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  As with the later massacres, the scale and the intensity of the Calcutta killings took both British and Indians by surprise. ‘No Indian political leader … neither the [Bengal] government, the opposition nor the press anticipated the magnitude of the tragedy.’ As later too, the national politicians in Delhi seemed more obsessed with the squabble for power than with its consequences for the febrile communities they represented. Like the frailest of firefighters, Gandhi alone would track the flames of violence, touring the stricken areas – Dhaka, then Noakhali (both in eastern Bengal) and then Bihar, all before the end of 1946 – as he fasted, marched and painfully practised the communal harmony that he so tirelessly preached. His colleagues preferred to accuse their political opponents either of starting the troubles or failing to suppress them, both of which only stoked the fires of hatred for the next round of atrocities. No one seemed capable of comprehending the scale and obscenity of the killing. In the midst of forming the interim government, Nehru breezily declared that his arrangements must ‘not be upset because a few persons misbehave in Calcutta’; Jinnah similarly refused to believe that any member of the Muslim League ‘would have taken part in using any violence’. A joint inquiry might have cleared the air. Neither party would agree to it. Instead both conducted their own inquiries. Each duly found against the other.8

  Ironically, the effect on the British was wholly counter-productive. ‘Direct Action Day’, though conceived by Jinnah as a way of demonstrating that the League could bite as well as bark and must therefore be taken seriously, merely impressed the British with the urgency of disengaging. The Viceroy and his advisers were convinced that the situation was getting out of control. An all-India civil war seemed imminent, with the British ill-equipped to prevent it and in danger of being caught in the crossfire. Not for the first time, Wavell wavered over the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power and began drawing up a plan B. The ‘B’ stood for ‘Breakdown’ – a breakdown in the constitutional process and a breakdown in law and order. To a military man who had presided over the Allies’ wartime retreats in both North Africa and South-East Asia, a carefully phased withdrawal was the obvious answer, first from the comparatively peaceful south of India to the Gangetic plain, then to the strategic redoubt of the Punjab and the north-west. In this scenario, Jinnah’s Pakistan, if it ever materialised, would come piecemeal, later rather than sooner, and by agreement with Westminster regardless of Congress. The Calcutta Killings had neither advanced the League’s cause nor made Pakistan inevitable. What they did make inevitable was an early British departure and the near certainty of constitution-making being sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment, while the apprehensions of undivided India’s four hundred million citizens were left to fester.

  *

  ‘Pakistan? What good is that to us? We want oil, cloth, sugar, wheat. And we want justice – that is all.’

  Such were the sentiments expressed by a couple of Qureshi Muslims when, in March 1947, they were asked how they felt about a Pakistan that was looming larger with every communal massacre and constitutional impasse. Qureshis claim descent from the Arab invaders who first brought Islam to India in the eighth century; these ones had bicycles and were heading for a building site near the Narmada river in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Famed for speaking their mind, Qureshis might have been expected to welcome the idea of Pakistan. But in this case their response was wholly negative, and it was not untypical. It echoed that of sundry Pathans, Punjabis, Jats, Mewatis and Rajputs – Muslims and Sikhs as well as Hindus – whose opinions had been quietly canvassed over the previous four months by the inquisitive Malcolm Lyall Darling.

  An ageing Quixote on a small grey horse, Darling had ridden out of Peshawar one raw November morning in 1946. From a start within sight of the Khyber Pass, he had been ambling east and south ever since. By March 1947 he was nearing the end of his epic ride in what was roughly the centre of India. Dressed in creaky leather boots, tweeds of many pockets and an outsize sola topi to protect his hairless pate, he looked exactly what he was: ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge and ex-ICS (Britain’s elite Indian Civil Service). But not for him the face-saving constitutional conundrums of Delhi or the peacekeeping anxieties of Calcutta. Darling was controversial. A gentle critic of many aspects of British policy, he had turned to Nehru when planning his itinerary, and would report to Gandhi on the findings of his trip. During thirty-six years’ service his speciality had been setting up agricultural cooperatives and encouraging ‘the Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt’ (as per the title of one of his books). Rural life remained his passion. An hour or two spent chatting with agriculturalists under the village pipal tree he accounted well spent and entirely pleasurable. The diary of his 3,000-kilometre ride from the Indus to the Narmada during what would be north India’s last winter as an undivided land affords the most comprehensive investigation on record of rural opinion at this critical moment. Ministers in limousines might be deciding the subcontinent’s future, but it was the threadbare figures aboard the oxcarts, whether in the boulevards of New Delhi or in the back of beyond, who would have to live with the consequences – or die because of them.

