History colliding with memory

Nearly seven decades after the departure of the British colonial power from India, through a tortuous and traumatic vivisection of the country into two independent nations, the issue of the 1947 Partition continues to evoke passions and intense debate among generations of South Asians whose experience of it has been second or third hand following the demise or decline of the generation that was instrumental in and suffered from the pain of the unprecedented break-up of a society.
Neeti Nair belongs to a generation of South Asians whose understanding of the events and incidents leading up to the division of India in August 1947 and its ramifications is based on scholarly analyses of history as well as oral tradition. Changing Homelands is a work which, in more than one sense, speaks for itself. Like so many other tomes produced down the years on the causes behind the tragedy, Nair's work is a record of the vicissitudes that accompanied the tragedy. Where Nair appears at a remove from most other documentary representations of this particular aspect of subcontinental tragedy is in her view that it was not only the Muslim community, or a very large segment of it, that advocated Partition. There were good, well-meaning Hindus as well who, much before 1947 came to pass, were progressively coming to the discovery, in their own, prejudiced manner, that a parting of ways between the two dominant religious communities might not be a bad thing after all. And it was a truth, a realization if you will, that was happening in the Punjab.
An early indication of how the Hindu mindset was beginning to work is to be had through the results of Nair's research. She notes the instance of Gokul Chand Narang, a Punjabi Hindu leader, who makes it a point to enlighten an audience two decades after Partition on the views he espoused on the Hindu-Muslim question. Referring to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founder, Narang was without ambivalence: “You know he (Jinnah) wanted parity. You understand what I mean by parity. If parity was there, Hindus would have been absolutely nowhere. I was chairman of a public meeting. I said that I would agree to Pakistan, but never to parity. Pakistan was much a lesser evil than parity.”
Given such strong opinions across the communal divide, it then becomes fairly easy to comprehend the trauma that visited not merely the division of India as a whole but the vivisection of the powerful, influential provinces of the Punjab and Bengal as well. In a historical moment that was as bizarre as it was seemingly improbable and crude in terms of degrading human behaviour, no fewer than 15,000,000 Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims found themselves abandoning the villages and towns where their ancestors had settled generations earlier and where they, their descendants, had lived peacefully with neighbours who had no reason or compulsion to share their faith. Both the Punjab and Bengal paid a price, and not merely in the matter of population transfer. Fierce rioting characterised the coming of Partition. With Muslims and Hindus slicing and hacking away at one another, Partition could not but turn into an inevitability. In Bengal, a last-ditch move to avert a division of the province through having it go its separate way as an independent country could not be lifted off the ground. The measure itself looked half-hearted, to say the least. With memories of the Calcutta Killings of August 1946 yet fresh in Bengali minds, men like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee were not expected to root for a free Bengal where Muslims would outnumber Hindus, the latter naturally turning into a permanent  minority. In the end, it was Mukherjee and men like him who won the battle for a division of Bengal.
Nair's focus remains, though, on the Punjab. She recalls those Hindu voices which felt that the Indian National Congress, in advocating a secular united India, was quite deliberately brushing aside the concerns of the Hindu community. Note the sentiments of Rai Bahadur Lal Chand, those he expressed through letters to the newspaper Panjabee. His complaint against the Congress was that 'it makes the Hindu forget that he is a Hindu and tends to swamp his communal individuality into an Indian ideal, thus making him break with all his past traditions and past glory.' There is too the reference to the Punjabi Congress leader Lajpat Rai. While in prison in Burma in 1907, he asked for works on Urdu poetry to be given to him. Four years later, in Lahore, he played a defining role in setting up Hindi Elementary Education Leagues. Large sections of Hindus were perturbed at the Minto-Morley reforms, for they were of the opinion that the measures proposed through the reforms, such as separate electorates, aimed at protecting Muslim interests in the Punjab, to the detriment of the minority Hindus..
Nair plumbs the unknown cavernous spaces of Indian history, moving beyond the Punjab to explain the rising levels of communalism that would eventually leave the country sundered. And then she returns to the Punjab, but not before she has drawn into her tale the contributions of such personalities as Gandhi, Swami Shraddhanand, Pandit  Ramchandra Mahopadeshak  of the Arya Samaj and the Mohammedan Maulvi Ahmed Saeed to present her argument that secular forces were around as well to campaign for the preservation of the common historical heritage India had over the centuries been heir to.
In the end, of course, history can only follow a course of its own making. Muslim communalism and Hindu nationalism were to throw up realities, many of them being pseudo-realities, that would leave India divided. The bitterness that parochial politics could engender was the consequence. Nair refers to Agha Shahid Ali's poetry. The verses put matters in perspective:
Your history gets in the way of my memory.
I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me . . .
Your memory gets in the way of my memory. . .

Syed Badrul Ahsan is with The Daily Star