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The Real Story Behind India Pakistan Partition Sam Dalrymple

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TITLE: The Real Story Behind India–Pakistan Partition | Jugnu Mohsin x Sam Dalrymple on British Raj | O1A2G CHANNEL: DRM News DATE: 2026-05-02 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Punjabi like or subscribe. Hello everyone. My guest today is Sam Durimple, historian, traveler, DIY at heart. We’re talking today about his book Shattered Lands, the five partitions that have made modern Asia. Sam, welcome. Let’s go back to 1931 and what the British Raj looked like and what its dominions looked like at the time.

Sure. So I mean this is really I think the crux of the book that we are so unfamiliar with the actual contours of what the Raj looked like. If you go back to 1931, um the Raj did not consist of the kind of pre-artition map of India that we imagined that India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This was a colonial empire within an empire. Britain had four offices of state. The home office, the foreign office, um and the colonial office and a completely separate India office because this was a colony that included a quarter of the world’s population. It stretched from the city of Aiden in what’s now Yemen and as far east as Rangun and Burma. Um we often forget I think the fact that Burma and the Gulf states were included in Britain’s Indian Empire. And I think it’s important to understand that the Raj wasn’t all governed in the same way. There was about onethird of it that was governed as princely states. these protectorates that were semi-independent. Uh they had uh you know like Jaipur, Jodpur, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Bhaval, Pur Kalat. Um these were semi-independent states that preserved their internal autonomy but were had given up their foreign policy to the Raj. Now what’s surprising to I think many people is if you look at the list of princely states that was officially printed by the British Indian government it opens alphabetically with Abu Dhabi and then goes on to list other states such as Bhutan and Nepal and Dubai and Katar and Qatar and so the the the story of this book essentially is how between 1931 and 1971 In the course of just four decades, five partitions tear this world apart into 12 independent nation states. You have Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. It’s a much vaster story than I think we tend to realize and one that I think explains so much about the world that we live in today. Everything from obviously you know the conflict over Kashmir and the nuclearization of the IndiaPakistan conflict but also conflicts in Balojasthan, northeast India, civil war in Myanmar and Yemen and even Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait all have their roots in these five partitions. Let’s go to 1937 when Burma is split off from the body of India and this was the first of the partitions that you talk about. How did that influence events that came later? So this I think is one of the least researched bits of of kind of 20th century South Asian history but hugely hugely important. You can’t understand the partition of India and the demand for Pakistan’s creation without understanding the events of 1930s Burma. The very first document that invented the word Pakistan by Rematali Chudri. He he coins the term Pakistan for a potential state uh for northwest Indian Muslims. Um and the justification that he uses for this state’s creation is that I see no reason why if Burma is allowed to be separated then we can’t too. The very first declaration in favor of Pakistan uses Burma’s separation as the president. Now this is a it it’s a very interesting moment. Burma, although today a bit of an international pariah, was the kind of, you know, Rangon was the New York of its day. There were more people traveling across the Bay of Bengal in search of work in the 1920s than there were across the Atlantic Ocean, in search of work in New York. Um, and yet this there’s so much immigration that, you know, increasingly Burmese people themselves need to learn Bangla, Damil. And there’s increasing demands for separation. And around the same time, there’s an interesting change in the way that India’s Congress uh leaders begin to talk about the the Indian nation. They begin to argue, you know, around the kind of 1920s that perhaps, you know, Indian nationalists shouldn’t just be inheriting all of the regions that Britain conquered and now is governed as India. um you have this this increasing vocabulary that the nation that we want to form should bear the contours of bat var this sacred homeland as set out in the ancient Mahabarat the epic um stretching from Kashmir to kanyakumari and from synind to Assam but that doesn’t include Burma and that doesn’t include the Arabian states and and I don’t think if you if if you don’t take this into account and the fact that this early partition chops off the the Buddhist and Muslim majority sections of the Raj. It’s impossible to understand why minorities starting in the late 1930s began to be so fearful about their future and potential domination by the vast Hindu majority. It’s impossible to understand that without understanding that all of the minority regions had been cut off in

  1. But Sam, let’s go back to 1906 when Muhammad Ali Jana joins the Indian National Congress and he doesn’t move over to the league to the Muslim League until 1913. In fact, he goes on to forge the even as as [clears throat] the head of the Muslim League, he goes on to forge the uh Nehujina pact of 1916 and he remains committed to uh Hindu Muslim unity. Starting with that kind of background and as we know Jina is a completely secular Muslim. How did things go so Ary?

