WHAT HAD BEEN ONE WAS NOT NOW TWO, BUT LEGION. INDIA and Pakistan were dominions within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Hyderabad, Kashmir, Bhopal, Indore, Kalat and Junagadh were of uncertain status, having refused to accede to either dominion, though Bhopal and Indore would soon accede to India, and Kalat ultimately to Pakistan. Owing to Jinnah’s laid-back policy, none of the ten princely states which were expected to go to Pakistan had acceded; British paramountcy was gone, and theoretically any of these could be recognized as independent nations. Even so, by the morning of 15 August, India was by population the second largest country in the world. On its eastern and western edges, the two chunks of Pakistan comprised the sixth largest country in the world. East and West Pakistan were separated by at least 725 miles of Indian territory, or a twenty-day journey by steamship around the edge. There was a good deal of bad feeling between India and Pakistan, and no borders – at least, none known to any but Sir Cyril Radcliffe and his secretary, for still the maps lay locked up on Mountbatten’s orders in a safe in Government House. In London, a Ministry of Works carpenter in a white apron and a Homburg hat briskly unscrewed the plaque to the left of the door on King Charles Street that read ‘India Office’, and replaced it with a new one: ‘Commonwealth Relations Office’.1
On the morning of 16 August, Jawaharlal Nehru closed the celebrations, and hoisted the Indian tricolour over the Red Fort in Old Delhi, the splendid palace of Shah Jahan, grandson of Akbar. Half a million people crowded into the wide street around the fort, whose red sandstone towers had been the setting for generations of potentates. The great Mughals had shown their majesty from its ramparts at daybreak every morning. The last Mughal, Bahadur Shah II, had briefly ruled the Indian mutineers from its pillared halls. King George V, in plumes and medals, had ridden forth from it for his coronation as Emperor of India in 1911. Now it was the turn of a man who hoped to represent democratic India. Over the archway leading into the audience hall of the fort, its ornate white marble walls inlaid with jewels cut and polished to represent delicately blossoming flowers, a famous Persian inscription reads: ‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is this’. The crowd agreed, cheering Nehru wholeheartedly; and Edwina Mountbatten, standing at the Prime Minister’s side, wore an expression of unreserved joy. She had come fresh from another fight with Dickie, this time over his acceptance of a new earldom. Dickie wrote to his daughter Patricia that Edwina was ‘in despair’ at being promoted from Viscountess to Countess, ‘for she disapproves so much of all these nonsensical titles.’2
‘That the double change-over occurred amid widespread rejoicings and peaceful demonstrations happily confounds the Jeremiahs who foresaw trouble’, read the Times of India’s confident editorial.3 It spoke too soon. Nehru’s speech from the Red Fort was the last happy moment of the transfer of power. That afternoon, Mountbatten handed Radcliffe’s finished award to the leaders in Delhi, and cabled it to their counterparts in Karachi. ‘Nobody in India will love me for my award about the Punjab and Bengal’, Radcliffe had written bluntly to his stepson three days earlier, ‘and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me.’4 He had the good sense to get on a plane to London on 17 August, and afterwards burnt all his papers relating to the partition.5
It was inevitable that none of the parties would be happy, which was why Mountbatten had secured on 22 July an agreement from both governments-to-be that they would accept the award, whatever it was. They did so without pleasure. In Pakistan, the Communications Minister, Abdur Rab Nishtar, described the award as ‘the parting kick of the British’,6 while Liaquat was livid at the loss of Gurdaspur. In India, the reaction was no less grim. ‘Bhai [brother] and the other Congress leaders read it with deepening misery’, wrote Nehru’s sister, Betty Hutheesing.7 Patel could not contain his rage at the award of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to Pakistan. But it was the Sikh minister Baldev Singh’s wordless dejection that augured the worst for the trouble to come.8 The Sikh population that he represented, scattered between West Pakistan and India, received the news hardest of all. The inclusion of the western Punjab and Lahore in Pakistan provoked an immediate response. A wave of violence, familiar in its intent but renewed in its vigour, spilled forth across the Punjab.
