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MAPPING PARTITION
“A hugely productive partnership between geography and history, ‘Mapping Partition’ does a great service to the field of Partition studies - it leaves us in no doubt about both the long-term cartographical processes that contributed to how South Asia was divided in 1947, and the importance of bringing a geographer’s insights to bear on this complex history of boundary making.”
Professor Sarah Ansari, Professor of History (South Asia), Royal Holloway University of London
“Fitzpatrick produces spatial readings of partition’s knowledge formations, geopolitical imaginaries, administrative cartography, and legal geographical expertise. These enrich the histories and geographies of partition through painstaking archival, textual, and visual analysis which will resonate far beyond historical geography and South Asian studies.”
Professor Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham
Mapping Partition delivers the first in-depth geographical account of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The book explores the impact of colonial geography and geographers on the boundary, both during the partition process and in the period preceding it.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Hannah Fitzpatrick argues that colonial geographical knowledge underpinned the partition process in heretofore unacknowledged ways. The author also discusses the consequences of placing different ethnic, communal, and linguistic groups onto the colonial map and the growing importance of majority and minority populations in representative democratic politics.
Mapping Partition: Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan is required reading for students and researchers studying geography, colonial and imperial history, South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary border studies.
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Seitenzahl: 460
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Dedication Page 1
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Chapter One: Remapping Partition
Introduction
The Unmaking of British India
Historicising Partition Historiography
Geographies of Empire, Colonialism, and Decolonisation
Critical Cartography and Map Histories
Doing Historical Geographies of Partition
References
Chapter Two: Surveying and Boundary‐Making in Colonial India
Introduction
Constructing Colonial Punjab
Counting, Surveying and Mapping India
Histories of Gazetteers in 19
th
‐Century India
Geography in the Service of Empire
Naming and Placing ‘Difference’
Stephen B. Jones and the Art and Science of Boundary‐Making
Conclusion
References
Chapter Three: Territorialising India and Pakistan
Introduction
Indian Muslim Reform and Revival in the 19
th
Century
The Two‐Nation Theory
Problems of Scale: Difference, Representation and Electoral Politics
The Idea and Geographical Shape of Pakistan, 1930–1947
Choudhary Rahmat Ali and the ‘Continent of Dinia’
Jinnah and the Lahore Declaration
Conclusion
References
Chapter Four: Geographies of the Punjab Boundary Commission
Introduction
The Punjab and Bengal Boundary Commissions
The Terms of Reference for the Boundary Commissions
Challenges to the Terms of Reference
Reading the Maps of the Punjab Boundary Commission
Conclusion
References
Chapter Five: Oskar Spate, the Muslim League and Geographical Expertise
Introduction
Oskar Spate and Geography at the End of Empire
Spate on India Before 1947
Spate and the Boundary Commission
The Case for Qadian to Go to Pakistan
Amritsar: ‘The Key to the Whole Boundary Problem’
Spate’s Strategic Maps and Issues of Defence
Visible Boundaries
Deconstructing the Red Line
Assessing the Sikh Claims
From Lahore to Simla
Conclusion
References
Chapter Six: Partition to Partitions: New Avenues for Historical Geography
Introduction
The Problem with ‘Expertise’
Bridging the Gap: Historical Geographies of Partition
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Partition Boundaries in the Punjab Map depicting notional boundar...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Historical maps of India, 1765 and 1805.
Figure 2.2 Historical Maps of India 1837 and 1857.
Figure 2.3 Prevailing Religions of the British Indian Empire.
Figure 2.4 Prevailing Races of the British Indian Empire.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Continent of Dinia and its Dependencies.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Map of the Punjab, 1931. Map showing areas under direct British a...
Figure 4.2 Official Map of the Punjab Before Partition. The map shows the no...
Figure 4.3 The Congress ‘Red Map’. Showing the Congress‐Sikh and Muslim Leag...
Figure 4.4 The Muslim League Map. The Muslim League map, submitted to the Pu...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Professor O.H.K. Spate.
Figure 5.2 Draft Map of the Punjab from Spate’s Collection. Depicting Muslim...
Figure 5.3 Spate’s Sketch Map. Showing Qadian (K), close to the boundary (de...
Figure 5.4 Spate’s Draft Map Depicting Three possible Corridors from East Pu...
Figure 5.5 Map of the North Western Railway System.
Figure 5.6 Spate’s Draft Strategic Map, showing both Congress‐Sikh and Musli...
Figure 5.7 Draft Map by Spate of Sheikhupura
Tehsil
. Showing Muslim and non‐...
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Dedication Page 1
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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To my mom, with all my love and gratitude.