The transformation of Jina I think is one of the bits of the book that I found so fascinating. Um I think it was Patrick French who wrote that you know Jyn has become such an icon. um and what he represents is so central to both India and Pakistan and Bangladesh that it’s very rare that we actually look at him as a human being and how he developed his ideas and more specifically how his ideas changed in the course of his political career. I think that as late as I think the 1920s Surroji Naidu probably the most prominent woman in the in the in the Congress called him the ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity. Exactly. and he, you know, he he drives around in fast cars smoking cigarettes and has uh has this piracy wife and he’s known as the best dressed man in Bombay. Um, for him to transform into the founder of what became the world’s first Islamic Republic um from the man who’s known as the uh ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity, he goes through a series of fascinating transformations. I think first and foremost is the fact that after marrying him his wife Ruti um is excommunicated by her paracy community and I think he begins to worry that maybe people can’t move beh uh like past these religious boundaries. Their marriage goes south very quickly and all this new research has shown that she probably committed suicide after an unhappy marriage. Um and I think that this completely changed him as a man and and particularly the fact that whilst he was looking after her in hospital during a depressive episode um Nu and Gandhi had used the opportunity to pass through a le a resolution basically overruling all of the the political gains that he’d made and he develops this very personal deeply personal and and painful animosity towards Congress’s two main leaders. He in particularly I think views Gandhi um as this kind of uh you know this this this diaspora guy who’s come back from South Africa with all sorts of ideas about what Hinduism should be and as a born again Hindu and he says that Gandhi’s use of Hindu imagery is threatens to hijack the whole narrative and turn it into more religious than it is secular. So he fears that but he leaves he leaves the Congress eventually because he cannot stand the way that religion is being brought into politics. And of course this is a huge irony isn’t it? It’s such a huge irony. But let’s go back further back into history. Let’s go back in fact to 1857 and what we call the first war of independence and and and British historians have known as the Indian mutiny. But following that when the British decided that if they were to rule India they couldn’t deal with the whole mass of Indian people and their subjects as one and so they had to divide them in order to rule them. So that’s a kind of given now in both India and Pakistan and across the the the lands that were once part of the British Empire. But you know it strikes me that the censuses that were carried out in which Hindus slotted into one section, Muslims slotted into the other section whereas in United India um I think that um identities were much more fluid than emerged in the censuses for instance. So that was one thing that set up the divisions that later then became so toxic. And after that of course uh you know separate electorates when Hindus could only vote for Hindus and Muslims only for Muslims. Then the partition of Bengal into Hindu majority Bengal and Muslim majority Bengal and so many other things that the British did to consolidate the separate identities of its subjects. Don’t you think those contributed eventually to um the fissures that we saw in India? I think absolutely and I think particularly separate electorates um particularly the way that I think it was Alex vonelman talks about you know by asking people to pick a box and choose choose a side in a sense uh people had to brush over the complexity of their own identities. Um and I think this is very very central into understanding um what was happening. What I think is also important to recognize though um and I think comes out particularly clear in the later years is that British politics much like politics today is constantly shifting depending on basically whether there’s a conservative or labor government and it’s fascinating how with each new viceroy you essentially get a completely new um political plan. So, I’m reading your book, I’m kind of struck by the casual racism of all the not only the voice viceroy that you mentioned, but other politicians like the Labour leader Clement Atley and others. Winston Churchill of course is the worst transgressor. He is a blatant uh racist, but um you know that comes across uh very regularly and obviously their racism informed their policies. What do you say about that? I mean I’m I was shocked by how even Clement Atley who’s a anti-colonial labor politician when he arrives in India during the simon commission and he finally reaches Rangon which was of course the eastern provincial capital of India at the time um he writes very casually racist things like kind of you know the the Burmans are jolly good chaps but with an unfortunate propensity to murder um and these kind of sweeping statements of entire and have we forgotten have we forgotten what Winston Churchill said when Gandhi first arrived to meet the viceroy and he said and how dare this half naked fak hair if I’m to quote him in imagined in in his tone go and pale with the with the representative of the king emperor I mean he was astounded and offended by that and uh how dare he beh babe like that he is one of the worst uh worst offenders and of course um during the Bengal famine which I think we’ll get to later in this conversation um you know he writes Even when uh Wavel etc is trying to get aid to the Bengales, Churchill writes these dismissive responses like you know if the Bengales are starving then why isn’t Gandhi dead yet? Yes quite right and then but none of this appears in British history you know uh British colonial history. I don’t see British textbooks reflecting any of this. Um you know I don’t see people