Imagine the fate of Bangladeshi Hindus who happened to be supporters of the Awami League and an elected prime minister named Sheikh Hasina.
Visit Kolkata and parts of West Bengal and Assam, and you will find these elements.
I once met a 10-year-old girl from such a background and casually asked her: “Which city is better for you, Kolkata or Dhaka?”
She did not answer specifically.
She merely said:
“Kolkatae war nei” — there is no chaos and violence in Kolkata. Imagine what will permanently stay in her memories. Partition has also been blamed on Mahatma Gandhi.
The impact of Partition on a Muslim family is depicted well in the Hindi film Garam Hawa.
From the trauma of 1947 to the continuing hostility between India and Pakistan and the Bangladesh paradigm, Partition remains one of the defining ruptures in the history of the subcontinent.
“Partition’s pain can never be forgotten,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in 2021 as he announced that August 14 would be remembered as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.
The conference in New Delhi on June 7, 1947, where the Partition plan was disclosed: Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister; Lord Ismay, adviser to Mountbatten; Lord Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of India; and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the All-India Muslim League.Downloading Interactive Geographic Maps
We may look for all kinds of debates and arguments, but the fact of the matter is that the very concept of the nation had completely changed after Partition.
Ironically, that element of change or transition is still a permanent feature.
In film 'Garam Hawa', Balraj Sahni gave a performance of his life. He did not live long enough to see the film’s release and commercial success. Salim Mirza, played by Balraj Sahni, does not want to leave India.
Salim’s two siblings migrate to Pakistan. Halim, the politician, realises he must move to Pakistan to flourish, taking his son Kazim.
Salim’s daughter, Amina, hopes to marry Kazim. But there is a twist. Once Kazim’s marriage to a politician’s daughter in Pakistan is decided, he runs away to Agra to meet Amina. But he is now “deported” for failing to register with the police because he is a citizen of a hostile country.
Garam Hawa maps real-life stories of how economic discrimination, along with the curses of Partition, property loss and societal shifts, slowly breaks apart the Mirza household.
There is one dialogue in Garam Hawa that should generate interest in contemporary polity. Balraj Sahni asks the character: “How come you are in Congress? You were all for Muslim League?”
The response is: “These days, post-Partition, Congress party gives us much importance.”
In Ritwik Ghatak’s Bengali film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star), the character Nita cries out:
“Dada, ami bachtey chai” — “Brother, I want to live.”
This comes at the end of the film, as she realises that all her life she has been exploited, thanks to Partition, her selfish family members and siblings.
In the film, Supriya Choudhury plays Nita. Her elder brother Shankar, played by Anil Chatterjee, is unemployed but pursues his career as a classical singer. The younger brother wants to be a player, while the father is a former schoolteacher and does little to sustain the Partition-hit family.
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Angry protesters often marched to Birla House to voice their protest.
In the words of Manohar Malgonkar in his book 'The Men Who Killed Gandhi':
“…when it turned out that the Muslim League was altogether unappeaseable, the Congress began to show signs of giving in to their demand for Pakistan, but Savarkar and his followers (that included Godse certainly) remained staunchly opposed to it till the very end, and so, to be fair, did a large number of people within the Congress organisation itself.”
It would be pertinent here to say that strangeness has always not only made history interesting — it has guided the course of history itself.
The two men, Narayan Apte and Godse, the elder of the two, were so different in personality. Yet, ironically, both had become the closest of friends. And they set out on a mission.
On a different plane, the real blame for Partition should have gone to those who went off in search of paradise in the new country.
But the “real tragedy”, according to M.J. Akbar — and I endorse that — is that the price of Partition is not being paid by the people who got Pakistan but “by the Muslims in India” who stayed back and trusted their Hindu and Sikh brethren.
This is the irony and a melancholic turn. The fine line between moral courage and entitlement is often not understood well.
Hope is what rebuilds nations because people believe in its worth.
In the case of Pakistan and India, too, this was the norm. India set out on its own journey of nation-making, while Pakistan opted to work for ways and means to defeat its bigger neighbour. The results are well known.
We may now examine:
What would have been the course of Indian history had protagonists like Mountbatten not come around to decide about India’s history?
Were the likes of Churchill already looking for a scapegoat in Mountbatten to pull them out of the mess?
Were the likes of Churchill already looking for a scapegoat in Mountbatten to pull them out of the mess?
“On the other hand, the Indian political scene had offered five foremost protagonists then to be dealt with effectively and individually, then collectively.
The famous five — Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Liaquat Ali Khan and
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — were already divided politically…”
The Muslim League didn’t care about independence. All it wanted was Pakistan. So the archrivals, the Muslim League and the Congress, which had never seen eye to eye about anything, finally found a common cause: the India-Pakistan split.
Both parties were shocked to see the Radcliffe Line, the boundary that demarcated India and Pakistan.
It was too late. The subcontinent could never really recover from the bloody aftermath of Partition.
But what was our Partition? And, more importantly, did the history-makers and historians miss the bloodbath and the post-1947 pattern of permanent hostility between India and Pakistan?
Would India of today be different without the chief protagonist of the Partition theory — Mountbatten himself?
“If somebody had told me he’s going to be dead in X months, would I then say let’s hold back India together and not divide it? Would I have put back the clock and held the position? Most probably,”
Mountbatten reportedly told Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in exhaustive interviews later in the 1970s.
(courtesy - The Raisina Hills)
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