  Oddly, Partition and Pakistan, though hotly debated and now only a matter of months away, were not yet, according to Darling, at the top of the villager’s agenda. Mention of azadi did occasion excitement – and more especially so after February 1947, when the British finally announced a deadline for their departure. At the time Darling was trotting through a yellow sea of oil-seed rape between Gwalior and Jhansi. He approved the deadline. He had in fact been urging commitment to a cut-off date for years, if only to concentrate the minds of the constitution-makers. Now, though, the announcement hinted as much at necessity as tactics. Despairing of the Congress–League negotiations – or the lack of them – desperate to depart ahead of any communal bloodbath and highly doubtful of Wavell’s step-by-step ‘Breakdown Plan’, the London government had decreed that, agreement or not, it would pull out of India by June 1948.

  Yet however imminent, even azadi was seen by the toiling masses less as a national triumph than as an economic panacea; for with self-government there would surely come the ‘oil, cloth, sugar, wheat and justice’ that were everywhere in such desperately short supply. Oil for lamps and cooking, cotton cloth for clothing (a single outfit of turban, trousers, shirt and shawl took twenty yards, ‘and women require considerably more’), sugar for sweets and treacly tea, and wheat (or rice) as the staple of subsistence – without these things life was barely supportable. Yet rationing, a wartime necessity in India as in Britain, had slashed their availability, while the combination of inflation and distributive corruption had pushed the prices of the little that was available way beyond the set rates. Incomes had roughly doubled in the previous five years, but ‘even the controlled price [of wheat] – Rs 10 a maund – is four times what it was before the war, and “in the black” [i.e. on the black market] it is Rs 14 to 16’, reported Darling.

  As we rode, we were waylaid again and again by officers, other ranks, headmen and peasants, drawn up by the roadside in long lines headed by some medalled veteran. They all had the same complaint – the complaint that has run like a telegraph wire all along our road for the last sixty or seventy miles. ‘We have nothing to eat, we are dying of hunger, there is no sugar, no cloth, no matches. Look at our children, how ragged they are! Our lot is unbearable!’ No one of course was dying of hunger, and many were tolerably well dressed. But … in ten to fifteen days 80 per cent of the people … [will] have to buy their food and most of them will have to do this ‘in the black’ … All agree that, if sufficient grain is not imported in the course of the next fortnight, there will be sheer starvation.9

  This was the situation in the extreme west of the Punjab, a province which was generally reckoned the most productive in the country. Darling found the same in what is now Haryana, and the refrain, echoed by those Qureshi contractors, continued right down into Madhya Pradesh. Even in the cities, where the fixed-
rate allowances of cloth and foodstuffs were on a more generous scale, the poor were feeling the bite. The widespread protests – the endless strikes, shut-ins, shut-outs and often bloody confrontations – were more about the cost of living than the iniquities of foreign rule. ‘It was a time,’ notes the editor of a recent collection of contemporary reports, ‘of remarkable, indeed unprecedented, labour unrest and it saw the beginnings of several powerful peasant movements.’ If Calcutta’s ‘working class belt’ had really resisted the frenzy of the August killings, it may have been because, while celebrating solidarity with the striking postal workers, the labouring classes were readying themselves for upcoming strikes in the docks and on the tramways. ‘The range of participation [in the unrest] … extend[ed] from sweepers through miners and railwaymen to white collar employees in post offices, banks and military establishments. Even policemen [were] affected, and that across several provinces … Taken together these [outbreaks] illuminate certain alternative possibilities that have been almost forgotten today.’10

