city’s streets.32 Cholera returned; industrial trouble flickered on while rural Bengal endured another bad season of cyclones, floods and fears of renewed starvation.
The British were alarmed and despondent. Following the euphoria at the end of the war everything seemed to be going wrong. The economic crisis at home, the threat of communism in Europe and the collapse of empire in the East amidst bloodshed and recriminations all seemed to feed off each other. Anti-British feeling in Calcutta was stilled neither by communal violence nor by the imminence of Britain’s departure. The year began badly with a riot in Calcutta about the situation in Indo-China or ‘Viet-nam… of all things’, as John Tyson, the secretary to the governor, put it.33 In February Saraswati Puja, the festival of the goddess of learning, saw displays of more pictures of Subhas Bose than images of the deity and more Congress flags than flowers in her honour.34
In spite of all the arguments for and against the partition of Bengal no one actually foresaw the civil strife that would result. On 20 June the Bengal legislative assembly voted to divide the province. Soon afterwards Sir Cyril Radcliffe, fresh from carving up the Punjab, established himself and his commission in the Belvedere palace and began work on dividing the province’s 25 million Hindus and 33 million Muslims whose lives had so long been intertwined. Radcliffe worked with great speed and without much local knowledge. He was dependent on maps and on the evidence given to him by the local political parties, with all their communal and factional biases.35 Whatever he ruled, most Muslims were likely to be outraged and no one would be entirely satisfied. Mountbatten kept the details of the plan quiet until two days after independence in the hope of avoiding the massive and bloody population movements that were going on in the Punjab. ‘I hope I am not here when the award is announced’, Tyson observed.
As most people expected or feared, the division approximated to the plan of partition that the provincial Congress had been pressing for over the previous year, though it was messier than they had wanted. Given Mountbatten’s distrust of the Muslim leadership and the strength of British commercial interests in Calcutta, it was to be expected that the city would be awarded to India. Not only did this leave what was to become East Pakistan without a major commercial centre, it also severed the growers of the region’s main export crop, jute, from the mills and marketing infrastructure located in and around the city. The future for jute export was already far from rosy because demand for the tough vegetable fibre was declining as new synthetic fibres developed during the war usurped its role. From the very start, the eastern wing of Pakistan was destined to be a drain on the resources of the more prosperous provinces in the west; eventually it would become a millstone. Another fillip for Hindu Bengal and the new India was that two of the rulers of the local princely states, technically independent kingdoms under the crown in British constitutional thinking, opted for India rather than Pakistan. Even though both Tripura in the southeast and Cooch Behar in the northeast had near majority Muslim populations, there was little the Muslim leadership could do. The accession of Tripura to India almost severed the important port district of Chittagong from the rest of East Pakistan, while that of Cooch Behar left a huge hole in the northeast. ‘Moth-eaten’ was a mild description of the misshapen state that emerged from such a random dispensation.
Yet India did not win hands down. Radcliffe’s rapid draughtsmanship assigned the Hindu-majority district of Khulna to East Pakistan. This was close enough to Calcutta to loose a further surge of the Hindu population to the west and further poison the relationship between the emerging dominions. If Chittagong was only joined to East Pakistan by a thread of land, India’s great northeastern provinces of Assam and Manipur were equally tenuously linked to West Bengal by a thin strip squeezed between East Pakistan to the south and the independent Himalayan states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan to the north. The populous district of Sylhet, formerly part of Assam, also opted for Pakistan after a plebiscite. The importance of all this was that India’s northeastern section of the old British crescent was distanced even further physically and psychologically from the rest of the country. Unsurprisingly, this encouraged some local leaders, particularly among the Naga peoples, to think in terms of total independence from India. It also ensured that the Indian authorities and the Indian army became even more concerned to make their presence felt in Assam and Manipur for fear of Pakistani and, later, Chinese interference in these distant provinces. As elsewhere down the crescent, partition and the creation of new independent states sparked many small wars of secession.
In part this was because the British and Christian missionaries had always treated peoples such as the Nagas and Garos, or equally the Kachin and the Chin in Burma, differently from the Indians and Burmese of the ‘plains’. Most local leaders felt that they had been conquered by the British, not by the Indians or Burmese, and they therefore saw nothing automatic about their incorporation in the post-British states. Roving British anthropologists had sought to protect their culture from ‘pollution’ by mainstream Hindu or Muslim society. In the case of the Nagas, American Baptist missionaries had protected them against the British civil administration and encouraged them to evolve an identity as a chosen people of God, distinct from the pagans of the Assam valley.36 By 1947 probably a majority of Nagas were Christian. This sense of separate identity had been strengthened during the war when many of them had fought against the Japanese on the Allied side. British officers had armed them and taught them that they were independent people and owed nothing to the seditious nationalists of the plains. Naga political associations gradually came into being, some pressing for local autonomy, some for outright independence. In July 1947, just as Radcliffe was passing through Delhi en route to Calcutta, a delegation came to meet the Congress leadership and seek guarantees for an independent Nagaland. Initially Gandhi seemed to accept this, stating that Congress wanted no one to be forced into the Indian Union. But by August the Congress leaders were rattled by the prospect that riot and secession would fragment the whole subcontinent. Their position hardened, provoking some Naga leaders to issue their own declaration of independence on 14 August. In contrast to the wild celebrations elsewhere in India, very few attended the flag hoisting in Nagaland. According to Mildred Archer, art historian and wife of W. G. Archer, a local official and anthropologist, ‘not a single Naga was anywhere in sight’.37 The messianic prophetess Gaidiliu, who had led a Naga rebellion against the British in 1930, remained in prison until 1948 at the behest of the suspicious Indian authorities. Decades of conflict, sabotage and insurrection were to follow in the northeast.
