Punjab Politics, 1 January 1944–3 March 1947: Last Years of the Ministries Governors’ Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents (review)

With the advent of autonomy for India’s provinces in October 1936, the British viceroy of India prevailed on his provincial governors “to supply . . . confidential appreciation of local developments . . . at possibly monthly intervals.” The viceroy indicated that he wanted up-to-date political information and analyses that would be useful for policymaking. After constitutional reforms were adopted and the tempo of political activities in India began to increase, the British secretary of state also felt the need for systematic and regular reporting. In a cable in March 1937, he asked governors “to send him at short intervals, reports of the more important events . . . with an expression of the Governor’s personal views upon them.” (The two quotations are from an earlier volume edited by Lionel Carter, Punjab Politics, 1936–1939: The Start of Provincial Autonomy—Governors’ Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents. New Delhi, Manohar: 2004, p. 7, 8, respectively)

These requests evoked a series of provincial reports that came to be known as “The Governor’s Fortnightly Reports.” Although provincial chief secretaries had regularly sent reports to New Delhi before the 1930s, these earlier reports had been too unfocused to meet the requirements of policymaking. A new form of report—shorter and of a more political nature—was what the viceroy and secretary of state were looking for. As a result, the fortnightly reports that were sent to New Delhi provided fairly detailed and insightful accounts of political, economic, and administrative developments in the provinces during the critical decade leading to decolonization and independence. In the case of Punjab, the reports explained why partition happened.

The volume under review is the third in a series of four compendia of fortnightly reports and other documents sent by the governor of Punjab to the viceroy of India from 1936 to 1947. The Punjab fortnightly reports contained detailed analysis and penetrating insights into economic, social, and political affairs during the final decade of colonial rule. This was a period of war, constitutional change, deteriorating communal conditions, and mounting political tensions among the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs as they maneuvered to secure an adequate share of political power in anticipation of the end of British rule. Lionel Carter’s first volume, published in 2004, covered a three-year period beginning with the onset of provincial autonomy in the Punjab in 1936. The second volume, covering the period from 1940 to 1943, was published in 2005.

The third volume contains the texts of 126 fortnightly reports and other documents sent from Punjab to New Delhi from January 1944 to March 1947. The reports cover critical events that foreshadowed the partition of the province: the economic disruption brought about by World War II; the erosion and eventual breakdown of Unionist authority, the activities of the Indian National Congress and the Sikhs, and the growing power of the Muslim League in Punjab. The main trend during these critical years was the breakdown of a political arrangement that had been in operation since the 1920s and that, if it had persisted, could have prevented the partition of the province. The documents in this volume vividly capture the economic and political conditions, personalities, and events that eventually put paid to any hopes that the province could continue to be governed by a coalition of landed interests represented by Muslims, Hindu Jats, and Sikhs, an arrangement that had worked well in the past. The climax of the story in this volume comes with the electoral victory of the Muslim League in the 1946 elections and the resignation of the final Unionist premier, Khizar Hayat Khan, in March 1947, setting the stage for the partition of Punjab a few months later.

By publishing these important documents, most of which have hitherto been accessible only in the India Office Library in London and the National Archives of India in New Delhi, Lionel Carter, the...