Throughline - Road to Partition

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

What happens when a nation splits apart? It's a question many of us are asking ourselves today. It happened 75 years ago with Partition, when India and Pakistan became independent nations, divided by a somewhat arbitrary line that separated neighbors, families, and communities. 15 million people were displaced, leaving a trail of chaos and violence that in some ways has never ended. In today's episode, NPR politics reporter Asma Khalid takes us back in time to learn how the road to Partition was paved, and to try to understand how people and nations reach a tipping point when neighbors realize it's no longer possible to live side by side.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. What is your full name? Aapne pooru naam?

Aap apne wale dahin ka naam? Ranbir Vohra. Bol naam takaji Shamsul Zaman. What is your full name? Where were you born and how did you get the name Khan Hassan Zia? And what is your date of birth? March 5, 8th of June, 1932. 1928. What do you think partition had the effect on people or overall Indian subcontinent? Neither side envisaged what they were unleashing,

which was a terrible carnage, which was totally unnecessary. My heart, my fellow traveler, it has been decreed again that you and I be exiled. People left with the clothes on their back. Go calling out in every street. They came running from inside. Turned to every town. They hid us there. And they were crying. To search for a clue of a messenger from our beloved,

to ask every stranger the way back to our home. How can I convey to you, my friend, how horrible is a night of loneliness? I saw some dead bodies in the water. I would gladly welcome death. Floating down in the river. If it were to come, but once.

Asma, are you there? Yes, hi, I'm here. Hi. Okay, I think that you are currently recording from the basement of the White House. Yes, that's right. I am in the basement of the White House. This is Asma Khalid. She co-hosts NPR's Politics Podcast and... I'm one of NPR's White House correspondents. I cover politics, and I've been covering politics for, it feels like, a lot of election cycles at this point. I covered the rise of former President Donald Trump. I covered President Biden's campaign.

A few months ago, Asma came to us with an idea for an episode about partition, an event in 1947 that tore British-ruled India in two, forming an independent India and Pakistan. A somewhat arbitrary line was used to separate villages and communities, neighbors and families, displacing around 15 million people. It was the largest mass migration in modern history, leaving a trail of chaos and violence in its wake. Everybody went separate ways. Memories of that rupture are recorded

in the 1947 partition archive, the largest collection of partition oral histories in the world, and in poems like the one Esma recited at the top. It has been decreed again that you and I be exiled. In this poem, this very prominent Pakistani poet, Fez Ahmed Fez, touches on this really universal feeling of longings that I think so many of the survivors of partition

speak to, whether they were leaving towns and villages in what was Pakistan or India. But also this concept of home. Like, what is home? What is home? Now, you might be wondering, why would a U.S. politics reporter be interested in something that happened 75 years ago, halfway across the world? You know, I think it's been really tough to cover American politics over the last decade and not see that there are

through lines to what's happened in other places around the world. These last few election cycles in particular have been really politically polarizing. And, you know, one of the things I've done as a political reporter is I don't just cover the candidate who's running for office, but I spend a lot of time crisscrossing the country, talking to voters. You know, people have told me that they prefer living in zip codes where pretty much everybody is like them. And I guess I get very nervous having been told stories of what partition was like for my own family members growing up

about the dangers of when people decide they can no longer live by people who perhaps, you know, in the case of America, have different religions or different political beliefs or different races. And so I wanted to go back and better understand what happened with partition and was it essentially unavoidable? Where did you first start to hear about partition?

Okay, so I grew up in Indiana. We were one of the only South Asian families in our town. And all my life, I remember hearing bits and pieces about partition. I'm from Pakistan. That's my grandma. We call her Nano. She'd tell us stories about how her family was forced to leave India when she was an eight-year-old child for a new home in this newly created country of Pakistan. Your grandfather used to say, you're a transit passenger in this world. The final destination comes after you. Go away from this world.

