Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (27 page)

The colonial town-planners also invested
heavily in reforesting the Aravalli ridges around New Delhi, particularly the
Central Ridge just behind Rashtrapati Bhavan. The principal tree that was used for
this was the Central American mesquite or ‘vilayati keekar’ that
would become a very common tree in Delhi. People tend to confuse it with the local
keekar or babool but, in fact, it is an invasive species that has edged out many of
the trees native to the area.
²⁶
As a result of all this tree planting, Central Delhi looks extraordinarily
green when seen from a height (say from the Taj Hotel on Mansingh Road). Whatever
one may think of the elitism of Lutyens’s Delhi, it is certainly
unique.

As the construction of the new city
neared completion, the British raised their own pillar in front of the Viceregal
palace—the Jaipur column headed by a six-point crystal star. It is easily
visible through the main gate on Raisina Hill. At its base, it is inscribed:
‘In thought faith/ In word wisdom/ In deed courage/ In life service/ So
may India be great.’ One could take these words as being patronizing or
one could think of
them as a premonition that colonial rule
would soon end. Perhaps recognizing their own transience, the colonial rulers merely
wanted later generations to think well of them. By the time New Delhi was completed
in the mid-thirties, it was abundantly clear the British rule would not last too
much longer.

As we have seen, India had withdrawn
into itself from the twelfth century. I have not been able to find a good
explanation for why they imposed on themselves caste rules that prohibited the
crossing of the seas. It is particularly puzzling since Indian merchants and princes
became very wealthy from maritime trade. Brahmin scholars also benefited greatly
from the demand for their services in South East Asia. It must also be added,
nonetheless, that caste rules were never watertight. Indian Muslims, and even
Hindus, continued to travel to foreign lands. There are remains of a large Indian
trading post in far away Azerbaijan. Built in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century, the Ateshgah of Baku includes the remains of a Hindu temple and
inscriptions invoking the gods Ganesh and Shiva. There are also records of Indian
merchants in Samarkand and Bukhara. Still, it must be admitted that these overseas
outposts were a shadow of the thriving Indian networks that had once extended from
China to the Middle East.

It was in the nineteenth century, under
British rule, that Indians began again to travel abroad in large numbers. An
important driver of migration was the demand for indentured labour in British
colonies after the abolition of slavery in 1834.
The initial
demand came from sugar cane plantations, but soon Indians were being used to build
railway lines and work mines. In the early years, the workers expected to come home
at the end of the indenture period, but the British decided that it was cheaper to
encourage Indians to settle in the colonies. Thus, Indian women were encouraged to
join their menfolk. The indentured workers faced a hard life, but the migration
process was given a boost by the Great Famine of 1877. In this way, large Indian
communities came to settle in faraway British colonies like Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana,
Malaya, South Africa and Mauritius. The French colony of Reunion and the Dutch
colony of Surinam also received substantial numbers. The place where half a million
Indian workers landed in Mauritius is preserved as ‘Aapravasi
Ghat’ (Immigration Depot) and now is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
²⁷

A surviving example of a contract for an
indentured worker of that period reads as follows:
²⁸

I, Peroo, engage to proceed to
Mauritius to serve E. Antard, pere, or such other persons as I may be
transferred to (such transfer being made by mutual consent, to be declared
before a public officer), as a khidmutgar, for the space of five years from the
date of this agreement, on consideration of receiving a remuneration of
Company’s rupees ten (10) per month, and food and clothing as follows;
viz

Daily:
14 chittanks rice, 2
chittanks dholl,
¹
/2 chiitanks ghee,
¹
/4 chittanks
salt.

Yearly:
1 blanket, 2
dhooties, 1 chintz mirjace, 1 lascar’s cap, 1 wooden bowl
… also one lotah or brass cup between four persons, and medicine
and medical attendance when required; also to be sent back to Calcutta at the
expiration of my period of service, free of all expense to myself, should such
be my wish, subject to the terms of my general agreement. Executed this day ____
of November 1837.