What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Figure 1.1 Partition Boundaries in the Punjab
Figure 2.1 Historical Maps of India, 1765 and 1805
Figure 2.2 Historical Maps of India, 1837 and 1857
Figure 2.3 Prevailing Religions of the British Indian Empire
Figure 2.4 Prevailing Races of the British Indian Empire
Figure 3.1 Continent of Dinia and its Dependencies
Figure 4.1 Map of the Punjab, 1931
Figure 4.2 Official Map of the Punjab Before Partition
Figure 4.3 The Congress Red Map
Figure 4.4 The Muslim League Map
Figure 5.1 Professor O.h.k. Spate
Figure 5.2 Draft Map of the Punjab from Spate’s Collection
Figure 5.3 Spate’s Sketch Map
Figure 5.4 Spate’s Draft Map Depicting Three Possible Corridors
Figure 5.5 Map of the North Western Railway System
Figure 5.6 Spate’s Draft Strategic Map
Figure 5.7 Draft Map by Spate of Sheikhupura Tehsil
Many people had a hand in supporting this book, as well as its previous iterations as postgraduate and undergraduate research. The initial idea for the project was developed during my time as an undergraduate at Barnard College in New York. It would never have seen the light of day without the support and training I received there, most especially from Rachel McDermott, who I want to be when I grow up. Anupama Rao taught me how to think about empire, while Jack Hawley taught me how to think about religion. Lisa Tiersten and Robert McCaughey nurtured my love for history. At St Andrews, I was supervised by the incomparable Dan Clayton, who believed in this project from the very beginning and who shaped my geographical education more than anyone else. I could not have had a better mentor and teacher.
The School of Geography and Sustainable Development, St Andrews, provided a small grant to obtain some of the archival materials reproduced here. A research incentive grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland in 2016 provided funding for a research trip to the National Library of Australia. I extend my sincere thanks to the many archivists at the National Library of Australia and British Library, Chris Fleet at the National Library of Scotland and Kevin Greenbank at the University of Cambridge Centre of South Asian Studies. Virginia Spate and Andy Spate, with the kind assistance of Jane Mills, very generously granted permission for me to use materials from the Oskar Spate Papers, held at the National Library of Australia. It was a privilege to speak with Virginia Spate about her father's work and his memories of his time working for the Muslim League, and I am grateful to Andy Spate and the family for their continued support and assistance.
Thank you to the editors of the RGS‐IBG book series, especially Ruth Craggs, who supported the manuscript (and me) throughout the process, and Dave Featherstone, who guided me through the proposal process. I am immensely grateful for their assistance and editorial guidance. Many thanks as well to the kind folks at the RGS, including Catherine Souch, Phil Emerson and Anna Lawrence.
Many geographers have supported this book in large and small ways. Satish Kumar and Mike Kesby were constructive and supportive examiners of the PhD, and Satish helped with the initial transition from PhD to book. Thanks also to James Sidaway, Tariq Jazeel, Andy Davies, Charlie Withers, Robert Mayhew, Miles Ogborn and Mike Heffernan. Stephen Legg has been a trusted reader and regular supporter, and I am grateful for his help over the years.
Thanks to colleagues in St Andrews, especially Matt Sothern and Sharon Leahy. I will be forever grateful to Lorna Philip and Caitlin Cottrill, who helped make time for me to visit Canberra while I was a teaching fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Caitlin was a mentor and advocate at a pivotal time in my life, and I will miss her very much. At the University of Edinburgh, thanks especially to Tim Cresswell, Fraser MacDonald, Andy Dugmore, Hayden Lorimer, Sukanya Krishnamurthy, Vaishak Belle, Faten Adam and Kath Will. Thanks also to the excellent historians who have answered questions and shared their knowledge, especially William Gould, Lucy Chester, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Gyanesh Kudaisya and Matthew Edney.
Anindya Raychaudhuri has been a steadfast colleague and friend since the moment we met, and both the book and my life would be diminished without his immense generosity. Thanks to excellent friends Alex Gnanapragasam, Angela Roberts, Hamish Kallin, Clare Raychaudhuri, Miriam Gay‐Antaki and Emmy Pierce. My heartfelt thanks to Fiona, who created the extra space I needed.
My family has been rooting for me from the finish line for many years, including my late grandfather Jack, who remembered 1947 and believed in the importance of my work. Love and thanks to Dad, Terri, Mike and Kelli. Tom has been my most loyal champion and a true partner in every sense of the word. He asked, ‘What about the dog?’ and he is correct, Ketchup the cocker spaniel was my writing companion. She is the best good girl.
My final thanks are to my mom, who gave me everything. This book is for her.
On 14 August 1947, Pakistan celebrated its first day of independence in its new capital, Karachi. Crowds of people celebrated in the street, raising and waving flags and cheering ‘Pakistan Zindabad!’ (‘Long Live Pakistan!’) as the new prime minister of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, drove through the streets in a State procession accompanied by the last British viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. ‘Spirits were high’, one observer recalled, as ‘officials who had opted for Pakistan were pouring in’, already beginning the work of establishing the government and ‘working in improvised offices’ (Spate, 1991, pp. 58–59).
