Speaker 1: Warning. The following episode contains stories of extreme violence. Have
Speaker 1: you ever walked the streets of a city or town
Speaker 1: the day after a parade or some other large event
Speaker 1: took place. You may see a cleanup crew or an
Speaker 1: overflowing trash can, maybe some stray balloons, no matter how
Speaker 1: joyous the occasion may have been. The next day, those
Speaker 1: areas tend to look a little apocalyptic, but you know
Speaker 1: they'll be as good as new in no time. Now,
Speaker 1: imagine this scenario, but instead of remnants of confetti and decorations,
Speaker 1: the streets are littered with corpses and blood is heavily
Speaker 1: drenched in the soil. Last week, you heard me talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about what happened when the people of
Speaker 1: India found out their country was going to be divided.
Speaker 1: But what about some of the events that took place
Speaker 1: before that? Many communal fights and riots broke out, most
Speaker 1: notably on August seventeenth, ninety six, a day known as
Speaker 1: Direct Action Day. What started out as a pressure tactic
Speaker 1: against the British ended up in absolute carnage. From I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, I'm Nehasis and this is partition a podcast
Speaker 1: that will take a closer look into this often forgotten
Speaker 1: part of history. The idea behind Direct Action Day, an
Speaker 1: event that took place exactly a year before the boundary
Speaker 1: line was announced, came from Mohammad Ali Jinna, the future
Speaker 1: founder of Pakistan. Jinna wanted to ensure the British knew
Speaker 1: that the Muslim League wanted a separate country and the
Speaker 1: transfer of power took place. He called for all Muslims
Speaker 1: to close their shops and take part in demonstrations. However,
Speaker 1: it was never quite clear what those demonstrations should be,
Speaker 1: and in the end, massive looting and destruction transpired. Author
Speaker 1: Nasidha Jari paints the grewsome picture in Midnight's Furies m
Speaker 1: hm m h. None the Law first noticed something was
Speaker 1: wrong when the cows sleeping in the middle of the
Speaker 1: road struggled to their feet to avoid an early morning
Speaker 1: street car. The normally packed tram that clanged past was
Speaker 1: completely empty. Nobody was heading to work instead. A half
Speaker 1: dozen trucks followed, filled with angry bearded men carrying brick
Speaker 1: bats and bottles. For a moment, None the Law watched,
Speaker 1: frozen in place as the thugs piled out and ransacked
Speaker 1: a nearby furniture store owned by a Hindu like himself.
Speaker 1: They tossed mattresses and chairs into the street and set
Speaker 1: them on fire. Then a hill of stones came pelting
Speaker 1: up the road towards him. Law turned and left. The
Speaker 1: violence seemed to have subsided by the evening, but when
Speaker 1: the clock struck midnight, a different story unfolded. Gangs of
Speaker 1: killers materialized, wielding machetes, torches, and even revolvers and shotguns
Speaker 1: with ruthless efficiency, they hunted down members of the opposite community.
Speaker 1: Where a lane of Muslim shanties crossed through a Hindu area,
Speaker 1: or a few threadbare hovels inhabited by Hindu families sat
Speaker 1: amid a sea of Muslim homes, the shrieking mobs woke
Speaker 1: the inhabitants, slaughtered them and set their cramped, flimsy huts alight.
