One of the great moments in the twentieth century was the achievement of independence on the Indian subcontinent. Along with independence went a reconfiguring of national space and of how it was perceived, understood, and utilized. This chapter examines some of the implications of the changes in attitudes following on the creation not of one but two nations on the subconti-nent. The discussion tracks through three terrains: the first is the transforma-tion of territorial imaginaries as a result of independence and Partitransforma-tion; the second is that of the streetside locality, the space inhabited by people in their daily lives before and after independence; and the last is the historicizing of a spatial past, a continuum of a rethought past provoked by new national identities. Decolonization created new national spaces that affected behav-iour and influenced perceptions in a variety of ways and in different places.
The impact of the intersection between the levels, between the configuring, for instance, of street-level and national space, was variable and often limited, and thus problematizes the affects of decolonization. That the street corner continued to retain spatial integrity – a sense of separateness within increas-ingly wider city, state, and national circles of organization – much as it had done under the predecessor regime challenges notions of the pervasiveness of decolonization in bringing about encompassing and qualitative structural change.
‘When the world went topsy-turvy.’1
Decolonization did not bring any change in the physical space and to po-graphy of South Asia: the same rivers continued to flow through the same terrain past the same cities and villages. The magic moment of independence of course could not affect the physical form of the land, but it could – and did – affect how the former colonial space was categorized and perceived.
In this sense, there were significant spatial changes in consequence of the
1 Manto 1987:39.
moment when Britain gave up its raj over the subcontinent.
The free space long desired and struggled for by nationalists, the idea of the free nation’s territory that had underscored the drive for political freedom, received physical reality on the assumption of independence. Yet the transfer of power to two independent nations failed to satisfy either of the parties that had pushed for the creation of successor states: the imagined national space behind the freedom struggles did not conform to the physical realities of the partition of British India into Pakistan and India. Neither the Muslim League with its push for Pakistan received the extended territorial areas that it had at some point wanted, nor did the Indian National Congress, the leading organization of the freedom struggle, fulfil its dreams of a subcontinental India as the proper, the logical, successor nation. There was thus ambiguity and contradiction in the new national territories. Hence, while in the celebra-tions at the independence hour there was jubilation over what had been won, there was also a sense of loss, perhaps failure, even if part of what had been wanted, freedom from British political rule, had been achieved. Nehru in his
‘Tryst with destiny’ speech at the midnight hour on 15 August 1947 in parlia-ment noted that at that moparlia-ment when India was achieving independence, the tryst with destiny, the pledge to obtain freedom, had eventuated – but only partially (Norman 1965, II:336-7). His underlying point was that while politi-cal independence was a reality the space of the nation had fallen short of what they had struggled for.
And what had been the idea of nation behind the struggle? Nehru, who had spent much of the 1920s and 1930s travelling around India in his work for the nationalist cause, discovered during his tours an India with an underlying unity that drew from the land and was expressed through its people:
Though outwardly there was diversity and infi nite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us. The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me: it was an emotional experience […].2 In speeches during his tours, Nehru used the three terms India, Hindustan, and Bharata to describe the territory of which he spoke (Nehru 1946:39). He wrote that he tried to make his audiences ‘think of India as a whole’, a notion already present in their minds through popular pilgrimage circuits and the all-India spread of the settings of the great epics and myths.
Nehru’s audiences sometimes greeted him with a shout, Bharat Mata ki Jai – Victory to Mother India – which gave him the opportunity to question
2 Nehru 1946:39. See also the perceptive analysis of these meetings by Pandey 1988.
what they meant by Mother India. For a time during the struggle for inde-pendence Bharat Mata had been personified as a goddess whose form was that of the subcontinent. The idea had emerged prominently in the agitation against the first partition of Bengal in 1905 and remained fixed in national consciousness through the rallying song, Vande Mataram (Hail to thee, O Mother), which Congress used as a prime song of protest against the raj and to promote the idea of national unity during its satyagraha (nonviolent) cam-paigns from the 1920s. The hymn came from the nineteenth-century Bengali novelist Bankimchandra’s account of an uprising of sanyasis (Hindu holy men) and their chant as they made their way to battle. The song to the Mother celebrated the confluence of two ideas, a national space which was that of the Mother, and a national space combining with national community: it was that confluence that was used to justify demonstration, action, and battle. As Gandhi pointed out to a Bengali audience in 1927, ‘Shall we not then live up to it and sing with all our hearts and say we are sons of Mother India, not merely sons of Bengal?’3 Vande Mataram provided a lineage that justified the struggle by locating it within a continuous history of the territory of the motherland and thus extended it from Bengal to all of India to assert a meta-physic unity of belief and space (Masselos:2002).
Nehru himself had a somewhat different perception of Mother India, one which brought diverse social and geographical complexity into the notion of a subcontinental entity. This is evident in his campaign through the villages of northern India for the 1937 elections. His style of electioneering was to begin by throwing questions at his audiences. When he asked them what was Mother India, someone might answer: the good earth of India; Nehru would probe: Which earth, the farm, the village, the province, all of India?
