Joya Chatterji is a distinguished British historian whose first degree was from the prestigious Lady Sri Ram College in Delhi.
Sadly she is stupid & ignorant.
Consider the following extract from her book 'Partition's legacies' on the 'long view' of Decolonisation in South Asia-
Decolonisation was a global process whose scale, pace, and implications are not best captured by a regional study. So what, one might ask, is gained by approaching the process from the perspective of South Asia?
Nothing. But a stupid and ignorant historian can tell stupid, ignorant, lies under this rubric.
There are, I believe, compelling reasons for giving decolonisation in the region special attention. India was the first colony to achieve independence,
The Philippines became independent from the USA on July 4, 1946. India & Pakistan became independent in August of the following year.
albeit as two separate nation states, India and Pakistan. Britain’s abrupt withdrawal from India after the Second World War – so swift that many have denounced it as a scuttle –
Indians could have formed a Federal Government under the provisions of the 1935 act.
raised questions that have helped frame the debate about decolonisation, not just in India but elsewhere.
Stupid and ignorant people who teach worthless shite don't conduct a debate. They eat their own shit.
Did Britain jump or was it pushed?
Why did the Tories pass the 1935 Act? The answer was that the Raj wasn't making much of a profit. Also, it was as boring as shit. Westminster didn't want to pass laws for India. Let the country become self-administering and self-garrisoning like the Settler Colonies.
If it jumped, was the prime agency of decolonisation situated in the metropolis, as some historians argue?
The Tories had nice mansions in Mayfair. They didn't live in some Calcutta slum.
In their view, Attlee’s Labour government chose to “transfer power” to independent nations from a Britain battered by war and mired in debt, thereby engineering a convenient “escape” from their Indian empire, while retaining, so it was hoped, informal influence over the region.
The British navy remained vital for the defence of South Asia. India retained a British admiral till 1958. Also, the Brits owed India money and thus India had an incentive to remain in the Sterling zone.
Others who insist that Britain was pushed, by contrast, are more attentive to local or “peripheral” forces and pressures:
e.g. India was a shithole. It smelled bad. Come to Delhi- get dysentery. So not worth it.
widespread disorder during the Quit India Movement,
Which Wavell quelled by killing lots of people.
communal riots
Gandhi told Wavell that if India wanted a bloodbath, India would get a bloodbath
and famine,
like the Bangladesh famine of 1974? It was preceded by genocide.
demoralisation in the lower ranks of government,
not to mention dysentery in the higher ranks.
disorder in the ranks and on the streets, wave upon wave of strike action, and above all to nationalism on the road Towards Freedom.
The recent Congress sponsored 'Bharat Bandh' was supported by 300 million people. Few noticed.
For decades this debate, launched by political historians
stupid shitheads
in the 1980s, seemed to be getting nowhere, stuck in a groove much like a needle in a vinyl record of that era, scratching away at the same refrains.
like this worthless shite.
That fundamental disagreement reverberated, as Shipway notes, through the study of decolonisation in other parts of the world.
i.e. other countries, too, had useless shitheads who teach shite.
The independence of India and Pakistan has powerfully influenced this wider debate, if not always in a helpful way. In recent decades, however, a new generation of scholars has moved the subject forward. Taken together, their work shows – and this is an argument I will pursue here – that decolonisation cannot be reduced to one or other of these single drivers.
It can be reduced to one and only one thing- viz. the ratio of cost to benefit. True, the French & the Dutch were foolish enough to squander a bit of blood & treasure on trying to take back Indochina & Indonesia respectively. But, if the thing isn't profitable, money for it will dry up sooner or later.
It was a process simultaneously local and global. For one thing, in geo strategic terms, India was never merely local or peripheral: the subcontinent always played a pivotal part in wider British imperial strategy.
It could play the same role after Independence. But, after Hiroshima, Britain's security did not depend on the Royal Navy. It depended getting nukes & delivery systems. Anything 'East of Aden' could go fuck itself. The Suez crisis showed that sabotage could close the Canal & blow up oil pipelines.
Even after India and Pakistan became independent, for the rest of the world they represented “exogenous factors” in their own right –
shit is exogenous to the asshole. But shit doesn't greatly matter if you pull the flush.
for the colonised a beacon of hope of what they could achieve,
turn to shit
and for colonisers a template of how they could manage retreat in parts of the world that were becoming too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to govern.
In which case they would be difficult for their own leaders to govern.
Posing the question in either/or terms does not advance our understanding.
Because you are as stupid as shit. Teaching History destroys brain cells.
By eschewing these polarities, I suggest that it was at conjunctures when local and global crises violently collided that decolonisation – never a smooth process – jolted forward.
This stupid lady doesn't understand that Ireland became independent in 1922. The price was partition.
The particularities of the process in this region are another compelling reason to focus on South Asia:
Though it merely repeated the trajectory of Ireland.
above all the fact that decolonisation was achieved by a radical partition.
Like Ireland.
In turn, the vivisection of British India would become a template for partitions elsewhere,
No. The Indians rejected a Federal solution. The Malays, Nigerians etc. didn't though the Malays did throw out Singapore.
notably Palestine in 1948.
Palestine wasn't fiscally viable just as it isn't now.