When Mountbatten had still been thrashing out the details of his plan, Gandhi had told him that there were two alternatives. Either British rule would be continued, or else there would be a bloodbath. ‘What should I do, then?’ Mountbatten had asked. Gandhi’s reply was typical. ‘You must face the bloodbath and accept it.’9
The bloodbath would have to be faced with an immediacy and on a scale that shocked all the governments involved. Within hours of independence, the Punjab, which had been disturbed for several days, suffered a total collapse of public order. Penderel Moon was in Lahore in 15 August and found it mainly deserted or on fire. While he was discussing the situation in broad daylight with another British official, a gang of Muslims broke into a Hindu house across the street and plundered it. The official told him that the Muslim police had been siding with the mob, to the extent of offering armed cover from the roofs while Muslim rioters ransacked Sikh gurdwaras.10 On the afternoon of 16 August Sir Claude Auchinleck, now Supreme Commander of the Indian and Pakistani armies, reported to Mountbatten that the new dominion of India was already in a state of civil war.
Less than a month before, the future governments of India and Pakistan had issued a joint declaration insisting that ‘in no circumstances will violence be tolerated’. There can be no doubt that the governments were genuine in their intention to preserve order, just as there can be no doubt that they had neither the imagination nor the capacity to do so. It had been believed, fancifully but firmly, that the local police and General Rees’s Boundary Force would be able to take care of any spots of bother.11 But the extent and vigour of communal tensions had been catastrophically underestimated.
On 17 August, Nehru dropped everything and flew to the Punjab to meet Liaquat. Side by side, the two men appealed for peace through public appearances and broadcasts. Meanwhile, Lord and Lady Mountbatten flew to Bombay to see off the first contingent of British troops, and to celebrate all over again. By the shores of the Arabian Sea, on Bombay’s Ballard Pier, Mountbatten asked the 5000 men to break ranks and cluster around, just as he had so often in Burma during the war. He made a jovial speech, and had a message of good wishes from Nehru read out.
Dickie and Edwina proceeded to a tea party at the Taj Mahal Hotel, and afterwards drove to Government House. The drive, just five miles around Back Bay, took almost an hour owing to the number of people lining the route – the Bombay police estimated 750,000.12 The Indian tricolour was waved all day by Lady Mountbatten and the crowds alike; they also waved the Union Jack. Just eighteen months before, remembered the journalist Phillips Talbot, the naval mutineers in Bombay had roused great crowds with cries of ‘Death to Englishmen!’ and ‘Britishers: Go Back!’ Now the cry was ‘Jai England!’ and ‘England zindabad!’13 ‘A senior British official was misty-eyed when he told me about it later,’ Talbot noted.14 Police cordons were broken as crowds swarmed the car. Dickie was overjoyed, and shouted ‘Jai Hind!’ all the way along Marine Drive. People climbed on to the footboard of his carriage to touch the hems of his gleaming naval whites, and he was ‘literally caressed for hundreds of yards by rapt admirers’, according to the Times of India.15
Dickie returned to Delhi, while Edwina stayed in Bombay to visit her usual round of worthy institutions. It was the cheerful photographs of her kneeling on the floor to play with the happy, healthy children at the United Mills Welfare Centre that made it into the official album of the trip; but the grimmer scenes at the Matunga labour camp and the filthy slum area made a greater impact on her personally. Edwina trudged for hours around the grim hovels in which many thousands of the city’s poor lived, and was quoted in the newspapers describing the conditions as ‘appalling’.16 But the press baulked at reporting the full force of her comments, which decried the slums as a ‘constant reproach to the citizens of the great and wealthy city of Bombay’, and called on those citizens to wipe out this shame. The reception she received from the locals was one of rapturous approval.17