in mainland Britain even talking about the racism of a person like Churchill. I know Tariq Khali has done a lot of good seinal work on this but in mainstream Britain one doesn’t see any of this at all. There’s a interesting shift. I mean it’s it’s still appalling. Um there’s an interesting shift though between I’d say 2018 and now. Um it just before Black Lives Matter etc. When I started project DANA in 2018 there was not a single textbook that taught about partition. Now it’s in every key stage three uh history textbook that you’ve got the beginnings. It’s still one small aspect of it, but they’re around the time of the 70th to 75th anniversaries of partition, the first inklings of it. But frankly, it’s appalling that Britain, you know, the most important thing that Britain ever did was conquer one quarter of the world and yet most Brits can go through their entire education system and not come across the British Empire. And and they can they can go around thinking that British history is only Henry VIII and Elizabeth the 1. It’s blah blah blah. and none of this and uh well it’s time to set that right but let’s also talk about some other racial uh stereotypes for instance the marshall races that’s another one that has cost us so dearly and keeps costing us to this moment I’d like you to reflect upon that I think that so the for those who don’t know the marshall races idea was invented basically in the wake of 1857 the great uprising um and was a way of justifying of Britain basically justifying through racial pseudocience how to justify only recruiting basically kind of loyal communities who’d stayed with Britain in 1857 and not having to recruit those who had uh joined the rebels. And uh the way that they do it is they say that kind of you know those who were loyal such as Punjabis and Patans um are considered marshal races and we’re going to induct them more into the army. People like Bengalies and people from UP are not going to be inducted into the army. And of course this because of course the revolt was was led by people from the UP initially. Yeah that’s right. The Mongal pandes and the Muslim soldiers or the Bengal regiment of the time. Precisely. And um but you can see I mean I think to this day um the this this this awful racial pseudocience continues to be present whenever you hear uh an army uncle in either India or Pakistan uh talk about oh Sikhs are a martial race or kind of Punjabis are a martial race. most brutally. It was used during 1971 by the Pakistani army to justify atrocities against Bengalies and by saying kind of oh you know we’re more marshal than them and then um similar attacks on Uru speakers on the basis that we are proving that we are a martial race and so the way that this this British colonial pseudocience about kind of you know racial hierarchies continues to cause such harm and and today it’s amazing how many seek friends that I have who have who continue to internalize this idea that Seikhs and Punjabis are a martial race and it’s somehow been brought into the kind of religious cannon almost that seikhs are a martial race despite the fact that this is a entirely random racial pseudocience invented by Britain in the 19th century with nothing to do with early seek uh ideas of the self. Your book is full of lovely personal grainy detail and that’s what makes it unputd downable for me. I enjoyed so much kind of exploring the characters who determined our histories. Um, one thing as a woman that struck me was that all these three leaders um, who led the independence of India, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehu, Muhammad Ali Jana, all three of them had miserable marriages. Um in the case of Nehu Motilal his father was a very doineering father figure you know a kind of uh and and he insisted that he marry within the cast Kashmiri pundits and married Kamala Nehu Kamala who later became but she was tubercular and she was miserable and he didn’t have time for her and they didn’t have much in common and finally she wasted away and died an early death similarly with Rati Jana you just mentioned her she was cast away by her family and then Jana felt that slight very very acutely especially because sad denaw petit her father was his best friend right and of course from his although they never spoke again after afteri ran away with him but and you can I mean I can understand it from saden’s point of view but also from Jenna’s point of view but then he never had time for his young wife too busy fighting the freedom too busy and then and but she writes in her letters that he was a neglectful husband as well and she so committed suicide at the age of 29 9 and his daughter Dina on her 29th birthday. She died on her 29th birthday. She committed suicide on her 29th birthday. How sad is that Sam? And their one child was not named for years and then she ended up naming herself Dina. In the case of Mahatma Gandhi, his wife Kasurba fell very ill. And when his son insisted that she would recover if demonst if if uh given a dose of penicellin, Gandhi objected and said no way she’s not getting penicellin. We will rely on Pratma. he’ll rely on traditional medicine etc. and Casturba dies and then Gandhi kind of dissolves into fits of tears etc and secludes himself for some time. What is it with these men? I think I mean I think Ruti Jenna um I think is has one of the most tragic stories of all and her suicide letter um kind of reduced me to tears the first time I read it. She she writes this incredibly heartfelt thing which I’m going to paraphrase but is along the lines of you know try to remember me as the flower that you plucked and not the flower that you stood that you trampled on. I’ve loved you my darling and had I loved you and had you loved me a little more I would have stayed with you and had I loved you any less I would have still survived [clears throat] and she’s written this wonderful book brilliant book recommended to all listeners here recommended to all listeners here yeah and it is really um so sad heart-wrenching heart-wrenching heart-wrenching Mr. Neru of course is very