But the Partition of India is also important because it has a profound bearing upon the second great issue of the subject – namely, what did decolonisation actually achieve?
Nonsense! Whether or not there was a federal solution, decolonisation meant local people moved into the mansions & officers of the former masters.
Did it merely involve the capture of the imperial state by local elites who perpetuated imperial “customs of governance” to secure their own dominance?
True Independence means killing the bourgeoise & the kulaks & the left adventurists & the right deviationists & everybody else who looks like they might become some such thing. Why bother with Commie shite? Marxism is dead.
What, if anything, changed on the ground for the ordinary citizen (herself a product of the decolonising imaginary) after the transfer of power?
Governance turned to shit.
Is there merit in “the continuity thesis” which holds that freedom in South Asia did not meaningfully transform colonial structures of power?
Why did soi disant independent countries not ban dicks? Did you know dicks cause RAPE!
I build upon recent scholarship to interrogate this powerful and durable thesis and challenge some of its conclusions, arguing that the imperial state was not some singular object, easily handed over, like a baton in a relay race, to local elites. Rather, it was an assemblage of power, “fluid, frequently irrational and often self limiting”, spread patchily over the various regions, articulated differently across different social spaces.
This could also be said of State power in the US, UK, Soviet Union etc. The fact is no country has banned dicks. This shows that everybody is a fucking Imperialist running dog of Neo-Liberal Patriarchy.
Decolonisation was therefore, and could only ever have been, an irregular process by which the imperial order was disaggregated –
Scotland is a colony of England. Evil English toffs are starving wee Scottish bairns. The UN special rapporteur on food security has said that Scottish women lack access to arable land to grow turnips to feed their their families. This is why the diet of the typical Scot consists of deep fried Mars bars in batter & Buckfast tonic wine.
Did you know that men in Scotland have dicks? This proves that King Charles III is a fucking tyrant.
unevenly, haphazardly, and incompletely – and replaced, also incompletely, by two fragile and nascent national orders.
Like the nascent national orders in England & Scotland or Maryland & California.
Such a process was not, and could never have been, seamless.
Because that's how history works.
Acknowledging the incompleteness has led historians to revaluate the significance of 1947
Its significance was fucking obvious. Some stupid Commies said 'Nehru is a lackey of Wall Street'. But once they were shot or incarcerated, they changed their tune.
and question the timing (and periodisation) of decolonisation. Did it occur, in some definitive way, in 1947?
Yes.
Or if it was indeed a more long drawn out process spread over about forty years or more,
Very true. When you celebrate your 40th birthday you are celebrating a long drawn out process spread over forty years and nine months.
as Dipesh Chakrabarty
Dipshit has shit for brains.
has suggested, where does 1947 stand in that longer course of events?
It comes after 1946 & before 1948. Being able to count is worthy of a PhD in History.
I shall offer here some new ways of thinking about 1947,
No you won't. You will offer meaningless shite.
which suggest that while many (but not all) imperial structures of governance stayed in place after Independence,
None did. India, Pak, Burma etc. could do what they liked whether or not they exited the Commonwealth or retained Dominion status.
Partition saw off many of the old social structures.
No. It saw off lots of people who were killed or who had to run away.
Another major change was that the independent states in South Asia had goals and purposes that their imperial counterparts had never envisaged.
It is easy to envisage stuff. It isn't the case that Nehru turned into a cabbage much to Mountbatten's surprise. Jinnah, on the other hand, chose to become a carrot. Bugs Bunny ate him & said 'What's up, Doc'. The King Emperor was greatly shocked by this development.
They derived their legitimacy from different sources and had to be seen to deliver different goods.
Ethnic cleansing? That's what they delivered.
They were subject, therefore, to far greater and very different pressures from the imperial regimes they replaced.
Not really. The Viceroy was under pressure from the Secretary of State who was under pressure from Parliament. Nehru kept winning elections & thus was under little pressure from anybody.
The way the nation states evolved as they faced these new challenges is, I argue, a crucial part of decolonisation.
No. It had nothing to do with it whatsoever. That's why there wasn't much 'evolution' in India- indeed, you had dynastic rule till assassination tempered autocracy. India became unitary and stayed unitary. Pakistan & Burma had military intervention & civil wars. India didn't, thought there were some localised insurgencies.
And by focussing on some of the
stupid or meaningless
questions raised by the recent historiography on South Asian decolonisation which have lent the subject fresh levels of empirical granularity and theoretical sophistication, I hope to pose new
stupid or meaningless
issues for the field as a whole.
1914–1922: From Flanders to Chauri-Chaura Colonial rule in India was a bricolage.
No. It was homogenous in the directly ruled areas & increasingly standardized in the protectorates.
A congeries of complex and fluid relationships, it was never spread evenly across the subcontinent;
Just as British rule wasn't evenly spread over London. That's why there was more crime in some parts of the City.
it penetrated some regions more deeply than others,
Because that is the nature of power. Basically, there is 'service provision discrimination' such that some get more protection than others. Sadly, in London now, you can get mugged in Mayfair just as easily as in Mile-End.
catching particular social groups more intensely in ever shifting webs of collaboration and extraction.
Doctors pay more in tax than muggers. Sad.
For purposes of analysis, three types of relationship might be identified.
There were two types of relationships- Indians were either British subjects or British protected subjects.