Edwina arrived back in Delhi on 19 August. In the four days since partition, the Punjab had been reduced to open anarchy. Seventy thousand Muslims from India had already arrived in Lahore. The Pakistani government opened camps for 40,000, but the rest were obliged to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, Hindus and Sikhs fled the city. In April 1947, the Hindu and Sikh population of Lahore had been estimated at 300,000. It was now, just four months later, barely 10,000.18 In Amritsar, on the Indian side of the border, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets and raped by a Sikh mob. Some Sikhs were able to rescue a few of the women and hide them in the Golden Temple until the army could arrive. The rest of the women were burnt alive.19 Murders were running at several hundred a day, and a bonfire had been made of Muslim houses. The police on both sides either stood by or, in many cases, joined in. The phrase ‘a thousand times more horrible than anything I saw during the war’ became a cliché among British and Indian officers. One officer was confronted with the sight of four babies that had been roasted to death over a fire.20
A strong desire for revenge following the massacres of Sikhs by Muslims in March meant that the Sikh campaign was being organized with striking efficiency, recruiting and mobilizing ex-servicemen and arming them from private stockpiles. Groups of anywhere between 20 and 5000 men (and sometimes women and children) would meet in gurdwaras and organize themselves into jathas, or fighting mobs, to raze Muslim villages. They were well armed with machine guns, rifles and shotguns, as well as grenades, spears, axes and kirpans, the ceremonial blade carried by all Sikhs.21 Usually, their Muslim adversaries only had staves. The pattern of attack was well established. When Muslim villagers saw a jatha coming, they would climb on to their roofs and beat gongs to alert neighbouring villages. The Sikhs would send in a first wave to shoot them off the roofs, a second wave to lob grenades over the walls, and a third wave to cut survivors to pieces with kirpans and spears. A fourth wave of older men would then go in and set light to the village, while outriders would ride around, swinging their kirpans to fell any escapees.
Retaliation against these atrocities was swift and furious. On 23 August a train full of Sikh refugees was attacked by Muslims at Ferozepur, leaving 25 dead and 100 wounded. In Quetta, riots kicked off between Muslim League supporters and Pathans. After three boys were paraded through the streets, bearing injuries sustained from riots in West Punjab, both sides turned on the local Hindus.22 One week after partition, Delhi was a temporary home to 130,000 Muslim refugees on their way to Pakistan, a quarter of whom had arrived in the preceding fortnight. Five thousand were crowded into a squalid refugee camp in front of the Jama Masjid; sixteen other camps were set up to host the rest.23 Inside these enclaves, according to Lord Ismay, ‘conditions defied description’: there was no water, no food, no sanitation and no security.24
Mountbatten has been widely held responsible for the scale of the partition disaster, and for the failure to deal with it once it started. For his management of the situation, according to his fiercest critic, Andrew Roberts, ‘Mountbatten deserved to be court-martialled on his return to London.’25 This is a serious accusation, and worth examining in some detail. The criticism has been aimed from three angles. First, Mountbatten is accused of ignoring the specific problem of the Sikhs, who were particularly disgruntled by their lot under his plan, and capable of organizing their disgruntlement into military action. Second, he is accused of failing to use British troops to stop the trouble once it started. Third, he is accused of having rushed through the whole transfer of power so fast that preparations made for the effects of partition were either inadequate or absent.
On the matter of the Sikhs, Mountbatten had long been alerted. During his very first week in India, he had asked V.P. Menon for an assessment of the Sikh situation.26 He had had extensive contact with the moderate Sikh Minister of Defence, Baldev Singh; he had also spoken to the more militant Akali Dal leaders, Tara Singh and Kartar Singh. He had heard their demand for an independent Khalistan.
Khalistan was impossible, as Kartar Singh himself admitted.27 The Sikhs had a great deal of land and people scattered throughout the Punjab, but they were a majority in no part of it – and neither Hindus nor, more emphatically, Muslims would have consented to live in a Sikh state. Inevitably, once the partition of the Punjab had been decided upon, the Sikhs would have to be split. The only alternative would have been to leave the Punjab intact and give it in its entirety to India or Pakistan. Pakistan was the stronger contender, for the Punjab had over 16 million Muslims against fewer than 8 million Hindus and 4 million Sikhs, and a strong Muslim League presence in its government.28 But without any firm word on their security or freedom of conscience the Sikhs were reluctant to enter into an Islamic nation.29 Several Punjabi Sikh groups threatened civil war if they were forced into Pakistan.