The contract is followed by a short
note signed by F.W. Birch, Superintendent of Calcutta Police that describes Peroo as
‘Height, 5 feet, 3 inches; age 28 years; colour, light; particular marks,
none; caste Mussalman.’ Hundreds of thousands of Indians would have left
their homes with contracts like these. It is estimated that less than a third
returned. Many perished during the sea journeys and the years of hard labour. Yet,
enough of them survived to form the Indian communities scattered across these
faraway lands.

Soon, Indian traders and clerks also
began to follow the British to the colonies. Gujarati merchants and shopkeepers
established a network in eastern and southern Africa. The Tamil Chettiar community
was especially active in South East Asia and established a network in Burma, Malaya,
Singapore and even French-controlled Vietnam. As they settled in these areas, they
would have found tiny remnants of Indian merchant communities that had survived from
ancient times. The ‘Chitty’ community, for instance, had
survived for centuries in Malaya with little contact with the original homeland.
They had intermarried with local women and adopted local dress, but somehow had
retained their Hindu religion and customs. The community is now rapidly merging with
the broader Tamil community in modern Malaysia.

Although this network of Indian
communities was created
and maintained by British power, the
diaspora played an important role in India’s struggle for independence
from colonial rule. Mahatma Gandhi, for instance, was part of the Indian community
in South Africa between 1893 and 1914, and he developed his political and spiritual
philosophy of non-violence while fighting for the rights of Indians there. The
incident in June 1893 that changed the course of his life was his eviction, on
racial grounds, from the first-class compartment of a train, despite the fact that
he had a valid ticket. This took place at Pietermaritzburg
station—visitors will see a plaque on the platform marking the spot where
he was thrown out. Gandhi would return to India only in 1915, at the age of 46, but
would soon become the country’s leading political figure.

Singapore, by contrast, was the hub of a
very different effort to rid India of its colonial masters. When the Japanese
captured the island-city during the Second World War, Netaji Subhash Bose used the
opportunity to form the Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army, by recruiting Indian
civilians and soldiers held as prisoners-of-war. The first review of the troops took
place in July 1943 on the Padang, a large open field that still exists at the heart
of the city. There is a small memorial near the Singapore Cricket Club that marks
the event. The original had been demolished by the British after the war, so the
current memorial dates only from 1995. You are likely to encounter a few Indian
tourists getting themselves photographed in front of it.

A twenty-minute walk will take you to
Dhoby Ghat where Bose declared the formation of the Provisional Government of Free
India. The proclamation was read out at the Cathay
Cinema Hall.
The building has been demolished, but a part of its façade has been
preserved as part of a new shopping mall. Bose’s army would fail in
military terms alongside the defeat of its Japanese sponsors, but it fundamentally
undermined the confidence of the British colonial government in the loyalties of its
Indian troops. Although seven decades have passed, there are still a few Singaporean
and Malaysian Indians alive who personally witnessed and participated in these
events. I found it remarkable that these people, many of whom had been born in these
parts and had never seen India, had been willing to die for the idea of a
civilization.

After centuries of foreign domination, India finally became independent on 15 August 1947. Unfortunately it was not a time of unmitigated celebration. The subcontinent was partitioned at birth into Muslim-dominated Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, which predictably was a very bloody affair. The matter did not end there. Over a third of the country was ruled by local princes who were less than enthusiastic about losing their kingdoms. There were even enclaves still ruled by the French and the Portuguese, leftovers from the age of colonial conquest. Add to this the fact that the long border with China (initially Tibet) was disputed. Thus, the borders of modern India were not established in August 1947, but evolved to their current shape only in the mid-1970s, when Sikkim was incorporated into the Union. The continued disputes with China and Pakistan mean that the
contours are still not set in stone. We now turn to the story of how modern India came to have its present borders.