First, there were the unequal and often uneasy alliances between the British imperial establishment and their so called collaborators, drawn from the Indian elites: princes, landlords, so called community leaders, mercantile elites, and high caste or ashraf educated Indians who helped govern the empire.
Fuck off! Plenty of such people were disloyal & actively trying to ally with Britian's enemies- e.g. the Aga Khan who was an admirer of Hitler. The true collaborators were guys paid by the Brits- i.e. civil servants, police officers, soldiers etc.
Second, there were relationships based upon the extraction of labour:
e.g. whores who had to extract jizz from johns?
peasants growing cash crops for export,
in return for money
workers in the public and industrial sectors, bonded and indentured labourers on the plantations, lascars who travelled the high seas in the service of the imperial economy, sepoys who manned the Indian army, as well as huge cohorts of lowly constables, village chaukidars and patwaris who
got a bit of money for doing their job
represented “the realities of rule . . . closer to the ground.”
Commie bullshit. Still, it is true that once Neo-Liberalism is crushed nobody will have to work. Donald Trump will come and wipe their asses for them.
Third, and at the broadest level, there were the connections that existed between the Raj and its ordinary subjects who, more or less, obeyed the law and paid taxes.
Viceroy would wipe their bums.
These were fragile linkages and bonds. Some were built on face to face interactions between rulers and the ruled; but most were rather more intangible relationships, deriving from notions of subjecthood, or namak, fealty to the hukum or will of the British sarkar.
Did you know that 'salary' comes from the Latin word for salt? British people who work in return for wages are showing fealty to the employer whose salt they eat. What is the point of saying something about India which is also true of every other country at every period of history?
Given how thinly the British presence was spread on the ground, Indian intermediaries
employees
mediated between the Raj and its numerous subjects in almost every sphere of governance.
Given how thinly Donald Trump's presence is spread on the ground of the USA, he does not deliver your mail personally. An employee of an agency of the Federal Government does so. On the other hand, in the UK, Queen Victoria personally delivered all letters.
Decolonisation in South Asia is best understood as
Westminster passing a law saying 'such and such country is now independent.'
the intricate process by which these relationships unravelled,
Nobody knows what that process was. We do know what acts were passed by Westminster at different times.
at different levels of imperial engagement and varying speeds, and across an array of locations. It was not, and could never have been, a smooth unilinear movement
Yet, that is what it was. Unlike economic processes, constitutional law is 'unilinear'.
along the high road to freedom. Along the way there were starts and stops, spurts and lulls, with more crises and corners to be negotiated than open roads and clear destinations.
Rubbish! There was a straight line from 1860 to 1947.
It is only by recognising the intricacies and complex interplays, both temporal and spatial, that we can begin to grasp what decolonisation was, and still is today.
Commie bullshit unless it is also RSS bullshit. We must decolonize India by banning English and ensuring every cow gains employment as a Joint Secretary in a Government Ministry.
But when, and where, did that process begin?
London. It began with the formation of the East India Company. It ended with the Indian Independence Act passed in July 18, 1947,
With no singular origin for a process of this complexity,
Yes there is. I've just given it. Either a discipline has 'bright line' demarcations or it isn't a discipline. It is just idle chit chat.
I will focus instead on critical junctures, moments of acceleration and of crisis.
She is too stupid to recognize any such things. The critical juncture was the fall of the Tzar. This signalled that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. The British Empire might survive as a Commonwealth with a common defence policy. India would have to become self-administering and self-garrisoning. How long would this take? Some thought it might take a century of 'dyarchy'. But Willingdon in Madras thought Madras could proceed more rapidly to provincial autonomy. After that, like Canada, Australia, South Africa etc. the Indians would agree to form a Federal Government.
The First World War and its aftermath – sadly still an understudied subject from Indian perspectives – was the first such major occasion when the concerns of Indians were propelled into an unprecedented confrontation with worldwide crises.
It was initially quite heartening for the Imperialists. India appeared loyal and ready to send troops & cash. But once the Tzar fell, it was obvious that even backward Asiatics didn't think God wanted them to die for some distant Emperor.
For one, the war drew Britain into a head on collision with the Ottoman sultan and caliph of Islam in ways that deeply tested the loyalty to the Raj of India’s Muslims.
Not really. A Muslim former ICS officer was an effective propagandist for the Brits. Most Muslims wanted to show they were more loyal- and had greater martial ability- than the Hindus, if not the Sikhs.
Not unlike the revolutionary Ghadar revolt,
There was no revolt. The Ghaddarites were mainly concentrated in the American West Coast. Khilafat spread after the war between 1919-1922. This suited the Brits who wanted the Ottoman Caliph to be their puppet. Incidentally a Khilafati tried to assassinate Ataturk whom the Caliph had sentenced to death.
with which it was loosely connected, the Khilafat Movement was simultaneously local, national, and “global”: its most expansive goals, as Maia Ramnath has noted,
It was stupid shit. Ataturk got rid of the Caliphate & defeated the Greeks & the allies. Significantly, ht Soviets helped him. Indeed, the first country to recognize Saudi Arabia was the USSR.
“could only really be imagined and enacted . . . outside the country.”
There was also the equally ridiculous 'hijrat'- i.e. emigration to Afghanistan. The Afghans weren't enthused.
