280. Partition: The Creation of Pakistan (Part 3)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpal. Now we are on the third of our five partition stories with Sam de Rimpel. We are really sort of exploiting him for the knowledge that exists in this wonderful new book of his, Shattered Lands, Five Partitions. Child labour. And the making of modern Asia. Hardly a child. He's the number one bestseller in India, where I believe you're at number five. So in this episode, the last episode was utterly fascinating. It was a terrain that is so little explored. and that is the way in which the Gulf states in the Arab Peninsula are subsumed in this idea of a greater India.

1:11This East India Company thing that doesn't even appear on maps that shows that, you know, some of these states that Sam talked about in the last episode were deemed to be like princely states in India itself. Not deemed to be like princely states, they were princely states. They were, with no gun salutes sometimes, but they were. But this time, right now, we are going to talk about something we have spoken about on this podcast before, the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. And you might remember we did this very good episode with Kavita Puri about this. It was way back in episode 16 of this podcast.

1:45Reduced me to tears, I remember. You did cry. And look, the thing is though, there is so much to this subject that we think it merits a revisit because what we didn't talk about in that wonderful episode with Kavita was what happened to Bengal and East and West Bengal and Bangladesh. So that's what we're going to be sort of concentrating on now. But we are also going to go over some of the terrain and some of the characters that you have probably come to know well. The first episode that we spoke to you, Sam. I was intrigued by why you started with the British trying to make contact with aliens.

2:21In this, let's start with the Great Wall of China because you go to space again to point out something that is not true, not going from here to there. This is looking from up to down. Tell me, what is your myth busting on this episode? It's just to highlight that partition of India and Pakistan is one of the most important events of the 20th century. They're both nuclear-run states now. Just last month, when we were recording this, there was almost a war between the two nuclear-armed states. And the border between them is an extraordinary one. You can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space.

2:58It's a complete myth. Even if you were to sit on the International Space Station and squint your eyes as hard as you could, you wouldn't be able to see a thing. And there's only one wall that you can see from the International Space Station, and that is the border between India and Pakistan. It stretches 3 ,000 kilometres from the Arabian Sea to the ice caps of the Himalayas, just near K2, the second tallest mountain in the world. And this is a line intended to divide Hindus from Muslims, visibly etched into the surface of the globe. There's three layers of fencing, three and a half metres high, accompanied by 150 ,000 floodlights, thermal sensors, landmines, and it's rendered Indians and Pakistanis almost completely inaccessible to one another.

3:43One of the ironies is that it's now easier for Indians and Pakistanis to meet in Britain, the country that colonised them, than it is for them to meet each other in the subcontinent itself. And yet, just 100 years ago, this border did not exist, but it was entirely unforeseen. No one could have imagined that it would have ruptured through the subcontinent in the way that it has. I mean, just tell me, the one place that you could glimpse a view of each other or even indeed cross over was the Wagga border. There was this extraordinary ceremony that would go on between the soldiers of both sides where they would walk up to each other in the most ornamental marches, trying to out-macho each other.

4:26Like the John Cleese Ministry of Silly Walks at times. Yeah, and just trying to out-manly each other. And crowds gather on both sides to watch this as they walk. I suppose it's the subcontinence version of the hacker, almost nose-to-nose, intimidating each other and then withdrawing. But that used to be open. I don't know at the moment, is Wagga open after the recent events? No, it's closed, I think. Completely closed, right. I think it's closed, but there's talk about potentially the border might be reopened for some stuff, but I don't think that the ceremony's back on. Okay. Okay. One of the things you said in a previous episode was that particularly Burma, which is number one in this mini series, that one of the people watching events very, very closely was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

5:11And I think since we're talking about the partition of India and Pakistan, we should delve into that a little bit more. Tell us where his ideas came from that actually there is no way that this can exist as one country and this floodlit long wall that you can see from space is inevitable. So one of the more unusual revelations of the book is that the idea of creating Pakistan, the idea of creating a partition dividing one region from another, is directly a response to the separation of Burma and Arabia in 1937, one decade earlier. A sense of a separate Muslim identity had been around in India for centuries.