keen on Padmau at some stage as you say in your book writing letters to her calling her curry sa etc. This is of course before Edwina Banbatton arrives on the scene. Um and um you you write also about other people in the partition and their personal kind of testimonies which again like the rati letter reduced you to tears for me fur tons’s words reduced me to tears really sam he’s a man who comes from tons sharif which is in south Punjab he’s a Hindu but styles himself in the udu tradition of fik tonsi right the thinking tonsi and um he has so many Muslim friends mumas and others with whom he’s like a brother and um that that that the travails that he goes through during the partition when he’s rent really um that was very interesting to me and then Sadhatasan Mantto’s testimony was very interesting to me even the poor Nabab of Junagar now I know that with your background with the Dastan project you are also an oral historian so how did you collect all these oral testimonies. So this was the background of the book. Um it began when I was in my last year of college actually when um I was having some conversations with my both my Indian and Pakistani friends a about how tragic it was that we couldn’t sit and have these conversations back in the subcontinent where Indians struggled to get to Pakistan and when we’re abroad we’re always each other’s best friends and this is this is not the case with any other major conflict zone. You don’t get Russians and Ukrainians or Israelis and Palestinians. Um so I think we were all uh chatting and about you know the fact that so Sparish my friend from Delhi who’s now in Australia he was desperate to see his ancestral hometown and show it to his grandfather who always dreamed of going back and never could. This is in Jang. This is Yeah, precisely just south of Jang, a small town called Baila, just just on the Punjab KPK border. And um and so we came up with this idea of using um virtual reality to try and reconnect families across the border and show people their old house, their old havi, their old mosque, mandara school, whatever it might be. One person wanted to see the place where they went on the first date with their husband before they moved to Karachi. and trying to track down these stories. I think I think it went viral on Instagram and suddenly all these people began reaching out to try and record their oral histories. We began traveling across India uh you know Punjab, UP um uh Hyderabad uh to Pasha uh to Dhaka, Kolkata and more and more I think as this project blew up more and more people offered up their stories and so we ended up I think um I mean this book uses interviews in I think eight different languages u many of which I collected with project Dan um and I think it there’s this urgency right now to try and collect these memories just as there was a few years ago with World War II veterans or Holocaust survivors. I think that you know the generation who remembered partition is now either getting too old and their kind of you know memories fading or they were too young when part you know we still have many people who were alive at partition but sometimes they were just 5 years old. Um and the people who were 20 years old at partition are now 98. Um and so we’re losing the generation who were composmentous enough to kind of really have strong memories of what was going on. Um and so there’s never been a more important time I think both in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and in particularly in the UK and the states. There are all sorts of archives that have been begun in the last decade. Uh shout out to the 1947 partition archive in Berkeley which has done incredible incredible oral history research to the point that now if I as a scholar wanted to you know uh to listen to some accounts of partition from Hedrabad I could have you know 120 interviews by logging onto their archive and could choose between kind of you know Hindu Muslim piracy Jewish testimonies. Tell me about this. Where do you log on to this? So um currently they uh so they’re based in Berkeley and I was lucky enough to work with them and got access to it but they are just basically starting up a new service now where universities across the world will be able to get a subscription and and and have it completely available online all these thousands of interviews um uh you know to available to all university students and then for other researchers you either have to work with them or or or pay. But it’s an incredible incredible resource and they they’re just really beginning to get the traction now I think that they’ve been they’ve been working at this for kind of 10 years now but it’s the website’s now live and all the rest of it so well worth um looking on to 1947 partition archive in 1939 the second world war breaks out Sam now we know that resources are diverted to the war we know that the Bengal famine happens as a result of those diverted resources we know that many Indians are mobilized and millions of Indian soldiers go and fight in the war effort. Tell me how that accelerates Indian independence and what effect the second world war has on the British Empire. I think the World War II is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle to understanding what happens at partition. And yet because of the fact that the soldiers are fighting for the British Empire, it’s one that all of the postcolonial nations of South Asia have been kind of quite keen to brush over. But the fact is that the Indian army mobilization in World War II was the largest mobilization in history. I think kind of you know in the millions of of of of volunteers the largest volunteer force in history. Um of course you know under colonial juress and etc. But um this completely changes the map of South Asia. Everyone is brought into the war effort in ways that we’ve completely forgotten. Um, you know, the gem cutters of Jedra, for example, are suddenly hired to make the first sniper scopes uh in South Asia. Um, you get the last use of war elephants in history as elephants are turned to logging on the