![]() Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy years of nationalist mythmaking. The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together peacefully. The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture unravelled so quickly has spawned a vast literature. Equally unexpected was the ferocity of the ensuing bloodbath. Whereas British rule in India had long been marked by violent revolts and brutal suppressions, the British Army was able to march out of the country with barely a shot fired and only seven casualties. From the vantage point of the retreating colonizers, however, it was in one way fairly successful. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”Īfter the Second World War, Britain simply no longer had the resources with which to control its greatest imperial asset, and its exit from India was messy, hasty, and clumsily improvised. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence. ![]() The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. ![]() Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies infants were found literally roasted on spits.”īy 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered. In Punjab and Bengal-provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively-the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.Īcross the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other-a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. ![]() Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. ![]()
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