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Literary Review
Perceptions of the past
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Remembering Partition draws upon written testimony, archival material and the memories of those who actually underwent the violence of Partition, and has a bearing on our understanding of the methodology of disciplinary historiography, says TAPAN RAYCHAUDHURI.
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PROFESSOR PANDEY'S latest monograph is in line with his earlier work on the construction of communalism and more recent studies by other writers like Urvashi Butalia trying to recover the experience of the violence/ Partition which accompanied the emergence of two independent states in the subcontinent in 1947. It draws upon written testimony, archival material and, above all, on the memories of those whose experience is the central concern of this volume. The material is analysed in the light of certain theoretical understandings of historical memory and evidence. The said analysis is of profound significance for all students , both the "non-disciplinary" (to quote the author's description) and the academic varieties, of the subject.
Pandey focuses on the inadequacy of academic historiography of modern south Asia, its obsessive focus on the origins of the two nation states and the political movements which produced those end results, the preoccupation with the causes which produced the phenomenon of Partition, the story ending in 1947. The misery which accompanied that event for vast numbers of men and women is barely mentioned in the literature. Their experience is treated as almost peripheral to the central story of nation/ state formation, an aberration, which at most merits an explanation qua aberration. The disciplinary history does not recognise that for the people affected, Partition and independence were equivalent to violence, the tearing apart of their lives, their share, hisse, of the grand events.
The author speaks of three Partitions, of the dependency, of two of its provinces and then in the lives of those who were butchered, maimed, uprooted or simply reduced to the status of second-class citizens in their own homeland, watan. It is the third Partition which constitutes the subject matter of this volume. For those caught up in it, the author suggests, the events of August 1947 and related developments had no other meaning. The study focuses on certain episodes, — in Punjab, Garhmukteswar and Delhi, case studies, as one would describe the exercise in academic history — to recover the pain and complexity of the experience.
One major contribution of this book is to nail the claim to authenticity of different varieties of sources of information, very much including the sacrosanct official records, eyewitness accounts and the memories of the high and mighty who were in charge. The estimates of death toll, it is pointed out, ranges from 2,00,000 to two million. Not one of these is based on any dependable calculation. The eyewitness accounts are often no better than rumours, honed and streamlined through constant repetition. When explored in any depth by an interrogator, the firm surface of the stories splinter and the "truth" looks very different from the received and widely accepted version. General Tuker, writing when his memory served, spoke of the women of Garhmukteswar cheering when their devilish men were busy butchering Muslim women. Historians of Pakistan have invariably cited this authoritative evidence as the basic truth concerning Hindu villainy. Tuker nowhere mentions the source of his information, probably because there was none. He writes that there was no British police officer in U.P. at the time. He forgets that the D.I.G. of police was an Englishman, Robinson. The heroic accounts of Hindus/ Sikhs suffering martyrdom rather than accept conversion and multiple humiliations give way when pushed, to reveal very human failures of courage and anxious efforts to escape, anyway, anyhow. Martyrdom, especially of women, are often imposed against their will or accepted with uncertainty and hesitation.
The construction put upon the violence also varied. Sometimes it is heroic revenge against a community guilty of savagery against one's own in some far away place; Bihar avenging Noakhali, western Punjab avenging Bihar, Garhmukteswar avenging Western Punjab and so on. At other times there is a sense of shame: it is really the responsibility of the other community, or of criminal or bigoted elements in one's own or innocent villagers misled by vicious fanatics. Sometimes it is outsiders who commit the crime, not the residents of one's own village. Sometimes it is the innate perfidy of Hindus or violence built into the Muslim psyche. Most spectacularly, there is the grand colonial perception. It is the monstrous Biharis whom the wise white rulers had expelled from the army after the horrors of 1857. But then one has to explain the Jats, loyal sepoys of the British Indian army. But it is not really that difficult: their natural savagery, kept in control under the iron discipline of British rulers, would break through whenever that discipline slackened. All is explained. One's perception of the past — imperialist, nationalist or communal — determined the interpretation of the violence.
Pandey's marvellous insights have a bearing on our understanding and the methodology of more wide-ranging historiography, including what he calls the disciplinary. He has shown new and significant ways of assessing data, which no one should ignore. But there are points where one feels constrained to raise questions. Delhi's population after Partition is neatly divided into two groups, the elite who rejoiced at independence and the refugees who did not. Any one who was in the city on the fateful night of August 15 and seen the outburst of joy among the poorest would not agree. Nor would those who witnessed in Calcutta the poorest segments of the population, Hindus and Muslims, fighting one another for over a year, pouring into the Raj Bhavan. No, for millions, privileged and not so privileged, the end of colonial rule was a moment of joy. Surely not for all and indeed not for the millions whose lives were shattered by the Partition. But, arguably, for the majority it was.
The nation-state in some intellectual circles is the source of all our misery, especially for the dispossessed. It is at best, a highly questionable proposition. I recently reviewed a book by an author, post-modernist in outlook and persuasion, on the people of a small state in Rajasthan remembering their days of sorrow under the local petty maharaja. Then the sorrows come to an end and there is an age of happiness. Who are the harbingers of this new ,unexpected, good fortune? The sarkar, i.e., the government of independent India, the much-maligned nation state in other words. A simple dichotomy between the elite and the non-beneficiaries of independence does not work.
Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. xiv + 218.
TAPAN RAY CHAUDHURI
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