by ROHINI HENSMAN
IMAGE / Amazon
Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947-65 by Haimanti Roy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 254 pp. $50.00)
The partition of British India to form independent India and Pakistan resulted in cross-border migration of nearly nine million Hindus and Sikhs into India and approximately five million Muslims into Pakistan. Partition in the west (Punjab), which was marked by horrific violence and the rapid establishment of a closed border that severely curtailed further migration, has been seen as paradigmatic of the process, and has received far more scholarly attention than the partition of Bengal in the east, which is the subject of this book. Using official sources like legislation, memos, directives by ministries in India and East Pakistan, local police records, private papers of leading political parties, and parliamentary debates, as well as “‘unofficial’ voices, of ordinary people who sent in letters, memoranda, and petitions to their official and political representatives demanding amelioration of their particular grievances” (p. 19), Haimanti Roy attempts to reconstruct not only the more prolonged and complex ways in which the border between India and East Pakistan was established but also what it meant for those who were directly affected.
Chapter 1 describes the process by which the boundaries in the west and east were drawn. In June 1947, Punjab and Bengal Boundary Commissions were established to demarcate the new boundaries, with four Indian members in each; former director-general of the British Ministry of Information Cyril Radcliffe was brought in to chair and have the deciding vote in both. It was an impossible task, made even more difficult by outdated maps and a time frame of less than six weeks: “The task of creating a border based on religious demography was bound to fail and in the end, pleased no one” (p. 51).
Some of the negative consequences described by Roy would have resulted regardless of the basis on which the partition was made. For example, rivers that were used as boundaries changed course over time, or flooding during monsoons obscured the border, and alluvial plains in the middle of large rivers—some large enough for whole villages to be built on them—were often claimed by both countries. Cattle and sheep crossed borders while grazing, and were sometimes seized by people on the other side. Seasonal laborers from East Bengal who came to work on tea gardens in West Bengal, and in pre-partition days tended to settle in places where they worked, now became foreigners who were not allowed to settle. However, the free movement of people and goods across the border continued for a while. Border dwellers who lived on one side of it but worked on the other were allowed to cross the eastern border daily, although they sometimes faced harassment in the process, as did villagers who had been separated by the border from the markets that served their daily needs. Even after a document regime of passports and visas was introduced, requiring border dwellers to identify themselves clearly as Indian or Pakistani, “the border citizens often had ambivalent attitudes about such impositions,” and “the illegal movement of goods and continuous flow of people without appropriate documents” continued (p. 81).
The disruption that would have accompanied the inauguration of any new international border was multiplied many times over by the ethno-nationalist rationale of the India-Pakistan partition. The new Pakistani state was explicitly Islamic while the new Indian state was overtly secular, but the very act of partition redefined Muslims in India and non-Muslims in Pakistan as “minorities,” whose “residence and national identity now were at odds with each other…. Both India and Pakistan, in their initial policies, implicitly assumed that religion would be the primary motivator in the decisions of these minorities as they debated whether to stay or leave” (p. 90). Yet this assumption was challenged by many Hindus and Muslims, who chose to remain in their ancestral homes in the country where they were now a “minority.” Perhaps the most bizarre consequence of the way in which the partition was carried out was the creation of enclave territories. “After 1947, India had 130 enclaves within East Pakistan and Pakistan claimed ninety-five territories within Indian territory. The inhabitants of these enclaves became ‘stateless’ people as neither states made efforts to claim them as their own” (p. 48). The problem persisted after East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, and was ultimately resolved only in 2015, when the enclaves became part of the countries in which they were located.
Despite pledges by both governments to protect their minorities, these hapless people became the target of all manner of harassment, both official and unofficial. For example, Roy describes how Muslims from India who had crossed over to Pakistan and Hindus from Pakistan who had crossed over to India temporarily—due to fear of violence, or even for medical treatment or to attend the marriage of a relative on the other side—were treated as “evacuees” whose property could be requisitioned by the state, and often found themselves homeless when they tried to return. In a few cases, such property was derequisitioned when the decision to seize it was challenged legally, but far more often, it was used to house refugees and offices of the new state and thus became impossible for the original owners to reclaim. At the same time, both states treated refugees from across the border as an unwanted problem, grudged the resources needed to rehabilitate them, and put bureaucratic hurdles in the way of their claiming citizenship in the country where they had been forced to resettle. Thus the minorities created by partition were faced with an unenviable choice: either to remain in their homes, where their loyalty to the nation was constantly under suspicion—a situation that obtains even today—or to migrate to a country that was not their home and where they were not wanted.
The insecurity suffered by minorities was exacerbated immensely by incidents of violence organized by right-wing Hindu and Muslim extremist organizations, which often also managed to mobilize local members of the “majority” community. Much of it was “small-scale” and “sporadic” and threatened the “psyche rather than the body. Such routine violence was mediated by: actual singular incidents of petty theft, loot, kidnapping of women, and murders; destruction and/or defacement of religious icons; by verbal threats, rumours aimed at maximising minority insecurities; and through embellished representation of communal incidents in the public media, political speeches, and thinly veiled state propaganda. Together they created a continuous ecology of fear and acted as catalysts for minorities to abandon their homes and cross the border” (p. 148). Perversely, the flight of some members of the minority community catalyzed by fear of violence was interpreted by majoritarian organizations as proof of their disloyalty.
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