Mountbatten had been warned that the Sikhs would object to their deal before partition. Liaquat repeatedly asked him to imprison Sikh leaders and to ban the kirpan.30 Mountbatten did not, and this has often been used to hold him responsible for Sikh involvement in the massacres.31 But he had only refrained from acting, on the advice of senior neutral experts. On 5 August, Mountbatten had a secret meeting with Patel, Jinnah and Liaquat, which directly implicated the Sikh leaders in a number of plots – including that to assassinate Jinnah in Karachi on 14 August. Jinnah and Liaquat again demanded the arrest of Tara Singh and his associates, but Patel warned that this would make the situation worse. Mountbatten did not take Patel’s word for it, but wrote to Evan Jenkins, Governor of the Punjab, and his two successors, Sir Chandulal Trivedi and Sir Francis Mudie, to ask them for their opinion. All three were firm and unanimous in their accord with Patel.32
Had Mountbatten imprisoned the likes of Tara Singh and Kartar Singh for crimes they had not yet committed, and had he banned the kirpan, he would have faced a tremendous backlash from the Sikhs before the transfer of power. This was exactly opposite to Britain’s interests, and therefore he could not do it. Even if he had imprisoned the leaders, it is unlikely that the Sikhs would have been pacified. From the character of the fighting during August and September 1947, it was obvious that they had created an organized militia. Had Tara Singh and Kartar Singh been removed, more heads would have sprung up to replace them. As Nehru wrote afterwards, ‘It is just childish nonsense or deliberate malice for anyone to contend that [the] arrest of Tara Singh or a few others could have made any difference to a vast explosive situation.’ Nehru also noted another point, too often ignored, that ‘The charges are based on premises that the Sikhs were originators of and guilty party in all that happened,’ premises which he described as ‘completely wrong’.33 Mountbatten did exactly as he was advised by his governors and staff: he duly reported the Sikh problem to London – which did not volunteer any extra reinforcements – and set up the Punjab Boundary Force with it in mind.34 Without hindsight, it is hard to see that he could have done more.
Mountbatten has also been charged with not deploying more British soldiers to maintain order, and to guarantee safe conduct for refugees between the two dominions.35 To a great extent, this would have been the responsibility of the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Air, and the Admiralty, rather than Mountbatten, but it is true that he did not bother those ministries for reinforcements.36 Had British troops been used, he argued, ‘They would doubtless have incurred the odium of both sides.’37 As it was, the Punjab Boundary Force was widely seen as being an arm of British imperialism.
After 15 August, Mountbatten was the servant of the Union of India; and his Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had made unequivocal his opinion: ‘I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than necessary.’38 Mountbatten’s staff agreed with Nehru. When the Governor General showed an inclination to send a British brigade to police Delhi, Auchinleck argued that British troops could only be used to protect British lives.39 British services were overstretched, and commanders had been pointing out for at least a year that the release of soldiers from India was a high priority: India was no longer relevant to British defence.40 Field Marshal Montgomery had visited Delhi in June, and met Nehru, to whom he expressed his desire to withdraw all British troops as fast as possible. ‘He asked me if there was any chance of our changing our minds later and asking some British troops to be left in India,’ noted Nehru. ‘If this happened it would upset his programme. I told him that there was not the least chance of this happening and we wanted British troops in India to be taken away completely.’41 The situation was unambiguous: the British government, the British services and the Indian government all insisted that British troops should be removed from India at the earliest possible opportunity. It is fanciful to imagine that Mountbatten could have acted in direct contradiction of the wishes of all three of these bodies.
