The Duel (7 page)

Looking back on this period now, it’s clear that even though an influential section of the imperial bureaucracy in India was citing the idea of “Muslim civilization versus Hindu civilization” to promote separation on the familiar lines of “two distinct nations,” it was, in fact, the Second World War that proved to be decisive in the partitioning of the
subcontinent. During the war, when the hub of the British Empire was fighting for its existence, the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru demanded immediate independence so that a free India could determine whether it should participate in the war effort. The British were angered by the request and refused. The Congress contemptuously broke off relations with the British and boycotted its institutions. The colonial power was even less pleased when after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942 Gandhi proposed and launched a “Quit India” movement in August. An offer from the British cabinet pledging independence at the end of the war was rejected with a biting phrase—“a blank cheque from a failing bank,” retorted Gandhi, who was convinced the British would lose in Asia and independence might have to be negotiated with the Japanese.

In polar contrast, the Muslim League had always remained on the British side. It was firmly supportive of the war effort. The British responded in kind. Pakistan was, in effect, a big thank-you present to the Muslim League. Had the Congress Party adopted a similar strategy, the result might well have been different. It is an intriguing counterfactual notion. Once the idea of a division had been agreed on, all movements that became an obstruction were gently discouraged. One of the least discussed aspects of the twenty months preceding partition was a wave of strikes that swept India, putting class above separatism. In the Punjab, Muslim peasants were ranged against Muslim landlords. The most important of these strikes was the naval mutiny in February 1946 that had paralyzed the Royal Indian Navy, evoking the specter of the naval mutinies that had heralded the 1917 Russian Revolution and the triumph of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Ships were occupied and the strike spread from Bombay to Karachi and Madras. Rear Admiral Godfrey threatened to bomb his own battleships, but his was impotent rage. The Strike Committee comprised Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. All were united. Then the politicians stepped in and both the Congress Party and the Muslim League backed the British and helped defuse the strike. Nehru was unhappy. “The choice was a difficult one,” he said of his decision.

Jinnah’s appeal to the naval ratings was also straightforwardly communal: “I call upon the Muslims to stop and create no further trouble
until we are in a position to handle this very difficult situation.” A general strike in solidarity with the sailors paralyzed Bombay and crippled industry. British-led troops and police opened fire, killing five hundred people. The politicians were shamefaced, but muted in their criticisms. The poet Sahir Ludhianvi asked, “O leaders of our nation tell us / Whose blood is this? / Who died?”
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In addition to the naval uprising, three hundred sepoys mutinied in Jabalpur, and in March that same year the Gurkha soldiers raised the flag of revolt at Dehra Dun. In April, ten thousand policemen went on strike. Gandhi now became nervous and referred to the united Hindu-Muslim strikes as “an unholy combination.” To support them, he argued, meant “delivering India to the rabble. I would not wish to live up to 125 to witness that consummation. I would rather perish in flames.”
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The acclivity of class tensions helped determine the fate of the subcontinent. Everyone was in a hurry now lest the situation become uncontrollable for all three sides—the British, the Congress Party, and the Muslim League. The deal was done in a hurry.

A sprinkling of lawyers and a clutch of clever businessmen (more interested in influence and increasing their assets than achieving greatness) had provided the Muslim League with brains and cash, but they were never in control of the organization. The principal leaders were all men of a conservative temperament, though modern in outlook.
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Few had ever been involved in the civil disobedience movements or helped organize peasants or trade unions. Aware that their nationalist credentials were limited, they had staged a few token protests, such as Direct Action Day a few months before the British left. As a result they were able to spend a few hours in prison, about which they would talk for the rest of their lives.

In London, on the eve of partition, an emergency Labour cabinet
assembled in a somber mood at 10 Downing Street. Presided over by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, it was devoted exclusively to the growing crisis in India. The secretary of state for India was despondent. The search for a last-minute way to stem the flow of blood resulting from the amputation had proved unsuccessful. The minutes reported, “Mr Jinnah was very bitter and determined. He seemed to the Secretary of State like a man who knew that he was going to be killed and therefore insisted on committing suicide to avoid it.” Surely he was not alone. The refusal of Congress Party leaders to accept a number of proposals that might have preserved the unity of the subcontinent had left him with no other alternative.