But it was also substantially located within India, in local communities, rallied by ulema, students, and journalists writing for a buoyant Urdu press, in a formidable agitation against the government. The war also sucked labour out of India and flung it abroad into strange lands. “Never before,” says Ravi Ahuja, “had rural people from the Indo Afghan frontier region and Nepal, from the Punjab and other military recruitment grounds of ‘British India’ engaged with European societies as intensively.”
There was a genuine danger of a spontaneous uprising. That's why the Brits brought in the Rowlatt Act. Gandhi started an agitation but called it off after Dyer massacred people in Jallianwallah Bagh. He then went on to lead Mulsim, Hindu & Sikh troops to victory in the third Afghan War.
When Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement, he wrote to the Viceroy saying he wouldn't withdraw the agitation even if violence occurred. He was lying. There was violence at Chauri Chaura & he unilaterally surrendered. In Egypt, a spontaneous uprising caused Allenby to demand UK recognise Egyptian independence (there had been a 'Veiled Protectorate') & bring back Saad Zaghloul. Ireland too achieved independence as did Afghanistan in 1922. But Gandhi had unilaterally surrendered. This meant that when Labour took power (as part of a coalition) in 1924, it didn't honour a previous pledge to give India independence. Olivier, not Wedgwood, was appointed Sec. of State for India. He soon became convinced that the Indians- Motilal & C.R Das- had shit for brains. The Brits would have to stay on.
I should mention the Moplah atrocities (massacre of Hindus) in Kerala. They caused South Indian politicians, like C.Sankaran Nair (who had condemned Jallianwallah Bagh) to whimper for some second Dyer to come to the rescue of the Hindus. He wrote a book titled 'Gandhi & anarchy'. The message was clear, Non-Violence was cool only so long as Pax Brittanica prevailed. Protest against the Brits by all means, but don't, for fuck's sake, let them leave unless (as Gandhi said at the Second Round Table Conference) they first hand over the Army to the INC.
Ironically, however, Gandhi’s success in becoming the Mahatma of the masses compromised his control over the direction of the movement he had started.
No. His problem was that he had visited the place and collected money & enrolled Congress men there. This meant there was evidence he had participated in a 'conspiracy to wage war on the King Emperor'- i.e. he could be sent to the Andamans. Better to meekly go to prison on the much lesser charge of sedition. He cooperated with the prosecution by pleading guilty and asking for the maximum penalty.
Why did Chauri Chaura happen? The answer is that the Majithia (Sikh) princely family had been awarded a big estate there in return for their loyalty during the Mutiny. The Sikh police chief there was unpopular. That is why policemen were attacked.
The denouement came at Chauri Chaura, a village in the North Indian district of Gorakhpur. Inhabitants of this hamlet, convinced that the new utopia was just over the horizon, burnt hapless Indian policemen alive for standing in their way, putting their little station to the torch.
Why won't Joya tell us why policemen were the target here but not elsewhere?
This dramatic instance of violence prompted Gandhi abruptly to call off Non cooperation.
Why did he cooperate with the prosecution? He could have said 'I don't recognize the authority of this court. Fuck off back to Blighty you white bastids.'
In January he had said
"Swaraj means, in the event of the foregoing demands (Khilafat and Justice for Punjab) being granted, full Dominion Status. The scheme of such swaraj should be framed by representatives duly elected in terms of the Congress constitution. That means four-anna franchise. Every Indian adult, male or female, paying four annas and signing the Congress Creed, will be entitled to be placed on the electoral roll. These electors would elect delegates who would frame the swaraj constitution. This shall be given effect to without any change by the British Parliament.
The Muslims might swallow this so long as Congress was allied with Khilafat. Once that alliance ended, Gandhi's demands would be opposed by everybody- Muslims, Justice Party (non Brahmin Madrasis), Princes, Akalis, Christians, etc.
All his own financial supporters wanted was a deal with Manchester which they got ten years later (Mody-Lees agreement).
After February 1922, Britain dictated the pace & scale of reform. First, the Rowlatt act was repealed because there was no need for it. Then in November 1923, General Elections in British India were held. Dyarchy could go forward but it was pretty useless. After Labour returned to power, Gandhi had a second chance which he muffed. Tory grandees then framed & passed the 1935 act which Churchill reviled.
Of course, the politics of Non cooperation floundered after this.
Indians realised that a spontaneous uprising- like that in Egypt- could succeed. But what would happen next? A Bolshevik uprising? Better to stick with the Brits who could supply 'the smack of firm government' till they got bored & handed over power (i.e. control of the army) to some barrister or the other.
And of course, as scholars have noted, the end of non cooperation was followed by a decade of apparent calm. But the events between 1917 and 1922 represented a decisive shift in the relationship between rulers and ruled.
No. It represented a decisive shift in what people believed would happen if the Brits fucked off. Might there be Bolshevism or Ataturkism? In 1928, Ataturk replaced the sacred Arabic script with the 'la-deen' Latin alphabet. The Soviets were worse. They were killing priests & mullahs and closing down mosques & churches. The landed aristocracy had been massacred or chased away.
Much had been damaged in the fragile web of imperial relationships.
