Death amid a whiff of freedom: A brief look at Punjab and Bengal’s ravaged history of Partition

Families were destroyed, lives were uprooted, and a whole generation of post-Partition children — who had no place to call home — were born. No other parts of country faced the sharpest edge of the sword of this horror than Bengal and Punjab.

On August 15, 1947, when "India awoke to life and freedom", parts of the country that underwent another horror — the Partition — were engulfed in death and destruction witnessed rarely in the history of mankind.

It all began after the 1946 Indian provincial elections, in which the Muhammad Ali Jinnah-led Muslim League performed well, thus giving a boost to his claims of a separate Pakistan.

Initially against the Partition, the British devised the idea of India being grouped into three separate provinces — two predominantly Muslim ones and the third being a Hindu-majority one. Although the Muslim League accepted this idea, Nehru rejected it, claiming that in this way, the central government, which would control the defence, communications, and foreign affairs, would be rendered weak.

What followed was a bloody road to making two nations out of a landmass whose united history goes back thousands of years. Families were destroyed, lives were uprooted, and a whole generation of post-Partition children — who had no place to call home — were born, and no other parts of country faced the sharpest edge of the sword of this horror than Bengal and Punjab.

Pre-partition violence

Direct Action Day/Great Calcutta Killings

After the Cabinet mission (that had planned to divide India into two provinces under one central government) plan failed to materialise, Jinnah announced that August 16, 1946 be regarded as 'Direct Action Day' a day on which the Muslim League would lay claim to their demand of a sovereign country. He sent out a warning to Congress in the same regard: "We do not want war. If you want war we accept your offer unhesitatingly. We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India."

On the proposed Direct Action Day, violence broke out between the Hindu and Muslim communities of Calcutta, and spread like wildfire across the city. An estimated 5,000 people lost their lives in the city, according to a report by Sciences Po.

Pictures of dead bodies lying unattended across the city and vultures waiting to feast of them can still be found on the internet.

Noakhali riots

Another dark spot in the story of India's independence are the Noakhali riots in East Bengal (Now Bangladesh). The area comprised around 10 lakh Muslims and two lakh Hindus, according to the book 1946: The Great Calcutta Killings and Noakhali Genocide.

The book further states that “It is clear that this overwhelming numerical superiority of the Muslims placed the Hindus absolutely at their mercy. From Calcutta ‘Direct Action’ spread to East Bengal… Ignorant villagers were told that the Hindus had killed almost all the Muslims living in Calcutta and they were asked to kill their Hindu neighbours in retaliation.”

The Noakhali riots started on October 10, 1946, with an attack on the house of Rajendralal Chowdhury, who was the president of the Noakhali Bar Association.

Under the behest of an influential Muslim leader, Golam Sarwar, mobs looted houses of the Hindu minority in Noakhali, killed numerous people, raped, and forcefully converted a large chunk of the populace in the area.

Such was the violence that Mahatma Gandhi himself decided to visit Noakhali and preach his message of non-violence there.

The Wire quotes historian Nirmal Kumar Bose, who said that Gandhi, in a speech, had claimed, “he had not come to talk to the people of politics, nor to weaken the influence of the Muslim League and increase that of the Congress, but in order to talk to them of the little things in their daily life. Ever since he had come to India thirty years ago, he had been telling people of these common, little things which, if properly attended to, would change the face of this land.”

The book Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali reveals that the then-Prime Minister of Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, had said in the assembly that there were 9,895 incidents of forcible conversions in the area of Tipperah alone.

Jawaharlal Nehru himself wrote to Lord Wavell in this regard, saying that he had been receiving telegrams that portrayed the images of violence in East Bengal that include "stabbings and murder and looting."

Post-independence violence: Punjab

Punjab saw some of the most horrific acts of mass violence right after India became independent and two separate states were born. Although 55,000 personnel under the Punjab Boundary Force were deployed, UK's National Army Museum reports that around two lakh people were killed in Punjab alone during migration.

Examples of horrors unfolded can be found in the account of Mohindra Dhall, who in an interview to the BBC, talked about how his father was trying to migrate to India from the newly formed Pakistan. Dhall says that his family decided to get on a train to India, but had to stay back because it was too crowded. Although his father managed to squeeze through, he decided to abandon his idea of departure.

Dhall said to the publication, "My father decided to come out of the train and we stayed back, only to hear the next day that whole train was completely butchered."

He further adds, "Half of our friends from the village, who were on the train, got butchered."

An article in the Economic and Political Weekly titled The Big March: Migratory Flows after the Partition of India, quotes a number of studies to reveal that millions in both Bengal and Punjab, on both sides of the border, went missing during the Partition.

Amritsar train massacre

One of the most brutal and shocking acts of violence following India's Partition occured on September 23-24, 1947 in Amritsar.

Punjabpartition.com quotes an Australian Associated Press report that says 3,000 Muslims were killed and 1,000 wounded after a train arrived in Amritsar.

Along with these, many other stories of loss and violence are closely knit with the independence of India. The horrors of Partition are best described by Nisid Hajari in his book Midnight's Furies: “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”