Still, Nano is nostalgic when she talks about India. It's where she was born and spent the early years of her life. She remembers her ayah, her nanny, her Catholic boarding school, the trains they'd ride to visit family, and her home alongside the train tracks where the family would gather, the home they fled for Pakistan during partition. In 2015, my younger sister Mariam actually tried to track down that home in India. No one in our family had ever gone back there. I haven't. Nano has it.

I knew that she had never gone back, like many people from her generation who left Indy or Pakistan. And so I figured why not make a day of it and see what happens. So my sister and a couple friends traveled there and hired a driver for the day. And he loved it. He's like, we're going to do this. In a short video she took from the car,

windows down, they pass rice fields, shovel, and brick and cement homes with metal gates. She had a few directions that Nano had given her. The home was somewhere by the train tracks in this town called Dusua, which is in Punjab. It's a state in the north that had experienced some of the worst ruptures of partition. So I was like, dear God, what train tracks am I going to end up at? Could be the start of like a really bad horror story. You have to find your ancestral home by the train tracks.

They drove about two hours to the Suwa, found these train tracks, and knocked on a door. And then Johnny Verk came. Johnny Verk, who now lives in Nano's childhood home, is immediately warm. And then Mariam tells him the name of our great-grandfather. Johnny Virk, who now lives in Nano's childhood home, is immediately warm. And then Mariam tells him the name of our great-grandfather. The fact that he recognized the name was very telling.

Then he goes and gets some paperwork and shows it to Mariam. It has our family's name on it. He kept joking, like, this is your home. We're the guests in your home. That's how Johnny would talk. I mean, they walked me through the entire home. They fed us. They were so warm. Johnny didn't stop there.

He took them to our great-grandfather's village, my grandfather's school. And along the way, they're treated like these celebrities. Throughout that entire day, the energy that people had with like, oh, you've returned to your roots was like remarkable. It was palpable, I would say. Why was it so emotional? Because they never had the opportunity to go back. And the thousands of other people who were impacted by partition

never had the opportunity to go back. And so the stories are tangible. And if it's not your story, then you know someone whose story is probably mirroring yours. I'm Asma Khalid. And in this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're traveling back in time to try to understand how the road to partition was paved and asking a question that many of us are asking ourselves today. What is the tipping point when neighbors realize it's no longer possible to live side by side? Hi, this is Kevin Weber from Kansas City, Kansas, and you're internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com.

T's and C's apply. Part 1. The Rise of the Raj. So, do you remember the address of your home there? Soura, Srinagar, Kashmir. That was the address. What was nearby? In those days, there were huge orchards of fruits. Cherries, apples, pomegranates. And as kids, we used to go and steal,

climb on those trees and try and steal as much as we could. And one day the gardener caught us. When Mainano used to live in India before partition, before there was a Pakistan, she too had a pomegranate tree in the backyard at her family's house. And at that time, India was under British rule, a period known as the Raj. The British first got involved in India back in the 1600s through trade, forming the British East India Company, which over the next couple of centuries

went from a trading corporation to a territorial power. It was a messy, sometimes violent affair that bled India of its resources, cotton, spices, textiles, with very little benefit to Indians themselves. Tensions came to a head in 1857, leading to a war between British traders of the East India Company and Indians who continued to be exploited. The following year, the British crown decided to officially take control of the country, beginning the Raj period. Queen Victoria even added Empress of India to her title, and elite Indian families adopted all things British.

So that's Jinnah's backdrop. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the man who would become Pakistan's first leader. He's known in pretty much every Pakistani household as Qadiyazm, the great leader, Pakistan's George Washington, if you will. Chances are, if you walk into a home or a restaurant or a shop in Pakistan, even today, you'll see his photo plastered on the wall. He was born in 1876 or 1875. There's some question about the exact date of his birth. Amadri Jinnah was from Gujarat, the same state as Mahatma Gandhi. Jinnah's family was upper class. He was the oldest of seven kids who went to a Christian missionary high school.

At the age of 16, he went off to London. Where he studied law. And from there, he did his bar and he eventually came back to India. This is historian Aisha Jalal. I'm the Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University, where I teach at the History Department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. And she's written a book called The Sole Spokesman, Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the demand for Pakistan. Did you take any notice of people's religious backgrounds? It didn't make any difference to me what religion you belong to.