frontier to help build defenses. Um, and in the process, I think you get the militarization of society that sets the basis for what happens in partition. You can’t understand the bloodshed that occurs in 1947 specifically in Punjab without understanding that Punjab was the center of the military and that in the way moment of the marshall races and so many arms left over floating about and so many trained men out there in the field. precisely the it’s impossible to understand what happens in the Punjab without understanding that there was the largest demobilization in history and that suddenly there the state was a wash with weapons on a black market and with men who knew how to use them. Um so I think it’s immensely um important and also the fact that you know you’ve got the so Congress protests the war effort the quit India movement is launched and the Congress is arrested for virtually the entirety of and the Muslim League supports it and the Muslim League supports it and rises up in Britain’s estimations so that by the end of World War II the Muslim League for the very first time is on par with the Congress in terms of popular support and that wouldn’t have happened had the Congress not been arrested and basically absent from the political scenario for uh for 3 years. So nature abhorose a vacuum and the Muslim League came into the vacuum. Let’s talk about the Bengal famine of

  1. Two to three million people starved to death during the Bengal famine. The British do nothing about it

until the very end. The greatest tragedy of the war and it’s it’s incredible. The the statistics are extraordinary. Kavita Puri’s amazing new um podcast 3 million everyone should listen to. Uh it’s ironic that the the year of World War II that actually had the uh least fighting would see the most ci civilian casualties in the British Empire. Um so it’s the the key to understanding it is basically the after effects of Burma’s partition with India are still there. uh bur Bengal had been reliant on Burmese rice coming in and when Japan basically conquers uh Burma, Bengal is cut off from much of its rice supply, but it still has enough. And then there’s a cyclone that hits um and things begin to go ary. But the key thing that changes is that you’ve got all these troops coming in from abroad um basically skyrocketing the inflation across Bengal. And it’s not that there wasn’t enough rice in the state. There just about was. there was much less than usual but there still was enough rice. Uh but the key as Amari Sen has shown in his work was that thanks to all this inflation people were unable to afford the rice. So and this is crucial there was enough rice. Um but Britain refuses to uh open up food kitchens uh being convinced basically that there was enough rice and and and and uh and Linithko and Wavel both write letters to Churchill basically saying stop diverting the rice we need to open soup kitchens etc. And interestingly they do open soup kitchens in Tamil Nadu which was also reliant on Burmese rice beforehand and there no one stuffs. Um but in Bengal they don’t. And Churchill writes back, “If the Bengales are starving, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?” And of course, in the next three years, three million civilians will die. There will be more civilian casualties from the British Empire during the year of the least fighting. Isn’t that shocking? Absolutely. And I think one of the um other interesting uh new revelations that have come out about partition recently uh by Janam Mukerji’s amazing work hungry Bengal uh is that the first um fighting that is recorded on direct action day the first partition riot was actually the the first bit of violence was hungry Bengali three years later trying to break into a food bank and so it wasn’t the the first gunshots on that famous day that would lead to the spiraling religious violence across the subcontinent. That wasn’t a communal cause in the first place. The first shots were hungry Bengalies breaking into a food bank. Not a communal cause by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, Sam, in 1946, there’s a moment of hope with the cabinet mission plan that arrives and proposes a loose federation with autonomous Muslim areas and Hindu areas and others. And interestingly, Mr. Jina accepts it, but Pandit Neu and Gandhi reject it. Do you think it was bound to fail? I don’t. I think so. This is everyone I know who’s worked on partition. The cabinet mission plan kind of sits there in your mind as the greatest what if. Um Jina by this point has been basing his career for the last six years on the establishment of a separate Muslim homeland. Um and yet when this plan is put forward the idea was that you’d have uh a UK style system. So just as the UK is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So there would be a federal system where there’s north India, South India, East Pakistan, West Pakistan and a dean and there would be five nations within one nation state. Um and Jina whose fight for Pakistan seems to be based around constitutional guarantees for Muslim security accepts this plan. Um and the Congress pulls out last minute because of the fact that the Northwest Frontier was then ruled by a Congress government and they wanted uh the Northwest Frontier to be part of the North India nation rather than the West Pakistan nation. um and which was physically impossible of course and this Fina who’s just you know basically given as much as he can sees this as the greatest betrayal and pulls out of the um out of the negotiations and he says if you’re pulling out of this we will either have a divided India or a destroyed India and he then organizes direct action direct action and that has disastrous consequences in Bengal to begin with and then later in Rahul Pindi and so forth but The leadup to partition is kind of laced with tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. Some of which could have been avoided. For instance, Lord Wavel, the penultimate vice roy of India was a man of tremendous integrity, was a man of enormous sympathy for everybody who lived