As late as March 1946, Jinnah had been prepared for an honorable compromise, but the visionless and arrogant Congress Party leaders (Gandhi, an honorable exception in this case, had suggested that Jinnah become the first prime minister of a united India) had prevaricated and then the opportunity was lost forever. Had Jinnah been able to peer a few years ahead, he might well have abandoned the experiment. The dust never settled on the state he had created. Jinnah was surrounded by a swarm of excited young men who were in the habit of talking of a “new spirit” without ever being able to explain what it meant. It is too late to turn the clock back now, but it certainly needs to be readjusted to South Asian time.

T
HE BIRTH OF
Pakistan was considered, by most of its supporters, as a great achievement, but the danger of embracing “great achievements” is only understood when the greatness, if ever it really existed, lies buried in the past. It takes decades for most modern states to acquire an identity. Pakistan’s rulers, attempting to stamp one by force, downgraded the existing identities of the regions comprised within the new state. Punjabis, Pashtuns, Bengalis, Sindhis, and Baluchis were, in the main, Muslims, but religion, while important culturally, was but one aspect of their overall identity. It was not strong enough to override all else. Historically, for most of these nationalities, Islam was essentially a set of rituals. It appealed to emotions, it made people feel part of a wider history. For the peasants, the interpreters of the true faith were
not mullahs, but the great mystic poets whose verses were sung and celebrated in each region. In the early decades of the new state, religion was never ideological except for a handful of clerics and the two small political parties discussed in the previous chapter, the orthodox Jamaat-e-Islami (JI, or the Islam Party) and Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI, or Party of Islamic Scholars). Even these organizations and others had espoused universalism and had opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state, referring to Jinnah as Kafir-i-Azam (the Great Infidel), which reportedly amused him a great deal. Pushed by the turn of events, both groups rapidly reconciled themselves to the new reality, and the former became a stern guardian of the “ideology of Pakistan” against secularists, Communists, liberals, and anyone who felt that things were going seriously wrong.

T
HE HORRORS OF
partition could not be addressed by those responsible for the division. It was left to poets and novelists to express the suffering of the many. Three of them produced work that has remained peerless. One was Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84), who together with Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet formed the much celebrated triumvirate of radical twentieth-century poets who shared a common experience of imprisonment and exile. Faiz was one of the greatest South Asian poets of the modern period. A Punjabi by birth, he wrote mainly in Urdu. “The Dawn of Freedom,” composed soon after the massacres of August 1947, reflected a widespread sadness, despair, and anger:

This pockmarked daybreak,
Dawn gripped by night,
This is not that much-awaited light
For which friends set out filled with hope
That somewhere in the desert of the sky
The stars would reach a final destination,
The ship of grief would weigh anchor....

Our leaders’ style is changing,
Sexual pleasures permitted, sadness for separation forbidden,
This cure does not help the fevered liver, heartburn or the unsettled eye.
That sweet morning breeze
Where did it come from?
Where did it disappear?
The roadside lamp has no news;
The heavy night weighs the same
The heart and eye await deliverance;
Forward, we have not yet reached our goal....

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55), one of the most gifted Urdu short-story writers produced by the subcontinent, took an even more detached view of the killings. Like Faiz, he too was able to turn painful events into great literature. He took no sides. He wrote with a passionate detachment, depicting the summer of 1947 as a state of utter madness. For Manto, it was a crisis of human nature, a sharp decline in moral conduct and behavior, and this shaped the structure of his stories about partition. The fear that gripped northern India in the months leading up to partition profoundly affected most people.
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Manto’s stories help us understand how and why.