And I thought to them, their religion, to me, my religion. Why interfere into anybody's religion? They were my friends as people, as a person. What happened to make religion so primary in the minds of people? Prior to the British, religion was there. People were concerned about their faith. But it was really more about Persians, Afghans, Turks, Hindi Muslims, rather than capital M Muslims facing a capital H Hindu community. That's not to say it was a utopia. The caste system in India, which has been around for thousands of years, created rigid social and economic divisions. And when it came to religion, Aisha suggests that while there were periodic flare-ups between groups,

the question of the capital M facing the capital H is a British construct. India is and was then a Hindu-majority country. And while there were many religious groups, the largest minority were Muslims, who at that point made up around 25% of the population. And that included Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The British chose, despite their own context of tensions between Catholics and Protestants, to privilege the religious distinction. Now, I'm trying to suggest to you that religion was always important, but by turning it into a category rather than a matter of faith, you politicized it.

The Mughal Empire, led by Muslim emperors along with their Hindu allies, had ruled over northern India since the 16th century. And while there's some disagreement among historians about how much the tensions between Hindus and Muslims were driven by British colonialism, one thing the British definitely introduced was the census. They began to gather data throughout India. Religious categories were prioritized. Muslims and Hindus found themselves having to argue

for their advancement in the colonial system based on census categories. And that lent a political significance to this battle. So what was really political becomes molded in religious terms. Enter Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India's first leader after partition. Nehru was born in 1889. so at really the high point of the Raj. And his father, a lawyer from the provinces, was a great believer, at least in early life, in the Raj in the sense that it brought law and order and so forth to India. So Nehru's early life was very much shaped by England and English values.

This is Sunil Kilnani. I'm now working with the university in India, Ashoka University, where I teach history and politics. He's also the author of the book, The Idea of India. He leaves Cambridge and returns back to India. He was being groomed to have a successful career under the British Raj in India, to become a lawyer or indeed even to join the Indian civil service. If his story sounds similar to Jinnah's, that's because it is, just a decade or so later.

It's interesting that Jinnah and Nehru's father had worked together. They both believed in liberal values. They believed in living well and having a drink every evening and so forth. But Jinnah and Nehru, in a sense, it was a kind of doomed relationship. They never really got on very well. In part, I think it's because they were, in some ways, quite alike one another. They were both anglicized. They were both lawyers.

They were both quite vain. They both enjoyed being flattered, certainly. Were they in the same social circles? Broadly, yes. I mean, they lived in different cities. But yes, they were broadly in the same elite. And while Jinnah was raised Muslim and Nehru was raised Hindu, neither man was particularly religious. So they had this kind of rivalrous relationship at a personal level, even before they were political opponents. And they, I think, never entirely trusted one another.

As tensions between Nehru and Jinnah simmered, the categories the British had been pushing began to seep into politics. There had been one main political party, the Indian National Congress, which had a more secular, nationalist agenda. But in the early 20th century, religious groups began to break off and form their own parties. For the purposes of this story, we'll focus on two of them. The Muslim League, who would name Jinnah as their leader, and the Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist party.

Meanwhile, the British were busy with World War I. And they sent over a million Indian troops to fight in trenches on nearly every front of the war. There is an indefinable, mysterious power that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. During the war, Nehru, a reluctant young lawyer, began spending more time with Gandhi. Gandhi was a friend of Nehru's father, and so he came to stay in the family house. And they spent time together, walking and talking. And Nehru just was completely enthralled to what Gandhi stood for.

Gandhi says to Nehru, look, go to the villages, go and learn about India, leave your legal profession, you know, don't listen to what your father has to say, just listen to me. In a sense, Gandhi stood for everything that Nehru's father didn't. In April 1919, with World War I at an end, something happened that brought Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, and really... An entire generation of Indians. Together against the British.