Not really. By 1926 the new Viceroy's big problem was Hindu-Muslim riots, not the assassination of British officers. However, the UK had completely changed its conception of the relationship between London & the Dominions. India too was ceasing to be profitable. Best to hand over power & be rid of the headache.
It was the first major crisis in the bumpy road to decolonisation.
One can draw a straight line from the Viceroyalty of Ripon to the Morley-Minto reforms & then the Montague-Chelmsford proposals & the supposed 'devolution' which was supposed to proceed apace in the Twenties. One might say there was a crisis in 1919- British troops were mutinous & Punjab was seething with unrest. Olivier saw that the Sikhs could be placated by getting rid of the Udasis Mahants even if this pissed off wealthy Bedis. It must be said, governance improved in the Punjab. British investment in canals had paid off. The people eagerly embraced education, thrift & enterprise.
The Interwar years – Deceleration? The Raj responded by devising novel strategies to reassert its authority.
No. London proceeded down a road dictated by British MPs. The Irish headache was over. The Indian headache was diminishing. If Canada doesn't want to send troops to fight Johnny Turk, we must respect their decision. The UK needed to focus on its own problems.
It strove to hold on to power
No. It strove to transfer power to 'responsible', if not 'representative' hands. MPs didn't want to sit through boring discussions of peshkash or taqqawi. They needed to solve the problems afflicting Industry- in particular, they needed to deal with the threat of a 'General Strike'.
by building new alliances and afforcing old ones.
The Princes were given a freer hand. More Indians were admitted to the higher ranks of the Civil Service. From 1918 onward, Indians were admitted to Sandhurst.
The plan was to devolve, in two stages, a measure of power to some Indians in the provinces.
The Brits gave universal franchise to the Ceylonese in 1931. Indians could have got the same thing if the minorities hadn't objected.
The goal of both the Government of India Acts of 1920 and 1935 was to recruit new collaborators in the provinces and strengthen the hand of old friends.
Why pretend the Brits were fucking Nazis recruiting 'collaborators' or Quislings?
The British hoped to achieve this by giving certain provincial groups (men with wealth, land, and education) a share in provincial government,
women got the vote at the same time as men. Some princely states had universal franchise.
and the right to raise and spend local taxes,
This existed, on paper, since Lord Ripon’s Local Self-Government Resolution of May 18, 1882. The problem was Indians don't like paying taxes. The 'Chirala-Pirala' deshtyag (i.e. abandoning homes & going to live in the Jungle) was a response to increased local cesses to pay for sewers, schools, etc. The greatness of Gandhi is that he said sewers were a bad thing. You should shit where you like and then use a small spade to cover over your faeces. Schools are very evil. If you send your kids to school they start demanding money to buy textbooks. Keep them at home and make them work for you. Hospitals are satanic. Doctors use them to spread diseases so as to increase their own earnings. If you fall ill, I will give you an enema. If that doesn't do the trick, I will take some wet mud and apply it to your body. If you wife falls sick, let her die. Medicine costs a lot of money.
thereby fortifying their local power and patronage (and, it was hoped, their loyalty).
Very true. Cambridge University paid this lady some money & thus secured her loyalty. She would beat to death any fucking Oxonian she met.
Historians have observed that this “retreat to the centre” worked for a while, at least in terms of quelling major disturbances.
The Brits didn't greatly care if Indians slaughtered each other. Sadly, the Indians cared even less.
Provincial parties and provincial questions dominated India’s politics in the 1920s, much as the British had intended them to do.
No. The Brits were stupid enough to think that Indians would want to solve 'collective action problems' by raising taxes & spending money on improving infrastructure, education etc. with the result that Income would rise more than proportionately so that the burden of tax would fall- i.e. a virtuous circle would be created. Indians had no desire to do this save maybe in Punjab & to some extent in Madras & Bombay presidency.
Until 1929, when Lord Simon’s
Sir John Simon. He became a Lord in 1940.
visit to India heralded a new round of reforms, politics at the all India level appeared to have lost all momentum.
It was vigorous enough. The hope was that the Indians would show cohesiveness & thus the Simon Commission could convince Westminster to get behind Provincial Autonomy & preparation for a Federal India.
Yet the interwar interlude watered down British sovereignty over India in subtle but significant ways. To make its strategies work, the Raj had to concede to the provinces the right to certain heads of revenue, degrading substantially its powers of extraction.
It would be fair to say the UK was only breaking even on India.
Under the 1920 constitution, the centre in New Delhi had to transfer about £6 million to the provinces.
Nonsense! The Meston Settlement forced the provinces to pay 10 million quid to the centre. Madras was disproportionately taxed. We are still angry about it. The thing was scrapped by the end of the decade.
It also began the “Indianisation” of government. In 1920, dyarchy, as this exercise in power sharing was called, gave Indian politicians in the provinces some say over certain areas of governance that today would be described as “development” (whether schools, sanitation, or roads), which were of vital importance to Indian lives in the localities, but which the Raj regarded as secondary to its core purposes.
Defence & Law & Order. It was literally a 'Night-Watchman' state. Sadly Indians didn't even want to pay the 'chowkidar' (night-watchman) tax.
After the Government of India Act of 1935, the vote was increased sevenfold, to about thirty five million voters, who now could elect their own provincial governments presided over by Indian premiers.
Interestingly, the Commies did well in 1937- better than in 1946.