5:52And I think you often chat to Pakistani nationalists and they'll say, oh, you know, the idea for Pakistan first arrived when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh in the 7th century. But as late as the 1930s, there's very much a joint sense of Indianness. You chat to someone in Lahore and they think of themselves as Indian, as someone in modern-day Tamil Nadu, as someone in Delhi, as someone in Bombay. But there is an increasing sense of hostility between Hindus and Muslims that the Brits definitely play into when it suits them, but this sense of a separate identity isn't created by the British. The British play on pre-existing divisions.

6:32But, crucially, in the aftermath of the announcement that Burma and Arabia are going to be separated from India, and that a partition will be carved through the subcontinent, a Cambridge student called Ramathali Choudhury says, while Burma is being separated from Hindustan, it remains a mystery to us why Pakistan is to be forced into the Indian Federation. Pakistan is a term that he invents to basically as shorthand for the Muslims of the regions of northwestern India. P for Punjab, A for Afghans, K for Kashmiris, and then stan as a summary of Balochistan. I mean, that in itself is interesting because, you know, the other story is it's Bagh for purity, the land of the pure, and that it comes from a religious perspective that this is going to be a theocracy.

7:19It's both at the same time. So he invents this anagram that spells something else. So it spells out land of the pure using the letters of the different ethnicities that exist in this region. But crucially, Jinnah, who will later create a country called Pakistan out of thin air, had early regarded this idea, as we said in episode one, as some sort of Walt Disney dreamland, if not a Wellsian nightmare. I think Jinnah the man is a very different one from the the one that both Indians, Pakistanis and Brits tend to imagine, and Bangladeshis. Everything about him in the 1930s or the 1920s belied the fact that he would soon create the world's first Islamic Republic.

8:00He's this kind of reserved Gujarati barrister. Again, Indians are often surprised to learn that he's Gujarati. He's not from the land that we now call Pakistan. He's a Gujarati barrister who the New York Times describes in the 20s as undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire. And this is a man who drinks whiskey, he eats pork, he does all sorts of things that Muslims aren't meant to do. And he's renowned for chain smoking cigarettes in his open top limousine. One of the other things that you reminded me of in your book, and I think I knew it ages ago, is that Jinnah, you know, these parallel sliding doors lives that people could have led, he originally wanted to be a Shakespearean actor.

8:37That's what was in his heart. He wanted to tread the balls. He could have been the Laurence Olivier of Karachi. What if that had worked out for him? Who knows? But he decides to become a lawyer and he's soon one of the best paid lawyers in the country. And Sirajani Naidoo, who I'd say is probably the most important woman in the Indian independence movement and who somehow hasn't had a biography in 50 years. And if anyone out there is looking for a topic. Don't tout that too far because I'm desperately in love with this woman. She was known as the Nightingale of India, because she was also a singer with this most extraordinary voice.

9:10She had the most close association with Gandhi and the letters that they wrote to each other over some of the most, first of all, mundane things like I'm really hungry and I haven't eaten and the food here is rubbish to really thorny issues of what the future of India might look like. So she's utterly fascinating. And she's a brilliant writer, isn't she? Yeah, fantastic. Absolutely brilliant writer. She talks about having to wear a fur coat at one point when she goes into Jinnah's company right at the end. Honestly, I think my favourite bit of research in the entire book was reading her letters.

9:41I was literally in the British Library just laughing out loud because she's just so pointed. But she writes about Jinnah in the 20s, that his accustomed reserve but masks for those who know him, a naive and eager humanity, an intuition as quick and tender as a woman's, a humour gay and winning as a child's, preeminently rational and practical, his worldly wisdom effectively disguises a shy and splendid idealism, which is the very essence of the man. And funny. The funny never comes across in any of the portrayals or most of the other writings. She knew funny. She knew funny. So, you know, she says he's funny.