Front ranks, kneeling, petition! The Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Travel to major. Three, two, one. Several thousand protesters. in Vallabar massacre. Several thousand protesters were peacefully gathering against some particularly repressive British laws. The British commandant

in the city decided to teach Indians a lesson, as he put it, paraphrasing, and basically fired on them. And killed several hundred. The exact count is still disputed. British violence against Indians was not entirely surprising or unexpected, but it was what happened afterwards.

The massacre made headlines around the world. And while Britain's Winston Churchill called it monstrous, not everyone agreed, including the general himself, who refused to apologize. Some Britons in India defended him and even... Collect money to support the general. That became a deeply disillusioning moment. That was really the moment that turned people against the British. The fight against the British united people. You know, the enemy of my enemy and all that. While Gandhi and Nehru worked within the political system to try to unify people for the cause of independence,

Nehru also traveled the Indian countryside. Tens of thousands of miles. Spreading Gandhi's message of non-violent resistance to people on the ground level and getting arrested repeatedly on sedition charges. He spent about 10 of the best years of his life in His Majesty's prisons. Pakistan, partition, none of that was part of the equation yet. The only thing on politicians' minds at this point was getting rid of the British. But old rivalries die hard, and simmering tensions between Nehru and Jinnah

would return with a vengeance if the British ever left. While Nehru was spending years in prison, Jinnah was pursuing a very lucrative legal profession, living in Hampstead in London. Jinnah didn't spend a day in prison. So Nehru never really took Jinnah seriously as someone who was willing to lay everything down for India's independence or its future. He felt he was an opportunist who came in late and came in only for his own reasons. Coming up, the idea of Pakistan is born.

This is Devin from Atlanta, Georgia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. You guys have brought so many stories of the global human perspective into focus for me, and I just can't thank you enough for that. Bye. If you're listening as a subscriber to ThruLine Plus, we just want to say thank you. And if you're not yet a subscriber and want to learn more about how to listen to the show without any sponsor breaks, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Becoming a Plus subscriber helps support all of our work at ThruLine. So we hope you'll join. Now, back to the show. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club,

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Must be 21 or older to purchase. Part 2. Looking into the Void Those who walk the road of industry are its hands and feet. The office of government is its beautiful face, and the poet of tuneful melodies is its seeing eye. If just one limb should suffer pain, tears will drop from the eye. How anxious the eye is for the whole body. Muhammad Iqbal. Growing up, my grandpa, like a lot of people of his time,

could recite lines from Muhammad Iqbal's poems from memory. Iqbal is sort of the intellectual forefather of Pakistan. You know, the Thomas Jefferson of the bunch. He's known to many as Allama Iqbal, sort of the intellectual forefather of Pakistan. You know, the Thomas Jefferson of the bunch. He's known to many as Alama Iqbal, meaning the most learned. Iqbal graduated from Cambridge in 1908, just a few years before Nehru. And a hundred years later, when I went there for grad school, his influence could still be felt. The Pakistani Student Association on campus would even host an annual dinner in his honor. You'd go where your fanciest sari or shalarkamies, you know, maybe meet a husband,

adjust, and reflect on Iqbal's ideas. And back in the early 1930s, as the independence movement against Britain was heating up, Iqbal's ideas laid the foundation for a new place, whose name was coined by a budding law student at Cambridge named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, a place called Pakistan. Pakistan is an acronym, B for Punjab, A for Afghan, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and Tan from Balochistan. All regions of colonial India that had large communities of Muslims. Pakistan also refers to, its meaning is the land of the pure, which was deliberately coined to counter the Hindu claim that Muslims polluted them, their sense of caste.

And with that, the Pakistan movement was born. The British Empire's days in India were numbered, and there were serious questions about who might fill the vacuum of power. Would Muslims be left out of the equation, or worse, discriminated against and persecuted? After all, there was a budding Hindu nationalist party. And so the Pakistan movement hoped to establish autonomous Muslim states within India, in places where Muslims were already the majority, and encourage other Muslims in the country to migrate there so they could be safe and in charge. The proposal was presented to Jinnah and the Muslim League. And they reject it as impracticable.