But the terms of the 1935 Act ensured that these governments would be dominated by “communal majorities”.
New provinces- Sindh & Orissa- were created. Burma & Aden went their own way.
This raised fears of permanent minority status among increasingly bitter and vocal political minorities, Hindu and Muslim alike, in different provincial settings: notably in the Punjab, Bengal, and the United Provinces.
This fear had already been expressed in the Twenties.
In the elections of 1937 the Congress, revived by another round of civil disobedience led by Gandhi in the 1930s,
because of the abject failure of that movement- in particular the threat that the property of Congress members would be expropriated- Congress decided not to boycott the elections. Still, the Tories didn't expect them to win.
won the support of most Hindu voters and came into office in every Hindu majority province in British India. In some Muslim majority provinces, “loyalists” did rather better, particularly in the Punjab where the cross communal Unionist Party came to power;
it was the landlord's party
but in Bengal, the largest province in India, the “Krishak Praja” party,
the tenant's party
backed by rural Muslims with anti establishment views, seized control.
No. It had to ally with the League or the Mahasabha. Hindu Bengalis think Nehru should have allied with Fazl ul Haq.
This polarisation of provincial legislatures along communal lines would have far reaching implications in the 1940s.
The Muslim league claimed that Congress rule had hurt the Muslims who were being forced to chant Vande Mataram in the 'Nai Talim' schools. Hindus pointed out that nothing whatsoever was being taught in those schools.
The Indianisation of government in the provinces whittled away, meanwhile, at the morale of British civil servants, who, as Bhattacharya has shown, found it hard to take orders from Indian ministers.
Only if they were utterly crap. Under Rajaji in Madras, morale improved. In fact the British ICS officers decided to voluntarily give up alcohol when prohibition was introduced though they had been offered medical permits to get booze.
The “iron frame” of the Indian Civil Service, on the face of it still intact, was becoming less secure under the surface.
Not if the Ministers were good. But that is true of any country.
Among civil servants, the introduction of popular government challenged their singular focus of loyalty.
No. The constitutional position was clear. The good news was that there was a clear chain of command. You can't be blamed for doing what you are ordered to do.
Competing commitments to different political masters, the Raj on the one hand and provincial ministers on the other, forced government servants to make their allegiances “both more explicit and more flexible”.
Not really. If you had a shitty minister you could generally find some way to get posted elsewhere.
This did not bode well for the empire.
Because it was turning into a Commonwealth. But for Gandhi's stupidity or cowardice it would have got what Ireland got in 1922. But that's exactly what the Indians didn't want.
In the interwar years the Raj might have persuaded itself that it still controlled the “vital attributes of sovereignty” by beating a strategic retreat to the centre.
It was transferring power in the same manner that it had done in settler colonies.
The viceroy continued to sit in splendour in his grand new viceregal lodge on Raisina Hill, apparently the commander of all he surveyed. But that was increasingly a chimera. The old balances had changed. By wresting fiscal autonomy from the treasury in London, Delhi had tipped the scales in India’s favour.
Nonsense! The Brits actually increased their control over the Indian economy as they themselves faced austerity. About 34 million pounds in gold was shipped from India over the course of the Thirties despite falling commodity prices.
Meanwhile in the provinces British rule was starting to look rather less secure.
Not as insecure as it looked to Whitehall. In 1932 the 'ten year rule' (i.e. the assumption there would be no war for ten years) was scrapped though rearmament began in earnest only after 1936. But, already, it was clear that air power would be decisive. In fact the UK wanted an offensive air doctrine. This meant the Empire counted for less & less. The Australians understood that they needed to befriend the Japanese. The Royal Navy couldn't fight a two front war. Even in the Great War, Japan had taken over some duties (even in the Mediterranean! ) from the Royal Navy. By 1938, the Brits were having to spend some of their own money on Indian defence.
The Second World War stripped India of its best soldiers & military equipment. Moreover, the Hitler-Stalin pact meant that Indian Commies had an incentive to get arms and stage an uprising. The country was very vulnerable. Thankfully, most Commies were utterly shite. One who wasn't- and who helped Bose to get out of India- quickly became Ian Fleming's brother's best double agent after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.
Why didn't the Indians- seeing War approach- form a Federal Government so as to enrich themselves from Defence contracts & (later on) American largesse? The answer is that they were utterly shite. Gandhi in 1939 wrote that the Brits must not fuck off until they handed over the Army to Congress. Why? Because Congress is a Hindu party. Hindus believe in Ahimsa fairy & thus can't fight. If the Brits leave the meat-eating Muslim & the Punjabi (regardless of creed) & maybe also the Gurkhas will take over everything. Ahimsa fairy may protect the anal cherries of Dalits but that was about all it could do.
My point is that no non-Congress careerist gained any value by allying with the Maha-crackpot. Still, the question remains, why did so many Indians eagerly join the Army or take jobs as policemen & jailors? The answer is that Britain always paid its debts- including pensions to ex-servicemen. Nobody could trust any Indian- more particularly if he was your brother or cousin- when it came to zar, zinn & zamin (gold, women, Land).
