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Hundreds of kings lost their glittering fiefdoms to independent India. Many have yet to find their place in the world's largest democracy
BY MASEEH RAHMAN/NEW DELHI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Throughout history, kingdoms have been lost or won in India as easily and unpredictably as a dice game. Even by the standards of the subcontinent, though, what happened in 1947 was astonishing. Before World War II, when the British were still well entrenched in New Delhi, 562 princes held sway over 90 million people living in enclaves spread over two-fifths of the subcontinent. Barely ten years later the royals were extinct. Never in the annals of monarchy had so many potentates disappeared so quickly from such lofty positions of power and prestige.
India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his deputy Sardar Patel, determined to forge a unified nation out of the disparate parts of a vast land, led the way toward this sudden eclipse of royalty. Much of the blame, however, lay with the princes themselves, who were too contentious and ill-equipped to cope with change.
After Britain subdued the last rebellious kingdoms in the 19th century, the princes swore allegiance to the crown and were permitted to retain feudatory control of their territories. There were thus two Indias--one run by the British, the other by the maharajahs under the watchful eye of the colonizers. Princely India covered more than 1.25 million sq km, an area greater than western Europe. Several of its kingdoms could compare with full-blown nations--Kashmir, for instance, was larger than France, Travancore more populous than Portugal. Some rulers even had their own armies and currencies. A majority of maharajahs were from warrior castes, and they loved nothing more than to ride out to battle from their hilltop forts. The British forbade their war-making ways but left them with bulging state coffers. So when the fighting stopped, the princes directed their energies into building palaces modeled on Windsor or Versailles and stocking them with trophies from the jungle or luxury goods from Europe.
During this period, the maharajahs developed a reputation for eccentricity and depravity. The Nawab of Junagadh, who was loathe to spend money on public projects, squandered a small fortune to celebrate the "wedding" of his favorite dog. Annoyed by a salesman's snub, the Maharajah of Bharatpur bought all the Rolls-Royces in a London showroom and turned them into garbage trucks back home. The Maharajah of Alwar, notorious as a sadist, poured kerosene over his polo pony and set the poor animal on fire. The Nizam of Hyderabad, acknowledged as the world's richest man, used egg-sized diamonds as paperweights, while the Maharajah of Gwalior built a 90,000-sq-m palace in which he never lived. "The British systematically alienated us from the real world. They demolished the capability of the order," laments Arvind Singh of Udaipur, scion of a 1,400-year dynasty that could be the world's oldest.
Whatever the cause of royal ineptitude, the princes were hopelessly outfoxed during the negotiations on the transfer of power in 1947. Finally, they had little choice but to cede their kingdoms to the new Indian union. They were allowed initially to retain administrative control, except over communications, defense and foreign affairs. But by 1949, contrary to the assurances given earlier by Nehru's government, they were forced to merge their territories with the Indian provinces. Unlike the sultans of Malaya, who retained a constitutional position after the British left in 1957, India's maharajahs could retain only their titles and personal assets. To make the surrender less painful, however, they were accorded a few privileges, such as exemption from income tax and the right to a state funeral.
The princes soon discovered, though, that they still commanded respect from their erstwhile subjects. Many of the maharajahs claimed "descent" from the sun, through the god Rama, while others traced their beginnings to the moon, through the god Krishna. The people also regarded them as representatives of gods and goddesses, and in many kingdoms religious festivals were incomplete without the presence of the maharajah. Nonetheless, several rulers had earned the admiration of their people by developing and modernizing their kingdoms. And despite their extravagant lifestyles, a few princes worked hard at playing the role of paternalistic benefactor--or anndata (grain-giver). "My grandfather used to be under canvas [in a tent] for more than six months of the year, touring his kingdom. He was a man of the people," recalls Madhavrao Scindia of Gwalior, a Congress politician who gets elected regularly to Parliament from the former capital of his princely state.
Feeling betrayed by New Delhi in 1949, the princes decided to show Nehru that they could be as adept at the game of democracy as at billiards or polo. When free India's first big elections were called in 1952, several maharajahs jumped into the fray. One even succeeded in giving Nehru's party a fright. Hanwant Singh, the playboy Maharajah of Jodhpur, put up his own candidates against the Congress in his former kingdom in Rajasthan--and virtually swept the board. Hanwant Singh could not live to savor his victory--the small plane he was piloting crashed (some said mysteriously) while the votes were being counted. But he had succeeded in making an important point: despite their excesses, the princes still commanded the loyalty and support of their former subjects. Even a politically untutored maharajah could humiliate a mighty organization like the Congress.
For a while, the royals inhaled the heady aroma of electoral victory. Some played safe and joined the Congress; but others, emboldened by popular support, decided to confront the ruling party and its socialist rhetoric by enrolling with a newly formed right-wing group. A majority who stood for Parliament won seats. The glamorous Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur, won a poll in 1962 by 175,000 votes, the biggest margin yet recorded in a democratic election. It proved a costly victory.
When Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi came to power in the late 1960s, she quickly moved against the royals. A public campaign was launched to paint the princes as decadent, exploitative and anti-democratic. Breaking pledges given at the time of independence, the government abolished all royal titles and privileges in 1971 and stopped payment of special pensions, called privy purses. Gandhi also set the tax sleuths on her blue-blooded opponents and threw a few in prison. Gayatri Devi was one royal who paid for annoying India's new empress: she served time in New Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail. "From being privileged, we became untouchables," says Hanwant Singh's son Gaj Singh, who returned to Jodhpur after studying at Eton and Oxford. "A lot of propaganda was whipped up against us, which made the simplest of activity suspect."
Consider the fate of Pravirchandra Bhanjdeo, the 20th Maharajah of Bastar in India's tribal heartland. The Bastar rulers trace their ancestry not just to the moon, but also to Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu king to rule from Delhi in the 12th century. In the 1960s, Bhanjdeo organized impoverished tribals and became immensely popular. The government responded first by declaring him "insane" and stripping him of his royal title. Then, in 1966, as tribal supporters armed with bows and arrows milled around him in his crumbling palace, he was shot and killed in cold blood by police.
Despite such setbacks, the royals had demonstrated they could play a role in democratic India. One study found that blue-blooded candidates enjoy an extraordinarily high success rate of 85% in elections. Amrinder Singh, whose father was the last ruling Maharajah of Patiala, resigned from the Indian Army to enter politics, serving briefly as a minister and working to help end Punjab's secessionist Sikh insurgency in the 1980s. Still an active politician--he left the Congress to join the regional Sikh party, the Akali Dal--he remains committed to his people. "The underlying cause for the insurgency remains," he says. "Educated unemployed youth have been beaten into submission, but how long can they be kept down?"
At the eastern extremity of a far-flung nation lies Tripura, a backward state long neglected by New Delhi and now threatened by angry tribals. As he examines a massive bust of Mussolini presented to his father by the Italian dictator in 1936, Kirit Bikram Dev Burman, former Maharajah of Tripura, observes sadly, "I joined politics because I thought I could help Tripura. After all, it was my state." The 186th ruler in a thousand-year-old dynasty, Burman has stepped aside to let his second wife, Bibhukumari Devi, take the political spotlight. Though defeated in the last parliamentary elections because of a split within the Congress, she remains confident about her political future. "For a section of the people, we are very dear," she says. "Basically, they know we won't cheat them, won't make money at their expense." That point is endorsed by Jagat Mehta, former Indian foreign secretary whose father worked for the Maharajah of Udaipur: "Maharajahs appear so much more benign, so much more restrained than today's corrupt politicians."
If royal lineage can be useful in politics, it is an absolute blessing in the tourism business. Since the Maharajah of Jaipur shocked everyone by converting his Rambagh Palace into a hotel in 1958, virtually every former feudal chieftain in Rajasthan has restored his crumbling fort or palace to lure western visitors. Revenue from tourism has allowed Gaj Singh, who has turned his family's art deco palace in Jodhpur into a hotel, to pursue his interests in environment and conservation. Perhaps the most successful hotelier is Udaipur's Arvind Singh, whose chain of nine inns grossed $8.5 million last year. He recalls how the family opposed his father's decision to convert one of the Udaipur palaces into the ethereal Lake Palace Hotel in 1962. Now Singh knows better. "Our generation has no excuses for not getting ahead," he says. "How much of a head start do you want? We had assets, good education, contacts. What was lacking was the ability to manage money. It was like sitting on a gold mine with a begging bowl."
Gold mine is not a bad description for the Bangalore palace of Srikantadatta Narasimha Raja Wodeyar, the Maharajah of Mysore. Built in 1874 as a copy of Windsor Palace, it is surrounded by more than 190 forested hectares in the heart of India's fastest growing city. Bangalore politicians want the local government to acquire the estate for a modest $8 million, and the matter is now in court. The maharajah is a prominent Congress member of Parliament, but he believes that has only made him a more tempting target. "It is to keep me tied down, keep me away from politics," he says. "There is so much instability, such a decline in public values, that the people have lost faith in politicians. I'm the only person who can rise above it, so naturally I'm perceived as a threat."
Politics would have been the full-time occupation of Mohammed Abdul Ali, the Prince of Arcot, had his wife not insisted he steer clear. Thanks to a quirk of history, Ali is the only royal recognized by the Indian government. His family lost its kingdom to the British in 1801. After much legal wrangling, Queen Victoria conferred the new title of Prince of Arcot in 1867 and granted a tax-free pension in perpetuity. Since this agreement is separate from the one signed with the other maharajahs in 1947 and scrapped by Indira Gandhi, the government continues to honor it. A prominent leader of the Muslim community in south India, Ali lives in an old mansion in Madras. He devotes his time to repairing the relationship between Hindus and Muslims. "We're behaving like buffoons, and the whole world is watching us," he thunders at a beachfront meeting in his home city. "India will die if there's no friendship between people of different religions."
The revival of Buddhism, rather than religious harmony, is high on the agenda for Wangchuk Namgyal, the son of the last Chogyal (king) of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. In 1975, Gandhi annexed Sikkim, ending its identity as a mountain kingdom similar to neighboring Bhutan and Nepal. Namgyal now lives alone in a palace draped with scarlet orchids above the state capital Gangtok, engaged in an effort to revive the Buddhist monasteries scattered in the mountains. "These are bewildering times for Sikkimese," he says. "We still feel shattered by the way India took us over."
The most poignant and widely publicized dispute between a royal family and the government is surely that of Wilayat Mahal, the self-styled Begum of Awadh, a descendant of the nawab who ruled from Lucknow until being deposed by the British in 1856. For years, Mahal attracted the world's press to her campsite on the ceremonial platform of New Delhi Railway Station, where she lived surrounded by her heirlooms, her hounds and her son and daughter, demanding that the government grant her a residence befitting her pedigree. After rejecting the offer of a colonial bungalow, she finally settled for a crumbling pavilion built by a Muslim emperor. There, in the 13th century ruin set amid a secluded forest near the presidential palace, she took her own life four years ago, according to her daughter Sakina Mahal and son Ali Reza. Lost without the mother's domineering presence, Sakina and Reza lived with her embalmed body for more than a year, laid out ceremonially on a marble-topped table and adorned with her jewelry. They later cremated her body and crushed the jewels. "She was our only anchor of survival," the daughter sobs. "I've left combing my hair since the princess has gone, thinking perhaps she might not be combing. I do not desire to live in this world."
Many other ex-rulers could also never quite cope with the realities of a different, democratic India. The fabulous Nizam of Hyderabad sank into miserable isolation. His grandson and successor Mukaram Jah, the eighth Nizam, hounded by tax officials, greedy relatives and deceitful acolytes, fled to manage a sheep farm in western Australia. After that venture ended in disaster--his second wife, an Australian, contracted aids--he tried to find his roots again in Hyderabad, changed wives two more times, and now lives mostly in Europe.
The Nizam can afford to fail on a grand scale. The smaller princes had no such choice, especially after the tax-free privy purses were stopped. Many share the predicament of Bhawani Singh, the Maharajah of Chhatarpur, who lives in a grubby corner of his palace abutting the 10th century erotic temples at Khajuraho, as devotees and camera-wielding tourists pass by. A number of families are also mired in endless feuds for control of property and wealth not already commandeered by the taxman. Jaipur's is the most famous instance, with Gayatri Devi (who long ago withdrew from politics) and her maharajah stepson locked in a court battle over assets worth millions of dollars.