No one could imagine how you'd possibly coordinate moving millions of people to these proposed states. So the idea of Pakistan was tabled. But the thing about ideas is that once they're unleashed, they have a way of sticking around, clinging to the hidden crevices of our minds.

And the idea of Pakistan would remain. The seeds of partition had been planted. 24 years ago, no one had ever heard of the shy, daydreaming youth who lived in Vienna and whose name was Adolf Hitler. Today, at 48, he too has completed his scramble to the pinnacle of power. Fast forward a few years to 1937 in British-controlled India.

In 1937, the British held elections for provincial assemblies. The electorate is 35 million. In a population of over 270 million. It's a very limited representative system. In other words, the average Indian would not have been aware of the political debates going on because they didn't have a say in politics anyways. This was mostly a relatively elite, upper-class, educated group who called the shots. Still, this was a really important election.

With Britain teetering on the edge of the Second World War, the stakes were higher than ever to figure out what an independent India might look like. Jinnah, as the leader of the Muslim League, was pushing for more autonomy for Muslims in provinces where they were the majority. Nehru, with Gandhi's guidance, was now the leader of the Indian National Congress Party. And he was pushing a secular socialist vision for the country. The Congress, to kind of show it stood for all Indians and not just for any particular religious group, said, look, whatever happens in these elections, we're going to have coalition governments,

the minority parties, the Muslim League. They will all have an equal share in government so that they don't feel threatened. In fact, when they won power, they didn't do that. Congress does exceptionally well and doesn't need the Muslim League. They reneged on their promise to form coalition governments. So the Congress then, and Nehru, calls upon Jannat to dismantle the Muslim League. Jannat gets furious with Nehru. And that sowed a lot of mistrust. That's when the parting of the ways business starts. In a series of letters back and forth between Jinnah and Nehru, which were printed

in the newspapers, you can hear the frustration of these childhood rivals. It sounds like an OG Twitter battle. Jinnah writes, it is the, quote, duty of everyone in India to bring about a pact between Hindus and Muslims. Nehru responds, sorry, the international situation, a.k.a. World War II, needs to be the top priority. Jinnah grows frustrated and tells Nehru he's, quote, divorced from the realities facing India. The press itself was polarized, each side leveling insults and allegations. And being a part of the American political press right now, I will say it is hard to ignore the parallels when it comes to the role our media can play in dehumanizing each other. In the case of India, it began to push things to the edge. And so by the time the war breaks out in September 1939, Jinnah is on a war path with the Congress.

As you know, of the many races, creeds and religions that inhabit the vast subcontinent of India, there are two major nations, the Hindus and Muslims. During the Second World War, Jinnah makes a very, very important speech at Lahore in which he says, India is not a single civilization. And India is not only practical solution. Jinnah was a master of ambiguity, so he never explicitly said what he wanted. He gestured towards ideas. For example, even when he talked about the idea of two nations in India, he was not saying these should be necessarily in the form of modern nation states or that there should be a partition.

I don't think at that point he really conceptualized that. You're saying for a long time he wanted Pakistan and Hindustan under the umbrella of one country. He left it an open question. An open question which, as long as the British were still in India, remained hypothetical. A problem for another day. Hostilities will end

officially at one minute after midnight tonight, Tuesday, May 4th. After the end of the Second World War, it becomes clear that the British are going to leave India. British won the Second World War thanks to America, but Britain was drained. Broke, in debt, and trying to rebuild, Britain no longer had the bandwidth to maintain an empire, so it began abandoning its colonial projects, including India.

I think people start to get more panicked about how this is going, what is this future going to be? We are at the end of an era. Very soon we shall embark on a new age. And my mind goes back to the great past of India, from the very dawn of that history, which might be considered almost the dawn of human history, to today. And all this past crowds around me and exhilarates me and at the same time somewhat oppresses me. This is Nehru in 1946 speaking at a constitutional convention in New Delhi. Right until 1946, these models, these ideas were being debated and discussed

by Jinnah, by Gandhi, by Nehru, by the British. And one of the big unresolved questions was whether Hindus, Muslims and other religions could actually live together peacefully in this new independent India. One of our cameramen visiting Calcutta sent back these typical scenes of the city with its mixed population of about a million and a half. He reports that murder and rioting still continued at the time. Calcutta, he says, may look peaceful in daytime, but violence... One event which showed the potential for violence driven by religion happened in August 1946, which was one of the worst months in the history of the subcontinent in terms of religious violence until that point.

