Midnight, August 14, 1947 and hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent suddenly found themselves in a new nation: now-independent India, or the just-created Pakistan.
That much is familiar history. But the midnight deadline wasn’t as decisive as it may seem: Britain’s man on the ground, the Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had ordered that the exact borderline between the two nations be kept under wraps until a few days after partition, to “divert odium from the British”. So when the clock ticked past midnight, all those millions of people knew they were in a different country, but many didn’t know just what country that was.
Mountbatten’s decision seems to sum up the careless, chaotic way in which Britain shrugged off an empire that was once the jewel in its crown.
And what an empire. At its peak, the Indian Empire – the Raj as they called it back then – stretched all the way east from Aden (now in Yemen) to the southern tip of Burma some 6000km away in a straight line. Almost twice the size of modern India, it was home to four-fifths of the people in the British Empire.
Or, in author Sam Dalrymple’s words, less than a century ago “a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were bound together under a single imperial banner”. A quarter of the world’s people lived there, using Indian rupees as their common currency and entitled to passports stamped “Indian Empire”.
This is the story of how that vast empire came apart, shattered by five partitions that created 12 nation states, and the often-tragic consequences that continue today.
The breakup began with the first two partitions on April Fools’ Day, 1937, when Burma and Aden were carved out from India to become separate colonies though not yet independent. Next came the main event, the 1947 separation of India and Pakistan. That was followed in the same year by what Dalrymple calls “the partition of Princely India”, when the 565 – yes, 565 – maharajas, sheikhs, nizams, nawabs and other traditional rulers who still controlled vast swathes of territory were persuaded, or forced, to join India or Pakistan. And finally, in 1971, Pakistan was torn apart and East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
And with each split, people suddenly found themselves in the “wrong” place, no longer wanted in what had been their country and facing violence, famine and ethnic cleansing.
In Burma, for example, separation from the Raj was followed by murderous anti-Indian pogroms, shops being broken up, mixed-race children harassed, and a propaganda campaign by a Burmese politician who was a keen Adolf Hitler fan. Unsurprisingly, many people of Indian ancestry decided to leave, even if their families had been in Burma for generations.
To this day, Burma’s government still persecutes the group known as the Rohingya, who were classified as “Indian foreigners” post-separation and thus not wanted in the new nation.
At least Burma’s split from India was planned well ahead of time. The India-Pakistan partition was arranged in less than three months – “haphazardly”, says Dalrymple, with considerable understatement.
In June 1947, Mountbatten dropped a bombshell when he announced the division would be moved forward: not June 1948 as expected, but August 1947, just 10 weeks away. “The date I chose came out of the blue,” he later recalled.
The resulting chaos was hardly surprising. (It was obviously no surprise to Cyril Radcliffe, the British civil servant who drew up the new nations’ borders: with the job done, he burnt his papers, refused his fee and fled in fear, declaring, “there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me.”
With partition, vast numbers of people left their homes and switched countries. By the end of 1947, an estimated 20 million had crossed the so-called Radcliffe Line between India and Pakistan – “no other migration in human history comes close”, says Dalrymple – as the two nations’ citizens set about murdering each other.
Writer Saadat Hasan Manto described the carnage he saw: “Before our eyes lie dried tracks of blood, cut up human parts, charred faces, mangled necks, terrified people, looted houses, burnt fields, mountains of rubble and overflowing hospitals. We are free. Hindustan is free. Pakistan is free, and we are walking the desolate streets naked without any possessions in utter distress.”
It was the turn of East and West Pakistan to be ripped apart 24 years later in the “Civil War”, “Liberation War” or “Third Indo-Pakistan War”, depending what side you’re on. Estimates of the death toll vary wildly: anything from 300,000 to 3 million Bengalis were killed and hundreds of thousands of women raped in an organised campaign of sexual violence.
“What is more certain is that in a matter of months, some 10 million refugees crossed into India and that by the end of the year hundreds of thousands of people had been rendered stateless,” writes Dalrymple.
Disassembling an empire was always going to be a convoluted business, and at times this account veers dangerously close to that old definition of history: “Just one damned thing after another.”
But that’s a minor criticism. Dalrymple – and yes, he is the son of author William Dalrymple, master of the subcontinental historical epic – has spent many hours in the archives, in several languages, and does a fine job of bringing to light the memories of people caught up in the turmoil, as well as the twists and turns of official policy.
His message is that the borders we now accept as natural were anything but. He’s not mourning the Raj, but what might have followed it: some sort of unity among former members of the empire, rather than today’s states, “born resentful of one another and suspicious of their minorities”.