Speaker 1: The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, seventeen August,
Speaker 1: and photographs they looked like mannikins, near naked and beginning
Speaker 1: to bloat, Their limbs tangled like rope. It was a
Speaker 1: kill or be killed situation. It wasn't just the Gunda's
Speaker 1: or low level criminals who are wreaking havoc, but regular
Speaker 1: citizens as well. One horrified Britain recounted how his butcher
Speaker 1: had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the
Speaker 1: street and using the same knife to slip the throat
Speaker 1: of a Hindu passersby. These days of bloodshed have another
Speaker 1: name as well, the Great Calcutta Killings. Negotiation after negotiation
Speaker 1: took place, different iterations of plans took place, and when
Speaker 1: it looked like progress was at the end of a
Speaker 1: long and winding road, it quickly dissolved as soon as
Speaker 1: it appeared. Jenna felt as though he was being ignored
Speaker 1: and that no one was listening to the wants and
Speaker 1: needs of the people who wanted a Muslim majority dominion
Speaker 1: Neary wanted to ensure that India wouldn't disintegrate. To shed
Speaker 1: more perspective on these riots and other aspects of partition,
Speaker 1: I spoke to David Gilmartin, a professor from North Carolina
Speaker 1: State University, to understand direct Action Day. There's a really
Speaker 1: important act to this and to Jenna's calling for protests
Speaker 1: on that day. I mean, I think it's very important
Speaker 1: to stress that Jenna did not call for open violence
Speaker 1: on this, but there are questions about the relative responsibility
Speaker 1: of different groups for the violence that broke out, and
Speaker 1: one could certainly say, you know, Jenna is not completely
Speaker 1: free from a case that there were certain things that
Speaker 1: he did which may have contributed to the violence. But again,
Speaker 1: what I want to stress is the backdrop to this
Speaker 1: had to do with the failure of the last major effort,
Speaker 1: through negotiations by the British and by the Indian National
Speaker 1: Congress and by the Muslim League, to produce a plan
Speaker 1: for India's independence which would keep India united as a
Speaker 1: single country and avoid a partition between two separate countries.
Speaker 1: After all my research, I kept coming back to the
Speaker 1: same conclusion. The whims and personal agendas of men constantly
Speaker 1: got in the way when creating a well thought out solution.
Speaker 1: I asked David what he thought about this. It's one
Speaker 1: of these questions that one can argue about. But I
Speaker 1: know this is a wishy washy answer, but I come
Speaker 1: back to it kind of yes and no, because there's
Speaker 1: no doubt that individual politicians had their own agendas, and
Speaker 1: in the riots in Calcutta, that's really clear. So I mean,
Speaker 1: a lot of the argument about that particular riot that
Speaker 1: followed Direct Action Day has to do with the role
Speaker 1: that was played by HS suro Worthy. So who was
Speaker 1: Hussaint Sahed sugar Worthy, the Chief Minister of Bengal under
Speaker 1: the Muslim League. And again there's a lot of controversy
Speaker 1: about this. You know, whether he restrained the police from
Speaker 1: moving in earlier to try to control the violence. Some
Speaker 1: people say yes, but that's contested. Some people say no,
Speaker 1: that he didn't. But one thing is very clear, quite
Speaker 1: apart from conflict with Hindus, Sarti was a Muslim leader
Speaker 1: in Bengal whose political base was in cal cut and
Speaker 1: the partition of Bengal while it was a negative thing
Speaker 1: one could say for many Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike,
Speaker 1: but for Sarroarty the partition of Bengal would have been
Speaker 1: political suicide. And in fact, in a certain sense it
Speaker 1: was because he had no significant political base in East Bengal,
Speaker 1: the part that ultimately went to bucket Stan. I tried
Speaker 1: very hard not to roll my eyes as David was
Speaker 1: telling me this, and I did not succeed in this task.
Speaker 1: I literally had to interject when he was speaking to
Speaker 1: Note that my iy roll was not directed towards him,
Speaker 1: but the incredibly frustrating information I was hearing. So he
Speaker 1: continued as a prominent politician, but actually largely by shifting
Speaker 1: his focus to the national level, to the Pakistani level.
Speaker 1: So there isn't any doubt he had his own agenda
Speaker 1: in this. But the other part of your question is
Speaker 1: can one explain what happened by this? Well? Maybe, but
Speaker 1: had there not been a leader like Sir Worthy, it's
Speaker 1: not clear that exactly the same thing wouldn't have happened,
Speaker 1: because there were very significant underlying questions that go beyond
Speaker 1: his particular agenda. I then asked where was everyone? Jenna
Speaker 1: and a Route were not physically in Calcutta, But what
Speaker 1: about the police? Why did this unrest go on for
Speaker 1: as long as it did. The question about the role
Speaker 1: of the police and the army is in part tied
Speaker 1: to the kinds of things you're implying in your question
Speaker 1: that a lot of these political leaders had their own
Speaker 1: goals but were in a certain way not ready to
Speaker 1: sacrifice those or sacrificed their own standing to to take
Speaker 1: an active role in trying to stop the violence. I
Speaker 1: am not naive. I understand the demand to be a
Speaker 1: politician and the complexities of having a difficult job, but
Speaker 1: behaviors like the ones David mentioned truly have me scratching
Speaker 1: my head. Is the death of our people worth political gain?