And this came to be known as the Great Calcutta Killings. It initially came from a call by Jinnah for a day of action, as he called it. And it led to a cycle, a spiral of violence between Hindus and Muslims in that city. And coming out of that, I think the leadership, Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru, became, I think, more worried about the situation. As the fragile crust of order broke, it seemed to make sense to just divide. In March 1947, less than a year after the great Calcutta killings,

Lord Louis Mountbatten landed in India. A former British naval officer and the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was tasked with negotiating the terms of independence with India's leaders, ASAP. Mountbatten was a flamboyant, reckless man in a hurry. He was, you know, extremely charismatic, extremely vain, a man who always got his own way. And he believed he would come, get the boys together, Janan, Nehru and Gandhi, all around a table, and we'll get this sorted out. The British wanted out of India by no later than June 1948. So suddenly a deadline was set.

And of course, once he gets them around the table, there's just endless argument about what the arrangements for a future India should be. It probably didn't help that Lord Mountbatten and Nehru were very close friends, leaving Jinnah as the odd man out. This argument goes on and on. And then in June 1947, Mountbatten makes this kind of surprise announcement. There can be no question of coercing any large areas in which one community has a majority to live against their will under a government in which another community has a majority. And the only alternative to coercion is partition.

He kind of says, India is going to be partitioned. And it's going to happen not next year in 1948, but it's going to happen by August 1947. The Indian leaders go along with that because they feel the clock ticking. Nehru and Gandhi are now, you know, getting on in age. Jinnah probably by this time is aware that he has a fatal illness. For Nehru, it was a kind of complete betrayal in the sense of all that he'd worked for.

It is with no joy in my heart of complete betrayal in a sense of all that he'd worked for. It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals to you, though I have no doubt in my mind that this is the right course. For generations... Nehru wanted a unified India because of the level of principle and ideals he believed that was the right thing. He also wanted a unified India for much more, you know, if you like, geopolitical reasons, a large India where, you know, it could stand up as a major force alongside China and Russia and the U.S. in a post-war, you know, 20th century world.

And I think in the end, you know, he sort of acquiesces to it. You know, Mountbatten sort of, you know, congratulates himself for carrying out the greatest administrative, you know, operation in no time. You know, it's eye-opening hearing this account, because in South Asian folklore, partition is this grand plan conjured up by Jinnah. But in reality, it all seems much more haphazard, more of an accident of fate. Like a lot of things in history, no one, I think, explicitly intended for it to happen the way it happened. And yet everyone conspired to make it happen. And when something comes together so chaotically, there are bound to be pieces missing.

In the case of partition, there was a really big missing piece. They don't know where the lines are going to be drawn. They don't even know what the lines necessarily signify. That task fell to a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe. He'd never stepped foot in India. Actually, he'd never traveled east of Paris. People have been unduly unkind to him. I don't envy his role.

He was given just five weeks to map out the borders. He was only carrying out what had been decided by His Majesty's government. I mean, you can blame him for agreeing to do it. And it went, well, as well as you can imagine. He drew the boundary line between Punjab and Bengal, having never visited the subcontinent. The result was that huge communities of Muslims were left behind in India, and large numbers of Hindus were included in Pakistan.

And if you look at a map, this new country called Pakistan was itself divided. East Pakistan on one side, West Pakistan on the other, and a huge India smack dab in the middle of them. It was a disaster because the lines were drawn arbitrarily that ran through villages, through houses. To leave in such haste meant that India was left in chaos. Mainano told me nobody realized how quickly their world was about to be turned upside down. They left with basically the clothes on their back. And right before they left, Mainano's grandfather handed their house keys to Johnny Virk's family.