Despite the celebrations, the festivities ‘were on a modest scale’, charged with a sense of uncertainty, as the geopolitical partition of the subcontinent had only just begun to take shape (Spate, 1991, p. 59). The official map of the new borders had not yet been made public. People checked newspapers and public notice boards for graphic evidence of independence – for a map – and for official news to reach towns, villages and local government offices. And the uncertainty was accompanied by threats and outbreaks of violence: Mountbatten had reported news of a bomb plot targeting Jinnah during their official drive to Government House in Karachi on 14 August. Despite the threat, the new leader of Pakistan insisted on the procession, and so even as ‘the route was lined with enthusiastic crowds’, the police and military presence was a reminder of the very real fear and uncertainty facing the new states of Pakistan and India (Mansergh 1983, p. 771). There were rumours of riots, explosions and scores of refugees crossing the new eastern and western borders of India and Pakistan. The celebrations were joyful, yet they were intermingled with fear, sadness and the imminent threat of violence.
Such fears were not unfounded. It has been estimated that roughly 14.5 million people migrated across borders in the four years following Partition, and that between two and three million people were killed or went missing (Bharadwaj et al., 2009). Kudaisya (1996) puts the number of migrants even higher, at over 18 million. The majority of migrants crossed the western boundary, with approximately 73% arriving in the Punjab (Waseem, 1999, p. 203). Those that arrived on both sides recounted stories of terrible violence, the abduction of women, and the killing, torture and rape of neighbours, relatives and strangers. Even for those who did not directly experience or witness the violence, the atmosphere was permeated by anxiety and insecurity. Even at the elite levels, the business of constitution‐writing and nation‐building that lay ahead was intertwined with a sense of territorial indeterminacy and uncertainty. The new borders were eventually announced on 17 August, two days after Indian independence and three days after Pakistani independence. On Independence Day, the border lines had been drawn, but only a select few, stationed elsewhere, knew their course (Figure 1.1).
This is a book about those borders. It is about how those borders were drawn and enacted in a rush in the summer of 1947, but also how they were imagined in multiple and contested ways during the prior decades of the 20th century, and about how their foundations were slowly and subtly brought into being in the 19th century. The book recovers and examines cartographic and territorial imaginaries of India at work from the late 19th century in order to trace the historically constructed discourses of ethnic, religious and geographical difference which permeated political discourses of distinctiveness and separation. Rather than follow the line of thinking summed up by Sumathi Ramaswamy that, ‘although the Partition of India was arguably precipitated by nongeographic and extraterritorial factors, the actual determination and drawing of the new boundary lines was a cartographic act’, I argue that geographical knowledge and colonial cartography were in fact at play prior to the actual drawing of the borders in July and August 1947 (2017, p. 290). In doing so, I construct a detailed story that takes a longer view of the geographical genealogy of Partition in order to trace the ways in which the geographical logic that was mobilised for the consolidation and administration of British India was the same logic that gave rise to the social, political and spatial conditions of Partition. The book also shows how a longer historical geographical account, which incorporates both the 19th and 20th centuries, can inform new ways of conceptualising the geographies of Partition, as well as uncover as‐yet under‐examined histories of geography in British India. This empirical investigation opens up new ways of understanding the events of 1947 as being more than simply a succession of interrelated decisions, negotiations and episodes which created a new spatial order. Rather, I show how those physical and imaginative Indian spaces which Partition was designed to administer and reorder were in fact a dynamic and active component of the partitioning process. I argue that the spatial and discursive arenas in which borders are imagined, contested, drawn and enforced are deeply political sites within which both states and subjects are reconstituted.
Figure 1.1 Partition Boundaries in the Punjab Map depicting notional boundary (east) and the boundary demarcated by Punjab Boundary Commission (west).
Source: British Library, Report on the last Viceroyalty, 22nd March‐15th August 1947 by Rear Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, KG, PC, GMSI, GCIE, GCVO, KCB, DSO. IOR/L/PJ/5/396 / CC BY 4.0.
As this introduction will show, there are already many books about Partition. Why write another? Why write it now? This book grew out of the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the often intricately detailed and theoretically complicated debates on Partition that have taken place among historians and other scholars of the subcontinent for many decades and, on the other, the relative paucity of a sustained engagement with the topic among human geographers. How could human geography, a discipline to which historical geographers have contributed so much, not have produced a community of scholars concerned with one of the most significant geographical events of the 20th century? In the past few years, historians have embraced a ‘spatial turn’, concerning themselves more deeply with the role that space and place play in the past and our interpretation of it, and this includes historians of Partition. Sarah Ansari and William Gould highlight the importance of place in the introduction to their 2019 book on citizenship in the newly partitioned nation‐states of India and Pakistan, Boundaries of Belonging: ‘Ignoring the spatial turn of the last couple of decades is no longer a realistic option for historians’ (Ansari and Gould, 2019, p. 4). Historical geographers, similarly, are engaging more systematically with historical geographies of the 20th century, including vital work on decolonisation (Clayton, 2020; Craggs, 2014; Ferretti, 2020). Yet there remains no historical geography of the political and legal process of Partition, nor is there a geographical account of the role of geographical knowledge and practice in the making of the boundary. What would historical geography have to say, not only about Partition but about how scholars might study Partition, if its methods and modes of inquiry were brought to bear on the Partition archive and the already crowded field of Partition literature?
