1947 – India
I have been reading The History of the World by John Roberts. [i] Rather slowly, because I read a chapter, think about it, and then go on to the next chapter a week or so later. A recent section dealt with India from 562 to 1526. Through that era and despite invasions, India was a loose mixture of minor states and principalities. The Mauryan and Gupta empires in the north grew down towards the central and southern parts of the sub-continent, accompanied by the gradual establishment of a dominant Hindu culture, and the steady expulsion of earlier Buddhist practices to the east. Hinduism was pluralistic, and this had allowed it to absorb various cults and outside influences, with the religious rites of different persuasions embraced within the concept of the ‘right knowledge’. Fatefully, while Hinduism was strong, that gradual process began to alter as Islam came in from the north and started to take hold throughout northwestern and central India. Islam had first made small inroads early on, in the 8th Century, and then, with an invasion of the northeast in the 11thcentury, it was firmly established in the Ganges valley. In a fragmented country, Islamic incursions were hard to resist. Compared to the caste system, many Indians found the revolutionary nature of a religion where all men were seen as equal hard to resist, even though women had a subservient place in both cultures. Neither Hinduism nor Islam dominated, and, without anyone knowing, the future path for the country was already being put in place.
India began to change in the 16th Century, first under Babur, a Turkish Mongol, a descendant of invaders coming from the east. He wanted to establish a pan-Indian empire, but one largely restricted to the north. His grandson, Akbar, extended it southwards, mainly by conquest, but also through shrewd alliances, marrying a Hindu. He was well aware that appeasement of the Hindus was necessary if government was to extend across the country. Akbar gave the growing empire stability, and even increased its productivity and standard of living. He reigned for just about the same time as Elizabeth 1 in England, starting his rule just before her, and dying shortly after her. Significantly, his time saw the first traders appear, the Portuguese on the west coast, while on the other side the English established the East India Company on 31 December 1600.
Akbar’s son continued the religious tolerance and relative stability achieved by his father, but it was his son, Shah Jahan, (and later his son) who extended the empire almost to the southern tip of India. Shah Jahan kept a lavish court in Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal, (built in memory of his favourite wife who died soon after he became Mughal emperor). His challenge proved to be dealing with the Europeans. As they gradually increased trading, they became the source of tensions, between those working with the Portuguese or with the British, but also among the various largely autonomous principalities. Had the early Mughal emperors but known, by giving space for commerce to the Europeans, they were changing their economy, creating a widening separation between the exploitative ruling elites and the peasant workforce, leaving Europeans, especially the British, sitting on to top of the system as the most exploitative group of all.
My own fascination with India began in my childhood. My grandfather had been there, and had brought back a small bronze head of Parvati and a Gurkha Kukri, a large curved knife. Sadly, the kukri has disappeared, ‘souvenired’ I think by the removals people, who also made off with an exquisite painting of an elephant on silk which one of my daughters brought back from a visit there. The knife and painting were personal treasures, two things I miss greatly. Anyway, my childhood passion for India had slipped into the background when I was in high school, only to reappear once I was at university. For social anthropologists, India is, quite simply, fascinating. There’s the caste system. There’s the Hindu religion. And then there are the Nayar.
The Nayar as they were called when I was a student, (but now referred to as the Nair), were a gift to social anthropologists. They had a particularly complex caste system, fluid and difficult to describe, in part because various groups self-defined their place in society, creating a caste system within the overall caste system. However, the real excitement concerned their matrilineal kinship relations. The Nayar family structure, or tharavad, comprised a group descended from one common ancestress, and could comprise 50-80 people (even up to 200 in some cases). The main tharavad house was for women only; men lived separately, often together in another building. A husband visited tharavad at night and left the following morning and had no legal obligation or rights over his children. Those lay entirely with the karnavan, the oldest male member in the tharavad. Family authority rested with the karnavan, who had full control of the common property, and managed income much as he pleased.
As one researcher observed “The Nayar marriage system has made them one of the most famous of all communities in anthropological circles”. [ii] Amitav Ghosh commented that, although matrilineal systems are not uncommon in communities of the south Indian coast, the Nairs “have achieved an unparalleled eminence in the anthropological literature on matrilineality”. [iii] To add to the complexities, two forms of ‘marriage’ were practiced: polyandry, where a woman might take one or more partners and bear children by them; and hypergamy, marriage up to a higher-caste Nayar. Sadly for anthropologists, by the 1950s the system was in decline. [iv] None of this complex system exists today, and some cynics have suggested the set of behaviours “was so loosely arranged as to raise doubts as to whether ‘marriage’ existed at all”. [v]
Enough wandering, it is time to go back to more recent political history, having left the story with Shah Jahan in the 17thCentury, and Hindus, Moslems and British all on the sub-continent. Let’s leap forward to the Second World War. With the outbreak of war, India was dragged in by the then Viceroy (the King’s representative and governor) without any consultation. In 1939 India had two key pressure groups, Congress, predominantly Hindu, and the Muslim League. Congress protested, but the Muslim league responded with ‘Deliverance Day’ celebrations (delivered from Congress domination) and happily supported Britain. This pushed Congress to become a Hindu-only organisation, and so began talks, protests, disagreements and threats over a possible split: “Muslims and Hindus…were irreconcilably opposed monolithic religious communities and as such, no settlement could be imposed that did not satisfy the aspirations of the former.” [vi] The Islamic incursion of 900 years earlier had put India on a path to partition.
In March 1942, Winston Churchill offered ‘dominion status’ to India at the end of the war in return for the Congress’s support during hostilities. The Muslim League was reassured no part of the British Indian Empire would be forced to join this post-war Dominion. Arguments ran all over the subcontinent, aggravated by Gandhi, pre-eminent in pushing for Indian independence, the symbol for a mass nationalist movement of millions. History guaranteed a mess. The war over, in 1947 British Prime Minister Attlee appointed Mountbatten as the India’s last viceroy, instructing him to ensure independence by June 1948, while hopefully avoiding partition. It didn’t take Mountbatten long to see partition was the only way to a quick transfer of power
In June 1947, the nationalist leaders, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines , and in stark opposition to Gandhi’s views. The predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. British ignorance, combined with Indian suppression, ensured there was no awareness of the population transfers that would take place. The UK imagined religious minorities would stay in the states where they were living, quite unaware of huge religious and ethnic tensions across the country.
The population of undivided India in 1947 was approx. 390 million. After partition, there were 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Once the boundaries were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of being part of a religious majority. It was a two-way process. About 11.2m (77% of those displaced) were in the west, most from the Punjab: 6.5m Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan, and 4.7m Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India; resulting in a net migration of 1.8m in the west from India to West Pakistan (now Pakistan). Another 3.3m (23% of those displaced) were in the east: 2.6m moved from East Pakistan to India, and 0.7m moved from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh); net migration in the east was 1.9m into India. [vii] Huge numbers and most moved on foot.
This wasn’t just a refugee crisis. The communal violence that accompanied the announcement of the Radcliffe Line, the line of partition, was even more horrific. Two historians wrote:
There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of babies’ heads against brick walls, the cutting off of the victim’s limbs and genitalia, and the displaying of heads and corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly, the scale and level of brutality during the partition massacres was unprecedented. Although some scholars question the use of the term ‘ genocide’ concerning the partition massacres, much of the violence was manifested with genocidal tendencies. It was designed to cleanse an existing generation and prevent its future reproduction.” [viii]
On 14 August 1947, the new ‘Dominion of Pakistan came into being (with East Pakistan later to separate as Bangladesh) and on the following day, 15 August 1947, the Dominion of India became an independent country, with Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister. Viceroy Mountbatten remained, now as the country’s first Governor General.
Like the gifts of the three wise men, the UK had given a fateful inheritance to this new country. It’s three gifts comprised a politically fraught system combining a desire for democracy, a poor economy, and simmering tensions over the effects of partition; an inadequate and ageing physical infrastructure, with a railway system, ports, but few roads; and an imposed western culture embracing everything from English as the language of the elite westernized Brahmins to cricket as the country’s sport. Like many such gifts, they had consequences.
In 1947 and as a British Dominion, India was neither a republic nor a part of the British Empire; it was independent, but with the UK responsible for external affairs. The country quickly set about planning full independence, and in just over two years, on 26 January 1950 the Republic of India was established (coincidentally the same day of the year as Australia Day, which marks the landing of the ‘first fleet’ there in 1788). Drawing on the western model of democracy, India is a federal parliamentary democratic republic. It has an independent judiciary, headed by a Supreme Court. It has two houses in parliament, the upper house, Rajyo Sabha (Council of States), and lower house Lok Sabha (House of the People). There are 543 members in the Lok Sabha, elected from the 543 Indian constituencies, and 245 members in the Rajya Sabha, 233 elected by members of the state legislative assemblies and 12 elected or nominated by the President of India. Government is formed by the party (or coalition of parties) forming a majority in the Lok Sabha elections, usually held on a five year cycle. Similar electoral mechanisms exist in the 28 States and 9 Territories, and with 8 national political parties, 52 more at the State level, along with another 47 notable but unrecognised parties and many others, it’s an unwieldy mess!
Another disaster was infrastructure. While major airports have been overhauled in recent years, roads are appalling. The easiest way to understand is to look at railway crossings in India. With the gates closed, photographs reveal a shambolic mess of vehicles, bicycles, people and animals filling up both sides of the road on both sides of the crossing! From personal experience, I can report travelling by road is an unpleasant adventure. As for India’s railway system, back in 1947 the railway system was the ‘jewel in the crown’ of transport infrastructure. Sadly, the network was allowed to decline. With 40,000 miles of track (in a diamond shaped country 2000 miles north to south, and a little less east to west), it was only many years after independence that work began on upgrading and fully electrifying tracks. A good network of roads is yet to be realised.
The third gift was culture. Here at least the result has been more positive. Since independence, India has produced outstanding scientists, philosophers, novelists, film makers and actors (yes, I admit, I think Aishwarya Rai is absolutely stunning!), many of them westernised brahmins. Over time English language’s dominance has diminished, although it is still widely spoken.
Above all, there’s cricket. When international tests are being played, the same question keeps being asked: ‘how come those chaps have been so successful?’ Indeed, the greatest batsmen have come from former colonies. Donald Bradman from Australia, Garfield Sobers and Viv Richards from the West Indies, and from India there’s Sachin Tendulkar. He is the highest run scorer of all time in international cricket, with one hundred international centuries, holder of the record for the most runs in both test and one-day international cricket, and the only player to complete more than 30,000 runs in international games. In the Member’s Room at Lords, they can’t forget: if it wasn’t for independence in 1947, he would have played for England!
[i] To be precise, the Sixth Edition, with many additions by Odd Arne Westadd, published by Oxford UP, 2013
[ii] C J Fuller, “The Internal Structure of the Nayar Caste”. Journal of Anthropological Research. Winter 1975. 31 (4): 283–312
[iii] Amitav Ghosh, (2003), The Imam and the Indian, (Third ed.). Orient Blackswan. p. 193
[iv] Nakane, Chie (1962), The Nayar Family in a Disintegrating Matrilineal System. International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Reprinted (in Family and Marriage, International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology: 1963: E. J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands) ed.). 3 (1): 17–28.
[v] T J Nossiter, (1982), Kerala’s identity: unity and diversity, in Communism in Kerala: a study in political adaptation. University of California Press. pp. 12–44
[vi] The long process is fully documented in Talbot, Ian and Gurharpal Singh (eds). 1999. Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press
[vii] These figures come from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
[viii] Talbot ad Singh, op cit, pages 67-68. Nearly 75 years later, Modi is heralding another ‘cleansing’.
