The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

I was born and brought up in India and I have a keen interest in South Asian history. Out of the 15 or so books on partition that I read (sometimes just skimmed through!), this book is undoubtedly the best. (Patrick French's book 'Liberty or Death' is also VERY good, but it covers lot of other issues- not just Partition and is quite long!).If you have an appreciation for good English writing, this book will be a pleasure to read- but don't expect something that panders to popular stereotypes about India/South Asia or interesting anecdotes about eccentric Indian kings or leaders- this is a serious work of scholarship suitable only for the deeply interested casual reader. The author appears to be a first rate scholar who has a very impressive command over the subject matter- she sometimes manages to convey more in a couple of paragraphs than some other historians will do in entire chapters. I needed all my prior knowledge of Indian history to begin to understand how good this book really is! In the interest of brevity, I will mention only two major strengths of this book relative to other general accounts of the Partition of India.1.This is history from the bottom up- instead of focusing on the discussions between leaders of the Indian National Congress, Muslim League and high ranking British officials leading up to the partition, the author concentrates on how the politics related to the partition played out on the streets of India- the fears, insecurities and expectations of the common people and how politicians sought to engage them. The majority of studies on Partition concentrate only on the 'elite politics' aspect- what Nehru, Jinnah or Mountbatten did or didn't do or say etc. Not that this is not important - but to really understand the positions taken by Nehru/Jinnah/Gandhi/Mountbatten and others- it is not enough to understand their personalities and their relationships- we also have to understand the broader social/political environment in which these positions were formed. The political decisions and actions of the major players cannot be understood in isolation- they become much more intelligible if you have a better understanding of the popular expectations, pressures and fears to which these leaders were compelled to respond. (This is probably particularly true of the Partition which became a highly emotive issue for many Hindus and Muslims/Sikhs during those times). In Yasmin Khan's book - this broader context, the evolving political situation in India in the late 1930's and early to mid 1940's is discussed with a richness and detail that is not equaled by any other book that I have read or heard about on the Partition of India- and this is a particular merit of this book.2.Both Hindu and Muslim nationalists (who have a particular stake in distorting the history of partition for their own purposes) will find a lot to be angry about in this book- and this is a very good thing! I think this is a highly judicious account which is not biased towards the official Indian or Pakistani version of the history of partition (although- of course, many will disagree- which again is unsurprising!).Overall, this is a relatively brief and exceedingly well written general history of the partition. (The overall tone of the writing is analytical- but there is little unnecessary academic jargon and it is not very dry either).

One of the more sizeable holes in my knowledge of twentieth-century history concerns the partitioning of the British Raj -- the dividing up of the British colonial territory on the Indian subcontinent into two countries, Pakistan and India (and, later, yet a third, Bangladesh). To address my ignorance, I turned to this book, THE GREAT PARTITION: THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN, written by a professor at Oxford. I learned a lot, but can't say that I am wholly satisfied with the book.THE GREAT PARTITION contains the basic facts: In 1946 and 1947, Great Britain, worn out and broke after World War II, abandoned the Raj; it cut its losses and ran. On June 3, 1947, it announced that the Raj would be partitioned and the constituent parts would be given their independence ten weeks hence, on August 15, 1947. As matters developed the lines of partition were not released until August 17, two days after the independence (and simultaneous birth) of India and Pakistan. Before partition, there had been widespread violence, primarily Muslims against Hindus and vice versa, but some of it involved Sikhs. That violence intensified after August 15th, and ethnic cleansing was conducted in many areas. One of the largest migrations in history ensued -- Muslims within the territory of India fleeing to East or West Pakistan, and Hindus fleeing from the two areas of Pakistan to India. About twelve million people were displaced. Hundreds of thousands died, in some accounts as many as a million.Britain's drawing of national boundaries, on both the east and west of what became India (a total of 3,800 miles of border determination), was hasty and arbitrary. The imperial mapmaker, Cyril Radcliffe, had never been to India before he arrived on July 8th, and in six weeks he and his assistants had finished the job. Their line drawing was done remotely, working with maps and dubious census figures. It seems farcical.One might naturally wonder whether an alternative to Partition was ever explored. The answer, as I learned from the book, is yes. In May 1946, a high-level British "Cabinet Mission" presented a plan that would have devolved power to Muslims within a united India. There would have been a central government to handle matters of foreign affairs and defense, but otherwise individual provinces would have enjoyed considerable autonomy, including the ability to join together on certain matters, thereby allowing large Muslim blocs to act in concert within the Indian Union. But diehards and extremists on both sides of the Muslim/Hindi religious divide rejected the plan, after which the more moderate leaders didn't fight against partition. As Nehru later admitted: "The truth is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years . . . The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it."The book covers all the above and considerably more factual territory. In a way, it packs quite a bit of history into its 210 pages of text. Supplementing that text are a glossary, a timeline, four maps, and about two dozen photographs.Nonetheless, I am not enthusiastic about the book. First, there are problems with the written presentation. Khan's prose is very smooth, but the text seems to have been written in discrete paragraphs, almost as if each was envisioned to stand alone. As a result, there is a choppiness to the presentation and, worse, considerable repetition of many points.Second, I would like to have been given some idea of how things might have been handled differently. Near the end of the book, Khan writes that "[t]here was nothing inevitable * * * about the way that Partition unfolded." But never in the course of the book does she discuss how the former Raj could have become self-governing without hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of people transplanted, and a continuing state of religiously-based tension and hostility between abutting nations.

I found this to be a very interesting, balanced discussion of the partition, neither making excuses for the actors nor descending into cynicism. Khan reveals just how nebulous the idea of "Pakistan" was at the time, allowing various players to project their preferred images onto the concept to further their own ends. This vision deficit still seems to haunt Pakistan.What do we expect to see when the elaborate social, business, religious and political networks that kept diverse peoples in some harmony, that took centuries to evolve, suddenly disappear? (Parallels with the breakups of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and lately of Iraq and Syria.)Khan does not seem particularly forgiving of Britain's role in this tragedy. She doesn't descend into cynical anti-imperialist formula that would just dismiss the Raj as an evil plot. What she does portray is just how IRRESPONSIBLE the British were. They didn't have enough skin in the game to see through the machinery they'd put in motion. They don't live in South Asia.Some of us keep hoping that we and our governments could learn something from history. Reading this book would be a good start.What does self determination really amount to when the citizenry really doesn't know what the state they're to be part of means, or what the consequences of slicing it one way or another might mean to their local social fabric? The disaster of Partition seems especially relevant now, as the U.S. pulls away from its commitments in Afghanistan and the Middle East (and elsewhere, no doubt), leaving the locals to pick up the pieces.