uh in the subcontinent and he famously recommended that the British should not pull out of India in unseammly haste and do it properly and over a period of time. Now we well sort of Whiteall loses patience with Wville and he’s withdrawn and you get the brash Lord Mountbatton to replace him who arrives and he just doesn’t have the bandwidth. I can just imagine him saying, “Oh, I’ve got such a headache with these people. He doesn’t have the bandwidth to do it slowly and patiently and he wants to out as soon as possible.” Wasn’t that another tragedy? Precisely. I think so. Um, I think that Wville was far more even-handed um, in his dealings with everyone, whereas Mountbatton clearly, you know, gets on famously well with Nu and cannot stand Jina and um, in some sense, I think the most consequential event in Mount Batton’s uh, vice royalty was the fact that he had been given by Prime Minister Atley. He’d been given a year and a half. He’d given until June 1948 uh to pull out of India. He’s given basically a year and a half. Um and he decides to speed it up to 77 days. Do partition two countries in 77 days. And he does he does so for a very simple reason. He he describes it later. His aim is to shock everyone into getting moving because he found that they were all being too slow. And why did he choose 14th 15th August 1947 as Independence Day? because it was the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender and would make a nice round whole number goodness and that’s why India and Pakistan have the independence day that they do. It’s another shocking thing to me that they know that they should think so cavalerely about the fate of millions and millions of people. Sam, we have long been taught that neighbor turned on neighbor, community turned on community. People who had lived in relative peace for a millennia at least together suddenly became bloodthirsty. But your book shows that that’s not necessarily the truth and that partition violence was organized and led by gangs from the RSS, the Muslim League National Guards and Abza groups, people who were just hungry for property and takeovers. So you know that to me is um a revelation which also contains a bit of hope because after all the communities who still tend to have sympathy for each other and across borders especially in the Punjab this kind of bears out the truth that you speak about. Tell us about that. In my time doing oral histories, you certainly find huge numbers of horrors that and sometimes you find horrors that people themselves remember doing. Um, far more and then and then dying of remorse after that and dying of remorse, but far more common are stories of people sheltering their neighbors from mobs. And one of the most frequent things that I heard is we don’t know where the mob came from because they weren’t from here. And there’s been a lot of new research recently in on the rise of paramilitary groups in the 1930s and the leading role that they played in the violence of

  1. It’s not just these paramilitary groups as well. It’s also local politicians who are trying to ethnically cleanse their district so as to win the next election. These incredibly kind of horrible figures who I mean in the politics of the subcontinent today we can completely imagine. And you have the um very clearly No Khali which is the second major um part moment of partition violence and then in Bihar which is the third before it then spreads nationwide. The second and the third key moments of violence, one is directed against Hindus, one is again directed against Muslims are both led by local politicians taking revenge against their political rivals and taking revenge against the neighborhoods who voted for their political rivals in the recent elections. And it was landgrabbing and it was this very zero- sum politics and the way that local politics was tied in with local gundas that led to this far more than individual neighbors turning on one another that almost nowhere I have actually found evidence of a neighbor turning on neighbor. do find horrific moments of course and there is one particularly scary moment when uh in during uh the violence in Kolkata in direct action day um there’s a a Hindu student who was uh staying with his Muslim friends and while staying there while sheltered by the Muslim friends the Muslim friends one day go out into the streets and kill a Hindu passer by and he he asks why they’re saving him if they’re killing other Hindus and they say we know you so it’s different so of course you do have this very blatant religious animosity seething at this point. But far more common is people trying to protect each other.

Sam, 17 to 20 million people crossed the Radcliffe line. Ratcliffe of course being that lawyer from Hamstead in London who had never been to the subcontinent before and who came here in matter of days and chopped it all up and off he went back to to Hamstead. Um, millions of people are killed. 100,000 women are abducted and raped. Women are the silent victims of these tragedies. Women are not part of the decision-m. They’re not part of any of the perpetration of the violence. And yet they are the prime victims of this through them through themselves on their own persons or their children or their husbands or their homes. And I don’t think enough is said about the women who were the victims of the partition. What do you think about that? I agree. Um and and it’s actually a lot of the best work on partition has been made by women who were interviewing about these horrors and I think um there’s a line by Yesmania uh on the violence of 1971 which was like don’t ask me which religion the perpetrator came from or the ethnicity of the perpetrator. the perpetrators were men and I think that uh that says it all. Let’s talk about Kashmir that festering saw that haunts both India and Pakistan to this day and the poor Kashmiris who are right in the middle of it. Do you think it could have been different because your book speaks about how the Lashkars were mobilized to go into Kashmir following killings in Kashmir following the Maharaja’s uh kind