10:17I believe her. Good. Okay. So he's an unconventional figure. He is a complicated figure. At what point does he turn from somebody who is really very much idealistically, passionately involved in the Quit India movement to somebody who starts saying, actually, you know what, this is not going to work. One nation is not the future. We're not going to have it. And Pakistan is a thing I'm going to fight for. So it's a very gradual shift, but it's one of the great, fascinating things because it challenged so many of my preconceptions. So I think it begins with his marriage to Ratti Petit. So she's an 18 year old, he's in his 40s.

10:54It's very much a kind of, He's marrying virtually a child and it scandalizes society. And crucially, she is excommunicated by her Parsi community. And Jinnah, once having dreamed of modern India would be able to move past divisions of religion and caste, begins to become disillusioned. And it's also in this marriage that he definitely hardens. He's a very neglectful husband. He's so obsessed with gaining India her freedom that he basically leaves Ratti alone for months on end. and she soon becomes addicted to morphine. It scandalizes friends who come to her house for leaving needles around the house and experimenting with drugs.

11:33To try and get Jinn's attention, starts going out scantily dressed to jazz cafes and constantly creating scandal for a politician who's very much a Muslim politician, as well as being secular. Then one day, she's found dead in her room and she commits suicide. And this very much changes him and hardens him. Sam, is that definite? Because there is some discussion on whether she committed suicide, no? So I think it's Sheila Reddy who found all of the letters that basically confirm that she committed suicide. Firstly, there's a suicide note that survives. She writes to her husband, try and remember me, beloved, as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon.

12:14Darling, I love you. I love you. And had I loved you just a little less, I might have remained with you. The higher you set your ideal, the lower it falls. I have loved you, my darling. So, Sirajani Naidu writes to her daughter Padmaja, and this is what basically confirms that she committed suicide, poor little Rutty has taken an overdraft or overdose of Veronal. But darling, you realise, of course, that this is not the official version. Poor mad little suffering child, maybe now she'll find the peace that she was denied or denied herself on earth. So that's the letter that seems to suggest the most that she definitely did commit suicide.

12:50And whatever the case, Jinnah snaps. His friend at her funeral writes that, Never have I found a man so sad and bitter. He screamed his heart out, and something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event, nor something to be grieved over, but he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life. So Jinnah changes after this, and you can see it in his letters too. And the particular focus of his animosity becomes this new upstart lawyer called Mahatma Gandhi. and Gandhi is campaigning for India, as we mentioned in episode one of this miniseries, to resemble the Hindu holy land of Parut, this land of the ancient Hindu epics that stretches from Kashmir to the tip of India and roughly includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

13:41But he was campaigning for the separation. And crucially, whilst Gandhi's doing this, Jinnah is saying, no, we shouldn't separate Burma and the Arabian states. We're all sons of the land and we have to live together. And Jinnah begins to see Gandhi, interestingly, as the communal one. He sees Gandhi as this politician who's bringing religion into politics, and he finds it abhorrent. And when people begin referring to Gandhi as the Mahatma, or great soul, Jinnah refuses to use the title. Yeah, he hates it. I mean, undoubtedly, we talked to Ram Guha about this, you know, Gandhi is using Sanskritized Vedic allusions when he talks about this.

14:21But when he's asked, what about the Muslims? He goes, well, there's no problem. We'll all live together. He sort of flicks it off like, what are they worried about? Of course, it's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. But that does not assuage any of Jinnah's fears, does it? Because he just doesn't buy into the fact that Muslims and Hindus will work together. And more to the point, he introduces a Hindu hymn as the national anthem, them. And he has prayer meetings at political rallies, all of which, in Jinnah's view, brings religion into politics. So yeah, I mean, it's very interesting and different from, I think, the narrative that I grew up in Delhi with, where Jinnah's the communal politician who wants separation and Gandhi wants unity.

15:02And that's definitely the case in the 1940s. But again, the key thing to remember is that all of these politicians changed their stance over the decades. And that what Gandhi's position in the 20s is, and what Jinnah's position in the 20s is, basically reverses. So Gandhi in the 40s is the person that we know from the Attenborough film. But he's not that in the 20s. The fact that he changes is important. They're on a journey, as they would say in today's parlance. Okay, they're on a journey. Let's talk about the Lahore Resolution, because that is decisive. It's such an important chapter in the history of partition.