Finally, there is the question of whether Mountbatten’s extraordinary rush to transfer power caused the disaster. Undoubtedly, Mountbatten went much faster than anyone asked him to. But the arguments against Mountbatten’s speed all rely on a mistaken assumption: that, if the Viceroy had stuck to Attlee’s timetable, he would have had the time and resources to subdue the Punjab. He had neither. Attlee had made it clear that Britain was going to leave India regardless of its situation in June 1948. Once this had been stated, even a dramatic show of force against rioters could only have postponed the violence until then. There is no reason to think that the slow-boiling of communal tempers under martial law for an extra nine months would have reconciled everybody to live happily ever after. There is every reason to think that the result would have been just as bad, if not worse.42 Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, who would the following year take over from Mountbatten as Governor General of India, was one of many who expressed this view. ‘If the Viceroy had not transferred power when he did’, he wrote, ‘there could well have been no power to transfer.’43
For Britain to impose martial law would have put the governments in Delhi and in London in a dubious situation. In the first place, there was no appetite in Britain for further British casualties in foreign wars. Only seven British officers were killed in India between partition and the end of January 1948; had the British Army taken full responsibility, it is logical to suppose that there would have been many more.44 In the second place, had Mountbatten cracked down hard on the Punjab before 15 August, he would have caused untold trouble both inside India and with Britain’s international allies, especially the United States. Assertions of British dominance were neither desirable nor practical. They risked antagonizing the Indian people and politicians further, and spreading serious discontent from the Punjab to other parts of India – an effect that was already visible from sympathy riots in the North-West Frontier Province. Neither Britain nor India needed in the middle of 1947 to risk any more Brigadier General Dyers carrying out any more Amritsar massacres.
But most important of all was the issue of resources. The British government was in the middle of its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There was very little popular understanding of what was going on in the Punjab, and even less interest. The British had recently emerged from six years of war. Hundreds of thousands had been killed, and millions expended. Their normal industries had been battered, their towns destroyed, their families broken up and stuck back together. Still they languished under the strictures of rationing, which were getting tighter, not looser. To these ordinary people, the Empire was a superfluous accoutrement. Edie Rutherford, a forty-three-year-old housewife from Sheffield, had a typically indifferent reaction to the mass of press coverage about the effective end of her nation’s Empire and the independence of 400 million of her fellow subjects. ‘I swear most folk couldn’t care less’, she wrote in her diary on 16 August 1947, ‘and I resent the inference that we have had them enslaved up to now. Most folk are simply glad to be shot of them, to put it vulgarly yet truthfully.’45 Churchill’s warnings about indignant Britons awakening sharply to defend their Empire came to nothing. Even he himself had relented. ‘I do not think we shall lose very much by leaving India at the present time, and that feeling is undoubtedly widespread here,’ he had mused in an unsent letter to Jinnah.46
Mountbatten’s early withdrawal might not have allowed sufficient time for the Indian and Pakistani governments or armies to get their acts together, but it did a service to Britain – whose interests, after all, he had been employed to serve. It has been argued that the British government should have felt a responsibility for the millions of Punjabis who were, after all, British subjects until August 1947. In moral terms, probably it should have. But in practical terms it felt a lot more responsibility for the millions of British subjects who lived in Britain itself, to whom it would still be accountable after 15 August. Faced with a choice between abandoning a nation a very long way away, and antagonizing the nation on its doorstep, the government chose the former. The decision may not have been a happy one, but no government in that position could have behaved differently.
On all three counts for which Roberts would have had Mountbatten court-martialled – the mishandling of the Sikhs, the lack of British Army support, and the speed of the transfer of power – there is a strong case in his defence. As Viceroy, Mountbatten was charged with serving the interests of Britain. He did this rigorously. Naturally, his focus on British interests meant that both India and Pakistan were ill-served by his viceroyalty – but that was inevitable. Moreover, for all his later boasts that Attlee had granted him ‘plenipotentiary powers’, Mountbatten’s hands were tied by what London would give him.47 He could not magic soldiers out of thin air.
From Mountbatten’s point of view, the greatest mistake was staying on as Governor General of independent India. At the stroke of midnight on the morning of 15 August 1947, he had been transformed from a servant of British interests to a servant of Indian interests. The best interests of Britain had been served by a swift exit, a slapdash partition, the creation of Pakistan, and the repatriation of British armed forces. The best interests of India might well have been served by exactly the opposite. After 15 August, Mountbatten was in the unenviable position of having to deal with a combusting and hamstrung India that had been left that way by his own successful management of his previous job. He had been deeply reluctant to accept the governor-generalship, but had had little choice under pressure from his king, government and opposition. From his point of view, though, his reputation would have endured far better had he been on his plane heading for London alongside Sir Cyril Radcliffe.