Speaker 1: Jenna certainly did not call for violence, but there is
Speaker 1: a certain sense in which, of course, even though the
Speaker 1: evidence I've seen suggests that the Muslims in Calcutta probably
Speaker 1: suffered higher casualties than Hindus did, but largely because the
Speaker 1: Muslim population was generally poor and less able to defend itself.
Speaker 1: But you know, the riot itself, no doubt, did make
Speaker 1: clear on a national stage that the question of coercing
Speaker 1: Muslims into any kind of arrangement that didn't take account
Speaker 1: of the Muslim demand for Pakistan was going to be
Speaker 1: a very difficult proposition, and that message actually got across,
Speaker 1: I mean, to both Congress and to the British. So
Speaker 1: I mean, in that sense one could say this did
Speaker 1: to a certain degree served part of Jenna's purposes. Now
Speaker 1: for the British, the British governor was very wary of
Speaker 1: trying to bring the British in and to cut out
Speaker 1: the elected Chief Minister of the province at this particular time,
Speaker 1: which would have brought the British in for huge criticism,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the British actions throughout this whole
Speaker 1: period leading up to partition one can explain by efforts
Speaker 1: of the British to avoid getting blamed for, you know,
Speaker 1: having been the cause of what happened, though of course
Speaker 1: they have been blamed, but nevertheless, you know, the idea
Speaker 1: was that they wanted to create the position, the image
Speaker 1: that this is something that different Indian groups need to
Speaker 1: work out. They're the ones who are responsible for partition.
Speaker 1: We are kind of above the fray. This is the
Speaker 1: standard kind of British argument they used to justify that
Speaker 1: they didn't in fact maintain order above the fray. The
Speaker 1: British who made the decision to colonize us and desecrated
Speaker 1: India and its economy basically said, this is above our paygrade. Certainly,
Speaker 1: there's plenty one can say about the role of British
Speaker 1: in this whole operation, which is not to say the
Speaker 1: British weren't in a somewhat difficult situation. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you know, they were in charge, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean who else was there too? I mean This
Speaker 1: is like this example that I was just gimming about
Speaker 1: what happened on direct Action Day and what followed, and
Speaker 1: you know, the the politicians, people like Sara Worthy, were
Speaker 1: under huge pressures and they did have their own agendas.
Speaker 1: But yet at the same time, you know, even if
Speaker 1: they were committed to a trying to control violence, they
Speaker 1: didn't have the means to do it that the British did.
Speaker 1: Accountability this is a characteristic that seems to be lacking
Speaker 1: throughout many of the issues that arose before and after
Speaker 1: a partition. No one wants to claim responsibility. It's like
Speaker 1: when you see something amiss when you're walking and you
Speaker 1: don't know if help is on the way. Most people
Speaker 1: assume the problem is being taken care of and go
Speaker 1: about their day. David said it himself. The lack of
Speaker 1: confronting the violence from all sides was due to the
Speaker 1: fact that there was confusion of who exactly was in
Speaker 1: charge at the time. There wasn't this idea of see something,
Speaker 1: say something. Direct Action day to me comes off as
Speaker 1: a fur the greater good argument that the destruction was
Speaker 1: a small price to pay in order to ensure that
Speaker 1: the politicians got the chance to get what they want.