Manto died in Lahore when I was eleven years old. I never met him and have always wished I had. In later photographs his melancholy is striking. He appears exhausted, the consequence of unhappiness and a ravaged liver; but earlier portraits reveal an intelligent and mischievous face, sparkling eyes, and an impudence almost bursting through the thick glass of his spectacles, mocking the custodians of morality, the practitioners of confessional politics, or the commissariat of the Progressive Writers. “Do your worst,” he appears to be telling them. “I
don’t care.” He could never write to please or produce formulaic literature in the name of “socialist realism.”

Manto wrote “Toba Tek Singh” immediately after partition. The setting is the Lahore
pagalkhana
(lunatic asylum). When whole cities are being ethnically cleansed, how can the asylums escape? Bureaucrats organizing the transfer of power tell the Hindu and Sikh lunatics that they will be forcibly transferred to institutions in India. The inmates rebel. They embrace each other, weeping. They will not be willingly parted and have to be forced onto the trucks carrying them to new asylums. One of them, a Sikh, is so overcome by rage that he dies on the demarcation line that now divides Pakistan from India. Confronted by so much insanity in the real world, Manto found normality in the asylum. The city he loved was Bombay, but he was forced to move to Lahore. He would later write:

My heart is heavy with grief today. A strange listlessness has enveloped me. More than four years ago when I said farewell to my other home, Bombay, I experienced the same kind of sadness. There was a strange listlessness in the air much like that created by the forlorn cries of kites flying purposelessly in the skies of early summer. Even the slogans of “Long Live Pakistan” and “Long Live Quaid-e-Azam” fell on the ear with a melancholy thud.

The airwaves carried the poetry of Iqbal on their shoulders, as it were, night and day and felt bored and exhausted by the weight of their burden. The feature programs had weird themes: how to make shoes . . . how to propagate poultry . . . how many refugees had come to the camps and how many were still there.

Faiz belonged to the region that became Pakistan. Manto migrated from India. Amrita Pritam, a Sikh by birth (1919–2005), was younger than both of them. She was born in Gujranwala, a small Punjabi town, but was educated in Lahore. Her father was a schoolteacher who also wrote poetry. Amrita wrote in Punjabi (the divine language of the Sikhs) and published an acclaimed first collection when she was seventeen. She did not want to leave Lahore and her many Muslim friends, but was swept across the new border by the merciless tide of history.
Traumatized by the partition, which would mark much of her work, she invoked Waris Shah (1706–98), the great mystical love poet of the Punjab, whose epic
Heer and Ranjha,
a ballad of impossible love, parental tyranny, and forced marriage, remains a great favorite on both sides of the Punjabi divide and is performed as regularly as Shakespeare. Pritam described the division of the Punjab as a poison that had destroyed a common culture:

I ask Waris Shah today:
“Speak up from your grave,
From your Book of Love unfurl
A new and different page.
One daughter of the Punjab did scream
You covered our walls with your laments.”
Millions of daughters weep today
And call out to Waris Shah:
“Arise you chronicler of our inner pain
And look now at your Punjab;
The forests are littered with corpses
And blood flows down the Chenab.”
Our five rivers lie poisoned
Their waters irrigate the earth....

Poets and writers stirred the dissatisfaction that stalked Pakistan. They shattered the self-image of the leadership, but to no avail. The Muslim League confiscated the heritage of the late Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), a great poet from a preceding generation, educated at Heidelberg and heavily influenced by German philosophy, which explains his later attraction to metaphysics. Iqbal wrote much about Islam and was a believer but never pious and, in the tradition of the Sufi poets of the Punjab, was contemptuous of mullahs. When he was alive, the preachers villified him as an “apostate,” “heretic,” and “infidel.” After his death they mummified him into an icon of the new state, a cultural equivalent of the Great Leader, and thus considerably reduced the impact of his poetry by presenting him as a crude revivalist. Some of us who came of age in the first decades of Pakistan were
alienated by this image. Only later did the radical literary critic Sibte Hassan rebuke us for our philistinism and teach us to appreciate Iqbal’s poetry and his “hidden” poems. One such remains apposite, though written about an earlier kind of globalization than the one we live in today: