by ARVIND SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
An army officer and historian’s balanced appraisal of humanity’s greatest ever migration, a story of bitter division and exploitation
In his own house, a father beheaded 25 women and girls of his own family so that they would not fall into the hands of the Other. Trains arrived filled with nothing but bodies; station platforms were covered in dried blood; rivers were streams of corpses. Rampaging mobs slaughtered tens of thousands with the active help of the police, of railway officials who passed on timings, of princely states’ armies, and sometimes the army, which was organised on regional, communal, and linguistic lines. Survivors’ stories still shock, and many of us have relatives who — at the very least — knew participants in the killing.
The aggregate figures tell their own story, if without the same hideous immediacy. A million people were murdered — by friends, neighbours, and total strangers; 16 million were displaced, in humanity’s greatest ever migration.
A ‘holocaust’
Barney White-Spunner, a British lieutenant-general and military historian, calls Partition a holocaust. His month-by-month account of the year 1947, drawing on a wide range of research work, official documents, letters, diaries, interviews, and conversations, moves through political manoeuvrings, cultural complexities, and ground-level detail to outline a terrible period in modern history.
The author, to his great credit, maintains a measured and balanced tone throughout a story of bitter division and exploitation, clashes of personality, incompetence, and missed or unseen opportunities. Most of those at the upper levels knew little of the culture over which they ruled or sought to rule, while some of those who knew the culture repeatedly roused millions to what White-Spunner calls medieval violence and gratuitous cruelty.
Certain episodes stand out. White-Spunner is clear about the effects of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and he is caustic about the colonials’ racist dismissal of Indian demands, following India’s contribution in World War I, for what later became Dominion status. He also details the ineptitude, indifference, and corruption which helped cause the Bengal famine, and adds that traders hoarded grain in reaction to supply problems. The book is, however, light on Winston Churchill’s diversion of grain to troops in other countries, and does not mention that Lord Cherwell lied about the supplies available.
It took Archibald Wavell, by all accounts a decent man with a general’s organisational ability, to do something about the famine, but White-Spunner is otherwise hard on Wavell, despite the chaotic nature of London’s orders. Wavell’s viceregal successor, Louis Mountbatten, was far more of a politician, with royal descent giving him a further advantage in India.
Yet Mountbatten shut Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, out of most meetings. Auchinleck, devastated by having to break up an army which had been his life, then retreated from events; the Punjab Boundary Force was a quarter the size it should have been, and could not even maintain basic order.
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