In August 1947 the Union Jack was taken down over New Delhi and about fifteen million people started moving across a border that was barely marked. Between roughly one and two million people may have died in the violence and upheaval surrounding Partition, although the precise death toll remains disputed. Historians still do not know for sure how many people died and they also do not agree on who or what caused this terrible thing to happen. The Partition of India is still a sensitive topic today even after nearly eighty years because each new group of historians looks at it in a different way.
The Partition of India is the subject of teaching material that Christopher Tidyman from Loreto Kirribilli made for the History Extension syllabus. He talked about it at the History Teachers Association of Australias conference in 2018. Of telling just one story about the Partition of India the presentation looks at what it calls seven different ways that historians have thought about the Partition of India over time. These approaches emerged at different moments, often challenging earlier ways of framing Partition while also adding new questions and sources.
The Blame Game
One of the earliest and most influential approaches to Partition historiography was what Tidyman calls “High Politics” or “Great Men History.” This approach sees the Partition as a failure of talks between Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. It is, basically a way of blaming others. Some Indian nationalist interpretations have placed primary responsibility on the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan and its rejection of constitutional arrangements favoured by Congress. Some Pakistani nationalist histories have presented Partition as the vindication of Jinnah's political strategy. As the historian Ayesha Jalal has said this kind of history is usually seen as belonging to one side or the other.
Jalals own work from 1985 The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, is the important challenge to that simple idea. Her main point is that the creation of Pakistan was not certain. It was the result of Jinnahs moves. More surprising is her idea that Jinnah might not have wanted separation at all. He might have wanted to keep majority areas like Punjab and Bengal inside a weakly connected India. In a 2017 interview, with the newspaper DAWN, Jalal repeated that idea. She said that people have focused much on the history that Jinnah created. Jalal argued that historians had paid too much attention to Jinnah's political actions and too little to the political circumstances that shaped them.
The Empire's Hand
A second, older argument places the blame further back on the British Raj itself. The former Indian diplomat and MP Shashi Tharoor has argued in his book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India that colonial administrators deliberately governed by exploiting religious division, a policy captured in the Roman maxim divide et impera “divide and rule”. Tharoor traces this back to an 1859 memorandum from the Governor of Bombay and to the introduction of an ethnographic census in 1872, which for the first-time classified Indians rigidly by religion and caste. In the early twentieth century, British officials also openly discussed the political value of dividing nationalist opposition. In the context of the 1905 Partition of Bengal, Home Secretary H. H. Risley wrote that one of the objectives was to “split up” and weaken a “solid body of opponents” to British rule. Tharoor's contention is that this administrative habit hardened religious identity into political identity, so that by the twentieth century a divide that had been official policy could no longer be undone without the departing power's help.
The British journalist and historian Alex von Tunzelmann makes a related point in Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, arguing that once colonial administrators began attaching political representation to religious identity, Indians increasingly felt compelled to define themselves by which "box" they belonged in.
From Palaces to Villages
In the 1980s a new group of historians came up with a way of looking at things: the Subaltern Studies Group. This group was started by Ranajit Guha, a historian from Bengal. He had learned from historians like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson before creating his own way of understanding Indian history from the perspective of ordinary people.
The Subaltern historians said that for a time people had been focusing on the rich and powerful and that was not what mattered to most people who lived through 1947. What really mattered was what happened to families and why.
Ranajit Guhas colleague, Gyanendra Pandey who now works at Johns Hopkins University has written a lot about the violence that was built into the system of the state. In his 2001 book Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India he talks about how the Partition of India was a time when two new countries used violence to say they were legitimate.
This new way of looking at things by focusing on what regular people went has led to some really powerful research on the Partition of India over the past forty years. One of the powerful books is Urvashi Butalias 1998 book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. This book is based on interviews with people who lived through the Partition of India.
One of the stories in this book is from a man from Thoa Khalsa village near Rawalpindi. He talks about how he saw his relatives kill their daughters so that they would not be taken by the rioting mobs. Historians often quote this story when they talk about the "honour killings" that happened during the Partition of India along with a lot of violence.
The anthropologist Veena Das drew attention to the extraordinary vulnerability of women and children in the aftermath of Partition; among the women and girls recovered through the post-Partition recovery process, girls under twelve reportedly constituted at least one-third. The Partition of India was a sad and violent time and the Subaltern Studies Group and other historians, like Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das have helped us understand what really happened to ordinary people during this time.
Not Madness, but Method
A fourth area of research has challenged the idea that the violence during Partition was just a sudden outbreak of religious "madness." The historian Yasmin Khan in her known book The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan talk about killings that were, at their worst, normal planned and done in an organized way instead of happening by chance. Moon's book is fundamentally an eyewitness account of the breakdown of government and communal violence, rather than a general theoretical claim about “groups with rules of respect.” Official reports from the Punjab government from March 1947 went further calling what they saw, as carefully planned military actions instead of just riots.
A Global Story, Not a Local One
More recently, historians have argued that Partition should be understood not as a uniquely South Asian tragedy but as part of a wider mid-twentieth-century age of mass displacement. In the preface to the 2017 edition of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, Yasmin Khan draws an explicit line between the refugees of 1947 and the images of drowned Syrian refugees that dominated front pages in 2015, arguing that Partition historians have too often suffered from what she calls regional myopia.
The American journalist Nisid Hajari, author of Midnight's Furies, makes the case that this history is not merely academic. He warns that Indo-Pakistani rivalry is becoming more dangerous rather than less, as both countries' nuclear arsenals grow and their media grow more strident arguing that it is well past time for the political heirs of Nehru and Jinnah to finally lay 1947's furies to rest.
Why the Argument Still Matters
When you look at eighty years of research you do not get a clear answer but rather more questions. The historian Sunil Khilnani says in The Idea of India that Partition was supposed to solve the argument over who got to rule the subcontinent and for all. What happened was that Partition became a repeated theme in the region’s history. A ghost in people’s memory and a constant challenge to the power of both India and Pakistan a challenge that never really went away.
The real lesson, from studying Partition is that we do not get one answer to the question of who was to blame but rather we see how each new generation changes the way they think about history. And how a hurt that happened in just a few weeks in 1947 is still being talked about and rethought today Partition is still being felt Partition is still an open wound.
Sources: Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985); Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India (2016); Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998); Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (1995); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007; 2017 ed.); Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (1961); John Keay, Midnight's Descendants (2014); Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies (2015); Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (1997); Srinath Raghavan, India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (2016); Jeff Kingston, Nationalism in Asia: A History Since 1945 (2016).
Based on historiographical material compiled by Christopher Tidyman, Loreto Kirribilli, for the History Teachers' Association of Australia, 2018.
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