My grandfather told them, if you come back, otherwise it's yours. Coming up, the unforeseen consequences of splitting apart. This is Irene calling from Everett, Washington.

You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 3. When the Fragile Crust of Order Broke

I had the feeling that I was kind of a twig floating in the water, in the sea, and at the mercy of the waves. Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge. Around midnight on August 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the soon-to-be prime minister of an independent India, made what would be called one of the great speeches of the 20th century. It was broadcast across the country. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, It was broadcast across the country.

The next day, August 15th, Muhammad Ali Jinnah addressed his new country, Pakistan, for the first time too. is a land of great potential resources. But to build it up into a country worthy of the Muslim nation, which will require every ounce of energy that we possess, I'm confident that it will come from all wholehearted men. Pakistan, Jinnah Khan. But these grand speeches were becoming more and more divorced from the reality on the ground, and the violence was getting worse. My father and my grandfather's parents had all said, no, there won't be trouble, there won't be trouble. We've been here for generations.

They said, ooh, what's going to happen now? They didn't know what to anticipate. The person who used to milk the cows for us was a Muslim. And he came and told the family, please leave. You will be attacked tomorrow or the day after. It became apparent that there was going to be conflict. Nobody went back to your ancestral house? No.

They left the house exactly the way it was. The money in the bank, the bank went bankrupt. And then you just waited because we didn't know what was going on. We moved in a bus from Senagar to Mari. We came to Pakistan. Three children, one servant, four adults in a jeep. There was no clarity. I mean, to the extent that there was not even a map of Pakistan

circulated with the official Muslim League. That's what led to violence. So much was left to chance. It was horrible. It was sheer chaos. While some of the most intense violence occurred in a few specific regions, including Bengal and Punjab, where Mainano's from, skirmishes also happened across the entire subcontinent,

in Hyderabad, in the south, in Karachi, in the west. All the oral histories you hear in the 1947 partition archive are eerily similar, regardless of religion or region. They would mercilessly kill people. I mean, people caught on the wrong side of the divide were butchered. While the overwhelming number of people were not violent, the violence was coming from all sides and for all kinds of reasons, among people who had lived side by side for generations.

Some saw it as retribution, others a land grab, instigated by political rhetoric from the top that fed the hysteria of the moment. I mean, I can say explicitly that the violence was not directed by the leadership, but their discourses, their discursive statements were interpreted variously by people and made use of. The speed at which the violence spiraled out of control is unimaginable. Women, children, horrible, horrible things. People used to come and tell us to put a bindhi on our heads, change our names. As many as 100,000 women are estimated to have been abducted during partition.

Many were forced into marriages or raped or killed. The final number of deaths was impossible to track. It was estimated that within the first few months, between 200,000 and 2 million people died. Within a year, around 15 million people left their homes. Even though some stayed behind, many families, like Mainano's, felt like the choice was to leave or be killed. Still, many actually thought they'd be able to move back and forth freely across borders, even return home, including Pakistan's founding father. many actually thought they'd be able to move back and forth freely across borders, even return home, including Pakistan's founding father.

Jinnah keeps his house in Bombay, present-day Mumbai, thinking that he can, you know, in a sense, be the leader of Pakistan during the week in Pakistan and spend weekends in Bombay. Jinnah died just a year after India was partitioned. He continues to have that George Washington-type reputation in Pakistan today. But for Nehru, who remained in power for almost two decades, his reputation went from someone who could do no wrong. I mean, he was referred to as Cha-Cha Nehru, Uncle Nehru. To becoming a scapegoat. Narendra Modi, India's present prime minister, basically blames everything that's gone wrong with India on Nehru. He's the kind of anti-George Washington in India today.