Fifty years after having lost their kingdoms, India's royal families are still groping for a role and a direction. Some have found salvation in the tourist-hotel boom, especially in Rajasthan. But even there, corruption and misrule have devastated the environment and kept the people poor and illiterate. The more thoughtful maharajahs, such as Jodhpur's Gaj Singh, recognize the need to play an active role to check the depredation and foster development. The immense prestige they enjoy locally can help bring about change. "Our future will depend on our own contribution," he says. "I tell my son we need to develop special skills for this."
Probably the most carefree royal in India today is Kamalchandra Bhanjdeo, 13, Maharajah of Bastar and grand-nephew of the unfortunate Pravirchandra. Though barely a teenager, he seems to straddle two worlds--the medieval and the modern--with natural grace. As he scooters back from a computer class to his family's decaying palace in Jagdalpur, Bastar's main town, a tribal villager arrives to offer obeisance. Rising from the floor after touching Bhanjdeo's feet, Ispar Maji proclaims: "Maharajahs may have been de-recognized by the government, but for us he's still the king. Without him, the goddess Danteshwari-Ma will be unhappy." As long as the faith of ordinary people like Maji endures, so, perhaps, will India's maharajahs.
--With reporting by Tim McGirk/Gangtok
Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 10:09 am
THE ROYALS' BLUES Hundreds of kings lost their glittering fiefdoms to independent India. Many have yet to find their place in the world's largest democracy
BY MASEEH RAHMAN/NEW DELHI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Throughout history, kingdoms have been lost or won in India as easily and unpredictably as a dice game. Even by the standards of the subcontinent, though, what happened in 1947 was astonishing. Before World War II, when the British were still well entrenched in New Delhi, 562 princes held sway over 90 million people living in enclaves spread over two-fifths of the subcontinent. Barely ten years later the royals were extinct. Never in the annals of monarchy had so many potentates disappeared so quickly from such lofty positions of power and prestige.
India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his deputy Sardar Patel, determined to forge a unified nation out of the disparate parts of a vast land, led the way toward this sudden eclipse of royalty. Much of the blame, however, lay with the princes themselves, who were too contentious and ill-equipped to cope with change.
After Britain subdued the last rebellious kingdoms in the 19th century, the princes swore allegiance to the crown and were permitted to retain feudatory control of their territories. There were thus two Indias--one run by the British, the other by the maharajahs under the watchful eye of the colonizers. Princely India covered more than 1.25 million sq km, an area greater than western Europe. Several of its kingdoms could compare with full-blown nations--Kashmir, for instance, was larger than France, Travancore more populous than Portugal. Some rulers even had their own armies and currencies. A majority of maharajahs were from warrior castes, and they loved nothing more than to ride out to battle from their hilltop forts. The British forbade their war-making ways but left them with bulging state coffers. So when the fighting stopped, the princes directed their energies into building palaces modeled on Windsor or Versailles and stocking them with trophies from the jungle or luxury goods from Europe.
During this period, the maharajahs developed a reputation for eccentricity and depravity. The Nawab of Junagadh, who was loathe to spend money on public projects, squandered a small fortune to celebrate the "wedding" of his favorite dog. Annoyed by a salesman's snub, the Maharajah of Bharatpur bought all the Rolls-Royces in a London showroom and turned them into garbage trucks back home. The Maharajah of Alwar, notorious as a sadist, poured kerosene over his polo pony and set the poor animal on fire. The Nizam of Hyderabad, acknowledged as the world's richest man, used egg-sized diamonds as paperweights, while the Maharajah of Gwalior built a 90,000-sq-m palace in which he never lived. "The British systematically alienated us from the real world. They demolished the capability of the order," laments Arvind Singh of Udaipur, scion of a 1,400-year dynasty that could be the world's oldest.
Whatever the cause of royal ineptitude, the princes were hopelessly outfoxed during the negotiations on the transfer of power in 1947. Finally, they had little choice but to cede their kingdoms to the new Indian union. They were allowed initially to retain administrative control, except over communications, defense and foreign affairs. But by 1949, contrary to the assurances given earlier by Nehru's government, they were forced to merge their territories with the Indian provinces. Unlike the sultans of Malaya, who retained a constitutional position after the British left in 1957, India's maharajahs could retain only their titles and personal assets. To make the surrender less painful, however, they were accorded a few privileges, such as exemption from income tax and the right to a state funeral.
The princes soon discovered, though, that they still commanded respect from their erstwhile subjects. Many of the maharajahs claimed "descent" from the sun, through the god Rama, while others traced their beginnings to the moon, through the god Krishna. The people also regarded them as representatives of gods and goddesses, and in many kingdoms religious festivals were incomplete without the presence of the maharajah. Nonetheless, several rulers had earned the admiration of their people by developing and modernizing their kingdoms. And despite their extravagant lifestyles, a few princes worked hard at playing the role of paternalistic benefactor--or anndata (grain-giver). "My grandfather used to be under canvas [in a tent] for more than six months of the year, touring his kingdom. He was a man of the people," recalls Madhavrao Scindia of Gwalior, a Congress politician who gets elected regularly to Parliament from the former capital of his princely state.
Feeling betrayed by New Delhi in 1949, the princes decided to show Nehru that they could be as adept at the game of democracy as at billiards or polo. When free India's first big elections were called in 1952, several maharajahs jumped into the fray. One even succeeded in giving Nehru's party a fright. Hanwant Singh, the playboy Maharajah of Jodhpur, put up his own candidates against the Congress in his former kingdom in Rajasthan--and virtually swept the board. Hanwant Singh could not live to savor his victory--the small plane he was piloting crashed (some said mysteriously) while the votes were being counted. But he had succeeded in making an important point: despite their excesses, the princes still commanded the loyalty and support of their former subjects. Even a politically untutored maharajah could humiliate a mighty organization like the Congress.
For a while, the royals inhaled the heady aroma of electoral victory. Some played safe and joined the Congress; but others, emboldened by popular support, decided to confront the ruling party and its socialist rhetoric by enrolling with a newly formed right-wing group. A majority who stood for Parliament won seats. The glamorous Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur, won a poll in 1962 by 175,000 votes, the biggest margin yet recorded in a democratic election. It proved a costly victory.
When Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi came to power in the late 1960s, she quickly moved against the royals. A public campaign was launched to paint the princes as decadent, exploitative and anti-democratic. Breaking pledges given at the time of independence, the government abolished all royal titles and privileges in 1971 and stopped payment of special pensions, called privy purses. Gandhi also set the tax sleuths on her blue-blooded opponents and threw a few in prison. Gayatri Devi was one royal who paid for annoying India's new empress: she served time in New Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail. "From being privileged, we became untouchables," says Hanwant Singh's son Gaj Singh, who returned to Jodhpur after studying at Eton and Oxford. "A lot of propaganda was whipped up against us, which made the simplest of activity suspect."
Consider the fate of Pravirchandra Bhanjdeo, the 20th Maharajah of Bastar in India's tribal heartland. The Bastar rulers trace their ancestry not just to the moon, but also to Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu king to rule from Delhi in the 12th century. In the 1960s, Bhanjdeo organized impoverished tribals and became immensely popular. The government responded first by declaring him "insane" and stripping him of his royal title. Then, in 1966, as tribal supporters armed with bows and arrows milled around him in his crumbling palace, he was shot and killed in cold blood by police.
Despite such setbacks, the royals had demonstrated they could play a role in democratic India. One study found that blue-blooded candidates enjoy an extraordinarily high success rate of 85% in elections. Amrinder Singh, whose father was the last ruling Maharajah of Patiala, resigned from the Indian Army to enter politics, serving briefly as a minister and working to help end Punjab's secessionist Sikh insurgency in the 1980s. Still an active politician--he left the Congress to join the regional Sikh party, the Akali Dal--he remains committed to his people. "The underlying cause for the insurgency remains," he says. "Educated unemployed youth have been beaten into submission, but how long can they be kept down?"
At the eastern extremity of a far-flung nation lies Tripura, a backward state long neglected by New Delhi and now threatened by angry tribals. As he examines a massive bust of Mussolini presented to his father by the Italian dictator in 1936, Kirit Bikram Dev Burman, former Maharajah of Tripura, observes sadly, "I joined politics because I thought I could help Tripura. After all, it was my state." The 186th ruler in a thousand-year-old dynasty, Burman has stepped aside to let his second wife, Bibhukumari Devi, take the political spotlight. Though defeated in the last parliamentary elections because of a split within the Congress, she remains confident about her political future. "For a section of the people, we are very dear," she says. "Basically, they know we won't cheat them, won't make money at their expense." That point is endorsed by Jagat Mehta, former Indian foreign secretary whose father worked for the Maharajah of Udaipur: "Maharajahs appear so much more benign, so much more restrained than today's corrupt politicians."
If royal lineage can be useful in politics, it is an absolute blessing in the tourism business. Since the Maharajah of Jaipur shocked everyone by converting his Rambagh Palace into a hotel in 1958, virtually every former feudal chieftain in Rajasthan has restored his crumbling fort or palace to lure western visitors. Revenue from tourism has allowed Gaj Singh, who has turned his family's art deco palace in Jodhpur into a hotel, to pursue his interests in environment and conservation. Perhaps the most successful hotelier is Udaipur's Arvind Singh, whose chain of nine inns grossed $8.5 million last year. He recalls how the family opposed his father's decision to convert one of the Udaipur palaces into the ethereal Lake Palace Hotel in 1962. Now Singh knows better. "Our generation has no excuses for not getting ahead," he says. "How much of a head start do you want? We had assets, good education, contacts. What was lacking was the ability to manage money. It was like sitting on a gold mine with a begging bowl."
Gold mine is not a bad description for the Bangalore palace of Srikantadatta Narasimha Raja Wodeyar, the Maharajah of Mysore. Built in 1874 as a copy of Windsor Palace, it is surrounded by more than 190 forested hectares in the heart of India's fastest growing city. Bangalore politicians want the local government to acquire the estate for a modest $8 million, and the matter is now in court. The maharajah is a prominent Congress member of Parliament, but he believes that has only made him a more tempting target. "It is to keep me tied down, keep me away from politics," he says. "There is so much instability, such a decline in public values, that the people have lost faith in politicians. I'm the only person who can rise above it, so naturally I'm perceived as a threat."
Politics would have been the full-time occupation of Mohammed Abdul Ali, the Prince of Arcot, had his wife not insisted he steer clear. Thanks to a quirk of history, Ali is the only royal recognized by the Indian government. His family lost its kingdom to the British in 1801. After much legal wrangling, Queen Victoria conferred the new title of Prince of Arcot in 1867 and granted a tax-free pension in perpetuity. Since this agreement is separate from the one signed with the other maharajahs in 1947 and scrapped by Indira Gandhi, the government continues to honor it. A prominent leader of the Muslim community in south India, Ali lives in an old mansion in Madras. He devotes his time to repairing the relationship between Hindus and Muslims. "We're behaving like buffoons, and the whole world is watching us," he thunders at a beachfront meeting in his home city. "India will die if there's no friendship between people of different religions."
The revival of Buddhism, rather than religious harmony, is high on the agenda for Wangchuk Namgyal, the son of the last Chogyal (king) of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. In 1975, Gandhi annexed Sikkim, ending its identity as a mountain kingdom similar to neighboring Bhutan and Nepal. Namgyal now lives alone in a palace draped with scarlet orchids above the state capital Gangtok, engaged in an effort to revive the Buddhist monasteries scattered in the mountains. "These are bewildering times for Sikkimese," he says. "We still feel shattered by the way India took us over."