Much has been written about the political events that led to the partition of India. Given the geographical focus of this book, I do not wish to recount these events except to say that, at its core, it was the result of a fundamental disagreement about the nature of India’s civilizational nationhood. Indeed, Mohammad Ali Jinnah explicitly stated his demand for Pakistan in civilizational terms on several occasions. It is not a divergence in world view that appeared suddenly with Jinnah in the 1930s. It can be traced back centuries to the differences between the Emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb. In fact, the intellectual origins of Pakistan are derived from a sixteenth-century Islamic scholar from Punjab, Ahmad al-Sirhindi. A prominent member of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, Sirhindi loudly denounced Akbar’s eclectic beliefs and his liberal attitude. In order to understand the subsequent history of Pakistan, therefore, it may be more instructive to read Sirhindi rather than Jinnah.

As the country hurtled towards independence in the mid-1940s, the demands of the Muslim League became increasingly strident. Amid growing tensions and frequent riots, the decision was taken to divide India along religious lines. The meeting that finalized Partition was held on 2 June 1947 in Viceroy Mountbatten’s study, under a large oil painting of Robert Clive
¹
. The Indian National Congress was represented by Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Acharya Kripalani. The
Muslim League was represented by Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan and Rab Nishtar. In addition, there was Baldev Singh representing the Sikhs. Lord Ismay and Sir Eric Miéville, two of the Viceroy’s key advisers, sat along the wall. The decision was announced at 7 p.m. on 3 June on All India Radio. The Viceroy spoke first, followed by Nehru and then by Jinnah. Pakistan was a reality.

No date had been announced for the handover. However, when Viceroy Mountbatten was later asked about it at a press conference, he replied that the final transfer of power to Indian hands would happen on 15 August—just seventy-two days later! It appears that this was a unilateral decision Mountbatten made—he had not consulted the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League or even Downing Street about it. It was a shock to everyone. It is unclear why Mountbatten opted for this date; it may have been no more than a sentimental attachment to the day on which the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies in 1945. It is instructive how the twists and turns of history can often be based on the most arbitrary of factors.

The partition of India was a major project. Writers Lapierre and Collins have aptly dubbed it ‘the most complex divorce in history’ and yet it had to be completed within a few weeks. Everything from the apparatus of the State, including the army, to government assets and debts had to be divided fairly between two sovereign countries. Even chairs, tables, petty cash, books and postage stamps had to be divided. There were many arguments, and often over very petty things. Sets of Encyclopaedia Britannica in government libraries were divided up. There is a story of how the instruments of the
police band in Lahore were divided up—a drum for India, a trumpet for Pakistan and so on. In the end, the last trombone was left and the two sides almost came to blows over it. As often happens, the madness of the situation is best captured in fiction; Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’ is a short story about how the inmates of Lahore’s mental asylum had to be divided up along communal grounds.

The frictions over dividing government property were minor compared to the real business of dividing territory, particularly the two large provinces of Punjab and Bengal. This job fell to a London barrister, Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He was considered one of the most brilliant lawyers of his time but had had nothing to do with India. His unfamiliarity with India was considered a major advantage as it was felt that this was the only way to ensure impartiality. On 27 June he was called to the office of the Lord Chancellor and given the job. Radcliffe must have been stunned when he heard this. He was being asked to decide the fate of millions of people with no previous knowledge of the territories that he was expected to divide. He must have known that, no matter what he did, his decisions would lead to unhappiness and bloodshed. It was the worst job in the world.