This book attempts to bridge this gap by recasting the material spaces and spatial practices of Partition, and by probing the ways in which space (broadly construed to encompass large‐scale territorial units and small‐scale rooms in courthouses, homes and offices) was both contingent and constitutive during the Partition process. Much of the literature on Partition has illustrated with great efficacy and rigour the many ways in which Partition precipitated the reconstitution of identity, very often wrought through the physical act of migration from one side of the new borders to the other, and was shot through by trauma and violence (e.g. Butalia, 1998; Khan, 2007; Menon and Bhasin, 1998; Pandey, 2001). I do not seek to challenge these powerful narratives. Rather, I argue that a more sustained engagement with the history and development of geographical practice, specifically with regard to surveying, cartography and boundary‐making in the context of Partition, and of British India more generally, allows for a different way of understanding violence and trauma wrought by the Empire and by Partition. By examining the productive capacity of space, we can draw a more explicit link between the epistemic violence of Empire as articulated by postcolonial writers, and the physical and psychological trauma associated with the violence of Partition.
I show how notions of ‘Indian territory’ continued to develop during the later colonial period, and probe how the spatial imaginaries which underpinned British governmentality in late colonial India were refracted through Indian reformist and nationalist narratives of ‘India’. I contend that these earlier spatial imaginaries informed the eventual Partition process in 1947. This historical orientation, I argue, allows for a new mode of interrogating both the geographical and political processes at work during the informal meetings, courthouse sessions and formal negotiations involved in the boundary settlement of 1947, and opens up new possibilities for understanding the logics, techniques and exigencies that characterised the territorial re‐ordering at the heart of India’s and Pakistan’s passage to independence. This book builds on and contributes to three distinct intellectual projects. First, the book adds a distinctly geographical approach to the Partition studies literature (a term used here as shorthand to refer to the historical, anthropological and political scholarship on the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan), not only through its analysis of maps and geographical materials but also in its emphasis on the histories of colonial geography as technical practice and mode of knowledge production. Second, the book is the first to contribute an extended account of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan to the critical literature in historical geography on geography, empire and decolonisation, particularly its postcolonial theoretical framing. And third, in both its empirical focus on maps, geographical data and narratives of spatial imagining and its theoretical postcolonial framing, the book is situated within the tradition of critical histories of cartography literature, which brings postmodernist, poststructuralist and postcolonial modes of analysis to the history and practice of mapping.
The most significant empirical contribution of the book takes up the issue, identified in both scholarly and popular accounts of Partition, of the lack of geographical expertise consulted during the boundary commission hearings in Bengal and the Punjab, either in the form of an academic geographer or a government official with practical experience in boundary‐making. There were, in fact, geographers who participated in the process in various ways during the summer of 1947. One of those geographers, Oskar Spate, had been employed by the Muslim League in the Punjab to assist in the development of their official arguments to the Punjab Boundary Commission. His role is acknowledged in some work on Partition (e.g. Tan and Kudaisya, 2002), and Lucy Chester (2009) makes very effective use of his personal diaries from 1947. But his geographical contribution to, and position within, the boundary commission has generally been unexplored. Intriguingly, and perhaps even more surprisingly, given Spate’s illustrious career and foundational contributions to the discipline of geography, historical geographers have also overlooked Spate’s connection to the Muslim League. On both counts, this is a significant oversight, and one I seek to rectify here, through the recovery of and work on a cache of previously unused archival material.
The rest of this introductory chapter proceeds as follows. First, I briefly sketch the historical background of Partition, in order to show the complexity of the story as well as the dynamic and volatile atmosphere of the final years of British rule in India. This provides historical context for the next section, where I outline the broad contours of the complex field of scholarship on Partition, highlighting the relative scarcity of interventions by geographers. This is then followed by an overview of the ways that geographers have engaged with the wider questions of empire, colonialism and decolonisation, in order to situate this project firmly in both fields. Most importantly, I situate this study of Partition within the critical history of cartography tradition, which has deep connections with the postcolonial and poststructuralist work of historical geographers and historians of mapping and empire. Throughout the book, I return to the concepts and approaches developed and refined by historical geographers of cartography and mapping in two primary ways: first, to re‐read scholarly accounts of Partition through a lens of critical cartography, and second, as a lens to analyse the primary source material produced here. Finally, I set out the structure of the book and introduce the archival sources that form the basis of the empirical research presented in the book.
The process of independence involved the significant reordering of territory, the creation of an entirely new nation‐state and the transfer of power to two new governments. The official process of Partition and the formal transfer of power was conducted within the space of two months. On 3 June, just two months before Jinnah and Mountbatten rode through the streets of Karachi, a radio announcement broadcast across India declared that British imperial rule in India would come to an end and that Independence would be granted to the Indian people (Khan, 2007). In the intervening weeks, one of the most significant geopolitical events of the 20th century was negotiated and enacted, including the making of one of the most fraught boundaries currently in existence. Scholars have, rightfully, been both fascinated and dismayed by the speed with which the borders were drawn and published, while mainstream and popular accounts of Partition often frame the boundary‐making process in similar terms. ‘Arbitrary and artificial – established in haste’ wrote Sarfraz Manzoor in The Guardian in 2016. Marking the 60th anniversary of Partition, the writer Pankaj Mishra recounted in 2007 in The New Yorker Mountbatten’s decision to ‘abruptly… bring forward the British government’s original schedule [for the transfer of power] by nine months’. Mishra sums up the takeaway from this story succinctly: ‘his decision is partly to blame for the disasters that followed’ (Mishra, 2007).