The most poignant and widely publicized dispute between a royal family and the government is surely that of Wilayat Mahal, the self-styled Begum of Awadh, a descendant of the nawab who ruled from Lucknow until being deposed by the British in 1856. For years, Mahal attracted the world's press to her campsite on the ceremonial platform of New Delhi Railway Station, where she lived surrounded by her heirlooms, her hounds and her son and daughter, demanding that the government grant her a residence befitting her pedigree. After rejecting the offer of a colonial bungalow, she finally settled for a crumbling pavilion built by a Muslim emperor. There, in the 13th century ruin set amid a secluded forest near the presidential palace, she took her own life four years ago, according to her daughter Sakina Mahal and son Ali Reza. Lost without the mother's domineering presence, Sakina and Reza lived with her embalmed body for more than a year, laid out ceremonially on a marble-topped table and adorned with her jewelry. They later cremated her body and crushed the jewels. "She was our only anchor of survival," the daughter sobs. "I've left combing my hair since the princess has gone, thinking perhaps she might not be combing. I do not desire to live in this world."
Many other ex-rulers could also never quite cope with the realities of a different, democratic India. The fabulous Nizam of Hyderabad sank into miserable isolation. His grandson and successor Mukaram Jah, the eighth Nizam, hounded by tax officials, greedy relatives and deceitful acolytes, fled to manage a sheep farm in western Australia. After that venture ended in disaster--his second wife, an Australian, contracted aids--he tried to find his roots again in Hyderabad, changed wives two more times, and now lives mostly in Europe.
The Nizam can afford to fail on a grand scale. The smaller princes had no such choice, especially after the tax-free privy purses were stopped. Many share the predicament of Bhawani Singh, the Maharajah of Chhatarpur, who lives in a grubby corner of his palace abutting the 10th century erotic temples at Khajuraho, as devotees and camera-wielding tourists pass by. A number of families are also mired in endless feuds for control of property and wealth not already commandeered by the taxman. Jaipur's is the most famous instance, with Gayatri Devi (who long ago withdrew from politics) and her maharajah stepson locked in a court battle over assets worth millions of dollars.
Fifty years after having lost their kingdoms, India's royal families are still groping for a role and a direction. Some have found salvation in the tourist-hotel boom, especially in Rajasthan. But even there, corruption and misrule have devastated the environment and kept the people poor and illiterate. The more thoughtful maharajahs, such as Jodhpur's Gaj Singh, recognize the need to play an active role to check the depredation and foster development. The immense prestige they enjoy locally can help bring about change. "Our future will depend on our own contribution," he says. "I tell my son we need to develop special skills for this."
Probably the most carefree royal in India today is Kamalchandra Bhanjdeo, 13, Maharajah of Bastar and grand-nephew of the unfortunate Pravirchandra. Though barely a teenager, he seems to straddle two worlds--the medieval and the modern--with natural grace. As he scooters back from a computer class to his family's decaying palace in Jagdalpur, Bastar's main town, a tribal villager arrives to offer obeisance. Rising from the floor after touching Bhanjdeo's feet, Ispar Maji proclaims: "Maharajahs may have been de-recognized by the government, but for us he's still the king. Without him, the goddess Danteshwari-Ma will be unhappy." As long as the faith of ordinary people like Maji endures, so, perhaps, will India's maharajahs.
--With reporting by Tim McGirk/Gangtok
US Commando Strike in Waziristan
An able but unprepared barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, took a heedless knife to India in the Raj's hectic last days
BY TIM MCGIRK/NEW DELHI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
While India and Pakistan were celebrating independence, the man responsible for drawing the partition lines was busy packing his suitcases in a bungalow in New Delhi. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was in a hurry to leave. He feared that once people became aware of his deed, he would be shot by an assassin.
As draftsman of one of history's great upheavals, Radcliffe had reason to worry. In an Aug. 14 letter to his stepson, he confided: "Down comes the Union Jack on Friday morning and up goes--for the moment I rather forget what, but it has a spinning wheel or a spider's web in the middle... Nobody in India will love me for the award about Punjab and Bengal, and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I don't want them to find me." Back in Britain, Radcliffe destroyed his files and refused to discuss what had guided his pen as it separated farmers from their fields, and canals from their headwaters--thus opening a Pandora's box of communal horror that would kill at least 500,000 people and uproot more than 12 million. Radcliffe, as University of London historian Sunil Khilnani writes in The Idea of India, "was without a doubt the Raj's most sphinxian figure, the guardian of the secret of its final and most decisive deed."
Over the years, evidence has seeped out showing that Radcliffe was at odds with Lord Mountbatten over the viceroy's interference in the boundary-making: Mountbatten liked Jawaharlal Nehru more than Mohammed Ali Jinnah and was appalled by the destructive haste with which he was supposed to dismantle a huge part of the British empire. Radcliffe, then 48, had formerly been director-general at the Ministry of Information. He was a lawyer by training, and a brilliant one, but he was neither cartographer nor expert on India. As his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, told Time from his home in Yorkshire: "Radcliffe had never been east of Gibraltar in his life, and he was a bit flummoxed by the whole thing. It was a rather impossible assignment, really. To partition that subcontinent in six weeks was absurd."
The task originally had been offered to the United Nations, which declined it. London needed someone quickly, and Radcliffe was an obvious choice: not only was he known by reputation to Nehru and Jinnah, both of whom had studied law in Britain, but his unfamiliarity with the subcontinent was viewed as a plus. "He was a very able chap and completely unprejudiced. It was difficult to find people without prejudice then," Beaumont says. Nehru and Jinnah thought that Radcliffe, the unflappable bureaucrat, would be impartial.
Radcliffe was in fact lured to India on a false promise: London told him that his job would consist merely of settling boundary disputes as they arose in Punjab and Bengal. Mountbatten had other plans. Says Khilnani: "The two men were opposite characters. Radcliffe was a fastidious intellectual, solid. Mountbatten saw himself as a man of action." After settling Radcliffe into a guest bungalow on the viceregal estate in New Delhi, Mountbatten told him of his impossible task: Radcliffe would separate Muslims from Hindus and Sikhs, in effect unthreading a tapestry of civilization woven together over nine centuries in towns and villages across the subcontinent.
That wasn't all: instead of having six months to draw the new boundaries, Radcliffe would have to complete the job in 36 days. A pile of charts was thrust into his arms and he was told to consult the 1943 census, already four years out of date. Working with these inadequate tools, Radcliffe was to amputate India's two wings, East and West Pakistan, slicing along adjoining areas of Muslim majority.
Laboring in his sweltering bungalow, Radcliffe knew that the shortage of time would not allow him to travel to Punjab and Bengal to see the land and the people whose lives he would alter. "It became a paper exercise," says Beaumont. "He never stopped work, and he never stopped sweating, poor chap, dressed as he was in the English gentleman's summer suit, which is no good in Delhi in July," when temperatures soar to 44AC.
Charting up to 45 km a day, his pen traversed deserts, climbed Himalayan ranges and squiggled through the mangrove swamps of the Sunderbans. Radcliffe seldom budged from his desk. Eight judges, four Hindus and four Muslims, had been assigned to help him take into account the human face of partition. They knew where roads, rivers, canals and railways ran; they also were familiar with the emotional territory of the subcontinent's people. But Radcliffe soon realized that the judges' opinions were based on faith rather than fact. Recalls Beaumont: "They were totally useless. They simply took the communal line, so he was left on his own."
Radcliffe's progress was supposed to be kept secret, even from Mountbatten. Any hint of prejudice by the British in drawing the boundary lines might have ended the chances of a smooth partition, since Nehru and Jinnah distrusted each other intensely. Yet Beaumont says Mountbatten and Nehru may have had a spy on Radcliffe's team. Working with Radcliffe was Rao Sahib V.D. Iyer, an assistant commissioner on Punjab and Bengal boundaries, who was a Hindu. Leaks were definitely drifting across the viceregal garden to Mountbatten, and Iyer was the leading suspect. The proof, says Beaumont, was that Mountbatten pressured Radcliffe on several occasions to redraw his lines--over the Chittagong Hill Tracts and in several Punjab districts, for example.
At least once, Radcliffe knuckled under. That was over Firozpur, a Punjab district on the Sutlej river, which he had originally awarded to Pakistan. On Aug. 11, "a date when His Excellency [Mountbatten] ought not to have known where the line was drawn," Beaumont notes dryly, one of the viceroy's confidantes, V.P. Menon, appeared at Radcliffe's bungalow at midnight. "Mountbatten wanted to get Radcliffe to alter the line. It was obvious, really. I threw Menon out and said, 'You can't see Radcliffe,'" Beaumont recalls. The next day, Radcliffe was summoned to lunch by the viceroy--the second and last time the two ever met--and Beaumont was pointedly excluded from the invitation. Firozpur was nudged back into India and fell inside the Maharajah of Bikaner's domain. Says Beaumont: "Mountbatten was very fond of the Maharajah, and he did it to help him."
Radcliffe finished his final map on Aug. 13, but Mountbatten did not reveal it to either Nehru or Jinnah until after the British had officially left two days later. Most likely, Mountbatten saw calamity coming and wanted to deflect blame from the crown and himself. Writes Khilnani: "To the departing British, the religious sentiments of the subcontinent were backward and superstitious, yet these very principles were adopted to create two modern nations."
Radcliffe left Delhi on Aug. 15, one of the first Englishmen to depart after independence. "He was very thankful it was all over," says Beaumont. He was also still worried about assassination. "I made them make a rigorous search of the airplane before we took off," Beaumont recalls. "It rather surprised the pilot." Radcliffe handed back to Her Majesty's government the A2,000 fee he had been paid for the project. He never returned to the subcontinent, to the two nations whose destiny his pen had so indelibly altered.
--With reporting by Kate Noble/London
Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 10:02 am
MAKING THE FINAL CUT An able but unprepared barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, took a heedless knife to India in the Raj's hectic last days
BY TIM MCGIRK/NEW DELHI
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
While India and Pakistan were celebrating independence, the man responsible for drawing the partition lines was busy packing his suitcases in a bungalow in New Delhi. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was in a hurry to leave. He feared that once people became aware of his deed, he would be shot by an assassin.
As draftsman of one of history's great upheavals, Radcliffe had reason to worry. In an Aug. 14 letter to his stepson, he confided: "Down comes the Union Jack on Friday morning and up goes--for the moment I rather forget what, but it has a spinning wheel or a spider's web in the middle... Nobody in India will love me for the award about Punjab and Bengal, and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I don't want them to find me." Back in Britain, Radcliffe destroyed his files and refused to discuss what had guided his pen as it separated farmers from their fields, and canals from their headwaters--thus opening a Pandora's box of communal horror that would kill at least 500,000 people and uproot more than 12 million. Radcliffe, as University of London historian Sunil Khilnani writes in The Idea of India, "was without a doubt the Raj's most sphinxian figure, the guardian of the secret of its final and most decisive deed."
Over the years, evidence has seeped out showing that Radcliffe was at odds with Lord Mountbatten over the viceroy's interference in the boundary-making: Mountbatten liked Jawaharlal Nehru more than Mohammed Ali Jinnah and was appalled by the destructive haste with which he was supposed to dismantle a huge part of the British empire. Radcliffe, then 48, had formerly been director-general at the Ministry of Information. He was a lawyer by training, and a brilliant one, but he was neither cartographer nor expert on India. As his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, told Time from his home in Yorkshire: "Radcliffe had never been east of Gibraltar in his life, and he was a bit flummoxed by the whole thing. It was a rather impossible assignment, really. To partition that subcontinent in six weeks was absurd."
The task originally had been offered to the United Nations, which declined it. London needed someone quickly, and Radcliffe was an obvious choice: not only was he known by reputation to Nehru and Jinnah, both of whom had studied law in Britain, but his unfamiliarity with the subcontinent was viewed as a plus. "He was a very able chap and completely unprejudiced. It was difficult to find people without prejudice then," Beaumont says. Nehru and Jinnah thought that Radcliffe, the unflappable bureaucrat, would be impartial.
Radcliffe was in fact lured to India on a false promise: London told him that his job would consist merely of settling boundary disputes as they arose in Punjab and Bengal. Mountbatten had other plans. Says Khilnani: "The two men were opposite characters. Radcliffe was a fastidious intellectual, solid. Mountbatten saw himself as a man of action." After settling Radcliffe into a guest bungalow on the viceregal estate in New Delhi, Mountbatten told him of his impossible task: Radcliffe would separate Muslims from Hindus and Sikhs, in effect unthreading a tapestry of civilization woven together over nine centuries in towns and villages across the subcontinent.