Speaker 1: On February, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time,
Speaker 1: Clement at Lee, made a statement that the British would
Speaker 1: leave India by June of but as we all know,
Speaker 1: that is not what happened. Like many characteristics of partition,
Speaker 1: we cannot pinpoint in exact reason why the date became August,
Speaker 1: almost an entire year earlier than expected. Was an ongoing
Speaker 1: unrest in patience, greed, and honestly probably is a combination
Speaker 1: of all these things and more. Here is another excerpt
Speaker 1: from Midnight's Furies. Mystery and misinformation still cloud the most
Speaker 1: pivotal decision in the partition process, to rush forward the
Speaker 1: date of the British departure by ten months. Mount Batten
Speaker 1: is typically blamed for the acceleration of the handover so
Speaker 1: the British would not be held responsible for the blood
Speaker 1: bath to come. Mountbatten did himself no favors by boasting
Speaker 1: in later years that he had plucked the date out
Speaker 1: of thin air at a press conference, choosing the anniversary
Speaker 1: of the Japanese surrender, simply because it's sprang to mind.
Speaker 1: If that were true, hundreds of thousands of dead and
Speaker 1: millions of displaced Pakistani's and Indians would indeed have been
Speaker 1: victims of one man's whimsical addicted You all may remember
Speaker 1: from last week that Lord Mountbatten was a royal representative
Speaker 1: whose job it was to oversee the separation of India.
Speaker 1: What a gentleman. On July, the British Parliament passed the
Speaker 1: Indian Independence Bill. The bill was made up of several
Speaker 1: committees to deal with different aspects of partition for the British.
Speaker 1: Some included assets and liabilities, economic relations, and armed forces.
Speaker 1: Care to guess how many committees were created to help
Speaker 1: the people of India and Pakistan. If you guessed zero,
Speaker 1: you would be correct. Politicians took a very lazy, fair approach,
Speaker 1: after all, what could go wrong? You've heard me say
Speaker 1: that June three was the date independence was announced, but
Speaker 1: how many people actually found out on this day? Remember
Speaker 1: this was the nineties. People were not getting news alerts
Speaker 1: and push notifications on their smartphones. While this information was
Speaker 1: on the radio and in the papers. The vast majority
Speaker 1: of residents lived in quiet, rural areas where this vital
Speaker 1: intel did not reach them. For weeks, the British hardly
Speaker 1: went door to door giving denizens an f y I.
Speaker 1: So how exactly was India going to be separated in
Speaker 1: a new country formed? Mount Batton and his team brought
Speaker 1: in a man named Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer. Radcliffe was
Speaker 1: literally chosen because he had absolutely no knowledge of what
Speaker 1: was happening in India. According to the British, this would
Speaker 1: allow him to do the job without a bias. To
Speaker 1: add insult to injury, Radcliffe had never been to India before.
Speaker 1: Do you think he bothered to visit the communities that
Speaker 1: would soon be split up? He didn't. Do you think
Speaker 1: he asked the United Nations for guidance? He didn't. The
Speaker 1: United Nations was deliberately left out of the conversation to
Speaker 1: avoid any delays. Did he make sure that all of
Speaker 1: the information and plans he had for the country were
Speaker 1: updated and accurate. He didn't. No map specialists or geography
Speaker 1: professionals were involved in the making of this decision. Radcliffe
Speaker 1: created these new territories in five weeks. The fate of
Speaker 1: millions of people was left up to a man who
Speaker 1: threw together a plan in five weeks. He left right
Speaker 1: after his task was complete, burning all of the documents
Speaker 1: before he left, or more truthfully, fled. Radcliffe wrote the
Speaker 1: following to his nephew, Nobody in India would love me
Speaker 1: for the award about the Punjab and Bengal, and there
Speaker 1: will be roughly eighty million people, with their grievance who
Speaker 1: will begin looking for me. I do not want them
Speaker 1: to find me. As Rackcliffe understood it, people were going
Speaker 1: to suffer no matter what. How nice to know we
Speaker 1: were nothing more than collateral damage. Rackcliffe ended up not
Speaker 1: accepting his fee for the job, hardly an atonement for
Speaker 1: his sin. Naturally, when we're turning back to Britain, he
Speaker 1: received one of the highest honors from the Queen the
Speaker 1: night of the Grand Cross. You may recall my grandfather
Speaker 1: talking about how he celebrated on the street as a
Speaker 1: teenager when independence was granted. However, the celebration and excitement
Speaker 1: was short lived because even though the British have left,
Speaker 1: the official boundary lines have yet to be made public.
