Assessment 7 out 10
This is a difficult book to review. It is very readable. It combines personal stories with a reversion to the Great Man Theory of History with the Great Men (& occasional Great Women) generally coming out of it badly. In 1932 Gandhi threatened to fast unto death against separate electorates for marginalised communities. Following inter communal violence in Calcutta in 1946, when up to 10,000 were killed, Partition was pushed through in the hope this would avoid further violence. Really? Up to 2m died. The Hindu RSS and Muslim League National Guard were responsible for much of the violence, then retreated into nearby Princely States where the Punjab Border Force, set up by the British to control violence, had no authority. Mountbatten advanced the date of independence by a year with the British army, which might have might provided a neutral force, exiting. A border commission under Cyril Radcliffe was set up, whose recommendations were only disclosed the day after Independence (see Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children and Brooke et al (2018)[1] on how state formation is determinative of the subsequent state).
There were some schoolboy howlers, which either Dalrymple or an editor should have picked up. The maps of the movements of the Simon Commission or Gandhi across the then Indian Empire add little. More detailed maps of the Princely States and how the Indian Provinces were reorganised in 1956 would have helped.
There was lots I didn’t know about. How big was the Raj. Hindus and Gandhi treated India as the Bharat of the Mahabharat, including the Indus Valley (now Pakistan) & Bengal and were disinterested in Arabia & Burma, that the Indian army and then former Japanese soldiers helped the Allies to attempt to re-establish colonial rule in French Indo-China and what became Indonesia, that Mountbatten’s reorganisation of Allied forces created the concepts of the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the previous links between India and Arabia and the temporary Arabian Raj with Princely States in Southern Arabia part surviving in the UAE. It ended in 1971 as did Pakistan as a unified nation and residual Princely rights in India.
Throughout you wanted more on why. Why was the Raj as big as it was? A partial answer is given in William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, on the cultural origins of India, Why had the Simon Commission decided to Partition India separating Burma & Arabia. They didn’t talk to Burmese opponents of that Partition who apparently were in a majority. The Arab view isn’t mentioned at all. 600,000 fled the Japanese in Burma for India in early 1942, 80,000 dying on the way. In 1943 Burma minus the Shan Princely States was granted “independence” by Japan. It became what Dalrymple describes as an ethno-nationalist state. So are Sri Lanka & Thailand, so much for Buddhist pacifism, an irony Dalrymple ignores.
In 1943 in the Bengali Famine a cyclone coincided with refugees arriving from Burma. 15% of rice had come from Burma. Supplies were cut as the British torched boats in Arakan to stop them getting into Japanese hands. Bengalis had been in control since the 1930s. In Madras the government provided food. In Bengal they didn’t, as technically there was sufficient food, but not at prices many could afford. Hindus fed their community contributing to the Hindu/ Moslem divide in Bengal.
India and Pakistan both contributed to violence in the other, hoping there would be successive Partitions. Pakistan gave assistance to insurgents in the Nilgri hills seeking reunification of the Nilgri people divided by the Indian/Burma frontier. In 1965 Pakistan seized part of the Rann of Kutch saltpans. Dalrymple doesn’t mention that this border dispute was then settled by international arbitration with 90% of the disputed area going to India. In 1971 Yahya Khan sent the Pakistani army overwhelmingly non-Bengali speakers into East Pakistan resulting in significant violence against Bengalis and the Hindu minority. 10m refugees fled across the open border with India. India then invaded forcing the surrender of the Pakistan army, 93,000 kept as POWs until Pakistan agreed to recognise Bangla Desh.At least 500,000 died in the conflict and perhaps 200,000 Urdu speaking Biharis, seen as collaborating with the Pakistan army, were murdered, others left stateless in Bangla Desh. Up to 400,000 Bengali women were subject to systematic rape. Yahya Khan stood down following the defeat in East Pakistan replaced by Ali Bhutto, under whom an unpublished report found the violence of the Pakistan army responsible for the loss of East Pakistan. Pakistan backed those seeking a Sikh homeland (Khalistan).In 1977 Bhutto was deposed & then judicially executed by the Islamist general Zia ul Haq. All three new nation States periodically descended into autocracy.
There are some interesting observations. What was Pakistan for, the people in the Moslem majority areas which became Pakistan or a refuge for Moslems from Hindu India? See Benedict Anderson on Nations as Imagined Communities. Following 25 years of Partition there was no desire amongst those in East Bengal for reunification with West Bengal.
Some things were overlooked altogether. How does Sri Lanka fit in? Except for Indian seizure of Portuguese Goa in 1961, there is no mention of how other European powers pulled out of South Asia.
How the Princely States were absorbed into the new national States deserves further analysis. Its historical importance and complications are addressed too briefly. The Nizam of Hyderabad wanted to create an independent Caliphate. Moslems arrived and Hindus left. This was followed by Indian “Pollice Action” in which up to up to 40,000 Muslims were killed. The Hindu Raja of Moslem majority Jammu & Kashmir also wished to join neither new nation State. India invaded with up to 200,000 Muslims disappearing and many others fleeing into Pakistan. Kashmir remains divided between India and Pakistan along the cease fire Line of Control. On the Kathiawar ( Saurashastr) peninsular Shah Nawaz Bhutto, Ali Bhutto’s father and the last diwan of the coastal princely state of Junagadh, tried to persuade the Nawab to join Pakistan leading to Indian intervention and a 1948 plebiscite with the Hindu majority population voting overwhelmingly for union with India.
You are reminded of the “cuius regio eius religio” principle of the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg moving from medieval universalism to rulers choosing between Lutherism and the Catholic Church, a step towards territorial sovereignty. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia is described as a further moment of transition from medieval feudal territories in Europe with shared sovereignty to sovereign territories. The transition from overlapping feudal states in India in, and after, 1948 with the demise of the Princely States covering 40% of the territory and 23% of the population of India may be seen as equivalent changes to the Treaties of Augsburg and Westphalia in Europe.
81% of the modern India Pakistan border was not the result of Radcliffe’s border delimitation, but the decisions of 7 Princes, whilst 36% of the East Pakistan border was the result of the decisions of another 10 Princes. Dalrymple does not refer to the 173 enclaves and 24 counter-enclaves on the border between India and Bangla Desh, resulting from Princely choices preserving existing feudal territory. [2]
He refers to the slaughter of big cats and the end of cultural continuity with the demise of the Princely States. So are there advantages in the normalcy of inequality? Discuss.
[1] Brooke et al (2018) State Formations; Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood
[2] The Border Enclaves of India and Bangladesh Reece Jones (2010).
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