The Partition of India

On the eve of independence, British India held around four hundred million people — roughly one in five human beings then alive. Hindus formed the large majority; Muslims were a very large minority, perhaps a quarter of the population; there were also Sikhs, concentrated above all in Punjab, along with Christians, Parsis, Buddhists and Jains. These were not sealed communities. Across most of the subcontinent they shared villages, markets, languages and festivals, and had lived as neighbours for centuries; in Punjab and Bengal the mixing was densest of all. Around a third of the territory lay outside direct British rule, in several hundred princely states bound to the Crown by treaty. The rest was governed from Delhi by a remarkably small British service dependent on Indian soldiers, clerks and taxes. It was an empire held together less by force than by arrangement — and arrangements can be renegotiated.

The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, began as a gathering of lawyers petitioning for a greater Indian voice, and evolved into a mass movement speaking for the whole subcontinent. Under Gandhi, from 1920, it turned into something no petition could match: millions marching, boycotting foreign cloth and going willingly to prison. Jawaharlal Nehru came to stand beside him as Congress's political heir. The All-India Muslim League, founded in 1906, spent decades as a small body of notables with little popular support. Between the two sat a British reform of 1909: separate electorates, under which Muslim voters elected Muslim representatives from reserved seats. Many historians argue that this hardened a religious identity into a permanent political category — that once you vote as a community, you come to think of your interests as communal interests. Others reply that the divisions were real long before any British clerk wrote them down, and that the Raj merely gave them legal shape. The argument is unfinished, and it matters: it decides how much of what followed was made in London and how much in India itself.

The 1930s brought the question to a head. In the 1937 provincial elections Congress won sweeping victories and formed ministries in most provinces; the League did badly. What happened next is disputed: League leaders claimed Congress governments behaved as a Hindu party in secular dress; Congress denied it and pointed to its own Muslim members. Either way, the League's fortunes changed. In March 1940, at Lahore, it passed a resolution demanding that the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west and the east be grouped into independent states. No borders were named, and historians still argue about what Muhammad Ali Jinnah actually wanted: a separate country, or a bargaining position strong enough to guarantee Muslims real power inside a united one. Then came the war. The Viceroy took India into it in 1939 without consulting a single elected Indian; Congress ministries resigned, and Quit India was met with mass arrests in 1942. With Congress leaders in prison the League grew rapidly, and by 1945 an exhausted, bankrupt Britain had elected Attlee's Labour government, which had no appetite for holding India by force.

The elections of 1945-46 left the two parties facing each other with hard mandates. Congress swept the general seats; the League won the overwhelming majority of the Muslim ones, and could now claim to speak for Muslim India. A British Cabinet Mission proposed one federal India with a weak centre; both sides accepted parts of it, read it differently, and it fell apart. In August 1946 the League called a Direct Action Day to press its demand. In Calcutta the demonstration gave way to four days of killing in which thousands died. Who struck first is still argued over; the effect is not in doubt. The violence spread to Noakhali in eastern Bengal, then to Bihar in reprisal, then to the United Provinces and Punjab, each atrocity answering the last. Ordinary people who had never wanted a partition began to move towards whichever side they believed would protect them. To politicians of every party, a single state came to look impossible.

In March 1947 Lord Mountbatten arrived as the last Viceroy, with instructions to transfer power and a reputation for speed. He found a country in which order was visibly failing, and concluded that delay would cost more lives than haste. The date announced for British withdrawal, June 1948, was brought forward to August 1947. Whether that saved lives by ending the uncertainty, or cost them by leaving no time to prepare, is one of the great open questions of the period. The plan announced on 3 June partitioned the subcontinent and left Punjab and Bengal, the two great mixed provinces, to be divided internally. Someone had to demarcate the line. The task went to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, an English barrister who had never set foot in India; his ignorance was treated as a qualification. He was given about five weeks, and worked from maps and census returns already years out of date, alongside commissions whose Hindu, Muslim and Sikh members could not agree, so the decisions ended up his alone.

On 14 and 15 August 1947 two independent states came into being: Pakistan, which marks its independence on the 14th, and India on the 15th. Pakistan was born in two wings, west and east, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory — a country whose halves shared a religion, a grievance and almost nothing else. In Delhi and Karachi there were flags, speeches and entirely genuine joy; for millions the end of foreign rule was the fulfilment of a lifetime's work. Yet the most important fact of those days was still a secret. The Radcliffe award — the boundary itself — was not published until 17 August, two days after independence. Mountbatten's reasons are disputed: perhaps he did not wish to poison the celebrations, perhaps he wanted the new governments to own the consequences. Either way, for two days people celebrated without knowing which country they stood in. When the lines appeared, whole districts learned that their homes and their ancestral villages lay on the wrong side of an arbitrary curve.

What followed was the largest forced migration in recorded history. Between ten and twenty million people left their homes in the months around independence: Hindus and Sikhs moving east out of West Punjab, Muslims moving west out of East Punjab and Delhi, and a slower displacement in Bengal that continued for years. The exodus was not orderly. Columns of refugees stretched for miles along the Grand Trunk Road; trains were stopped and attacked, and some arrived with no one alive aboard. Communal killing settled into a cycle in which each massacre was defended as a reprisal for the last, and no community was only a victim. Very large numbers of women — tens of thousands, on the estimates most often cited — were abducted, raped or killed. Households prosperous for generations were reduced to a single trunk and a place in a camp. How many died is genuinely disputed: figures range from several hundred thousand to two million. The width of that range shows how completely the record was lost, and how differently the event is remembered on each side.

Two figures stand out against that autumn. Gandhi, who had opposed partition to the last, spent independence day not in Delhi but in Calcutta, and fasted there and later in Delhi to shame the killing into stopping. In both cities it largely did, at least for a time. In January 1948 he was shot dead in Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who believed he had conceded too much to Muslims. Meanwhile the princely states had to accede to one dominion or the other, and most did so quickly; one case has never been settled. In Kashmir a Hindu maharaja ruled a Muslim-majority population; when armed tribesmen crossed in from Pakistan he acceded to India, and Indian troops were flown in. Pakistan holds that the accession was invalid, signed under duress; India holds that it was lawful. The first India-Pakistan war ended in 1949 with a ceasefire line that has divided the territory ever since, and no plebiscite was ever held.

The line has gone on charging for itself. India and Pakistan have fought further wars — in 1965, in 1971, and on the heights of Kargil in 1999 — and the 1971 conflict ended with East Pakistan breaking away, after a brutal military campaign and another vast movement of refugees, to become Bangladesh. The state built on shared religion had itself been partitioned, which for many historians was the sharpest comment on faith as the sole basis for a country. In 1998 both countries tested nuclear weapons, and Kashmir remains heavily militarised. Elsewhere the legacy is quieter and no less real: a diaspora whose family maps begin with a departure in 1947; a border that separates cousins; two national histories in which the other side's version is barely taught. The last survivors are in their nineties, and their memories are being gathered by oral-history projects and by the Partition Museum in Amritsar. What that record shows is not two nations but several million private catastrophes, each still owed a hearing.