That wasn't all: instead of having six months to draw the new boundaries, Radcliffe would have to complete the job in 36 days. A pile of charts was thrust into his arms and he was told to consult the 1943 census, already four years out of date. Working with these inadequate tools, Radcliffe was to amputate India's two wings, East and West Pakistan, slicing along adjoining areas of Muslim majority.
Laboring in his sweltering bungalow, Radcliffe knew that the shortage of time would not allow him to travel to Punjab and Bengal to see the land and the people whose lives he would alter. "It became a paper exercise," says Beaumont. "He never stopped work, and he never stopped sweating, poor chap, dressed as he was in the English gentleman's summer suit, which is no good in Delhi in July," when temperatures soar to 44AC.
Charting up to 45 km a day, his pen traversed deserts, climbed Himalayan ranges and squiggled through the mangrove swamps of the Sunderbans. Radcliffe seldom budged from his desk. Eight judges, four Hindus and four Muslims, had been assigned to help him take into account the human face of partition. They knew where roads, rivers, canals and railways ran; they also were familiar with the emotional territory of the subcontinent's people. But Radcliffe soon realized that the judges' opinions were based on faith rather than fact. Recalls Beaumont: "They were totally useless. They simply took the communal line, so he was left on his own."
Radcliffe's progress was supposed to be kept secret, even from Mountbatten. Any hint of prejudice by the British in drawing the boundary lines might have ended the chances of a smooth partition, since Nehru and Jinnah distrusted each other intensely. Yet Beaumont says Mountbatten and Nehru may have had a spy on Radcliffe's team. Working with Radcliffe was Rao Sahib V.D. Iyer, an assistant commissioner on Punjab and Bengal boundaries, who was a Hindu. Leaks were definitely drifting across the viceregal garden to Mountbatten, and Iyer was the leading suspect. The proof, says Beaumont, was that Mountbatten pressured Radcliffe on several occasions to redraw his lines--over the Chittagong Hill Tracts and in several Punjab districts, for example.
At least once, Radcliffe knuckled under. That was over Firozpur, a Punjab district on the Sutlej river, which he had originally awarded to Pakistan. On Aug. 11, "a date when His Excellency [Mountbatten] ought not to have known where the line was drawn," Beaumont notes dryly, one of the viceroy's confidantes, V.P. Menon, appeared at Radcliffe's bungalow at midnight. "Mountbatten wanted to get Radcliffe to alter the line. It was obvious, really. I threw Menon out and said, 'You can't see Radcliffe,'" Beaumont recalls. The next day, Radcliffe was summoned to lunch by the viceroy--the second and last time the two ever met--and Beaumont was pointedly excluded from the invitation. Firozpur was nudged back into India and fell inside the Maharajah of Bikaner's domain. Says Beaumont: "Mountbatten was very fond of the Maharajah, and he did it to help him."
Radcliffe finished his final map on Aug. 13, but Mountbatten did not reveal it to either Nehru or Jinnah until after the British had officially left two days later. Most likely, Mountbatten saw calamity coming and wanted to deflect blame from the crown and himself. Writes Khilnani: "To the departing British, the religious sentiments of the subcontinent were backward and superstitious, yet these very principles were adopted to create two modern nations."
Radcliffe left Delhi on Aug. 15, one of the first Englishmen to depart after independence. "He was very thankful it was all over," says Beaumont. He was also still worried about assassination. "I made them make a rigorous search of the airplane before we took off," Beaumont recalls. "It rather surprised the pilot." Radcliffe handed back to Her Majesty's government the A2,000 fee he had been paid for the project. He never returned to the subcontinent, to the two nations whose destiny his pen had so indelibly altered.
--With reporting by Kate Noble/London
US Commando Strike in Waziristan
Fifty years after emigrating to Pakistan, a journalist embarks on a trip that resurrects fears and confusion, but also old hopes and family ties
BY TIM MCGIRK/LUCKNOW
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Afdar Barlas cannot believe his eyes: the fierce-looking Sikh horsemen are there at the border, as they were 50 years ago. Back then, he was a young journalist leaving India for the newly created state of Pakistan. He was crammed onto a train with hundreds of other Muslim refugees, some clinging to the roof, others hanging from windows. The train had rumbled through Punjab at night, giving Amritsar city a wide pass; there, Sikhs and Hindus were waiting at the station for Barlas' train with swords drawn. They wanted revenge. Those were days of riots and frenzied communal killings among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. Trains full of corpses had pulled into Amritsar coming from Pakistan, and, in retaliation, trains carrying slaughtered Muslim refugees had ghosted across from India.
Barlas' refugee express was easy prey. Juddering across the wheat and paddy fields of Punjab, the train had only seven Indian army soldiers for protection. If it came under attack, would this Rajput lieutenant and his Hindu soldiers risk their own lives to defend a train full of hated Muslims? Many of the passengers had their doubts.
It was late in the summer of 1947, one of the hottest this century. Barlas remembers his terrible thirst on that journey. "We didn't dare drink any water at the rail stations along the way. The rumor was the Hindus had poisoned the water to kill us all," recalls Barlas, now 68 and silver-haired with aquiline features.
The train was within a few kilometers from the frontier at Wagah when the Hindu and Sikh horsemen appeared out of the steamy darkness close to the rails. Turbaned and with long beards, the Sikhs are a martial race, and the passions of partition had inflamed their hatred of Muslims. A few horsemen had revolvers, others had kirpans--long daggers traditionally carried by Sikh men--and spears that glittered like shards of moonlight. They clearly intended to kill as many Muslims as they could. But as the horsemen came into view, the Indian lieutenant and his men, who were riding in the locomotive, shouted a challenge. The horsemen scattered into the tall wheat fields, and the train steamed on to Wagah--and safety. "A fearful joy overtook me" Barlas recalls. "When we reached Wagah, everyone in the train got off and prayed to thank Allah the Almighty. The Rajput lieutenant was a brave man, and I never even knew his name."
It is 50 years later, and the Sikh horsemen are once again waiting for Barlas' train. This time, though, he is coming from Pakistan back to India, and the horsemen are members of the armed Indian Border Security Force who gallop alongside the slowly chugging Samjhota (Understanding) Express to catch any illegal contraband, such as heroin, tossed from the train for local smugglers crouched in the grass. Still, the sight of the turbaned horsemen unsettles Safdar, bringing back the anguish of that first journey during partition.
Barlas is returning for the first time to his birthplace, Lucknow, a city in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He never imagined that it would take so long for him to go back. "Not that I was reluctant to come to Pakistan," he says. "Far from it. But we believed that the frontiers would remain open, that Pakistan would be a liberal Muslim state, harmonious and free of religious bickerings."
Since then, enmity between the two countries has made travel nearly impossible. Only this year did Barlas feel that it was safe to obtain an Indian visa. Why go back after half a century? As age overtakes him, Barlas knew this could well be his last chance to revisit the land where his ancestors--noblemen from Central Asia--had spread their roots for centuries. This would probably be his last opportunity to reunite with his Lucknow relatives before that link in the family chain becomes broken permanently. "I'd lost my next immediate generation," says Barlas, who speaks in the courtly style that is typical of Lucknowis. "I'd been gone so long that all these nephews, nieces and cousins, I didn't know them and they didn't know me."
Barlas never doubted that he had made the right choice 50 years ago. After campaigning so long for Pakistan, he found it imperative to join in the new nation's struggle for survival. But even in Karachi, where he settled, working as a journalist for Dawn newspaper and a contributor to Time, he still meets regularly with other homesick Lucknow emigres to talk about politics and Urdu poetry, which reached its zenith in Lucknow during the pre-British days of the nawab rulers.
So it is that Barlas finds himself crossing into India with 900 other passengers, including traders and divided Pakistani and Indian families. Two Pakistani plainclothes police approach him on the train; one asks him to bring back saucy Indian film magazines for them. In Wagah, on the Indian side, authorities are just as ornery. Only five customs booths are open, and each carries out a microscopically thorough search of the passengers and their baggage. It takes 13 hours until the train is cleared. Often, a 100 rupee ($2.80) "facilitation" is demanded of each passenger before Indian immigration men will stamp the passports.
Barlas' childhood had centered around "Peelikothi," a yellowed old mansion in Lucknow. He talks excitedly about seeing the house, where his family lived with a rich grandmother. Yet once he arrives in Lucknow, he is curiously reluctant to visit the ancient home where he and his friends had played hide-and-seek in its many rooms, eaten summer mangoes and splashed in the pool used for prayer ablutions that was under a shade tree in the courtyard. Instead, he makes contact with his relatives, and his fears of estrangement vanish. "When we met, their words of affection, the shine in their eyes made me realize that kinship is a strong, timeless bond," he says.
Barlas eases into Lucknow slowly, inhaling the familiar smells coming from the kebab stalls and coffee houses. When he left, Lucknow's population was around 200,000. Now it's 1.7 million. "It's so much more crowded," he says, stopping to watch two Hindu women stroll by in saris, their brown midriffs exposed. "I'd forgotten what women looked like in a sari. In Pakistan, we are much more conservative." Glancing up at the garish cinema marquees, Barlas notes sadly that in this seat of Persian culture, Hindi script has eradicated his beloved Urdu. He goes to the Great Imambara hall and mosque with its darkened, three-story maze, the bhulbhulaya, built in the 18th century. Barlas had wandered through its narrow, keyhole corridors as a child. In many ways, his return to Lucknow is like that of a man trying to find himself in a labyrinth.
Many of Barlas' personal landmarks in the city have vanished in 50 years. Baroque palaces have been torn down to make way for drab government office blocks or hospitals splotched green by monsoon decay. Four-lane roads, busy with trucks and horse-drawn tonga carts, have swallowed up many of the city's exquisite riverside gardens. He struggles to regain his bearings, and at last in the City Station neighborhood, he succeeds. "See that house there? Used to belong to a family elder. Terrible toady he was. He delivered Christmas hampers to all the British. They gave him a title," says Barlas, pleased at last to have discovered a familiar monument in this alien chaos of hooting rickshaws and Hindi billboards.
By his second day, Barlas is prepared to visit his ancestral home. "Peelikothi" has been disfigured monstrously. Its ornate facade has been gnawed away by a tea stall and a photo studio. Worse still, the building's new owners, a family of Hindu jewelers and money-lenders, have demolished the ancient exterior and replaced it with slapdash concrete and glass. Barlas takes this all in stoically. "My family used to be landowners," he says. "For her dowry, my mother was given a village of 50 families. But all that land was taken away by the government. 'Evacuee property' they called it. My relatives who stayed on had to sell their jewelry, their antiques, everything, just to survive."
Barlas' family were devout Muslims--the women were kept in purdah--and he and his friends every year would join the Muharram processions to commemorate the martyrdom of Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Husain. These processions snaked along Victoria Street, passed the bazaar of bird-sellers, and ended at Talkatorey ki Karabala, a mosque school and graveyard where some of Barlas' ancestors are buried. "Many of our Hindu friends would join us in these processions," he recalls. "There was no trouble then. The only thing was, at school Hindus and Muslims drank out of different taps."
The mosque complex lies hidden in a sandy oasis of palm trees, and a young boy in a green Nike T-shirt offers to guide Barlas around. The boy tells Barlas that city authorities have banned the Muharram procession for fear of riots, but this year he and other Shi'ia youths will try it anyway. As Barlas leaves, the boy clasps his hands together in a Hindu salutation of namaste. "Forget this namaste," says Barlas, "Give me your hand, the way Muslims do."
A few days later, Barlas reads in the papers that communal rioting broke out when the Shi'ias undertook their religious march. Naturally, he thinks of his fervent young friend in the Nike shirt with his namaste goodbye. "We had a traditional greeting in Lucknow: adab-arz, which means 'my respects to you,'" says Barlas. "It was neither Hindu nor Muslim. But nobody seems to be using it these days. That harmony is missing."
Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 09:50 am
PASSAGE TO INDIA Fifty years after emigrating to Pakistan, a journalist embarks on a trip that resurrects fears and confusion, but also old hopes and family ties
BY TIM MCGIRK/LUCKNOW
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Afdar Barlas cannot believe his eyes: the fierce-looking Sikh horsemen are there at the border, as they were 50 years ago. Back then, he was a young journalist leaving India for the newly created state of Pakistan. He was crammed onto a train with hundreds of other Muslim refugees, some clinging to the roof, others hanging from windows. The train had rumbled through Punjab at night, giving Amritsar city a wide pass; there, Sikhs and Hindus were waiting at the station for Barlas' train with swords drawn. They wanted revenge. Those were days of riots and frenzied communal killings among Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims. Trains full of corpses had pulled into Amritsar coming from Pakistan, and, in retaliation, trains carrying slaughtered Muslim refugees had ghosted across from India.
Barlas' refugee express was easy prey. Juddering across the wheat and paddy fields of Punjab, the train had only seven Indian army soldiers for protection. If it came under attack, would this Rajput lieutenant and his Hindu soldiers risk their own lives to defend a train full of hated Muslims? Many of the passengers had their doubts.
It was late in the summer of 1947, one of the hottest this century. Barlas remembers his terrible thirst on that journey. "We didn't dare drink any water at the rail stations along the way. The rumor was the Hindus had poisoned the water to kill us all," recalls Barlas, now 68 and silver-haired with aquiline features.
The train was within a few kilometers from the frontier at Wagah when the Hindu and Sikh horsemen appeared out of the steamy darkness close to the rails. Turbaned and with long beards, the Sikhs are a martial race, and the passions of partition had inflamed their hatred of Muslims. A few horsemen had revolvers, others had kirpans--long daggers traditionally carried by Sikh men--and spears that glittered like shards of moonlight. They clearly intended to kill as many Muslims as they could. But as the horsemen came into view, the Indian lieutenant and his men, who were riding in the locomotive, shouted a challenge. The horsemen scattered into the tall wheat fields, and the train steamed on to Wagah--and safety. "A fearful joy overtook me" Barlas recalls. "When we reached Wagah, everyone in the train got off and prayed to thank Allah the Almighty. The Rajput lieutenant was a brave man, and I never even knew his name."
It is 50 years later, and the Sikh horsemen are once again waiting for Barlas' train. This time, though, he is coming from Pakistan back to India, and the horsemen are members of the armed Indian Border Security Force who gallop alongside the slowly chugging Samjhota (Understanding) Express to catch any illegal contraband, such as heroin, tossed from the train for local smugglers crouched in the grass. Still, the sight of the turbaned horsemen unsettles Safdar, bringing back the anguish of that first journey during partition.
Barlas is returning for the first time to his birthplace, Lucknow, a city in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. He never imagined that it would take so long for him to go back. "Not that I was reluctant to come to Pakistan," he says. "Far from it. But we believed that the frontiers would remain open, that Pakistan would be a liberal Muslim state, harmonious and free of religious bickerings."
Since then, enmity between the two countries has made travel nearly impossible. Only this year did Barlas feel that it was safe to obtain an Indian visa. Why go back after half a century? As age overtakes him, Barlas knew this could well be his last chance to revisit the land where his ancestors--noblemen from Central Asia--had spread their roots for centuries. This would probably be his last opportunity to reunite with his Lucknow relatives before that link in the family chain becomes broken permanently. "I'd lost my next immediate generation," says Barlas, who speaks in the courtly style that is typical of Lucknowis. "I'd been gone so long that all these nephews, nieces and cousins, I didn't know them and they didn't know me."
Barlas never doubted that he had made the right choice 50 years ago. After campaigning so long for Pakistan, he found it imperative to join in the new nation's struggle for survival. But even in Karachi, where he settled, working as a journalist for Dawn newspaper and a contributor to Time, he still meets regularly with other homesick Lucknow emigres to talk about politics and Urdu poetry, which reached its zenith in Lucknow during the pre-British days of the nawab rulers.
So it is that Barlas finds himself crossing into India with 900 other passengers, including traders and divided Pakistani and Indian families. Two Pakistani plainclothes police approach him on the train; one asks him to bring back saucy Indian film magazines for them. In Wagah, on the Indian side, authorities are just as ornery. Only five customs booths are open, and each carries out a microscopically thorough search of the passengers and their baggage. It takes 13 hours until the train is cleared. Often, a 100 rupee ($2.80) "facilitation" is demanded of each passenger before Indian immigration men will stamp the passports.
Barlas' childhood had centered around "Peelikothi," a yellowed old mansion in Lucknow. He talks excitedly about seeing the house, where his family lived with a rich grandmother. Yet once he arrives in Lucknow, he is curiously reluctant to visit the ancient home where he and his friends had played hide-and-seek in its many rooms, eaten summer mangoes and splashed in the pool used for prayer ablutions that was under a shade tree in the courtyard. Instead, he makes contact with his relatives, and his fears of estrangement vanish. "When we met, their words of affection, the shine in their eyes made me realize that kinship is a strong, timeless bond," he says.
Barlas eases into Lucknow slowly, inhaling the familiar smells coming from the kebab stalls and coffee houses. When he left, Lucknow's population was around 200,000. Now it's 1.7 million. "It's so much more crowded," he says, stopping to watch two Hindu women stroll by in saris, their brown midriffs exposed. "I'd forgotten what women looked like in a sari. In Pakistan, we are much more conservative." Glancing up at the garish cinema marquees, Barlas notes sadly that in this seat of Persian culture, Hindi script has eradicated his beloved Urdu. He goes to the Great Imambara hall and mosque with its darkened, three-story maze, the bhulbhulaya, built in the 18th century. Barlas had wandered through its narrow, keyhole corridors as a child. In many ways, his return to Lucknow is like that of a man trying to find himself in a labyrinth.
Many of Barlas' personal landmarks in the city have vanished in 50 years. Baroque palaces have been torn down to make way for drab government office blocks or hospitals splotched green by monsoon decay. Four-lane roads, busy with trucks and horse-drawn tonga carts, have swallowed up many of the city's exquisite riverside gardens. He struggles to regain his bearings, and at last in the City Station neighborhood, he succeeds. "See that house there? Used to belong to a family elder. Terrible toady he was. He delivered Christmas hampers to all the British. They gave him a title," says Barlas, pleased at last to have discovered a familiar monument in this alien chaos of hooting rickshaws and Hindi billboards.
By his second day, Barlas is prepared to visit his ancestral home. "Peelikothi" has been disfigured monstrously. Its ornate facade has been gnawed away by a tea stall and a photo studio. Worse still, the building's new owners, a family of Hindu jewelers and money-lenders, have demolished the ancient exterior and replaced it with slapdash concrete and glass. Barlas takes this all in stoically. "My family used to be landowners," he says. "For her dowry, my mother was given a village of 50 families. But all that land was taken away by the government. 'Evacuee property' they called it. My relatives who stayed on had to sell their jewelry, their antiques, everything, just to survive."
Barlas' family were devout Muslims--the women were kept in purdah--and he and his friends every year would join the Muharram processions to commemorate the martyrdom of Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Husain. These processions snaked along Victoria Street, passed the bazaar of bird-sellers, and ended at Talkatorey ki Karabala, a mosque school and graveyard where some of Barlas' ancestors are buried. "Many of our Hindu friends would join us in these processions," he recalls. "There was no trouble then. The only thing was, at school Hindus and Muslims drank out of different taps."
The mosque complex lies hidden in a sandy oasis of palm trees, and a young boy in a green Nike T-shirt offers to guide Barlas around. The boy tells Barlas that city authorities have banned the Muharram procession for fear of riots, but this year he and other Shi'ia youths will try it anyway. As Barlas leaves, the boy clasps his hands together in a Hindu salutation of namaste. "Forget this namaste," says Barlas, "Give me your hand, the way Muslims do."
A few days later, Barlas reads in the papers that communal rioting broke out when the Shi'ias undertook their religious march. Naturally, he thinks of his fervent young friend in the Nike shirt with his namaste goodbye. "We had a traditional greeting in Lucknow: adab-arz, which means 'my respects to you,'" says Barlas. "It was neither Hindu nor Muslim. But nobody seems to be using it these days. That harmony is missing."
US Commando Strike in Waziristan
Did independence come too soon? After years of research, two authors find there was an excess of haste and a bureaucracy without a clue
BY LARRY COLLINS AND DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
In each passing century there are a few defining moments. One occurred just seconds after midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, when the Union Jack, emblazoned with the Star of India, began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House in New Delhi. The last retreat of that banner proclaimed far more than the departure of the British Raj and the independence of 400 million people. It heralded the end of the Age of Imperialism and its precursor, the Age of Conquistadores, when the great explorers--from Columbus to Cortes, Magellan and Pizzaro--opened up the world by conquering boundless lands for God, gold and the monarchs of Spain, Portugal, France and England.
What a cast of characters stood center stage that historic night half a century ago. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, sent out to Delhi to relinquish the finest component of an empire consolidated by his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Jawaharlal Nehru, a man of impeccable taste, breeding and fastidious intelligence, destined to become the first leader of the tumultuous Third World. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, cool, austere, polite to a fault, determined to force on the departing British the formation of a new Islamic nation (while savoring nightly a whiskey and soda forbidden by that faith).
And, towering above all was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the proponent of nonviolence who hastened the end of empire by the simple expedient of turning the other cheek. In an age when television did not exist, radios were rare and most of his countrymen were illiterate, the "Mahatma," or Great Soul, proved a master of communication. He had a genius for the simple gesture that spoke to his countrymen's souls.
Two new nations, India and Pakistan, were born in an hour of glory and rejoicing, which transformed all too quickly into a cauldron of bloodshed and horror as millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were uprooted from their homes. That appalling outburst of violence dwarfed anything we have witnessed recently in Bosnia or Rwanda. In three years of research for our book Freedom at Midnight, we interviewed the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for 30 hours. He talked of 250,000 fatalities--an estimate undoubtedly tinged with wishful thinking. Most historians of the period place the figure at 500,000; some put it as high as 2 million.
Could it have been prevented? To find an answer to that question, we read every weekly report submitted to Mountbatten by the governors of India's provinces, officials who represented the best and wisest products of British rule in India, the mandarins of the Indian civil service. None foresaw a disaster even remotely close to the one that overwhelmed the subcontinent.
We talked at length to the Indian politicians who were close advisers to the leaders of the new nations. Without exception, they all urged Mountbatten to transfer power to their hands as swiftly as possible. These men had been agitating and preparing for the exercise of power for years. Nothing was going to delay them in getting that power. If violence were to follow the division of the subcontinent, well, they were confident they could handle it. What their innermost thoughts might have been cannot be said. But all of them, in their recorded conversations with Mountbatten, minimized the dangers that partition posed, and vastly overstated their abilities to deal with them. It was a classic--and tragic--example of political ambition taking precedence over reality. Only one person foresaw the dimension of the tragedy about to overwhelm the subcontinent. That was Gandhi. And in mid-summer 1947, no one was listening to the prophet of nonviolence.
There was one vital piece of information, however, that was denied to Mountbatten. We uncovered it during our research: the x-ray of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's lungs. This secret document revealed that the future leader of Pakistan was dying of tuberculosis. We met the doctors who had told Jinnah he had less than six months to live. Jinnah was the one unyielding obstacle in Mountbatten's desperate efforts to keep India united. Mountbatten acknowledged to us that had he known the Muslim leader was dying, he would have been strongly tempted to delay independence to await his death. Then, perhaps, an independent Pakistan would never have come into being.
Neither nation has successfully mastered many key problems: overpopulation, corruption, religious extremism. But for all their travails and conflicts, India and Pakistan can take pride in their accomplishments over the last half-century. "A moment comes," Nehru told his countrymen that midnight 50 years ago, "which comes but rarely in history ... when an age ends, when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance." How clearly do we now see that an age was ending that night, an age that had begun one soft summer day in Cadiz in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed off on the endless green seas in search of India and found America instead.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre are the authors of Freedom at Midnight, the bestselling 1976 history of India and Pakistan's independence.
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Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 09:49 am
HURRYING MIDNIGHT Did independence come too soon? After years of research, two authors find there was an excess of haste and a bureaucracy without a clue
BY LARRY COLLINS AND DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
In each passing century there are a few defining moments. One occurred just seconds after midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, when the Union Jack, emblazoned with the Star of India, began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House in New Delhi. The last retreat of that banner proclaimed far more than the departure of the British Raj and the independence of 400 million people. It heralded the end of the Age of Imperialism and its precursor, the Age of Conquistadores, when the great explorers--from Columbus to Cortes, Magellan and Pizzaro--opened up the world by conquering boundless lands for God, gold and the monarchs of Spain, Portugal, France and England.
What a cast of characters stood center stage that historic night half a century ago. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, sent out to Delhi to relinquish the finest component of an empire consolidated by his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Jawaharlal Nehru, a man of impeccable taste, breeding and fastidious intelligence, destined to become the first leader of the tumultuous Third World. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, cool, austere, polite to a fault, determined to force on the departing British the formation of a new Islamic nation (while savoring nightly a whiskey and soda forbidden by that faith).
And, towering above all was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the proponent of nonviolence who hastened the end of empire by the simple expedient of turning the other cheek. In an age when television did not exist, radios were rare and most of his countrymen were illiterate, the "Mahatma," or Great Soul, proved a master of communication. He had a genius for the simple gesture that spoke to his countrymen's souls.
Two new nations, India and Pakistan, were born in an hour of glory and rejoicing, which transformed all too quickly into a cauldron of bloodshed and horror as millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were uprooted from their homes. That appalling outburst of violence dwarfed anything we have witnessed recently in Bosnia or Rwanda. In three years of research for our book Freedom at Midnight, we interviewed the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for 30 hours. He talked of 250,000 fatalities--an estimate undoubtedly tinged with wishful thinking. Most historians of the period place the figure at 500,000; some put it as high as 2 million.
Could it have been prevented? To find an answer to that question, we read every weekly report submitted to Mountbatten by the governors of India's provinces, officials who represented the best and wisest products of British rule in India, the mandarins of the Indian civil service. None foresaw a disaster even remotely close to the one that overwhelmed the subcontinent.
We talked at length to the Indian politicians who were close advisers to the leaders of the new nations. Without exception, they all urged Mountbatten to transfer power to their hands as swiftly as possible. These men had been agitating and preparing for the exercise of power for years. Nothing was going to delay them in getting that power. If violence were to follow the division of the subcontinent, well, they were confident they could handle it. What their innermost thoughts might have been cannot be said. But all of them, in their recorded conversations with Mountbatten, minimized the dangers that partition posed, and vastly overstated their abilities to deal with them. It was a classic--and tragic--example of political ambition taking precedence over reality. Only one person foresaw the dimension of the tragedy about to overwhelm the subcontinent. That was Gandhi. And in mid-summer 1947, no one was listening to the prophet of nonviolence.
There was one vital piece of information, however, that was denied to Mountbatten. We uncovered it during our research: the x-ray of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's lungs. This secret document revealed that the future leader of Pakistan was dying of tuberculosis. We met the doctors who had told Jinnah he had less than six months to live. Jinnah was the one unyielding obstacle in Mountbatten's desperate efforts to keep India united. Mountbatten acknowledged to us that had he known the Muslim leader was dying, he would have been strongly tempted to delay independence to await his death. Then, perhaps, an independent Pakistan would never have come into being.
Neither nation has successfully mastered many key problems: overpopulation, corruption, religious extremism. But for all their travails and conflicts, India and Pakistan can take pride in their accomplishments over the last half-century. "A moment comes," Nehru told his countrymen that midnight 50 years ago, "which comes but rarely in history ... when an age ends, when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance." How clearly do we now see that an age was ending that night, an age that had begun one soft summer day in Cadiz in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed off on the endless green seas in search of India and found America instead.
Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre are the authors of Freedom at Midnight, the bestselling 1976 history of India and Pakistan's independence.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
US Commando Strike in Waziristan
Partition brought the scarred and the terrified to a child's Lahore, but also a hint of the strength of subcontinental women
BY BAPSI SIDHWA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
I was a child then. Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore. The glow of fires beneath the press of smoke, which bloodied the horizon in a perpetual sunset, wrenched at my heart. For many of us, the departure of the British and the longed-for independence of the subcontinent were overshadowed by the ferocity of partition.
My recall is fragmented. Grouped round a boy waving a makeshift flag, a sudden rag-tag of urchins materializes on Warris Road. My brother and I rush out of the gates and, depending on the affiliation of the flag-bearer, our childish voices echo the words of the mobs. For a group of Muslim children we shout "Pakistan zindabad! Hindustan murdabad! (Long live Pakistan! Death to Hindustan!)" For another, of Christian-Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Parsi children, we yell: "Long live Hindustan! Death to Pakistan!"
My father, who has never held a firearm, returns one afternoon with a long box. He opens it to display an enormous double-barreled gun nes-tling in a bed of red satin. Mother is skeptical, nervous. Can he handle this wayward-looking thing that is meant to protect us?
But children are more intuitive: I seldom feel at risk--partly because we live in a safe neighborhood, far from the savaged heart of the inner city, partly because we are Parsi Zoroastrians. Like Christians, Buddhists and Jains we are not directly in the path of the political and religious inferno that engulfs the three major players in the communal stakes: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
As the Radcliffe Commission sorts out cities as if from a pack of cards, Lahore is dealt to Pakistan: in a snap, just like that, we are Pakistani. To the left of our house on Warris Road is the whitewashed bungalow inhabited by Mr. Singh's extended Sikh family and their three water buffalo, which provide our daily quota of milk. The Singhs' children, Rosy and Peter, are our constant companions. When it becomes clear that Lahore will go to Pakistan, Mr. Singh--and our parents' other Hindu and Sikh friends--pile their belongings into trucks and cars, and store with us the things they hope to retrieve when they return to their bungalows. (No one ever came back, and years later, tired of waiting, my mother sold the whole lot to a kabari, or junk dealer.)
Gradually the rioting subsides. By autumn 1948, with Pakistan just over a year old, the flood of refugees has shrunk to a nervous trickle. Two refugee camps have been set up on the outskirts of Lahore. Bedraggled, carrying tin trunks, string-cots and cloth bundles on their heads, Muslim refugees from India swamp the city, looking for work, setting up house on sidewalks, in parks, or wherever they happen to be at sunset.
Mr. Singh's bungalow has been looted several times. Around New Year's I begin to notice signs of occupation: a window boarded up with cardboard, a diffused gleam from another screened with jute sacking. The takeover has been so subtle that it dawns on me only gradually: I have new neighbors. I know they are refugees, nervous of drawing attention to their furtive presence.
Although the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house that have been converted into a camp for so-called recovered women. Why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories. Thousands of women were kidnapped: Muslim women by Hindus and Sikhs, Hindu women by Muslims. Terrible vendettas were enacted on their bodies, not so much to dishonor them as to humiliate the men of another faith. What legacy have these women left us? Or those women who abandoned their veils and joined Gandhiji's nonviolent movement, and otherwise dedicated their lives to the struggle for independence? I believe that their spirit animates all those women who have bloomed into judges, journalists, ngo officials, filmmakers, doctors and writers--women who today are shaping opinions and challenging stereotypes.
For me, the British Raj was imposed by the massive statue of Victoria that overlooked Queen's Park. Resplendent in gun-metal, she held a large iron ball in one hand and an iron club in the other, her billowing raiment filling the delicate marble canopy that framed her statue. It occurs to me that her role as empress, and the complete acceptance of her dominance, might have contributed to the election on the subcontinent of six female heads of government, with Sri Lanka's Sirimavo Bandaranaike leading the way, followed by India's Indira Gandhi, Sri Lanka's Chandrika Kumaratunga, Bangladesh's Sheik Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. Still massive but less majestic, Victoria is now ensconced in the Lahore museum; her place under the canopy in Queen's Park has been taken by a splendidly calligraphed edition of the Holy Koran.
Bapsi Sidhwa, author of The Crow-Eaters and Ice-Candy Man, divides her time between the U.S. and the subcontinent.
Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 09:40 am
NEW NEIGHBORS Partition brought the scarred and the terrified to a child's Lahore, but also a hint of the strength of subcontinental women
BY BAPSI SIDHWA
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
I was a child then. Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore. The glow of fires beneath the press of smoke, which bloodied the horizon in a perpetual sunset, wrenched at my heart. For many of us, the departure of the British and the longed-for independence of the subcontinent were overshadowed by the ferocity of partition.
My recall is fragmented. Grouped round a boy waving a makeshift flag, a sudden rag-tag of urchins materializes on Warris Road. My brother and I rush out of the gates and, depending on the affiliation of the flag-bearer, our childish voices echo the words of the mobs. For a group of Muslim children we shout "Pakistan zindabad! Hindustan murdabad! (Long live Pakistan! Death to Hindustan!)" For another, of Christian-Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Parsi children, we yell: "Long live Hindustan! Death to Pakistan!"
My father, who has never held a firearm, returns one afternoon with a long box. He opens it to display an enormous double-barreled gun nes-tling in a bed of red satin. Mother is skeptical, nervous. Can he handle this wayward-looking thing that is meant to protect us?
But children are more intuitive: I seldom feel at risk--partly because we live in a safe neighborhood, far from the savaged heart of the inner city, partly because we are Parsi Zoroastrians. Like Christians, Buddhists and Jains we are not directly in the path of the political and religious inferno that engulfs the three major players in the communal stakes: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.
As the Radcliffe Commission sorts out cities as if from a pack of cards, Lahore is dealt to Pakistan: in a snap, just like that, we are Pakistani. To the left of our house on Warris Road is the whitewashed bungalow inhabited by Mr. Singh's extended Sikh family and their three water buffalo, which provide our daily quota of milk. The Singhs' children, Rosy and Peter, are our constant companions. When it becomes clear that Lahore will go to Pakistan, Mr. Singh--and our parents' other Hindu and Sikh friends--pile their belongings into trucks and cars, and store with us the things they hope to retrieve when they return to their bungalows. (No one ever came back, and years later, tired of waiting, my mother sold the whole lot to a kabari, or junk dealer.)
Gradually the rioting subsides. By autumn 1948, with Pakistan just over a year old, the flood of refugees has shrunk to a nervous trickle. Two refugee camps have been set up on the outskirts of Lahore. Bedraggled, carrying tin trunks, string-cots and cloth bundles on their heads, Muslim refugees from India swamp the city, looking for work, setting up house on sidewalks, in parks, or wherever they happen to be at sunset.
Mr. Singh's bungalow has been looted several times. Around New Year's I begin to notice signs of occupation: a window boarded up with cardboard, a diffused gleam from another screened with jute sacking. The takeover has been so subtle that it dawns on me only gradually: I have new neighbors. I know they are refugees, nervous of drawing attention to their furtive presence.
Although the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house that have been converted into a camp for so-called recovered women. Why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories. Thousands of women were kidnapped: Muslim women by Hindus and Sikhs, Hindu women by Muslims. Terrible vendettas were enacted on their bodies, not so much to dishonor them as to humiliate the men of another faith. What legacy have these women left us? Or those women who abandoned their veils and joined Gandhiji's nonviolent movement, and otherwise dedicated their lives to the struggle for independence? I believe that their spirit animates all those women who have bloomed into judges, journalists, ngo officials, filmmakers, doctors and writers--women who today are shaping opinions and challenging stereotypes.
For me, the British Raj was imposed by the massive statue of Victoria that overlooked Queen's Park. Resplendent in gun-metal, she held a large iron ball in one hand and an iron club in the other, her billowing raiment filling the delicate marble canopy that framed her statue. It occurs to me that her role as empress, and the complete acceptance of her dominance, might have contributed to the election on the subcontinent of six female heads of government, with Sri Lanka's Sirimavo Bandaranaike leading the way, followed by India's Indira Gandhi, Sri Lanka's Chandrika Kumaratunga, Bangladesh's Sheik Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia, and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto. Still massive but less majestic, Victoria is now ensconced in the Lahore museum; her place under the canopy in Queen's Park has been taken by a splendidly calligraphed edition of the Holy Koran.