15:37What happens? So in 1937, Burma and Aidan are severed from the Indian Empire and the Congress Party adopts Vande Mathuram as India's national song and begin equating the new map of India with the Hindu goddess, Durga, which alienates Muslims. So Vande Mathuram is an interesting thing because it literally translates the first few lines as I bow to my mother and mother is taken to mean mother goddess, which is the Hindu deity, Durga Ma, she is the mother goddess. And that alienates Muslims who would regard this as a pagan goddess. Yeah, and it is, you know, if you were in any doubt and you say, well, look, you know, this is all just imagery, you know, relax.

16:16The later verses of Andematham mentioned Durga by name. And so that really does, you know, sort of put backs up that why is our national anthem containing a goddess that is not part of our pantheon? So, you know, you're right. This kind of stuff is irksome, mildly putting it, and is one of the catalysts for partition if you want to take it to the other extreme. So this has happened. What happens then in response to this? Because there is a coming together and this thing happens in Lahore, which is really pivotal. So tell us what happens there. Sure. So Jinnah basically announces in Lahore that independent states for Muslims should be created.

16:56states plural, interestingly, and it's unclear whether these states mean nation states or states within some greater India, whether it's states like the United States of America, or whether it's a nation state entirely separate from India. Crucially, he has just witnessed this massacre of Muslims and Indians in Burma and has come to the conclusion that without legal protections, India's Muslim minority will be overwhelmed and politically destroyed by an even larger Hindu majority. We've got to remember that at this time, even after the first partitions of Arabia and Burma, this united India still has the largest Muslim population on the planet, larger than the entire population of Muslim Arabs, larger than the Muslim population of Indonesia.

17:48It is enormous, It's the united Muslim population of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And he's worried that even despite its size, they're still going to be screwed over by an even larger Hindu majority. So he calls for independent states to be created. And it's very interesting how all of the discussion about this is in relation to what happened in Burma. So you get, for example, Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, asking why there is so much uproar about Jinn's suggestions, given that basically the unity between India and Burma was not less fundamental. If the Hindus did not object to the severance of Burma from India, it is difficult to understand how the Hindus can object to the severance of an area like Pakistan.

18:33I think it's very interesting how these debates play into one another, how each partition sets off the next like a set of dominoes. It becomes more than just a discussion in Lahore, it becomes a resolution. So you actually start having sort of documentation that is produced saying this is now what we want, this is now official. And it's very hard to roll that back once you have a resolution that has been put out to the world. And also then, I mean, around about this time as well, is the Bengal famine. And that too has a connection with the impetus to have an independent Pakistan. Tell me what happens and how that feeds in.

19:08So this is something that, again, new research that's come out. I think Jhanna Mukherjee's book, Hungry Bengal, was the first to bring this up. And it was all these previously unreleased files that show that during World War II, after Japan conquers Burma, Bengal is cut off from all the rice in Burma. And in order to create a front line, they burn all the ships that are able to get rice from rice farms to shops. And when a cyclone hits and basically devastates a bunch of farms, famine hits. You've already destroyed half the crop, you've cut off all the transport systems, and now there's a cyclone on top of it.

19:47And what begins is the Bengal famine. Which we should say, there is a whole episode we've done again with Kavita Puri, if you want to know more about this. And Bengal is one of India's easternmost provinces. It's where Kolkata was. It corresponds to modern Bangladesh and India's West Bengal province. and it had for centuries been one of the most religiously syncretic regions of India. It was often difficult to differentiate between Hindus and Muslims there at all. Devotees spoke the same language, shared the same script, ate the same food, and in many cases even worshipped the same gods. The very first Bengali language biography of the Prophet Muhammad, for example, describes Muhammad as an avatar of Niranjana, the Immaculate One, who had previously come down to earth as the Hindu deity Ram.