Despite the rushed timeline of the Partition itself, the political path to independence was much longer, and part of the wider, complex and rapidly shifting political, social and economic contexts of the time. The June announcement was preceded by a number of failed attempts by nationalist leaders and the British government to agree on a plan for independence, as well as increasing public agitation and outbreaks of violence in India. As Yasmin Khan (2007) notes, independence occurred within a post‐war global context of economic hardship and political upheaval: mass food shortages and famine, the return en‐masse of Indian soldiers from war‐torn Europe, memories of unkept promises of independence by the British Government, and the release of Congress party leaders from prison all contributed to the rush towards a transfer of power. The Independence movement had diversified as more players entered the arena. Marxist and communist groups, Hindu nationalists, scheduled caste groups, entrenched regional political parties and others all worked to mobilise Indians and popularise ideals of independence. Meanwhile, post‐war circumstances in Britain meant an overwhelming Labour victory in Westminster, led by Clement Attlee, and a sea change in Indian policy.
Politics in India were similarly shifting. There had, from the beginning of British involvement in the subcontinent, been anticolonial feeling and action among Indians towards the British. But the final stage of centralised and organised anticolonial and nationalist politics began in earnest in the 1880s, with the founding of the Indian National Congress, which was to become the political party that would assume power in India upon independence in 1947. The party of Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress from its founding had framed its mission as representing the interests of all Indians, no matter their background or identity, and insisted that, while the majority of Indians were Hindu, Congress politics were secular and the party’s membership was open to all. But criticism and opposition came from a variety of positions and places. Prominent among them were the All‐India Muslim League, founded in 1906 by a group of elite Muslim intellectuals and politicians predominantly from the United Provinces in north India. The League argued that the Congress’ position of universal inclusion and representation could not overcome the problem of electoral democracy for minorities in India. Dalit leaders mounted a similar criticism, arguing that the Congress did not adequately represent the interests of scheduled castes. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists, many of whom were affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founded in 1925, argued that Indian identity and Hinduism were inextricably linked and that India was fundamentally Hindu. The Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist organisation within Congress, split from Congress in 1933 to become an independent political party. Meanwhile, regional parties like the Unionist Party in the large province of Punjab were suspicious of an overly strong central government, and worked to build regional alliances across identity‐based communities to retain power at the regional scale.
Over the course of the first decades of the 20th century, Indian nationalist movements worked in competition and collaboration with one another, creating dynamic spaces of debate, dissent, protest and negotiation. By the mid‐1940s, it was increasingly clear to the British government and the Indian parties’ leadership that independence would be granted to India. The arguments honed in on what that independence would look like, and what form the new Indian government should take. Before the Second World War, the Congress Party was the most powerful of the Indian nationalist parties. In 1942, however, Congress leaders were imprisoned by the British Government over their connection to the Quit India Movement, a civil disobedience campaign for independence. During this period, the Muslim League managed to chip away at the Congress Party’s hold over the Independence movement and to build a solid base of power among Indian Muslims. Jinnah, who had been working since the 1930s to rebuild the Muslim League, win seats for League candidates and create a political party with the authority to represent Indian Muslims, finally succeeded in proving to the British Government that he had a legitimate role to play in the transfer of power.
The elections of 1945 marked a significant moment in the transition process for a number of reasons. For historian Yasmin Khan (2007), the elections were the Indian people’s first taste of democracy and introduction to self‐rule. Shot through with ballot fraud, bribery, coercion and limited access, the elections were far from ‘legitimate’ by contemporary standards. But for Khan, this was self‐rule in action, and it set the stage for the eventual takeover of regional assemblies, bureaucracies and institutions by the victorious parties in 1946. Additionally, the Muslim League’s unprecedented and overwhelming success in the 1945–1946 elections became the most powerful card in Jinnah’s hand when Britain officially withdrew from India; Jinnah had become, in Ayesha Jalal’s (1994) words, ‘the sole spokesman’ for Indian Muslims.
Meanwhile, communal tensions continued to escalate across north India. On 16 August 1946, Jinnah and the Muslim League called for a day of ‘Direct Action’ where Muslim businesses would close and Muslims would gather in public places to make known their political will for the creation of Pakistan. What followed was one of the most infamous and violent series of riots in British India. Bengal in particular was caught up in the waves of communal violence (Khan, 2007). As tensions grew and episodes of violence became more systematised and organised, the British government and Indian nationalist leaders grew increasingly desperate to find a solution.
The British Government attempted, through a series of missions, to build a framework through which power would be transferred to the Indian political parties. All of these missions maintained at their core the idea of a united India. The final mission, the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, eventually failed when Congress, under Nehru’s leadership, chose to reject its terms. Jinnah, however, was prepared to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan, sparking scholarly interest in Jinnah’s true motives for supporting the Pakistan demand (Jalal, 1994).
