Reporting the Partition of Punjab, 1947: Press, Public and Other Opinions (review)

The British colonial withdrawal from the subcontinent in 1947 is a tale of woeful political judgment, colossal administrative incompetence, and utter moral callousness. In the aftermath of World War II, the British were weary of the burdens of far-flung colonial commitments in South Asia and were eager to focus on domestic reconstruction to offset the damage inflicted by the war. Having lost the ability to preserve the unity of the subcontinent, the British dispensed with their Indian empire in considerable haste. They were well aware of the acute ethnoreligious polarization that had emerged between the two principal religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, in the twilight of the empire. Yet they failed to make even modest preparations to ensure a peaceful division of the subcontinent into the two nascent states of India and Pakistan.

As a consequence of Britain’s failure to arrange a secure transfer of populations, roughly one million individuals lost their lives and at least another six million were uprooted. Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered Muslims, especially in the state of Punjab, which bore the brunt of the partition. Muslims, in turn, decimated Hindu and Sikh communities in the western part of Punjab and elsewhere. Contrary to partisan accounts, any dispassionate analysis of this period shows that none of the three religious communities demonstrated any particular moral rectitude. Although some members of all three communities engaged in individual acts of courage and decency, collective behavior was altogether another matter.

This calamity, which took place in August 1947, continues to poison the relationship between India and Pakistan. Memories of the horrors of partition have been passed on through biased history textbooks, partisan documentaries, and popular cinema, among other media. Only a handful of Pakistani and Indian writers, most notably Saadat Hasan Manto, Manohar Malgaonkar, and Khuswant Singh, have been able to write about this event with any element of even-handedness. More recently, the expatriate Pakistani novelist, Bapsi Sidhwa, has also written a moderately fair-minded account seen through the eyes of a polio-stricken child in the Zoroastrian Parsi community, on the eve of partition.

Honest intellectual examination of this epic tragedy has been all but impossible, especially in Pakistan, with its long periods of authoritarian military rule. Fortunately, in India, which has a vigorous and lively press and a well-established tradition of historical scholarship, this extremely fraught issue is now increasingly being subjected to both popular and academic scrutiny. In recent years, journalists and scholars alike have sought to document the events that led to this disaster.

Despite the progress in attempts to collect the memoirs of survivors, to bear witness to the times, and to reconstruct oral histories, the bulk of the scholarship remains atheoretic. Neither conventional historians nor empirical social scientists have even attempted to explain why members of the two principal religious communities descended into such unmitigated savagery at the time of colonial withdrawal. Although Hindu-Muslim violence had stalked various parts of the subcontinent both prior to and during British colonial rule, few events in the troubled history of the subcontinent had culminated in such widespread carnage.

Raghuvendra Tanwar’s distillation of press reports from both the English and the vernacular dailies, private papers, governmental minutes, and private correspondence provide a dense account of the terror that befell the state at the time of partition. Tanwar’s scholarship is careful, honest, and prodigious. He has sifted through a vast corpus of material to provide a thorough account of how the state came to be partitioned, the role of key players, and the tragic aftermath of partition. He focuses not only on the higher realms of elite politics but also on the conditions that prevailed at the level of districts and their local administrators. It is a tale of colossal human folly, cupidity, and myopia.

Despite many polemical accounts, the larger outlines of the history of the partition of Punjab are reasonably well established. Tanwar’s contribution lies in his ability to provide...