Speaker 1: No one knew what land now belonged to what country. Remember,
Speaker 1: this announcement came out on auguste The borderline cuts through
Speaker 1: Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west. And
Speaker 1: because Radcliffe made his decision on religious grounds, Muslims found
Speaker 1: themselves on the Hindu side, and Hindus found themselves on
Speaker 1: the Muslim side. Suddenly, even without moving, people were on
Speaker 1: the wrong side of the border, and just like that,
Speaker 1: we were in a state of genocide. A passage from
Speaker 1: Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition states a whole village might
Speaker 1: be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned
Speaker 1: in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls
Speaker 1: by impromptu firing squads using machine guns. Children, the elderly,
Speaker 1: and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and
Speaker 1: conversions from one faith to another occurred alongside systemic looting
Speaker 1: and robbery, clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives.
Speaker 1: It seems that the aim was not only to kill,
Speaker 1: but to break people over and over again. I think
Speaker 1: about these horrific facts and stories. These are stories that
Speaker 1: determined much of my life, but not once did this
Speaker 1: information come to play in my pre college education. I
Speaker 1: graduated high school in two thousand eight, fourteen years ago.
Speaker 1: I was curious to find out if others had similar
Speaker 1: experiences to me, or by some miracle, this history hasn't
Speaker 1: been erased from textbooks. My alma mater, the University of
Speaker 1: Texas at Austin, is home to one of the most
Speaker 1: distinguished South Asian programs in the country. I interviewed two
Speaker 1: different students from UT, both of whom took an entire
Speaker 1: course devoted to partition top by professor in any chater
Speaker 1: g Did either of them know about it before taking
Speaker 1: this class? Here's what they had to say. I didn't
Speaker 1: know basically anything about partition before the class. That's Christine.
Speaker 1: I just found the way the professor just made the
Speaker 1: past come alive and really like reinforced the idea, like
Speaker 1: that the past isn't even past. Um That made me
Speaker 1: want to take more classes. Christine observed that while some
Speaker 1: students were in this class to fulfilling requirement, others were
Speaker 1: there for a very different reason. So I was one
Speaker 1: of a handful of nonsalth Asian students in the class.
Speaker 1: So at the beginning she was like, why are you here,
Speaker 1: like asking people, and a lot of people were there
Speaker 1: because they had never taken history classes before. They weren't
Speaker 1: even liberal arts majors. They were just wanting to explore
Speaker 1: family history or learn more about their heritage. And I
Speaker 1: was like I'm just taking a history class. I felt
Speaker 1: sort of like I was really missing something I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I guess what the big deal at the time was,
Speaker 1: because yes, my understanding and this is from like high
Speaker 1: school history classes of partition was just kind of a
Speaker 1: natural process of the independence movement and like a byproduct
Speaker 1: of getting rid of British colonial rule was that these
Speaker 1: two states had to form like it was almost inevitable,
Speaker 1: which was something that was completely broken down in UM
Speaker 1: the class. And one thing I come away with UM
Speaker 1: is that it was definitely not inevitable and it was
Speaker 1: a huge product of the British Rutha is a South
Speaker 1: Asian like myself. She also immigrated to the United States
Speaker 1: as a baby, so I was especially keen to know
Speaker 1: if our experiences mirrored my own. My family didn't talk
Speaker 1: about partition much, so are at all like the sentiment was,
Speaker 1: you know, Pakistan an idea at one point where the
Speaker 1: same country and then they split and now there's you know,
Speaker 1: animosities one against the other. For me, it was just
Speaker 1: kind of like this accepted thing that had happened. There
Speaker 1: was no debate about if it was the right or
Speaker 1: wrong thing to do. There was no Um, there was.
Speaker 1: There just wasn't much like critical thought put towards it.
Speaker 1: And I think what I learned in class was this
Speaker 1: is a shared experience that people part of our generation
Speaker 1: think have and it's because that history is really painful.