  Rather more than a ‘possibility’ is the inference that sectarian bigotry was by no means the only cause of civil strife in 1946–47. The Communists were as active as the ‘communalists’ (India-speak for religious zealots). The waves of protest that had until lately buffeted British imperialism now pounded the ramparts of capitalism just as much as they undermined the breakwaters of secularism. A strike in a railway workshop in far-off Madras province had turned violent almost as readily, and at about the same time, as had ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta. Nehru and Jinnah might paint glossy word-pictures of ‘the great future that beckons us’, but their roseate visions were often lost on a hungry and fearful public. In rural areas, starvation was no idle threat. Only three years earlier millions had died in the great Bengal famine of 1943. Though blamed primarily on the British and their World War, it was common knowledge that the famine had been exacerbated by the inadequate relief effort of Bengal’s government and by the hoarding and profiteering of Bengal’s grain contractors. The Bengal government had been that of the Muslim League, giving Congress a ready scapegoat; and the contractors were mostly Hindus, giving the Muslim League a ready scapegoat. All too easily distress of any sort could be translated into the confrontational rhetoric of Congress–League rivalry and so, by extension, into the incendiary terms of sectarian hatred.

  Darling found the same thing happening along the line of his epic ride across north-west India. Power and responsibility in the provinces had been handed over to elected governments back in 1937. It was they – Congress-run in most provinces, League-run in a few – who had imposed the rationing, who had lately tightened it, and who were responsible for administering it. Hence, just as the incumbent League ministry in Bengal bore the brunt of the blame for the Calcutta Killings, so the Congress ministries in three of the five provinces through which Darling rode were being blamed for the economic hardship. The accolade of ‘most corrupt [department] in a very corrupt province … is now universally accorded to the Food Supply [Civil Supplies] Department and its satellite traders who, controlling the very basis of life, exploit their neighbours to the full, as they once did with their money-lending’.11 This was à propos the North-West Frontier Province, where a Congress ministry presided over a largely Muslim population; but it applied equally to the Punjab and the United Provinces (UP). Congress governments stood accused of rewarding their supporters with lucrative posts in the Food Supply Department, from where, abetted by Hindu contractors and moneylenders, their largesse was channelled exclusively to Hindu recipients and Congress voters. According to one of Darling’s informants, it was this situation rather than the prospect of Pakistan that accounted for the growing popularity of the League among Punjabi Muslims.

  The chief spur is the fear of Hindu domination, deriving from the domination of the Hindu money-lender and trader which … has taken a new lease of life with the control of supplies. The fear is widespread and the bloody doings in Bengal [the killings in Calcutta and Noakhali] and Bihar have created, to quote the Assistant Registrar, some hatred in their hearts …12

  As yet the hatred was only a presentiment, continued Darling’s informant; the relationship between the different communities in this particular Punjabi village was ‘still a happy one’. But by March, when Darling was reaching the end of his ride, it was not at all happy. From Calcutta and Bihar the inter-communal killing had spread to Garhmukteshwar in UP, then to the villages of western Punjab. As Darling closed his diary on the Narmada, his first informants back beside the Indus were already succumbing to the madness. As victims, perpetrators or both, many more would follow them before his diary was published in 1949.

  *

  When traversing the north-west, including its several princely states, it was impossible for the wayfarer not to be reminded of the complexity of the subcontinent. Preserving the unity that both British administrators and Indian nationalists so cherished was all very well on government-headed paper; but on the ground, amid the heat and the dust, an undivided India (bharat akhand) could look to be wishful thinking. The four hundred millions now hammering ‘at Freedom’s Door’, as Darling put it, were converging from all points of a finely calibrated social, religious and political compass. Beneath the village pipal tree literally dozens of conflicting identities awaited the visitor, some so subtle as to be scarcely discernible, others starkly distinct. Counterposing just Muslims and Hindus – a practice long favoured by the British and now championed by Jinnah, endorsed by the Cabinet Mission Plan and fitfully contested by Congress – woefully oversimplified the situation.