20:28Crucially, after the famine breaks out, most of the people actually starving are Muslims, because the majority of the peasantry of Bengal were Muslims, whereas the upper class were mostly Hindu landowners. And the founder of modern Hindutva, Vinayak Savarkar, calls for Hindus to boycott government efforts to buy up their rice, because he blames the local provincial government which is under the Muslim League, and so says not to give rise to Muslims. And he says that every Hindu should send all help to rescue, clothe, and shelter Hindu sufferers alone. And most of Bengal's rural poor, the people actually suffering from the famine, are Muslim at this time.

21:12And so Savarka's boycott effectively condemns millions to starvation, and in the process helps make Muslim freedom from Hindu economic domination an attractive idea in Bengal for the very first time. Is that something which Hindutva people would deny today, or how would they, if one was speaking to a Savarka enthusiast, of which there are many, as we know, all over modern India, how would they explain those words? They basically see it as him trying to punish the Muslim League government that was very much also responsible for the famine, just like Churchill is to some extent needs to be held accountable for this.

21:49The local provincial government was run by the Muslim League, and they also need to be held accountable for not having set up food kitchens in Kolkata, etc. And so he's trying to punish them. Are they commonly oriented too? Are they trying to feed Muslims and not Hindus or anything like that? No, but there is a sense that they are definitely sometimes giving preferential treatment to Muslims and that there is a growing religious divide here. So that's what Zavarka enthusiasts would say is that this was a kind of necessary evil to show political opposition to the Muslim League government. And listen, we're going to take a break in a moment, but what we

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23:20Welcome back. We talked in the last half about Jinnah and the impact of death upon him, somebody that he loved and how it changed his personality and how he was on this journey. Gandhi too goes on a very, I mean, it's so weird about these two men. They live almost symmetrical lives, both Gujarati, both lawyers, both from sort of similar backgrounds and both who suffer the death of a wife that ultimately does reshape them in some way. Tell us about Kasturabhai, because she's a big part of his life, but almost invisible until really fairly recently. And it's her death that has a huge impact on him.

23:59So during World War II, most of the congressmen are arrested after they announced the Quit India movement, basically, that no one should cooperate with the British government. And this is a movement that really kind of begins to break down the fabric of the British Raj and is one of the main reasons, I think, why the Brits finally leave. You know, there's so much protest to British governance that the Brits have to start legalising machine gunning from the air at protests and that kind of thing. So it's a really big thing. Gandhi's imprisoned and he's imprisoned with his wife. But when she gets ill, he refuses to let her have penicillin because he opposes a lot of modern medicine and she passes away.

24:39And in the wake of this, he becomes much more emotionally unstable. And when this grief-stricken Mahatma approaches Jinnah after his release to negotiate a power-sharing agreement for India's future, it's becoming clear that the Brits are on their way out. We now need to start thinking about who's going to take over the reins. Maybe we can share power. He finds that Jinnah is now known as Kaidiyazam, the great leader. And he takes this failure in negotiations with Jinnah personally. he begins these controversial brahmacharya experiments that I think a lot of people have recently begun to talk about, where he sleeps next to naked women, including his 16-year-old grandniece Abba, to test his vow of celibacy.

25:20And there's no indication that he ever makes sexual advances on these women. But he does cause them emotional turmoil. And there's an interesting quote that he apparently says, saying, if I can master this, I can still beat Jinnah. We should say what the this is, because the brahmacharya experiment, for those who aren't from the subcontinent. They may not know what it is. But it is basically celibacy. He would test his resolve to celibacy and brahmacharya, which is being purer and nearer to God, by lying with his nieces in this instance. He should not have any kind of omission. Can I put it that way?

25:55An omission during the night would show that he had mastered his feelings. I did put this to Ram Gua, the Ick, Ramgur, who's an exceptional historian of Gandhi, that there's a major problem with this, which he accepts. And as you say, nobody's ever dared really to look at this in any great detail until recently. And I wonder if the ability or the space to look into it now is because Gandhi's position in India is slightly dipping and people like Savarka, who you mentioned before, who had such uncompromising things to say about Muslims is on the up. So now, where you couldn't talk about the great soul at all, now you can and you can talk about some of the seediest aspects of undoubtedly a great life and a man who achieved great things.