Modi's party, the BJP, was heavily influenced by the ideology of the Hindu Nationalist Party, the Mahasabha, which had helped fuel the fears that led to the ideology of the Hindu Nationalist Party, the Mahasabha, which had helped fuel the fears that led to the creation of Pakistan. In a way, both Pakistan and India continue to live in the shadows of partition, despite the fact that both countries share so much culture, food, music, people, language. The border has become nearly impenetrable. Both countries have issues with religious extremism,

and both are nuclear powers with weapons aimed at one another. So it's easy to wonder, did partition ever end? The simple, obvious answer would be, well, it ended on the 16th of August, 1947, the day after, as it were. But in fact, that's not the case. Well into the 1950s, people were continuing to migrate across the borders. The borders had not been established and were still being contested. In 1971, you have a further partition when Pakistan breaks up

and East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh. I had to come across when the Pakistani army started burning down the villages, and East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh. So in a sense, if you like, the partition is relived in many ways then. And Kashmir, for many people, continues to be the unfinished business of partition. Kashmir is a Muslim majority region in the north that is still disputed. On the surface it's a fight over resources, water in particular, but for many Kashmir is the embodiment of what went wrong in partition. Split between India, China and Pakistan, it lives in the imagination of many

Pakistanis as this beautiful place of mountains and lakes that, with its majority Muslim population, slipped through Pakistan's hands. What happened on the 14th and 15th of August 1947 in the Indian subcontinent reverberates today not just in the Indian subcontinent, but in all those places where the diaspora can be found. So partition has no one territory. It sadly has come to live in people's minds and travels with them wherever they go. Remember Johnny Virk? Well, years after my sister visited him, she still had his contact info in WhatsApp. So I asked us all, me, Mariam, my nano, and Johnny, to jump on a call. They immediately started talking in Urdu Hindi and then in Punjabi, their shared mother tongue, which I admit is not easy for me to get.

I don't understand. It's okay if you don't understand. Even though they have never met, it was like they had known each other for years. Because while their religions would have put them on opposite sides during partition, their family stories are so similar. We belong to the same soil. I have my roots in Pakistan, and your nanny has roots in the

Suwa. And yet, their feelings on partition are complicated and personal. When you look now at where India and Pakistan are today, do you think partition was worth it? Yes. For Mainano, Muslims in India were never going to be treated equally. Even now, now the Indian Muslims are suffering more. But you look also, though, at Pakistan, it's, you know, an impoverished country. It has struggled to have a good government. Like, it's not a really great quality of life for many people too, right?

No, I understand that. But the thing is, that's their own mistake. Partition of anything cannot be better. If you divide something, how can it be better? I think it would be very hard to say that it was worth it. Here it's worth remembering that India was not alone in this. They began with Ireland, Palestine, Korea, Vietnam, Germany. In no case have they been successful. In some cases, they've been reversed, as in Germany and in Vietnam, and things have become better.

In cases where they continue, they have remained sources of conflict and tension. More specifically, in the case of India and Pakistan and South Asia, I think they have been really quite ruinous for the life chances of people there. Memory is a very tricky business. We're all into memory and the role of memory and all of this that you're talking about, about partition experiences is memory-based. But you see, memory is also being filtered through the prism of the present. And so 75 years of

recriminations between India and Pakistan are playing a role in how people talk about partition. I would love if you visit the Suwa. I do hope and pray to Allah, that if you bring your grandmother, I will be the most happiest person to host you.

So lovely to talk to all of you. Thank you. It's very nice to talk to you. God bless you. God bless you. God bless you. Thank you. Rabraka. Bye. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui.

And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu. Julie Kay. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sangwini. Casey Miner. Christina Kim.

Devin Kadiyama. Sanjukta Poddar. Olivia Chulkodi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thank you to Sanjukta Poddar, Karen Bellamy-Danyu, Ganita Singh Bala, Diamond Kennedy, Vincent Nee, Dia Hadid, Salman Riaz, Taylor Ashe, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman.

And a special thanks to the 1947 Partition Archive for graciously allowing us to use oral histories from their archive in this episode. And to the Faiz Foundation Trust, Lahore, for letting us use the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

This episode was mixed by Andy Huther. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani,

Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLine NPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Grammarly. Back-and-forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at Grammarly.com slash enterprise.

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