NEW LIGHT ON THE HISTORY OF PARTITION

NEW LIGHT ON THE HISTORY OF PARTITION

The spoils of partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 By Joya Chatterji, Cambridge, Rs 795
The British loved to redraw boundaries and borders when they escaped from their own empire. The process of decolonization is littered with maps that were rendered out of date as the sun set on the British Empire. The Union Jack had flown proudly over India, but in August 1947 it had to be pulled down in two separate countries. India was divided into India and Pakistan because of the craftiness of British rulers which was helped not a little by Indian politicians, Muslims and Hindus, seeking a quick road to power.
Bengal was one of the provinces that were affected by the partition of India that came with independence. Bengal was broken up into the tiny state of West Bengal and the Muslim-dominated province of Pakistan, East Pakistan. On August 15, 1947, many Bengalis, who lived in the vicinity of what today constitutes the border between Bangladesh and India on the West Bengal side, woke up not knowing where they belonged, India or Pakistan. The partition was inevitably followed by a transfer of population: there was an influx of refugees from East Pakistan into West Bengal. This transformed the nature of life and politics in the state.
Joya Chatterji’s monograph is concerned with the gap that almost always exists between intentions and results. She argues that those responsible for partition and the creation of a new state wanted to achieve a peaceful and an orderly transfer of power which would firmly and securely fall into the hands of the small elite of which they were the leaders. “They expected,” she writes, “partition — by creating a small, manageable, Hindu-dominated state of West Bengal inside independent India — to restore a lost golden age of bhadralok power and influence.’’ This argument, a carry-over from her previous book, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition (Cambridge, 1994), is persuasive except that it takes the British rulers and their policies out of the partition process. This make the partition of Bengal in 1947 seem like the product of a fight for spoils between the Hindu bhadralok and the Muslims.
Proceeding from the premise of what she calls the Grand Design of the leaders of the Hindu elite, Chatterji shows how history rewrote the design. A shrunken Bengal soon lost its voice in national politics. (This point can be contested since both B.C. Roy and Atulya Ghosh remained important in national politics right through her period.) Bengal lost its fabled prosperity after partition. This can hardly be disputed. But the “gravest error of the architects of partition” was to assume that after partition, Hindu and Muslim minorities on both sides of the new frontier would remain where they were. This, of course, did not happen. Nobody gained from partition, Chatterji concludes. The Muslims of West Bengal, she asserts, were “terrorised and displaced” and the new rulers treated their problems “with callous indifference and blank disregard”.
The biggest loser, however, was the class from which the architects themselves came. They were squeezed out by restricting economic and administrative opportunities on the one hand, and by a migrant population on the other. Their promised land disappeared almost at birth. The levers of politics and power went out of the hands of the party, which represented their interests, into the hands of the Communist Party of India. Politics moved away from middle-class associations to the streets.
Chatterji reconstructs this narrative with great lucidity. She takes her readers through the reasons why Hindu leaders wanted partition and the vision they had for West Bengal. She moves from the top to look at the impact of partition on the people, and, finally, to the politics and changing structures of power.
This is a book on an important subject. Most books on partition stop with the actual partition or with the violence that came in its immediate aftermath. Chatterji brings the partition of Bengal in 1947 forward to 1967. It could have been stretched to 1971 when one aspect of the partition was undone. With illegal immigrants, even terrorists and drug smugglers, coming into West Bengal from Bangladesh, the partition could be said to be part of West Bengal’s present.
Chatterji’s book straddles history and contemporary history. The official archives for a large part of the history she covers remain closed. In spite of this, Chatterji’s research is solid, and her analysis penetrating and often provocative.
RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE
http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html