Finally his audience would impatiently ask him to tell them. He answered as follows:
India was all this that they had thought, but it was much more. The mountains and the rivers of India, and the forests and the broad fi elds, which gave us food, were all dear to us, but what counted ultimately were the people of India, people like them and me, who were spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people […]. (Nehru 1946:40.)
At the time of independence at that midnight hour in 1947, the territory Nehru had perceived was divided and the link between land, people, and culture broke with the creation of Pakistan and India. Later each would
estab-3 M.K. Gandhi, ‘After the Congress’, speech at Comilla, 5-1-1927, published in Young India 13-1-1927, in Prasad 1929:30.
lish new linkages as part of the process of creating new national identities.
But that was to be in the future.4
Before 1947 the general objective of the Indian National Congress had been to win political freedom for a nation covering the entire subcontinent.
The imagined space of the nation was that of the total territory of the British raj and political freedom would apply to all of it. After 1947, however, the truncated and separated nations on the subcontinent created a reality that was not in conformity with the earlier imagined nationalist space of the Congress, nor even of the Muslim League that had wanted a larger and more extensive Pakistan.
Immediately, both Congress and the League were faced with the fact of the truncation of what they had long considered national space, though for each it was different. The process of coming to terms with what they had, rather than what they had aspired to, was made even more traumatic by the surgical divi-sion of the two border provinces, Bengal and Punjab, with each divided into two parts. The division of Bengal was the less difficult. Punjab posed greater problems, given the intermixing of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs throughout the provinces. Since the Congress and the Muslim League were unable to agree on how the provinces were to be partitioned, the task of ensuring a fair division was assigned to an independent arbiter, Cyril Radcliffe. He was to determine the precise boundary that both sides were required to accept, sight unseen. The moment of independence on 15 August, however, was not spoilt since Radcliffe’s decision was handed down only afterwards, on 17 August.
Inevitably difficulties arose over the decision. The line of separation between India and Pakistan was painful. The line cut through villages and fields that had before always been a single unity, and massive numbers of people had to relocate in order to place themselves within their preferred nation. The communal antagonism that had exploded during the Great Calcutta Killing in August the preceding year and had spread throughout the subcontinent now intensified and drove large numbers of people away from their ances-tral villages. By the time order was largely restored in 1948, perhaps ten to twelve million people had become refugees in great, sweeping movements of population across the new borders. Perhaps over half to a million people died in the rioting and civil conflagration that accompanied the uncoordinated interchange of people and what was, though the term was not then current, the ethnic cleansing of the districts that straddled the borders.5
The pain of what had happened was intense. At the emotional level,
4 For a discussion of the way this applied in the context of national celebrations, see Masselos 1990, 1996.
5 As Gyanendra Pandey has pointed out, any set of figures is per se questionable both for meth-odological as well as practical reasons, 2001:88-91.
Mother India had been dissected, whether she was perceived as the combining of people and land in civilizational unity as in Nehru’s case, or as a pervasive quasi-religious mystical entity, as among more right-wing opinion within the country. As Butalia notes, the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Hindu cultural body, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), had a front-page illustration on 14 August of Mother India – a map of the country and a woman lying on it.
One of her limbs was cut off. Nehru stood beside her holding a bloody knife.
Butalia (1998:141, 143) continues, ‘[T]he severing of the body of the country recalled the violation of the body of the nation-as-mother’. It was for what was seen as his pro-Muslim and pro-Pakistani attitudes that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated not much later, on 30 January 1948.
A large literature has appeared over the past decade around these events.6 The studies attempt to explain a hurricane of destruction and murder unpar-alleled in the history of the subcontinent. Whatever the social, political, religious, and psychological reasons for the massacres, in the hunting out of victims and in the exodus were new underlying territorial mindsets about what was one’s own territory and what was alien territory. It was one’s own territory that was being asserted in the attacks on people who were viewed as other, people who after the Partition belonged to, and were part of, another space, another and opposed nation. Though ideas of the nation’s space had been under challenge and were in a state of flux from the time of the appear-ance of Pakistan on the League’s political horizon, the consequences of the policy and the realities of what it would mean had remained unclear and were not at all apparent at the ground level. Only from late August 1947 did the practicalities become the unavoidable stuff of daily life and the conse-quences painfully evident in chaos and killing. Apart from a range of alter-nate explanations for the behaviour, the attackers and their forays can also be interpreted as imposing the new spatial order of the new nation on those who were viewed because of their religion as not belonging to it. The victims were seen as inhabiting a space not theirs anymore and, therefore, were the object of exclusion and persecution. That there was so much chaos in the process derived from the very confusion and uncertainty caused by the seemingly irrational partition of what had previously been undividable and complete.
Clearly a major rethinking of the space of the nation was needed. The enormity of what happened around Partition has been caught in numerous short stories; outstanding among them are those by Saadat Hasan Manto.
His focus is on individuals caught up in events. Manto captures the feeling
6 They include Pandey 2001; Butalia 1998; Low and Brasted 1998; and Talbot 1996: section 2. Of course, all scholars owe major debts to the memoirs and studies that appeared in the first decades after independence and for the major collection of articles and reminiscences put together in Philips and Wainwright 1962.