Radcliffe set to work in the sweltering July heat from a lonely bungalow in the Viceregal estate in Delhi. Given the paucity of time, he had no opportunity to visit the lands that he had to divide. Instead, he had to trace out a boundary line on a Royal Engineers map with merely population statistics and maps for company. If he had not already known it, he would soon have realized the near-impossibility of what he was expected to do. The Hindu and Muslim enclaves were
haphazardly mixed up. The city of Lahore, for example, was split exactly between the Muslim and the Hindu–Sikh populations (600,000 each). Similarly, Amritsar was a holy city for the Sikhs, but was surrounded by Muslim-majority areas. There were other factors to be considered as well. In Bengal, Calcutta was the main industrial cluster and had a Hindu majority. However, the raw jute for its jute mills came from the Muslim-majority east. In Punjab, critical irrigation systems had to be severed. The barrister would have pondered these issues in the solitude of his bungalow.

Even as Radcliffe was drawing his line, communal violence continued to escalate across the countryside. Refugees were already on the move even before the border had been demarcated. The maps that would decide the fate of millions was delivered to the Viceroy on 13 August, but they were not made public for seventy-two hours. Thus, when India became independent on 15 August, many Indians along the borderlands did not know in which country their homes would fall. The maps were made public a day later and the bloodbath began. People were on the move—on trains, on bullock-carts and on foot—holding on to whatever they could salvage of their former lives. It is estimated that about 7 million Muslims moved from India to Pakistan and a similar Hindu–Sikh population shifted from Pakistan to India. Meanwhile, a disenchanted Radcliffe returned to his London chambers. He returned the 2000 pounds that he had received for his services.

The Hindus and Sikhs who fled West Paksitan were directed to hundreds of refugee camps. One of the largest camps was in Kurukshetra, the battlefield where the Pandavas and Kauravas are said to have fought each other in the
Mahabharata. The camp was planned for 100,000, but three times the number came to inhabit it by December 1947.
²
Half a million refugees, mostly from West Punjab, came to Delhi. These desperate people squatted wherever they could, including the pavements of Connaught Circus. In time, they would build homes in ‘colonies’ allotted to them in the south and west of Lutyens’s garden city. We know them today as Lajpat Nagar, Rajendra Nagar, Punjabi Bagh and so on. A smaller group of refugees from East Pakistan also made their way to Delhi and were settled in East Pakistan Displaced Persons Colony. Now renamed Chittaranjan Park, it retains a distinct Bengali identity. Thus, within a few decades, Delhi had gone from being city of Mughal memories to a grand Imperial dream and then to a city of refugees.

If the migration happened in one big rush in Punjab, it was spread over many years in Bengal. A series of anti-Hindu riots in East Pakistan in 1949–50 forced a second spike in refugee movements, with 1.7 million coming to West Bengal in 1950 alone.
³
A steady trickle continued for over a decade. Indeed, many members of my mother’s family made the shift only in the early sixties. The luckier refugees stayed with relatives and friends but, as in Delhi, many squatted wherever they could—in railways stations, unoccupied homes, vacant land and even barracks. There have been accusations, arguably true, that the national government in Delhi did far less to rehabilitate the Bengali refugees than their Punjabi counterparts. Still, unlike in West Pakistan, a sizeable Hindu population continued to live in East Pakistan. They would face a second crisis two decades later.

Despite all their troubles, the Punjabis and Bengalis at least
had provinces, namely West Bengal and East Punjab, that they could call their own. The sorriest communities, therefore, were those that could no longer lay claim to any territory. For instance, the Sindhi Hindus found that their entire province was part of Pakistan. Many of them headed for Bombay, where they were accommodated in five refugee camps. A concentration of Sindhis remains in Ulhasnagar, an industrial suburb of Mumbai. Over the years, however, they have migrated all over the world and today run a network of international businesses. Hong Kong, for instance, has a significant number of successful Sindhi business families. I have attended Sindhi community gatherings in the former British colony. It is touching to see how old customs have been lovingly kept alive by a generation that has had no contact with the original homeland.

