The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan

Author:Yasmin Khan [Khan, Yasmin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Modern, 20th Century
ISBN: 9780300230321
Google: 9vEpDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300143338
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:41:21.200000+00:00

Revealing the borderline

Still, few, if any, were contemplating a mass migration of any description. Some leaders mooted the idea of moving people long before 1947. ‘Quite a number of people, especially educated people, might be expected to migrate,’ a leading Muslim Leaguer, Choudhry Khaliquzzaman had breezily told the Cabinet Mission delegation in 1946.46 And others had advised that co-religionists cluster together in ‘pockets’ for safety in the towns and cities afflicted by rioting. Some Sikh leaders had talked up the exchange of population as a solution to their own community’s anxiety. Tara Singh told his Sikh followers in a press statement that they faced ‘extinction’ and that they should start shifting eastwards in Punjab.47 This could all be written off too easily as bravado and posturing.

The thought that the intermingled populations of towns such as Amritsar, Lahore, Calcutta or Dacca would be systematically weeded out and completely shorn of minorities was simply too far-fetched and preposterous for most people to contemplate. One Sayyid ‘Abd al Latif of Uthmaniyah University had put forward a strategy involving the mass exchanges of population of tens of millions of people in the late 1940s as a possible solution to the constitutional gridlock. ‘This was so utterly impracticable that even its author subsequently rescinded the suggestion and favoured a federal constitution,’ commented Wilfred Cantwell Smith in 1946, similarly agreeing that any exchange of population was simply too unfeasible and too undesirable to bear thinking about. ‘Some people hoped Pakistan would be formed but no one thought that they would have to migrate,’ was how Intizar Husain remembered those days.48 This myopia about the risk of mass upheavals was still very much present as the Partition plan was being put into operation in June and July.

Yet, by the summer of 1947, before Independence, the first trickle of refugees had already started. Soon it would turn into a torrent. ‘There is some movement of bank balances to “Hindustan” and a certain fall in the value of real property in Hindu areas. There is also vague talk of emigration to Hindustan,’ said a government report from Sind. Phillips Talbot, an American journalist, took things more seriously: ‘trains and planes are loaded, according to local stories with gold bullion, jewelry and local currency. Bank accounts are being transferred in large numbers. Houses which sold six months ago for 60,000 $ are being offered for 20,000 $ if their owners are Hindu and anxious to get out of Pakistan.’ He concluded that ‘the amount can safely be estimated at tens of millions of dollars’.49 In the early days of Partition, the well-informed put arrangements in place to transfer precious objects and savings. People often regarded this as a precaution rather than as permanent evacuation.

G.D. Khosla, a judge of the Lahore High Court, and later author of several well-known books about Partition, described how he received a letter from his wife who was staying with their children in the cooler hill station of Musoorie, in the summer of 1947; in it

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