Ten days after the transfer of power, the scale and awfulness of what was underway had still not been realized in Delhi. ‘We are only just alive’, wrote Edwina to her friend Kay Norton, ‘but the last gruelling five months have been well worth while after all the incredible happenings and demonstrations of the last 10 days.’ She expressed the hope that the refugee situation would soon be resolved.48 In the days after writing those words, both she and Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Punjab, and the grim truth began to sink in.
In 1946, Nehru had made three predictions to journalist Jacques Marcuse. ‘One, India will never be a Dominion. Two, there will never be a Pakistan. Three, when the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.’ Marcuse was back in Delhi just after partition to interview him again, but could not bring himself to remind Nehru of their previous conversation. In the end, Nehru brought it up himself. ‘You remember, Marcuse, what I told you? No Dominion, No Pakistan, No …’
Both men were silent for a moment, until Nehru added wistfully, ‘Wasn’t I wrong?’49
On 24 August, he set out at six o’clock in the morning in an aeroplane for the Punjabi town of Jullundur, and spent hours travelling by car and jeep across the dusty plains. He emerged to walk through deserted ruins which had been lively, noisy and welcoming villages. Now there was no sound, no life; just corpses, cinders, and dried-up splashes of bloodstain in the dust. He saw a caravan of 100,000 refugees, moving despondently away to a new land unknown. He talked to as many as he could. ‘I cannot imagine another day when he could have felt more strongly that all his hopes, his dreams, his faith in human nature were crashing down in pieces,’ remembered his secretary, H.V.R. Iengar. Finally, he made it to bed at two o’clock the next morning, before getting up at half-past five to fly to Lahore. The passengers on the plane slumped back in their seats, exhausted and miserable; except for Nehru, who was engrossed in reading a slim volume. Iengar asked him what it was. He explained that it was a Sanskrit play: Mrcchakatika, or The Little Clay Cart.50 It is the witty and scandalous story of a hero, Charudatta, ‘the tree of plenty to the poor’, ‘a treasure of manly virtues, intelligent, liberal, and upright’, who has given up his hereditary riches to the people. Charudatta falls in love with a spirited, bold and compassionate woman, Vasantasena. But Vasantasena is claimed by another man – the frivolous, hasty and foolish brother-in-law of the King. ‘There is no changing nature,’ a character remarks; ‘nothing can keep an ox out of a field of corn, nor stop a man who covets another’s wife.’ In the end, Charudatta not only wins the love of Vasantasena, but through ‘noble daring wrested an empire from its ancient lords’.51 Much in this ancient tale must have resonated.
Two days after Nehru had set out, Edwina flew to Jullundur with her close friend and India’s first female cabinet minister, Amrit Kaur. She had gone after consulting Maniben Patel, who had told her that it would be helpful to have a reliable eyewitness report on the situation, in addition to the raising of morale her trip might effect.52 The local authorities were in such disarray that no welcome party had turned up to meet Edwina and Amrit, apart from a lost baby buffalo that had wandered on to the tarmac. Eventually, they managed to commandeer a jeep, and toured seven refugee camps and hospitals in Jullundur and Amritsar that first day, distributing medical supplies and food when they could, and making notes of what was needed after they ran out. As Edwina came to the end of her tour, she was told of an attack on a lorryload of refugees who had come in from Sialkot. Without hesitation, she returned to the Victoria Memorial Hospital to visit the survivors. Afterwards, she went to see the Sikh leader, Tara Singh, in person. According to Alan Campbell-Johnson, he was ‘at last beginning to tremble at the wrath he has readily invoked’.53 The next morning she was off to Lahore in Pakistan, visiting a Muslim refugee camp and a school before breakfast. She continued through Rawalpindi, Sialkot and Gujranwalla before returning to Delhi.