After the 11th‐hour failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy in February of 1947 and charged with the task of facilitating the withdrawal of the British Government from the subcontinent and transferring power to Indian leaders. It was decided that the boundaries would be drawn by two boundary commissions, one each for Bengal and the Punjab, which meant that when independence came, India and Pakistan would thus share not one but two international borders. The historical and geographical implications of this dual Partition have been tremendously significant. After the 3 June radio announcement, Mountbatten, Jinnah and Nehru began the process of determining the structure and remit of the boundary commissions. Each of the boundary commissions would be comprised of a chair and four Indian justices. Nehru insisted that the four judges on each commission be of ‘high judicial standing’, and that they should represent the primary populations and parties at play (Sadullah, 1983, p. viii). The Congress Party and Muslim League therefore were central in the nomination of each of the judges for each of the commissions. The four judges were hardly neutral players, of course, and were the ones who took the keenest interest in the way their respective parties’ arguments to the boundary commissions were constructed (Chester, 2009).
Both boundary commissions, it was agreed, would be chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a highly regarded London lawyer. The commissions would hold simultaneous semi‐public hearings in Lahore and Calcutta, where representatives of interested parties would be invited to submit memoranda and present arguments to the justices. One of the most curious and widely cited facts about Radcliffe was that he was not a boundary‐making expert and he had not previously visited India. He was unfamiliar with the geography of this vast colonial domain and had only scant knowledge of the political and ideological battles between Indian nationalist groups that had led to the decision to divide British India into two independent nation‐states. The India‐Pakistan boundary still bears his name – it is known as the ‘Radcliffe line’ – and he has variously been understood as elusive; disinterested (both in the sense of being fair‐minded and detached from colonial and nationalist emotions and intrigues); as a pawn in an Indian (specifically Hindu‐Muslim) power struggle; and as an imperial bureaucrat and overseer whose influence was hedged by complex political forces (Chester, 2009).
Despite this criticism of Radcliffe’s lack of geographic credentials by scholars and other commentators today, Jinnah and Nehru both consented to Radcliffe’s nomination as chair, believing that his lack of knowledge and familiarity with India would make him a more neutral and objective arbiter (Sadullah, 1983). He was assisted by two secretaries, V.D. Ayer Rao and H.C. Beaumont. Both had for many years served in the Indian Civil Service and were appointed in order to provide Radcliffe with an expert knowledge of India. Although Radcliffe met briefly with members of each boundary commission before the hearings began, he chose not to attend either set of hearings as they took place concurrently, and as an effort in his mind to maintain his neutrality. He preferred to work at a distance from the cut and thrust of the legal and political debate, with arguments and evidence flown to him in Delhi after each day’s proceedings. He also heard individual arguments from each judge after the hearings had finished (Spate, 1991). His award was published on 17 August 1947, but violence had already escalated in the first two weeks of August. The two‐day delay in the announcement of the award did not help stem the tide of aggression and brutality. Even before the award was officially announced, the communal violence and mass migration which has become so emblematic of Partition historiography had begun. Radcliffe left the country immediately, saying he could never return and destroying all of his papers relating to his work as chair of the boundary commissions (Chester, 2009).
The intricacies and intrigues of British‐imperial and Indian high politics, combined with the catastrophic violence and mass migration which attended the geopolitical act of partition, have spawned an array of interpretations and debates regarding the process and legacies of Partition from different ends of the social and political spectrum. The processes precipitating the creation of the new national borders, and the events that followed the August decision (both immediately and in the longer run), have been the subject of multiple tellings and re‐tellings of Partition. These narratives and interpretations are the crux of an eclectic (Indian and Pakistani; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh; metropolitan and colonial; elite and subaltern; academic and popular) specialist literature on the subject. In recent years, this literature has played a significant role in the configuration of a wider border studies literature that envisions physical and symbolic borders and boundaries as integral to contemporary problems of cultural identity, nationhood, migration, democracy and human rights, and to configurations of sovereignty, state power and resistance in a putatively ‘borderless’ age of globalisation.
This section introduces the broad thematic and methodological debates in the scholarly literature on the Partition of India and Pakistan. Partition studies itself has a history. A crowded field, historical accounts of Partition have been written since the ‘moment’ of Partition itself. Indian nationalists and British witnesses, many of whom were bureaucrats or civil servants, wrote their own accounts of the years leading up to Partition, of the summer of August 1947, and of the aftermath. This is the period, between 1947 and roughly 1980, in which official and more traditional historical accounts of Partition were consolidated and canonised. Importantly, Partition entered official and semi‐official state historiographies of India and Pakistan in relation to particular nationalist and communal ideologies and discourses and helped develop them. In many cases (and certainly in the most famous cases), these authors were current or former members of government. Eyewitness accounts from the founders and thinkers of the new nation‐states, therefore, became seminal for those whose job it was to bring these newly independent countries into the international community and global economy. As early as 1949, Partition was being narrated officially by those who had observed it from various vantage points. Indian accounts included G.D. Khosla’s Stern Reckoning (1949), V.P. Menon’s The Transfer of Power in India (1957) and Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah’s account of the Muslim independence movement in Bengal and the establishment of Bengal, From Purdah to Parliament (1963, 1998). British accounts of Partition written from the perspective of colonial officials included Penderel Moon’s Divide and Quit (1962), H.V. Hodson’s The Great Divide (1969), Christopher Birdwood’s India and Pakistan: A Continent Decides (1954) and E.W.R. Lumby’s The Transfer of Power in India (1954). The journalists Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ often cited Freedom at Midnight (1975) recounts Mountbatten’s role (largely from interviews) and positions Mountbatten’s memories as a faithful and accurate narrative of Partition. And finally, one of the most significant eyewitness accounts was produced by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a prominent Muslim member of the Congress party during the decades leading to independence. He completed India Wins Freedom in 1958, but it was not made available to the public until 1988.