Speaker 1: A lot of people's relatives experienced it firsthand and they
Speaker 1: can speak to how it was more of an atrocity
Speaker 1: than you know, the political gain. She recalls her first
Speaker 1: time finding out about partition as a teenager. It was
Speaker 1: actually kind of funny. Um, in my ninth grade World
Speaker 1: Geography class, we talked about partition for I think like
Speaker 1: a few lessons. It was like two were three lessons,
Speaker 1: and um, the way it was talked about was so
Speaker 1: surface level tangential. And now looking back on it after
Speaker 1: taking the classes that I have, it's almost offensive the
Speaker 1: way that it was taught, Like, you know, they were
Speaker 1: just they were just like, yeah, God, he was this
Speaker 1: wonderful person who did so much great work to bring
Speaker 1: peace to South Asia. And I just think about it now,
Speaker 1: like as if that was a big joke. If you
Speaker 1: remember from last week's episode, learning about Gandhi was also
Speaker 1: the only aspect associated with partition I was taught as well.
Speaker 1: Dr Gunita Singhbala, founder of the Oral History Project Partition Archive,
Speaker 1: mentioned her education or lack there of, on this topic.
Speaker 1: When we were children, the history that we were learning
Speaker 1: in school, the official history was so disconnected from folk history,
Speaker 1: and not just the history, even the news, like what
Speaker 1: we would hear on National team me at the time,
Speaker 1: there was only you know, one channel in India and
Speaker 1: Pakistan as well at the time, the Indian channel was
Speaker 1: called Dooders and um the news we would hear about
Speaker 1: the job versus what we were seeing. There was such
Speaker 1: a disconnect. And similarly in history, the folk history that
Speaker 1: our grandparents and our communities carried and told through folklore
Speaker 1: versus um you know what we lived in school, I
Speaker 1: always knew that that gap needed rebridged and that would
Speaker 1: solve a lot of the misunderstandings, a lot of the
Speaker 1: problems we were having, a lot of the conflict that
Speaker 1: resulted in real lives lost. So that thought was in
Speaker 1: the back of my mind for a very long time.
Speaker 1: Fast forward to high school. Um, I learned about, you know,
Speaker 1: the independence movement in India and how India freedom uh
Speaker 1: India and Pakistan and you know, the it was like
Speaker 1: a one liner in our two books. Basically, Gandhi walked
Speaker 1: to peaceful march the British left and it was like
Speaker 1: a peaceful trance for a power and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: that's just not what I heard growing up. Here's David
Speaker 1: again with his experience as an educator. Mostly the students
Speaker 1: know very little about partition. Some I've never heard of it.
Speaker 1: Others sort of say, oh, yeah, there was something in
Speaker 1: a school textbook about that, but you know, they can't
Speaker 1: remember very much. But but of course other students know
Speaker 1: much more about it, and particularly students who you know,
Speaker 1: as you've been describing, have some family connections to partition,
Speaker 1: and you know, their grandparents were involved in some way
Speaker 1: or they've heard about it, and so they don't know
Speaker 1: all of the details, but they do have real questions
Speaker 1: tied to it, which puts them in a somewhat different
Speaker 1: perspective from the other students. So yeah, I mean, among
Speaker 1: the students who hadn't sort of heard at all about
Speaker 1: partition before, some get really quite interested, you know, and
Speaker 1: people of course are always amazed to discover important things
Speaker 1: in history that they ever heard of. You know. We
Speaker 1: talked about the people whose lives are affected by this
Speaker 1: event in a general sense, but for the next two
Speaker 1: episodes I will specifically talk about women and their treatment.
Speaker 1: During Partition, I spoke to our survivor who wrote a
Speaker 1: book as a way to cope with her trauma and
Speaker 1: use the women in her life as inspiration for her characters.
Speaker 1: How was the transformation of women possible through this kind
Speaker 1: of carnage and trauma that women went through. My father
Speaker 1: till my mother's dying day would say well, you know,
Speaker 1: your mother saved our lives And I'd say how And
Speaker 1: my mother she didn't want to live through the trauma
Speaker 1: again until next week. I'm ness and this is Partition.
Speaker 1: Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up
Speaker 1: initiative created by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Median. Partition
Speaker 1: is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becka Ramos.
Speaker 1: It is edited by Rory Gagan, with original score composed
Speaker 1: by Mark Hadley.