  For one thing, it ignored the Sikhs. Though statistically irrelevant in the rest of India, in the Punjab the followers of the ten Gurus and the Granth Sahib made up around a quarter of the population and were, reported Darling, as evenly distributed about the province’s Muslim and Hindu majority areas ‘as the ingredients of a well-made pilau’. This was the problem. Muslims and Hindus enjoyed majority status in numerous provinces; if sovereignty was to reside in the provinces and groups as per the Cabinet Mission Plan, each was assured of a share of power. But it was not so with the Sikhs. A minority in their Punjab homeland, they were, like the titbits of mutton in the pilau, so nicely spread about the plate as to be minorities even in most of that province’s districts and sub-districts.

  The Cabinet Mission had been made aware of this problem. Sikh spokesmen had lobbied for a settlement that would afford them some guarantee of local autonomy and religious freedom, and that would not further fragment them by dividing the pilau – the Punjab – between a Muslim Pakistan and a non-Muslim ‘Hindustan’. (At the time it was assumed that an India without its Muslim majority areas would call itself ‘Hindustan’, the land of the Hindu, rather than lay claim to the term ‘India’.) Partition would, of course, produce precisely this disastrous bisection of the Sikh community. But the Cabinet Mission’s masterplan for a united India was equally objectionable, in that it consigned the Sikhs to demographic inconsequence within a Muslim-dominated Punjab that would itself be attached to the Muslim-dominated north-western ‘group’ of provinces. ‘We have been thrown into a pit,’ moaned a young Sikh to Darling.13

  In making almost no provision for the Sikhs, the Plan ignored a community that was arguably the most distinctive and assertive in the whole country. Uncut hair, billowing beards and tightly tied turbans positively trumpeted the identity of all Sikh Sardars; their neat fields and thriving agricultural cooperatives brought a special glow to Darling’s heart; and their disproportionate representation in British India’s regiments, not to mention their familiarity with firearms and their attachment to costume weaponry (dirks and swords), left little doubt that they would defend their interests. These interests were not purely doctrinal. Muslims were sometimes accused of embracing independence as a chance to put the clock back to a pre-British India when the Muslim Mughals ruled most of the subcontinent. Sikhs felt somewhat the same about their province. The Punjab had been British for less
than a hundred years. Before the 1840s it had been the heart of an independent Sikh kingdom – or sometimes ‘empire’ – extending from the Khyber Pass to Tibet. As champions of the Punjabi language and as the region’s erstwhile rulers, the Sikhs effectively defined the province. Their ‘empire’s’ political capital of Lahore was still the administrative capital, and their spiritual capital of Amritsar was still its only rival. Sites associated with the triumphs and tribulations of early Sikhism were scattered right across the province, as were Sikh shrines, places of pilgrimage and centres of worship. Whatever the electoral mathematics, the Sardars felt entitled to special consideration. Their dream of an independent ‘Khalistan’, like the Muslims’ dream of ‘Pakistan’, was as yet more a battle-cry than a realistic proposition, but as the Punjab began to shatter along its Hindu–Muslim faultline, the idea of an autonomous Sikh homeland was becoming ever more attractive.

  Another casualty of the constitution-makers’ tendency to polarise Hindus and Muslims (and indeed Sikhs) was the rich matrix of customs and values that both communities shared. In the villages of central Punjab even the experienced Darling sometimes had difficulty telling who was a Muslim and who a Hindu. They were hard to distinguish because Muslims (and Sikhs) were often descended from converts whose caste or tribe was still that of their Hindu neighbours. There were thus Hindu Gujars and Muslim Gujars, and Hindu Jats, Muslim Jats and Sikh Jats. It was the same with Rajputs.

  Riding along this morning, I asked a Muslim Inspector [or Zaildar] …, whether Muslims ever have their horoscopes read. ‘Yes,’ he replied, and added, ‘all Bhatti Rajput Muslims have this done by the family Brahmin.’ The Naib-Tehsildar [Deputy Officer], a Hindu, joining in, said: ‘The Zaildar and I are of the same tribe. He is a [Muslim] Bhatti and I am a [Hindu] Bhatia; our origin is the same.’14