Still, if the Japs hadn't attacked Pearl Harbour, Eastern India would have had to be abandoned to the Japanese. One reason they wanted it was to stop American supplies to the Chinese 'over the hump'. American air-power enabled Gen. Slim to by pass the Japs (he was resupplied by air) who quietly starved to death in the jungles of Burma. Gandhi, fool that he was, had been wrong to bet on the Japs & demand the Brits 'Quit India'. At this point, something unexpected happened. Wavell- the man who brutally crushed the '42/'43 resistance- decided India was indefensible. He proposed the evacuation of the White population! Churchill was dismayed. The man was a second Allenby! Even Atlee found him defeatist. Still, Wavell's authority as a military man forced even the die-hard Tories to concede a full & genuine transfer of power. Atlee authorised Mountbatten to get out even if he didn't have a deal. Just transfer power to the Princes & the Provincial Premiers. Get the Whites out & let the place revert to anarchy- if that's what the Indians want. Thankfully, the Hindus had learned from their history that they must hang together against the Muslim menace. That is why India survives to this day.
Was Partition inevitable? Yes- once Muslim officers decided they would be better off in Pakistan. Liaquat Ali Khan, as Finance Minister, was able to use Muslim civil servants to paralyse the administration. Sardar Patel, the Home Minister, was snookered. After 'Direct Action Day'- i.e. the Bengali Premier's attempt to secure Calcutta for Pakistan by massacring Hindus- the die was cast.
Astonishing as it may seem in retrospect, no one expected the carnage that followed.
A lot of it was carefully planned. Still, Indians are always making grand plans. They are lazy people. Nothing may come of it.
No one anticipated the refugees, the looting, the mayhem, and the massacres. A state and army in the simultaneous process of a transfer of power, and dividing itself into two parts, was ill prepared to cope with the riots that spread across the Punjab, killing three quarters of a million people.
It would have been easy to organize an exchange of population supervised by troops from other areas- e.g. Madrasis in Punjab & Punjabis in Bengal. The other thing was that the local administration should have externed or incarcerated known incarcerators. In two or three cases a mob should have been machine gunned. The thing was easy enough to do. But why bother?
Contrary to Devji’s assertion that Pakistan was intended to be a “Muslim Zion”, there is little evidence to suggest that Jinnah expected all of India’s Muslims to migrate there, or that he welcomed them, and mounting evidence to suggest that the governments of both Pakistan and India were desperate to stop the tides of refugees spilling over the new borders and engulfing their nascent states.
They genuinely didn't give a fuck. It must be said, Punjabi refugees were seen as people with fighting spirit. Help them & you increase your own strength. Bengalis are useless- more particularly if, like J.N Mandal, they supported the Muslim League. Let them fuck off & die in some jungle in Orissa.
These upheavals have been the subject of much scholarly attention.
We picture them furiously fisting themselves as they gloat over atrocity stories.
Some historians, notably Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, challenge what they see as an overdrawn emphasis on the impact of Partition, overshadowing the moment of freedom.
Indians didn't care then but may pretend to do so now coz the Brits weep over it.
Research has shown that in a myriad ways refugees drove change.
In which case there would have been change on both sides of the border. There wasn't. Consider Madras. It had zero refugees but has changed greatly. Bengal too has changed- for the worse.
Partition profoundly shaped and marked citizenship in India and Pakistan,
No it didn't. That's why Pakistan broke up.
and later in Bangladesh.
Because Pakistani citizenship didn't mean Pakistan Army wouldn't rape and kill you.
It framed notions of belonging,
the integration of the Princely States did that as did the linguistic reorganization of States in India & the replacement of Urdu with Hindi & so forth.
and coloured attitudes towards government servants and the state itself.
Not really. Speaking generally civil servants had greater power till the political class asserted itself.
As Gould, Sherman, and Ansari have pointed out, assumptions about the loyalty of officers and men were fundamentally altered by Partition everywhere in the subcontinent, even in its most remote district.
No. They remained the same. Morarji Desai had been in Provincial Civil Service in Godhra. There were riots there. Since he was Hindu, he was accused of partiality towards Hindus. There really is nothing new under the Sun.
Government workers who did not belong to the majority community were particularly vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and corruption, even as popular perceptions of corruption and partiality among bureaucrats grew more commonplace.
Corruption would increase but controls on market forces make that inevitable.
The discourses of “corruption” and “anti corruption”, Gould notes, were “often used as a means of creating or consolidating social advantage”;
the issue of which community was disproportionately getting Government jobs had been around since the 1880s. Did you know that 120 percent of all Judges in the Miss Teen Tamil Nadu Beauty pageant belong to Iyengar community? That is why I didn't win that coveted title last year.
and in a context where flux and change intensified these struggles for advantage, the discourse of corruption undermined public faith in government itself. It quickly led to a mood of disillusionment and put a dampener on the euphoria of freedom, a mood brilliantly captured in R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi novels.
Fuck off! Malgudi (Mysore) was not affected by partition. Indeed, it wasn't affected very much by anything at all. That was its charm.
The adoption in 1950 of universal adult suffrage was another remarkable and dramatic change in India.
Not really. Burma got it earlier. Ceylon got it in 1931. Getting rid of separate electorates meant Muslims lost political influence.
(Whether this would have been achievable so quickly without the changes Partition wrought is moot.)
Muslims aren't terribly keen on Democracy.