Bapsi Sidhwa, author of The Crow-Eaters and Ice-Candy Man, divides her time between the U.S. and the subcontinent.
US Commando Strike in Waziristan
For one generation, independence was more than a historical event. It was a moment of madness, mourning--and terrible choice
BY ANTHONY SPAETH
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Partition is an oddly dry and technical word to describe the sundering of a subcontinent with the stroke of a pen, or the pain of being forced to choose one side of the divide or the other. The individual stories of the act are vastly more compelling. They form a mosaic of lives uprooted, families split and existences made suddenly tenuous in the minority ghettos of India, Pakistan and what would become Bangladesh. The darker colors of the mosaic came from murder and fear. But there were flashes of light as well: of charity, decency and luck. Without its human faces, partition was but a territorial "award," to use the terminology of the day, a mere line on a map.
Happily Unbudged
Allah Rakha was India's greatest tabla player at independence. As a Muslim, he had to decide whether to move to Pakistan. "So many students and fans came to my house," he recalls. "They said they would lie down on the railway tracks and not allow the train to leave." Allah Rakha decided to stay, and his career thrived. His son Zakir Husain is now a respected tabla performer. (Generally, prominent Muslim families have fared better in India than common folk.) "Sometimes some people cause trouble here," says Allah Rakha, 77, referring to recent anti-Muslim riots in Bombay, the city that his been his home for more than 50 years. "But there are many others who will come forward to protect us."
The Right Choice
Wajahat Husain was a young lieutenant in the Indian Army in 1947. After partition he left India, served 32 years in the Pakistani Army and as Pakistan's ambassador to Greece and Australia before retiring as a major general. Now 71, he readily admits Pakistan's failings. "If we had strong leadership and democratic institutions," he says, "this country would have moved as fast as the countries of East Asia." But he doesn't regret his choice. "Last December, I attended a reunion of my Indian Military Academy class," he relates. "I drove through India and thought, 'Thank God I made the correct decision.' I cried at the conditions of the Muslims I saw there."
Memorable Encounter
Aslam Khan Mamdot, 82, cannot forget 1947, when he helped refugees as a volunteer on the border near Lahore. "I saw a young boy on the road from Murree to Rawalpindi," he recalls. "He was Hindu. The Muslims had attacked his village the night before. He said, 'I am the only survivor.' He was in our car, among five or six Muslims with firearms, and he was shivering. I let him out in Rawalpindi and said, 'Go tell the other Hindus that not all Muslims are killers. It is to the same God that we pray.' The boy was feeling so helpless. Millions must have felt the same way."
Still Spinning
Jharna Chowdhury was born to a wealthy Hindu family in the Noakhali district of eastern Bengal. In 1946, her home was burned by a Muslim mob. "I remember them forcing people to eat beef and read the Koran," she says. Then Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Noakhali. He encouraged Hindus to return to their former homes: Chowdhury's family was one of the few who complied, choosing not to migrate to India. She joined a Gandhian ashram, where she endured more anti-Hindu violence during the splitting of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Now she runs the Gandhian commune, finding time each day to spin her own yarn. "People have forgotten Gandhi," says Chowdhury, 63. "But I am doing what I always wanted. Hopefully I will die before things change even more."
Family Reunion
Balraj Dutt was in Lucknow seeking college admission in August 1947, when he heard that Hindus were fleeing his home district of Jhelum in Punjab. He went to a refugee center on the Indian side of the new border, hoping his family had survived the trek. There were thousands of refugees and Dutt, despairing, joined a voluntary aid group. "I thought if I helped people in distress," he says, "someone else might help my family." One day a relative spotted him in the crowd. "He caught hold of me and said, 'Come.' I was so scared, I didn't even ask about my family." In a shelter he found them: "I saw my mother, my brother, my sister." He later changed his name to Sunil Dutt, rose to fame as a movie star, married a Muslim actress and became a member of Parliament. "We made one of the biggest sacrifices for our country," he says. "We gave up our homeland."
The Final Hindu
Nigel Hankin, a British soldier stationed in New Delhi in 1947, recalls how Sikh soldiers slipped out at night during the partition carnage. "They would come back in the morning and show us bloody swords," he says. "They had been taking revenge for what was happening in Pakistan." Hankin returned home to Britain--but not for long. "I remembered India, the sun of India," he says. Since 1951 he has "stayed on," currently working as a free-lance tour guide for foreign visitors. "India is my home," insists Hankin, 77. His one regret is failing to see Gandhi at his New Delhi prayer meetings. "I could have gone along ever so easily," he says. "But he had wrecked the Empire. That's how we thought at the time."
Staying On Forever
Hindus left behind in Pakistan have had a hard time--living in ghettos, discriminated against for jobs--but not Daropti Devi. Her physician father refused to abandon the town of Dinga in 1947, and since he had treated all members of the community equally, the family was spared the violence inflicted on other members of their religion. Now elderly and infirm, Devi is Dinga's last remaining Hindu. She is cared for by the Ballar family, who are Muslim. "Generally we don't like Hindus," says Naveed Ballar. "But we don't feel that way about her. She is our family member."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Posted by
saharanpuri
Sep 10, 2008 09:30 am
PARTITION'S CHILDREN For one generation, independence was more than a historical event. It was a moment of madness, mourning--and terrible choice
BY ANTHONY SPAETH
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Partition is an oddly dry and technical word to describe the sundering of a subcontinent with the stroke of a pen, or the pain of being forced to choose one side of the divide or the other. The individual stories of the act are vastly more compelling. They form a mosaic of lives uprooted, families split and existences made suddenly tenuous in the minority ghettos of India, Pakistan and what would become Bangladesh. The darker colors of the mosaic came from murder and fear. But there were flashes of light as well: of charity, decency and luck. Without its human faces, partition was but a territorial "award," to use the terminology of the day, a mere line on a map.
Happily Unbudged
Allah Rakha was India's greatest tabla player at independence. As a Muslim, he had to decide whether to move to Pakistan. "So many students and fans came to my house," he recalls. "They said they would lie down on the railway tracks and not allow the train to leave." Allah Rakha decided to stay, and his career thrived. His son Zakir Husain is now a respected tabla performer. (Generally, prominent Muslim families have fared better in India than common folk.) "Sometimes some people cause trouble here," says Allah Rakha, 77, referring to recent anti-Muslim riots in Bombay, the city that his been his home for more than 50 years. "But there are many others who will come forward to protect us."
The Right Choice
Wajahat Husain was a young lieutenant in the Indian Army in 1947. After partition he left India, served 32 years in the Pakistani Army and as Pakistan's ambassador to Greece and Australia before retiring as a major general. Now 71, he readily admits Pakistan's failings. "If we had strong leadership and democratic institutions," he says, "this country would have moved as fast as the countries of East Asia." But he doesn't regret his choice. "Last December, I attended a reunion of my Indian Military Academy class," he relates. "I drove through India and thought, 'Thank God I made the correct decision.' I cried at the conditions of the Muslims I saw there."
Memorable Encounter
Aslam Khan Mamdot, 82, cannot forget 1947, when he helped refugees as a volunteer on the border near Lahore. "I saw a young boy on the road from Murree to Rawalpindi," he recalls. "He was Hindu. The Muslims had attacked his village the night before. He said, 'I am the only survivor.' He was in our car, among five or six Muslims with firearms, and he was shivering. I let him out in Rawalpindi and said, 'Go tell the other Hindus that not all Muslims are killers. It is to the same God that we pray.' The boy was feeling so helpless. Millions must have felt the same way."
Still Spinning
Jharna Chowdhury was born to a wealthy Hindu family in the Noakhali district of eastern Bengal. In 1946, her home was burned by a Muslim mob. "I remember them forcing people to eat beef and read the Koran," she says. Then Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Noakhali. He encouraged Hindus to return to their former homes: Chowdhury's family was one of the few who complied, choosing not to migrate to India. She joined a Gandhian ashram, where she endured more anti-Hindu violence during the splitting of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Now she runs the Gandhian commune, finding time each day to spin her own yarn. "People have forgotten Gandhi," says Chowdhury, 63. "But I am doing what I always wanted. Hopefully I will die before things change even more."
Family Reunion
Balraj Dutt was in Lucknow seeking college admission in August 1947, when he heard that Hindus were fleeing his home district of Jhelum in Punjab. He went to a refugee center on the Indian side of the new border, hoping his family had survived the trek. There were thousands of refugees and Dutt, despairing, joined a voluntary aid group. "I thought if I helped people in distress," he says, "someone else might help my family." One day a relative spotted him in the crowd. "He caught hold of me and said, 'Come.' I was so scared, I didn't even ask about my family." In a shelter he found them: "I saw my mother, my brother, my sister." He later changed his name to Sunil Dutt, rose to fame as a movie star, married a Muslim actress and became a member of Parliament. "We made one of the biggest sacrifices for our country," he says. "We gave up our homeland."
The Final Hindu
Nigel Hankin, a British soldier stationed in New Delhi in 1947, recalls how Sikh soldiers slipped out at night during the partition carnage. "They would come back in the morning and show us bloody swords," he says. "They had been taking revenge for what was happening in Pakistan." Hankin returned home to Britain--but not for long. "I remembered India, the sun of India," he says. Since 1951 he has "stayed on," currently working as a free-lance tour guide for foreign visitors. "India is my home," insists Hankin, 77. His one regret is failing to see Gandhi at his New Delhi prayer meetings. "I could have gone along ever so easily," he says. "But he had wrecked the Empire. That's how we thought at the time."
Staying On Forever
Hindus left behind in Pakistan have had a hard time--living in ghettos, discriminated against for jobs--but not Daropti Devi. Her physician father refused to abandon the town of Dinga in 1947, and since he had treated all members of the community equally, the family was spared the violence inflicted on other members of their religion. Now elderly and infirm, Devi is Dinga's last remaining Hindu. She is cared for by the Ballar family, who are Muslim. "Generally we don't like Hindus," says Naveed Ballar. "But we don't feel that way about her. She is our family member."
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Krishnakant’s Will
Posted Monday, Sep. 8, 1947
While the orchestra at Lahore`s Falett`s Hotel played quietly for dancing, European guests drank cocktails on the moonlit terrace. Beyond earshot of the music, whole blocks of buildings lay gutted. Streets were bare and silent. Over the deserted railroad station the smell of corpses hung.
One-seventh of Lahore, capital of the Punjab, had been destroyed. Scores of nearby towns and villages had been razed. War—or rather, competitive massacre—between Moslems and Sikhs had reached a pitch of horror that made the Indian Mutiny of 1857 look like a mere street brawl. In two weeks, between 40,000 and 150,000 people had been killed in the Punjab. Most of the bodies were too hacked and charred to be recognized. At least a million were homeless.
``Never during two wars have I seen such sights as I have seen these last two days,`` said a middle-aged British colonel at Lahore airport. ``All those atrocity yarns we used to hear, such as Germans cutting Belgian children`s hands off and raping and then killing women, have suddenly come true in the Punjab during the last week.``
``The Joy of Fraternization.`` For months the Punjab`s communal hatred had been boiling up into slaughter. A previous climax came last spring when hundreds were killed in riots there (TIME, March 17). In mid-August the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan left 1.6 of the 3.8 million Sikhs in the province under Moslem rule; at least twice as many Moslems remained on the Indian side of the border in a new East Punjab state.
The Sikhs are an offshoot of the Hindu religion; they organized 300 years ago to resist militantly Moslem oppression. The British had used the warlike Sikhs extensively, giving them land and offices, especially in the fertile, predominantly Moslem West Punjab. In consequence, the Moslems hate Sikhs far more than they do Hindus.
The rest of India was relatively quiet. In once turbulent Calcutta, Mohandas K. Gandhi, still striving for Hindu-Moslem unity, was able to write of the situation there: ``One might almost say the joy of fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour.``
There was no fraternization in the Punjab. At Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, organized gangs of Sikhs had exterminated or driven out the Moslem minority population (150,000). Moslems in Lahore and other Pakistan border regions retaliated against the Hindus and Sikhs there.