of uh undecidedness about whether he should exceed to India or Pakistan and the pressure on the Maharaja and then crucially the cutting off of Guraspur district which was uh contiguous with Pakistani territory 60% Muslim and yet delivered to India because without Guras ASPR India would not have had an entry into Kashmir. Tell us about that. So the I think we often imagine that the way that that the task that Radcliffe was given when drawing the Radcliffe line was dividing districts by simple Hindu Muslim majorities. Um in fact he was given the task also to basically allow for viable states. Um take into account water tables and take into account access to other areas. So for example um whilst both countries were required as part of his brief to have access to Kashmir. There was one road that had to come in from Pakistan, one road that comes to India. So Gurdaspur despite being majority Muslim ends up with India. Um likewise you actually get the Chittagong hill tracts which were 1% Muslim given to East Pakistan because and and despite the fact that they were 99% Buddhist um and and animist were given to Pakistan so that Chittagong the biggest port that’s now in Bangladesh would have a um would have a hinterland and wouldn’t just kind of be backed onto uh Indian territory. And so likewise, Muridiabad with a Muslim majority now in one of the you know historic centers of of of Muslim culture in Bengal is given to India. And that time and time again you see this the story of the princely states I call the fourth partition in my book because we often think that Radcliffe drew the entire line but in fact 81% of the India Pakistan border was determined by princes exceeding to one or the other exceeding to one or the other. Whereas almost 100% of the India Bangladesh border, East Pakistan’s border, you can call the Radcliffe line. Remarkably only the segment between basically kind of um Sri Gangagar and uh and Gradaspur that section of the western border was drawn by Radcliffe and nothing else. Kashmir wanted to follow suit from Bhutan and Nepal which let’s not forget were also princely states and passed a legal case to have their independence recognized because they were Himalayan states bordered in more than on three sides by non-Indian territory and historically linked with Tibet rather than the plains. Um Nepal and Bhutan passed this resolution saying that Himalayan states should be allowed to remain independent. And what’s fascinating is the Maharaja of Kashmir originally had planned to follow suit from Nepal and Bhutan and also remain entirely independent. Yes. But Mr. Nehu was from Kashmir and he wanted desperately for Kashmir to be part of India. So he was asked according to your book, don’t you want Kashmir? And he said yes, I do want Kashmir to be part of India. But we hear that the Pakistani tribal lashkars who were sent into Kashmir to forcibly change the status quo were sent in as an answer to an act of provocation. What do you say about that? What provoked that? So what seems to have happened? Um so both Nu and Jina early on don’t make I I I think there’s that there there’s this kind of myth that both of them are after Kashmir alone. Early on it seems that both of the leaders are are kind of willing to let Kashmir go. They’re trying to ask the Maharaja to join their countries. They’re doing all sorts of politics but they’re not forcing anything. Um what seems to change is that there’s uh that a partition mob crosses from Punjab into Jamu. Um and it’s it’s mutual ethnic cleansing, but in particular the Muslims of Jamu are murdered. And this convinces several Pakistani generals to go behind Jina’s back and sponsor Alaskash to enter Kashmir and get it to join Pakistan. So Jina didn’t know about it. Ja had no idea. And this is the first but not the last time that members of the Pakistani military will go behind the back of civilian authorities. Don’t we know about all that? Sponsor [laughter] sponsor crossber um sort of attacks. And I think that this is the moment that forces the Maharaj of Kashmir’s hand. Seeing basically this Lashka enter is the moment that he actually decides to aced to India and of course very quickly after this fact you have the Indian and Pakistani armies pulled into Kashmir so that by the end of the year you have troops who let’s not forget were fighting alongside one another defending their lives in World War II you know risking their lives for one another as brothers suddenly fighting against each other on the front lines on the plateau of the world and let’s not forget that the lashkars stop in Baramula exactly one hour out of Sinagar to to to loot and pillage and they’re merily doing that whereas they could have gone on to Sinagar and altered the status quo forever but they don’t do that and then the militaries get involved and then Pakistan’s British commander-in-chief General Gracie refuses to follow Jina’s orders and says I will not engage And that’s not the first time that Pakistani generals have refused to follow their leaders’ orders. Exactly. Um so there’s all sorts um of fascinating new documents that I think have also been released on this and I think this is something we should also talk about. I think that so much has been written about Kashmir and the origins of the conflict. But in recent years, what’s so fascinating is the way that a host of new secret intelligence documents by all of the major countries involved have been released to the public and often been sitting in these archives, but without scholars looking at them. And I think that there’s a few books recently um that have really begun really since since 2018 really begun to change a lot of the received narratives that we’ve had for the last 70 years based off of these declassified uh new pieces of information. I think one of the most surprising uh pieces is the fact that in the wake of the ceasefire in Kashmir and and the nuat pact um Indian and Pakistani secret intelligence begin information sharing for almost a decade. Your book shows that um Mountbatton is um very perturbed at what’s happening in Kashmir and he