The trip established Edwina’s position at the prow of the government’s relief efforts, making her one among many visible women in senior positions in the Indian administration. Independent India had been constituted along remarkably progressive lines. From the outset, Indian women would earn equal pay for equal work – a right not conferred upon British women until the 1970s. ‘A lot of people will dispute the advisability of such a thing in this country, and it remains to be seen what will happen here,’ Lady Mountbatten told a meeting of the East India Association in London the following year; ‘but I am convinced that India was perfectly right to decide that there should not be any discrimination between men and women, that every field of service should be open to those women who were qualified to serve. Men and women must be equal before the law and if that is so they must then receive equal pay for equal work.’54
But behind this image of feminist progress lay a long, dark shadow of female despair. At Calcutta in 1946, and subsequently, the vengeance of the rioters had been wreaked deliberately on women. As the great migrations and great slaughters following partition got underway, so too did a sustained and brutal campaign of sexual persecution. The use of rape as a weapon of war was conscious and emphatic. On every side, proud tales were told of the degradation of enemy women. Thousands of women were abducted, forcibly married to their assailants, and bundled away to the other side of the border. Many never saw their families again. Thousands more were simply used and then thrown back into their villages. There were accounts of women who had been held down while their breasts and arms were cut, tattooed or branded with their rapists’ names and the dates of their attacks.55
As if such ordeals were not horrific enough, the media and public officials publicly glorified a distinctly feminine martyrdom. It was constantly suggested that the high point of female heroism was to commit suicide rather than face the ‘dishonour’ of rape, as if the shame and guilt for the crime would fall on the victim rather than on the perpetrator. The desperate actions of such women were admired as an example of feminine virtue rather than deplored as an example of female subjection. India might have had the most visible female politicians of any nation, but the notion that a woman’s chastity was worth more than her life abounded, even among the political class. Jawahar’s cousin, Rameshwari Nehru, visited Thoa Khalsa, where ninety Sikh women had committed collective suicide by jumping into a well rather than face a Muslim attack. ‘It was eighteen days after the incident that we arrived at this sacred spot’, she wrote. ‘The bodies of those beautiful women had become swollen and floated up to the surface of the water. Their colourful clothes and long, black hair could be seen clearly. Two or three women still had [the bodies of] infants clinging to their breasts.’ She was with a large group of observers come to gawp at this gruesome spectacle. ‘We thought of it as our great good fortune that we had been able to visit this site and worship these satis’.56
The violence in the Punjab was getting worse, rather than better. On the night of 25 August, the small town of Sheikhupura, near Lahore – with a population of 10,000 Muslims, and 10,000 Hindus and Sikhs – exploded into a massive pitched battle, for no reason anyone could ascertain. It had previously been known as one of the quietest spots in the West Punjab. Twenty-four hours later, several thousand people, mostly Sikh and Hindu, had been murdered in a frenzy of stabbing, shooting, beating and burning, and parts of the town were ablaze. No effort had been made to quell the violence. The Muslim police actually aided it. A journalist who visited Sheikhupura the next day found a civil hospital in a disgusting state, with flies teeming thickly over the blood-soaked rags that substituted for bandages, and the stench of death in the muggy monsoon air. Most Sikhs were too scared to go to hospital, and were sheltering in their gurdwara without even basic facilities. ‘Here there were more appalling sights’, he wrote; ‘men and women whose hands had been cut off and whose forearms were black putrescent fly-covered stumps, and children, even babies, who had been cut and slashed. Perhaps the most heart-rending spectacle of all was the young mothers who had lost their children.’57 Visiting days later, Nehru described himself as ‘sick with horror’; still the stink of blood and burnt human flesh was inescapable.58 His car was stopped by Muslims, shouting at him to stop the war. ‘Are you not ashamed of yourselves?’ Nehru shouted back. ‘Have you no conscience left? What do these houses and these dead bodies show? Who is conducting this war?’59
Nehru wrote to Mountbatten in deep depression. ‘I suppose I am not directly responsible for what is taking place in the Punjab’, he wrote. ‘I do not quite know who is responsible. But in any event I cannot and do not wish to shed my responsibility for my people. If I cannot discharge the responsibility effectively, then I begin to doubt whether I have any business to be where I am.’60 Only the courageous spirit of Edwina Mountbatten could lift him from this gloom. Indira Gandhi remembered one evening in her father’s house when a telephone call came through from Patel. A train had just arrived in Delhi from the Punjab, filled with dead bodies. Edwina turned up at Jawahar’s door, and changed her high heels for sensible shoes. ‘I am just going to the station,’ she announced. ‘And of course there was no security, no arrangements,’ said Indira. ‘She just went.’61