The proliferation of more critical academic treatments of Partition began in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of these began to move away from official and explicitly ideological renderings of their subject to foster more critical and revisionist approaches. Most prominent among these is undoubtedly Ayesha Jalal’s (1994) The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. A path‐breaking revisionist work, Jalal looked afresh at, and in some respects recovered for the first time, the complexity of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s political strategies and leadership of the All‐India Muslim League. Her chiefly archival findings and argument challenged the accepted historical narrative, which held that Jinnah and the League were so intractable in negotiations that Pakistan became the only acceptable outcome. This narrative placed the blame for Partition primarily on Jinnah and his League supporters, absolving Nehru’s Congress Party and Mountbatten himself of responsibility. Jalal showed that Jinnah had spent the 20 years leading up to independence attempting to consolidate a diverse and diffuse Muslim political community in India through the vehicle of a run‐down and barely functioning political party (the All‐India Muslim League). Even more astounding was her contention that Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan was a ‘bargaining chip’. She argued that Pakistan was a political card that Jinnah hoped to play in order to force the Congress’ hand in agreeing to more legal and institutional protections for minorities, and, in particular, the sizeable Muslim minority, in a de‐centralised but still unified independent India. The idea that Jinnah could, in fact, disagree with the demand for Pakistan and that his support for it was rooted in a more complex series of political manoeuvres, departed significantly from official narratives of the Independence movement and transfer of power. Jalal’s work led the way for critical historiographical accounts of Partition that challenged colonial and nationalist narratives about the varied concepts and themes that much of the earlier work took for granted, including religious identity and communalism, hagiographies of prominent individuals and, importantly, where responsibility for Partition should be located (e.g. Ahmed, 1997; Chatterji, 1994; Page, 2002).
There has simultaneously been a proliferation of other works that depart significantly from the ‘high politics’ approach to Partition that imbues early and official historiography. They lean more towards regional or local politics and popular and oral histories, and emphasise the human drama and trauma of Partition. This shift away from official and institutional archival sources was subject to critique because it reframed the agenda away from identifying a seemingly more accurate and nuanced picture of how Partition came about and towards a multiplicity of irreconcilable narratives of experience rooted in memory and testimony. By the turn of the 21st century, debates about methodology as well as interpretation and narration had developed considerably (Pandey, 2001). Ian Talbot argues that much of this work grew out of the experience of ‘communal violence in India during the 1980s’ which ‘encouraged a number of activists and scholars to draw parallels with Partition’ and do so within the analytical framework and timeline of ‘living memory’ (2006, p. 4). At the vanguard of this movement were feminist scholars Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon, whose work recovered the experiences of women during and after Partition. Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (1998) and Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition emphasised a methodology of ‘history from below’ (1998, p. 8). This work introduced the notion that most people whose lives were irrevocably altered by Partition had been excluded from most accounts of it. Violence and trauma now occupy a particular place in the literature on Partition. The feminist work above necessarily engages deeply with the experiences of violence, as well as the methodological challenges of articulating and narrating memories of violence. Paul Brass (2003) has written about Partition violence in Punjab in terms of genocide, as a way of understanding both the violence itself and of clarifying our understandings of collective violence.
In conversation with the feminist approaches and work focused on violence and trauma studies, there is also a strand of Partition literature that stems from the school of Subaltern Studies, which is a collective of primarily historians who formed in the early 1980s, which also attempts to historicise and spatialise the trauma and violence of this event in different and more holistic ways. In a historicist mode, subalternists like Gyanendra Pandey (2001) argue that Partition violence should not be conceived as an exceptional ‘blip’, or an unexpected or uncharacteristic moment in an otherwise glorious South Asian history, but as both a historical event and a collection of malleable and shifting meanings through which contemporary conflict and moments of violence in India are refracted and written into nationalist myths and historiographies. For Pandey and his colleagues, the disjuncture between studies of the high politics of Partition and the quotidian violence of Partition (and the debates over the legitimacy and quality of methodologies and sources which grow out of this disjuncture) prohibits scholars from dealing effectively with the ways in which Partition as event and Partition as memory are intertwined in processes of Indian nationalist myth‐making (Pandey, 2001). He says, ‘The current debate on the vexed question of memory and history, in fact, tells us more than a little about the relationship between nation and history, and history and state power’ (2001, p. 7). Pandey’s work is a relatively theoretical engagement with the relationship between violence, remembering and forgetting, and the implications of these for writing Partition historiography, but he points to other forms of recording memory, including oral histories, which have also been central to the empirical project of reckoning with the violence.