offers Mr. Jana uh plebvisit in Kashmir provided the lashkars are withdrawn quickly and then uh Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan uh on the condition of Hyderabad’s accession to India. Yeah. And Mr. Jina refuses to take that. Mr. Jina refuses and the the this whole story is full of so many whatifs and moments that somehow in the public consciousness have been completely forgotten. And after this tragedy of Kashmir, we come to 1950 and the Liyakat Neu pact which again is a very hopeful milestone in Indak relations followed by 11 years of peace and cooperation and it doesn’t end until India uh invades Goa and conquers it and then Aayup Khan who’s the first martial law dictator in Pakistan just goes up the wall. What happened then? This is one of the most important new revelations that’s come out with the declassification of uh of basically intelligence files that’s been released in the last 1015 years and has only really been discovered by scholars since co and there’s two in particular um Abanesh Palwell um is one and uh Balabi Ragavan and they both found this extraordinary series of documents that proved that India and Pakistan begins working together. You’ve got the Indis water treaty of course, but you also um have the resolution of all sorts of border issues and most importantly Indian and Pakistani intelligence officers working with each other and sharing intelligence to stop the rise of communism in their respective countries. So there’s a particular moment in early I think it’s 1951, but I may be wrong there. um when they begin working together to back anti-communist forces in Rangon because they thought they saw communism as the bigger foe at the time the the China turning communist um you know in the late 1940s creates a completely a complete switch and suddenly as a result there’s a complete Thor in relations that I think we’ve by and large forgotten but it’s it’s as a result of this Thor that Muhammad Ali’s tomb in Karach is built by an Indian Muslim from Bombay. Um you suddenly you have um Zufukarali Bhuto able to retain his Indian citizenship and resolve his um his property laws until the mid 1950s. Uh so he doesn’t become a Pakistani citizen until 1955 I think. Yeah. And um and there’s time and time again you have joint IndoPakistani passports that I think if you go to the Museum of National History in Lor you’ve got some of these passports and they are fascinating. they say you know India’s/Pakistan and that was a possibility to have these kind of joint documents showing you know ties across these borders that stays there until 1961 and this is when India decides to what they call the liberation of Goa basically kicking out the Portuguese who Indian India cons continues to consider you know European colonists that stayed on in South Asia and need to be kicked out. Um but Aay Khan sitting here in Pakistan considers this a scary moment and begins to worry that India has newly expansionist tendencies. And so in order to kind of back this up uh and and uh look after his options, he for the first time in 1961 extends support to Naga rebels in northeastern India. uh he had the opportunity to do so three years earlier and turned it down because he was actually working with India. But in 1961 it all goes south and within two years of this you get Indian intelligence’s first communications with um separatist groups in both East Pakistan as well as the northwest frontier province. What’s interesting is that at this late stage you know Kushmir and Baljasthan don’t have anything to do with crossber funding. It’s actually early on more in in in East Pakistan and Nagaland, India’s northeast and that is where the early subtituge happens. But by 1964, just four years later, everything has collapsed. The whole cooperation pacts have collapsed. So that by 1965, you’ve got the second Indopart war and that is and and from that partition survivors are no longer able to cross the border and visit old family members. the idea of having crossber property is revoked. So the enemy property acts are passed on both sides. And I think that 1965 and then of course later 1971 are in a sense kind of you know these these second moments of partition the moments when the ruptures of 1947 which had been healing are reopened and they’ve remained festering wounds ever since. Well Sam, all of this shows that when geopolitics changes, things in the Indian subcontinent also follow suit and also change with tremendous possibilities for peace at the time and as we know things are topsyturvy these days in the world and geopolitics is changing very fast. So on that note can we hope that things will change for the better in the Indian subcontinent as well? I despite my better judgment am still very hopeful. I think I mean we mentioned this earlier in the discussion but there is no other war zone where people have been at firing missiles across a border this year where it’s still possible where every Indian and Pakistani that meet abroad will become best friends they will have eat the same food listen to the same music often date one another um and you know their conversation will sour when Kashmir is brought up but by and large there is still this kind of person to person um ability to just get along immediately that is not there amongst Ukrainians and Russians amongst Israelis and Palestinians um and no other war zone uh is full of people who so more want to be friends I think and so despite the tireless attempts by politicians to pull these countries apart I think it’s inevitable that at some point this border will be lesser you know I don’t I don’t see a moment where um you know of of where the border has disappear and we’re reunited into a going to greater South Asia. But I do see at some point something has to give. Something has to give. Hope springs eternal and who knows all those old dreams that Mr. Jana had of cooperation in the subcontinent and that other leaders had too. Pandit Neu had them and certainly Mahatma Gandhi also had them. We don’t know they might yet come true. Thank you very much Sam. Thanks for having me.