As Shani notes, this involved deliberate “ruptures from colonial practice”
e.g. Viceroy wiping his own bum. Nehru never wiped his own bum. He requested aid from Eisenhower for bum-wiping purposes with the firm intention of developing indigenous bum-wiping technology & infrastructure by 2047. True Independence means being able to wipe your own bum. This is why we need a Planning Commission so as to implement Amartya Sen's capability approach to bum-wiping in a truly inclusive & democratic manner.
which had deemed full democracy “impracticable” in Indian circumstances.
What we got was Dynasticism till autocracy was tempered by assassination.
Bold in imagining “all eligible adults as procedurally equal individuals”,
which they already were.
with an equal right to vote,
eligible voters had always had an equal right to vote. Eligibility had expanded, that is all.
India’s constitution makers also made provisions for affirmative action to “uplift” the “downtrodden” scheduled castes and tribes.
This existed in the 1935 bill. Ambedkar's genius was to strip this benefit from Muslims, Sikhs & Buddhists (Christians were already barred).
While scholars
useless shitheads
identified certain continuities in this approach with colonial constitutionalism and its communal safeguards, many agree that the 1950 constitution, and the rights and redresses it gives citizens, have collectively assumed a status almost larger than life in India’s public culture.
Some cretins talk off the constitution as a 'holy book' & gas on about 'constitutional morality' (which only applies to those who hold office in constitutionally mandated bodies.)
Rohit De vividly describes how “a document with alien antecedents
The Constitution itself subscribes to the doctrine of constitutional autochthony (i.e. all laws are deemed to be indigenous) which was borrowed from the Irish.
that was the product of an elite consensus” became “part of the lived experience of ordinary Indians”, becoming “the dominant field for Indian politics”.
Fuck off! The lived experience of ordinary Indians was that the Constitution didn't mean shit. Anyway, the First Amendment made this amply clear.
The constitution’s procedural provisions, which “empower citizens to challenge laws and administrative actions before the courts, and greatly enhance the powers of judicial review”, have allowed the citizen to have her say in “an elite conversation”.
The right of judicial review was firmly established under the Raj- vide. Emperor v Burah (1877)
Writ petitions
first recorded as used in 1774
have forced state authorities to defend their policies before courts, and the government has suffered huge reverses in these bruising encounters.
Only if it gives a shit about the matter. Getting a judgment is one thing. Enforcing it is another altogether.
Partition did not greatly affect India. One could say that Punjab & Bengal lost influence while the cow-belt gained it. But that had been happening since the early nineteen twenties when the boycott of the Prince of Wales was strongest in UP & Bihar.
I suppose, the Kashmir issue is the biggest legacy but the truth is there would have been a problem there sooner of later. At the time of second Round Table Conference, the Maharaja had called in British troops to put down a rebellion in Poonch. The Brits stayed on & thus, when they left, the place would probably have gone to Pakistan in any case. Still, Kashmir doesn't greatly matter to most Indians though, no doubt, Modi benefits by periodically 'mowing the grass' with air-strikes on terrorist training camps across the border.
Joya has something odd to say about the only important legacy of Partition-
None of this is intended to suggest that conflict was no part of the relationship between India and Pakistan. Of course it was. Kashmir was already a huge bone of contention in the early months of 1948. Junagarh, Hyderabad, and the Indus Waters dispute would soon deeply compromise the fragile trust between these two nations.
Pakistan could do nothing about Junagarh & Hyderabad. America solved the Indus water problem. The Pakistanis jumped the gun on Kashmir but probably got all they could safely keep. Nehru's stupidity & the Army's poor showing in '62 may have encouraged Ayub (some say it was actually Bhutto) to invade in '65. After '71, Pak Army decided it needed 'force multipliers' against both Afghanistan & India. This was the 'mard-e-momin' (Islamic superman) doctrine so loved by Field Marshall Munir which now means that Pak is fighting both India & Afghanistan while keeping Imran Khan in jail.
It is obvious that Pak Army is keeping this issue alive to consolidate its power. Munir got promoted & ensured the Army got more money after Modi punished Pakistan last year. Now Hamas, having been beaten to a pulp in Gaza, is building relations with jihadi outfits in Pakistan. 70,000 Gazans are now enjoying 72 virgins each in Heaven. Why not join them there? According to Trump, Khameni has been killed. It appears backing Hamas can get you to jannat much more quickly than you anticipated.
But the point here is that both sides had developed a pragmatic understanding that each of these conflicts had to be resolved,
No. Pakistan Army has the even more pragmatic understanding that it will get less money if the conflict is resolved.
or if that was not possible, at least contained.
India bombs Pakistan & it runs howling to Uncle Sam. Trump says Sharif thanked him for saving the lives of 35 million Pakistanis.
Moreover, these areas of conflict must be understood alongside the very significant areas of agreement between the two sides.
Joya can't understand shit. Suppose there was a historian who wasn't utterly stupid. The dude would be earning lots of money as a consultant. He wouldn't be teaching cretins.
The contrapuntal relationship between the notorious disagreements which have dominated the conventional narrative on Indo Pakistan affairs and their less well known, but arguably more substantial agreements, calls, as this essay has suggested, to be explored more fully, and to be better understood.
It is understood by smart people- not historians. Still, we must understand that 'legacy of partition' made some people too stupid & ignorant to be anything else.
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