The violence kept spreading. By 26 August, the great industrial city of Ludhiana was aflame. At the end of August, Lahore was described as a ‘city of the dead’ by the Times of India. Its mall was deserted, its shops shuttered, its roads empty except for military vehicles. No Hindus or Sikhs were visible outside the refugee camps. Those refugees brought stories of thousands shot by police and the army in the nearby towns; 16,000 languished in the camps, with hardly any food; 8,000 or 9,000 were supposed to be in one camp at Jullundur, and most of them had had just one meal in the five days up to 24 August.62 At some of the camps, food was not free; unsurprisingly, few among the refugees had brought supplies of cash. Local banks closed down under threat of looting, and it was not long before even the wealthy went hungry. Driving to the town of Hasilpur, Penderel Moon noticed great heaps of what he thought was manure piled up along the roadside. When he got closer, the horrible truth became clear, and he exclaimed, ‘They’re corpses!’ Three hundred and fifty Hindu and Sikh men, women and children were piled up in heaps, arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, bodies hideously contorted. They were the victims of a Pathan mob that had passed through that morning. In the town he found a weeping group of women and children desperately fanning the flies away from two or three blood-drenched survivors. ‘It was hard to endure,’ Moon remembered. ‘We could do nothing to help.’63 It was announced that every available plane of the British long-haul carrier BOAC would be sent to India and Pakistan to evacuate Europeans. Paradoxically, the Europeans were those in the least danger.64
On 29 August, in the middle of the Punjabi holocaust, the Punjab Boundary Force was actually disbanded at the order of a Joint Defence Council meeting in Lahore. Mountbatten, Auchinleck and General Rees were profoundly opposed to this action, but their hands were forced by the other members, including Nehru, Baldev, Liaquat and Jinnah, and by public opinion. Indian and Pakistani representatives alike argued that the force needed to be reformed under the command of each national government. Each government wanted direct military control over its new borders; rumours circulated in the press that the force was hoarding the best officers. On the ground, the force was accused of having communal sympathies. Rees admitted that the internal atmosphere of the force had become impossible to maintain by the end of August, though he noted that there were many examples of courage and lack of prejudice among the troops. One Sikh major, guarding a train full of Muslim refugees, took three bullets and six spear wounds while fearlessly fighting off a mob of his co-religionists.65 There were much more credible allegations of partiality against the police, but the visibility of the force made it a focus for resentment. Edwina had returned from the Punjab the day before, and repeated to Dickie that such allegations were now widespread. Reluctantly, he gave in. The one effort he had been able to make towards protecting the Punjabis had fallen flat.66
On the last day of August, Calcutta, too, finally succumbed to the communal fury, and there was a furious demonstration against Gandhi’s mission. A mob broke into the Belliaghatta mansion in which he was staying, bearing a wounded Hindu who they alleged had been stabbed by a Muslim, and demanded he call for revenge. He refused to do any such thing: without a tremor he stood to face them, quietly, with arms folded. Someone threw a brick. Another hit at him with a lathi, and narrowly missed him. The eighteen days of peace in Calcutta between the Mahatma’s arrival and the end of August had been the longest and most notable interlude of calm in that city for a year, and were a direct result of Gandhi’s awe-inspiring presence in the popular imagination. But the peace could not hold, and the dozens rioting that night had to be dispersed by police armed with tear gas.67
That same evening, the film at Government House in Delhi was Men of Two Worlds, a thoughtful drama about colonialism in Africa. A young musician from Tanganyika is sent to London, and returns fifteen years later as a health worker. He finds himself caught in a bitter conflict with his village’s witch doctor. His Western sophistications offend his tribe’s traditions – and the British workers in the village cannot agree about whether or not their civilization is worth emulating, either. It is not known who was choosing the films at Government House, but he or she must have been a perceptive critic. One of the biggest questions facing the war-ravaged subcontinent was whether Nehru’s Western ideals, or Gandhi’s traditional medicine, would heal India. As it turned out, neither would work fast enough. Within a week of the film’s screening, the situation right in the heart of India’s capital was to get much, much worse.