The haste to partition Bengal might have made it look as if the eastern part of the province were being abandoned, but some preparations had at least to be seen to be made. The middling-sized town of Dacca was designated the capital of East Pakistan. In the eighteenth century Dacca had been a major city in the Moghul province of Bengal, but with the rise of Calcutta it had lost its importance and become an undistinguished district headquarters noted mainly for its university and periodic flooding. Already tense from minor communal incidents, the town was sadly lacking in facilities for the large number of Muslim clerks and officials who were congregating there from all over Bengal. The residence of the former Nawab of Dacca was commandeered as Government House while a British army barracks became the secretariat building and dormitory home for 3,500 disgruntled clerks.
Independence in Bengal was an even more shambolic affair than it was in Delhi. A few days before 15 August the Calcutta Corporation renamed three streets in the city centre ‘Netaji Subhas Bose Street’, souring the occasion for the British. C. Rajagopalachari, the moderate Madras Congressman who had been nominated governor of West Bengal, also showed little inclination to respect British traditions. He entered the splendour of the throne room of Government House for his swearing-in dressed simply in homespun dhoti and cap. Perhaps it was just as well. On 15 August a huge crowd waving Congress flags and shouting ‘Jai Hind!’ invaded the building, stirred to action, it was rumoured, by Sarat Bose. They swarmed through the governor’s quarters seizing everything from door handles to table ornaments as mementos. The police removed them only after several hours by throwing tear-gas canisters into the building. In the meantime, the outgoing governor and his family beat a hasty and ignominious retreat. As Arthur Dash recalled it, ‘someone who recognised him jammed a Gandhi cap on his head and the last British Governor went out of Government House by a side door so crowned and with his wife waving the new Dominion (late Congress Party) flag. They were glad to get away.’ Dash also noted that the governor’s escape route was a stairway traditionally used by the low-caste sweepers who cleaned the building.38 As the two new dominions were born, Gandhi and Suhrawardy fasted together and prayed for communal peace.39 Years later the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri related that out in the district town of Barishal his father had kept awake throughout the night of 14 August with a gun in his hand. The disturbances he feared did not come that night, but they came soon enough.40
The Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar killings had already begun the slow tide of migration across the borders of the new states. Sensing that the partition would strand them in hostile territory, hundreds of thousands more had begun to move in July and August. By 4 August Mookherjee, the Hindu leader, was deprecating ‘the mass evacuation of Hindus from the Pakistan zone’.41 Independence and the disclosure of the Radcliffe award speeded the exchange of populations and the atrocities that accompanied it. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim League, Calcutta remained in India, so thousands of its Muslim population moved eastwards while Hindus began to stream westwards. Quite apart from the fact that many of them already had relatives and patrons in the west, the option of remaining in what Tyson called ‘a rural slum’ which, at one stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, had been made a food deficit area did not appeal to them. The government of East Pakistan almost immediately started to beg for rice from neighbouring Arakan, but this seemed a fragile lifeline as the Burmese province was itself wracked by civil war.42 One of the biggest problems was that the police and subordinate civil servants almost unanimously opted for the dominion where their co-religionists were in a majority because ‘a Muslim who elects to serve in West Bengal tends to be looked on, at the moment, as a traitor to his religion and community’, and vice versa. Poorer people threatened with minority status therefore felt that they would have no patrons who would protect their interests in the apparatus of the state and they too began to migrate. Though there was nothing on the scale of the events in the Punjab, minor communal incidents continued throughout the autumn, climaxing in late October and November as Hindus celebrated Durga Puja, the festival of Bengal’s patron deity, and Muslims began their own more sombre celebration of Mohurrum. At this time tension was especially high in Dacca and Chittagong, the latter the division in which Noakhali and Tippera were situated. In Dacca religious animal sacrifice by Hindus was banned for the first time, at least in public. This was a sensible measure but it made the minority community fear for its future and only speeded the exodus. The new prime ministers of West Bengal and East Pakistan, P. C. Ghosh and Khwaja Nizamuddin, respectively, tried to stem the flow with speeches and tours across both territories. Ghosh pronounced the flight of upper-class Hindus from Pakistan ‘a betrayal of the interests of poorer people’. Speaking in Comila, a district town in East Pakistan, he revealed that Muslims in Calcutta had come to him vowing to end the annual sacrifice of cows, which was deeply offensive to the Hindus, in order to ease the situation: ‘I dissuaded them from doing so’, he recalled, ‘as I did not want the Muslims to live their lives as cowards nor do I want the Hindus in East Bengal to behave as cowards.’43 But politicians had acted too little and too late. Rumours, especially of the abduction and rape of women, proved just as deadly as the sporadic burnings. Neighbours turned to killers. One old villager mused: ‘We were under British rule for 200 years. Will Muslims prove more foreign than the British?’ Arthur Dash served in East Pakistan for several months after partition. He remembered the strange world of Dacca, the new capital choked with refugees, lacking basic commodities, its schools crippled by the loss of their Hindu staff. He grew almost accustomed to the cycle of revenge killings: ‘One day, for instance, you would find on your morning walk on the golf course the body of an old woman stabbed to death, lying near the sixth green. Or you are held up in your car at Nawabganj level crossing at 8am… Just before you arrive 28 Hindu passengers had their throats cut by a gang of Muslims who had passed along the whole length of the train.’44 Even those who tried to stay eventually lost heart and hundreds of thousands of migrants crossed the borders again in 1948, 1950–51 and 1973.
In 1946 the poet Samar Sen wrote, in Bengali:
In Bengal, Bihar, Garmukteshwar,
People go to the graveyard or burning ghat
With limbless corpses on shoulders.
Perhaps death brings amity:
Everyone is equal after death–
Bihar’s Hindu and Noakhali’s Muslim
Noakhali’s Hindu and Bihar’s Muslim.45