The partition of British India was not the only territorial problem faced by the country at independence. Over a third of the country was ruled by princes, over 500 of them. Some of them ruled kingdoms that were as big as major European countries, while others ruled only a few villages. Some of them had survived from before the Islamic conquests. It says a lot about the spirit of the times and the persuasive powers of the negotiators that, after a lot of grumbling, the occasional theatrics and some last-minute bargaining, almost all of them signed over their kingdoms to the new democracy by the 15 August deadline (of course, some also opted for Pakistan). There were three important exceptions to this—Junagarh in
the west, Hyderabad in the south, and Jammu and Kashmir in the extreme north. The first two had Muslim rulers but a Hindu-majority population, while the reverse was true of Jammu and Kashmir.

Junagarh was not just wedged within Indian territory but was also of great symbolic value. Within its borders were the ancient temple of Somnath and the sacred hill of Girnar with its numerous Hindu–Jain temples. At the base of the hill, and a short walk from the Junagarh fort, are the rock inscriptions of Ashoka, Rudradaman and Skandagupta. In addition, it is home to the last Asiatic lions left in the wild. In 1947, it was ruled by Nawab Mohabat Khan, best remembered for his love of dogs. It is said that he owned 2000 pedigree dogs and that when two of his favourites mated, the ‘wedding’ was celebrated as a State event.

In the summer of 1947, Mohabat Khan was on holiday in Europe but had left the country in hands of his Dewan, Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a Sindhi politician and the father of future Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. When the Nawab returned, Bhutto convinced him to opt out of India. On 14 August 1947, just hours before the handover, Junagarh declared itself for Pakistan! A few weeks later, Pakistan accepted the accession. The local population, 82 per cent Hindu, and India’s leaders were enraged. Deputy Prime Minister Patel, himself a Gujarati, responded by getting two of Junagarh’s vassal states to declare for India. A small military force was sent in to support them. Meanwhile, a popular agitation began to gather momentum. The Nawab panicked and fled to Karachi, taking with him a dozen of his favourite dogs! With his back to the wall, Sir Shah Nawaz agreed to a plebiscite that overwhelmingly voted in favour of India.

The period of political uncertainty in Junagarh meant that the lions of Gir suffered. With the Nawab’s protection crumbling, several lions were hunted down in the later months of 1947. It is said that some of the hunters were princes of neighbouring principalities who simply took advantage of the confusion to add to their private collections. Thankfully, order was restored by early 1948. This was not merely an act of wildlife conservation. The lion, as depicted on the Mauryan pillar in Sarnath, was now the national emblem. There had been some who argued in favour of the elephant but a committee headed by future president Rajendra Prasad had ruled in favour of the lion in July 1947. The same committee also decided that the flag of the Indian National Congress would be adopted as the national flag after replacing the symbol of the ‘charkha’ (spinning wheel) with that of the spoked wheel from the same Mauryan column—the ancient symbol of the Chakravartin or Universal Monarch. After thousands of years, Sudas’s dream was still alive.

Even as the Junagarh crisis was being resolved, a fresh crisis was brewing in Hyderabad, a leftover from Aurangzeb’s invasion of southern India. It was the largest of the princely states and its ruler Nizam Osman Ali Khan was famous as one of the richest and most miserly men in the world. Although the state had an overwhelming Hindu majority, the Muslims dominated the police, civil service and the landowning nobility. It even had a sizeable army that included armoured units as well as Arab and Afghan mercenaries. Faced with the withdrawal of the British, the Nizam first attempted to negotiate some form of independence and then hinted that he would opt for Pakistan.

The threat was never really tenable since Hyderabad was a landlocked state surrounded by Indian territory. Still, the Nizam was persuaded by Kasim Razvi, an Islamic fanatic, to allow the creation of an irregular paramilitary group called the Razakdars, which had 200,000 members at its height. As the political situation deteriorated, the Razakdars unleashed a reign of terror in the countryside. India responded by tightening an economic blockade. Finally in September 1948, more than a year after independence, Deputy Prime Minister Patel decided to move. The military action was named Operation Polo, supposedly because of the large number of polo grounds in Hyderabad.