Mohamed Ali Jinnah, who had conceived Pakistan in hatred and was now its president and undisputed boss, sent to the West Punjab as governor his faithful follower, the Khan of Momdot. The bland, moonfaced Khan had served four years in the Punjab Legislative Assembly without opening his mouth. When he got to the West Punjab, he acted. With his province literally in flames, the Khan of Momdot relaxed regulations that had restricted the carrying of firearms; he also decreed that every man could wear a sword, provided it was covered.
Some of his subordinates went further. The Moslem deputy commissioner of one of the Western Punjab districts mourned a son killed on the Indian side of the border. Said he to the young Moslems: ``You have full liberty to go the limit.
Take revenge as you like, but if there is one Hindu or Sikh left alive in my district after you are through, I swear to kill them myself.``
The Canal Turned Pink. TIME Correspondent Robert Neville flew over the area last week, then talked with refugees and correspondents fleeing from the carnage. Neville cabled:
``Just flying over the Punjab today with a landing here & there gives a feeling that terrible things have happened below. The number of smoking villages that can be counted from Ambala up to Lahore must be at least 150. Here & there can be seen a big town like Sialkot and Gujranwala, where charred black districts tell the story that here the property of one entire community was wiped out.
``The panorama of West Punjab seems even worse. In hitherto peaceful districts like Montgomery and Lyallpur there is not one town which has not been a battlefield. There is no bazaar which has not been burned out. Streams of refugees can be seen approaching all bridges, and over some roads they form virtual convoys miles long. On a ten-mile stretch of road leading to the big bridge over the Sutlej River into Pakistan, there must have been 100,000 people, most of them walking beside bullock carts piled high with their sole possessions.
``At Lahore`s Central Station, Sikh and Hindu refugees from North or West Punjab were mobbed on the platform, often stabbed to death and their few belongings looted. A major incident involved a big convoy carrying perhaps 1,000 from Sialkot to Amritsar. The convoy was stopped and attacked at the Ravi River bridge. Hundreds were stabbed to death and other hundreds wounded.
``Refugees from Lyallpur in West Punjab say that so many Sikhs and Hindus were murdered and their bodies thrown into the canal that the canal actually had a pinkish color for a day after. Moslem refugees told how Sikhs stripped and paraded Moslem women through the streets, raped them and then killed them. British correspondents reported having seen dead, naked women lying about villages of the Amritsar district.``
A Look of Satisfaction. ``Although railway administrations of both Dominions have doggedly tried to keep a skeleton schedule going, they have now given up. For days on end no trains arrived in Delhi without having been attacked and looted practically all along the route.
``Near Jullundur, a band of Sikhs held up a train, methodically searched all compartments and pulled out 17 Moslems, whom they beheaded on the platform. Most amazing of all was the look of bland satisfaction on the faces of these young Sikh men, their hands dripping blood, their clothes smeared with blood, as they stood and grinned at their handiwork while the train finally pulled out. The only Moslems who escaped on this trip were two who were hidden by two British officers under their baggage.
``A British correspondent traveling in the opposite direction through this territory saw half a dozen lying stabbed on the Lahore platform, slowly dying without any help being given. Later that night, on a small siding south of Amritsar, a band of Sikhs entered his compartment and before his eyes beheaded a Moslem apparently trying to travel disguised as a Hindu. (For identification, both sides use the tried and true means of seeing whether there has been circumcision. Moslems always circumcize, the Hindus and Sikhs practically never.)
``A member of the U.S. Embassy arrived in Lahore from Delhi with another tale of horror. Reaching the small station of Okara, near Montgomery, he found the station platform utterly deserted except for several hundred dead Hindus and Sikhs lying around the platform, apparently slaughtered only a few hours before while waiting for the train to escape. All these people were workers in a textile mill which had been attacked by Moslems. Their bodies were mostly stripped and in several instances limbs had been torn from the bodies. The wife of a British textile factory manager told how a Moslem mob had attacked the Hindu and Sikh workers in another factory. When Moslems broke into the ground floor, the Sikhs slashed the throats of their own wives, and afterwards tried to fight through themselves. All were killed.``
Authorities were utterly unable to cope with the situation. In many cases both Sikh and Moslem police had participated in the riots. British soldiers, present in the Punjab, were not allowed to interfere under the arrangements now in force for Indian independence.
No Plans. For the homeless, crippled refugees, no one had anticipated relief measures. In New Delhi a penniless Hindu woman from the West Punjab clutched her two children, told of her husband`s murder by Moslems. ``Don`t ask her about her plans,`` cautioned a welfare official, ``she hasn`t any and neither have we.``
The rioting was breaking down railroad traffic between parts of India and Pakistan. Unless it was soon restored, both nations, especially Pakistan, would be economically crippled. Fearing that the Punjab rioting would spread, millions of Hindus and Moslems prepared to cross borders in a transfer of population greater than Europe had ever seen.
In his new capital, Karachi, Jinnah preached that ``restraint is necessary.`` However, the fires of communal hatred, which he had fanned for 20 years, were burning too brightly in the Punjab to be easily stifled. They might spread
From the Sep. 8, 1947 issue of TIME magazine
Posted by
saharanpuri
Aug 26, 2006 05:36 am
Competitive MassacrePosted Monday, Sep. 8, 1947
While the orchestra at Lahore`s Falett`s Hotel played quietly for dancing, European guests drank cocktails on the moonlit terrace. Beyond earshot of the music, whole blocks of buildings lay gutted. Streets were bare and silent. Over the deserted railroad station the smell of corpses hung.
One-seventh of Lahore, capital of the Punjab, had been destroyed. Scores of nearby towns and villages had been razed. War—or rather, competitive massacre—between Moslems and Sikhs had reached a pitch of horror that made the Indian Mutiny of 1857 look like a mere street brawl. In two weeks, between 40,000 and 150,000 people had been killed in the Punjab. Most of the bodies were too hacked and charred to be recognized. At least a million were homeless.
``Never during two wars have I seen such sights as I have seen these last two days,`` said a middle-aged British colonel at Lahore airport. ``All those atrocity yarns we used to hear, such as Germans cutting Belgian children`s hands off and raping and then killing women, have suddenly come true in the Punjab during the last week.``
``The Joy of Fraternization.`` For months the Punjab`s communal hatred had been boiling up into slaughter. A previous climax came last spring when hundreds were killed in riots there (TIME, March 17). In mid-August the partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan left 1.6 of the 3.8 million Sikhs in the province under Moslem rule; at least twice as many Moslems remained on the Indian side of the border in a new East Punjab state.
The Sikhs are an offshoot of the Hindu religion; they organized 300 years ago to resist militantly Moslem oppression. The British had used the warlike Sikhs extensively, giving them land and offices, especially in the fertile, predominantly Moslem West Punjab. In consequence, the Moslems hate Sikhs far more than they do Hindus.
The rest of India was relatively quiet. In once turbulent Calcutta, Mohandas K. Gandhi, still striving for Hindu-Moslem unity, was able to write of the situation there: ``One might almost say the joy of fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour.``
There was no fraternization in the Punjab. At Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, organized gangs of Sikhs had exterminated or driven out the Moslem minority population (150,000). Moslems in Lahore and other Pakistan border regions retaliated against the Hindus and Sikhs there.
Mohamed Ali Jinnah, who had conceived Pakistan in hatred and was now its president and undisputed boss, sent to the West Punjab as governor his faithful follower, the Khan of Momdot. The bland, moonfaced Khan had served four years in the Punjab Legislative Assembly without opening his mouth. When he got to the West Punjab, he acted. With his province literally in flames, the Khan of Momdot relaxed regulations that had restricted the carrying of firearms; he also decreed that every man could wear a sword, provided it was covered.
Some of his subordinates went further. The Moslem deputy commissioner of one of the Western Punjab districts mourned a son killed on the Indian side of the border. Said he to the young Moslems: ``You have full liberty to go the limit.
Take revenge as you like, but if there is one Hindu or Sikh left alive in my district after you are through, I swear to kill them myself.``
The Canal Turned Pink. TIME Correspondent Robert Neville flew over the area last week, then talked with refugees and correspondents fleeing from the carnage. Neville cabled:
``Just flying over the Punjab today with a landing here & there gives a feeling that terrible things have happened below. The number of smoking villages that can be counted from Ambala up to Lahore must be at least 150. Here & there can be seen a big town like Sialkot and Gujranwala, where charred black districts tell the story that here the property of one entire community was wiped out.
``The panorama of West Punjab seems even worse. In hitherto peaceful districts like Montgomery and Lyallpur there is not one town which has not been a battlefield. There is no bazaar which has not been burned out. Streams of refugees can be seen approaching all bridges, and over some roads they form virtual convoys miles long. On a ten-mile stretch of road leading to the big bridge over the Sutlej River into Pakistan, there must have been 100,000 people, most of them walking beside bullock carts piled high with their sole possessions.
``At Lahore`s Central Station, Sikh and Hindu refugees from North or West Punjab were mobbed on the platform, often stabbed to death and their few belongings looted. A major incident involved a big convoy carrying perhaps 1,000 from Sialkot to Amritsar. The convoy was stopped and attacked at the Ravi River bridge. Hundreds were stabbed to death and other hundreds wounded.
``Refugees from Lyallpur in West Punjab say that so many Sikhs and Hindus were murdered and their bodies thrown into the canal that the canal actually had a pinkish color for a day after. Moslem refugees told how Sikhs stripped and paraded Moslem women through the streets, raped them and then killed them. British correspondents reported having seen dead, naked women lying about villages of the Amritsar district.``
A Look of Satisfaction. ``Although railway administrations of both Dominions have doggedly tried to keep a skeleton schedule going, they have now given up. For days on end no trains arrived in Delhi without having been attacked and looted practically all along the route.
``Near Jullundur, a band of Sikhs held up a train, methodically searched all compartments and pulled out 17 Moslems, whom they beheaded on the platform. Most amazing of all was the look of bland satisfaction on the faces of these young Sikh men, their hands dripping blood, their clothes smeared with blood, as they stood and grinned at their handiwork while the train finally pulled out. The only Moslems who escaped on this trip were two who were hidden by two British officers under their baggage.
``A British correspondent traveling in the opposite direction through this territory saw half a dozen lying stabbed on the Lahore platform, slowly dying without any help being given. Later that night, on a small siding south of Amritsar, a band of Sikhs entered his compartment and before his eyes beheaded a Moslem apparently trying to travel disguised as a Hindu. (For identification, both sides use the tried and true means of seeing whether there has been circumcision. Moslems always circumcize, the Hindus and Sikhs practically never.)
``A member of the U.S. Embassy arrived in Lahore from Delhi with another tale of horror. Reaching the small station of Okara, near Montgomery, he found the station platform utterly deserted except for several hundred dead Hindus and Sikhs lying around the platform, apparently slaughtered only a few hours before while waiting for the train to escape. All these people were workers in a textile mill which had been attacked by Moslems. Their bodies were mostly stripped and in several instances limbs had been torn from the bodies. The wife of a British textile factory manager told how a Moslem mob had attacked the Hindu and Sikh workers in another factory. When Moslems broke into the ground floor, the Sikhs slashed the throats of their own wives, and afterwards tried to fight through themselves. All were killed.``
Authorities were utterly unable to cope with the situation. In many cases both Sikh and Moslem police had participated in the riots. British soldiers, present in the Punjab, were not allowed to interfere under the arrangements now in force for Indian independence.
No Plans. For the homeless, crippled refugees, no one had anticipated relief measures. In New Delhi a penniless Hindu woman from the West Punjab clutched her two children, told of her husband`s murder by Moslems. ``Don`t ask her about her plans,`` cautioned a welfare official, ``she hasn`t any and neither have we.``
The rioting was breaking down railroad traffic between parts of India and Pakistan. Unless it was soon restored, both nations, especially Pakistan, would be economically crippled. Fearing that the Punjab rioting would spread, millions of Hindus and Moslems prepared to cross borders in a transfer of population greater than Europe had ever seen.
In his new capital, Karachi, Jinnah preached that ``restraint is necessary.`` However, the fires of communal hatred, which he had fanned for 20 years, were burning too brightly in the Punjab to be easily stifled. They might spread
From the Sep. 8, 1947 issue of TIME magazine
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