Reflecting David Gilmartin’s (1998) call to move beyond the high politics/history from below division, much historiographical work now aims to bridge the gap between the high politics of Partition and the ways that Partition shaped the lives of people who lived through it. One of the most successful examples of such work is Yasmin Khan’s (2007) The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007). Not only does Khan analyse Partition at multiple scales, she shows how events that took place in one arena had consequences in another. Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh’s (2009) account brought into a single frame the causes and legacies of Partition, allowing for a more nuanced appreciation of Partition as a set of processes that represented both rupture and continuation. Some work has honed in on the importance of scale, moving away from the national scale to examine Partition’s causes and legacies at the regional or city scale. Studies of the Punjab have been well represented in the literature (Ahmed, 2012; Chester, 2009; Gilmartin, 1988; Jalal, 1998; Singh and Talbot, 1997; Virdee, 2017). Meanwhile, Joya Chatterji (1994, 2007) challenged the dominance of the Punjab in Partition historiography by fixing her attention on the eastern border in Bengal, while Talbot and Singh (1999) have engaged a comparative approach. Sarah Ansari (2005), meanwhile, considers the legacies of Partition in Sindh, in Pakistan. Ansari and William Gould (2019) have more recently considered the significance of comparison across the border, examining how in Sindh and Uttar Pradesh, the Indian and Pakistani states were both in the process of creating new citizens. Vazira Fazila Zamindar’s (2007) excellent The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories similarly illustrates how high‐level attempts at state‐making, through the creation of passports and the transfer of property, were both experienced and shaped by contingencies on the ground.
As in Zamindar’s account, migration and mobilities have become more prominent themes in scholarship on Partition, including themes of intergenerational experiences of displacement and familial remembering and forgetting. Haimanti Roy’s (2013) Partitioned Lives: migrants, refugees, citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–65 also examines how the state produced citizens, focusing more specifically on Bengal and the eastern border. Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi’s (2004) collection People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post‐Colonial Migration places Partition migration within the wider context of mobilities that were both facilitated and forced by colonial capitalism, Partition, and postcolonial political economy.
Many accounts of migration make effective use of oral history, demonstrating how personal testimony can illuminate the ways that everyday social lives and cultural practices were transformed by the geopolitical and bureaucratic processes taking place in government offices. Much of this work also utilises literature, art and film alongside oral history to furnish narratives of Partition that move beyond traditional scholarly modes of writing. Pippa Virdee (2013) illustrates how oral histories produce unique forms of narrating and understanding troubling and violent pasts in the context of Partition. Gera Anjali Roy and Nandi Bhatia’s (2008) Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement examines displacement and the making of home in just this way. Ayesha Jalal’s (2013) account of her uncle, the writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s life, analyses a selection of his fiction in the context of her family archive, illustrating how Manto reflected Partition as he witnessed it in his stories. Anindya Raychaudhuri’s (2019) Narrating South Asian Partition reads an extensive oral history collection alongside cultural representation of Partition in film and literature to examine how collective memory of Partition is formed through the imbrication of lived experience with cultural texts. He opens his book with a story about a conversation he had with his mother, declaring at the start that autobiography is central to his method, and there is a growing trend for scholars of Partition to frame their readings of Partition memory in terms of their own. Aanchal Malhotra’s (2019) Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided, which presents memories through the telling of stories about objects that migrants brought with them, begins with an interaction with her grandmother. Neeti Nair (2011), meanwhile, reflects in her opening pages on how an encounter with a document in the archive unsettled her inherited knowledge of Partition.
There are fewer explicitly geographical and spatial analyses of Partition, although there have been some notable and highly significant interventions. Lucy Chester’s (2009) groundbreaking Borders and Conflict in South Asia was the first archival account to take the boundary commissions themselves seriously. She argues that one of the reasons the boundary commissions have been sidelined in the historiography is because they have not been seen as critical to understanding either the causes or the outcomes of Partition. She shows how the making of the commissions, as well as the drama of the hearings themselves, were in fact contingent and did have a bearing on how the process was completed. One of her strongest contributions is her archival work on Cyril Radcliffe, showing how he might be re‐inserted into the narrative of Partition in a way that neither vilifies him nor denies his impact. More recently, William Gould and Stephen Legg (2019) have edited a special collection, ‘Spaces before Partition’, that shows how multi‐scalar historical study can help us understand how spatial reordering in the years before Partition impacted the eventual Partition itself. The collection emphasises geographical modes of analysis, demonstrating how scholars can use scale to unpack complex and often contradictory social and political boundary‐making processes.
Meanwhile, a few notable and relatively isolated studies in political geography indicate that the politics of Partition are of relevance to political geographers. One of the earliest works in political geography, produced by Thomas Fraser (1984