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Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2010

CATHERINE COOMBS
CATHERINE COOMBS*
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS2 9JT Email: jhm3cebc@leeds.ac.uk
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Abstract

Grassroots accounts of the tragic events of partition are increasingly in the spotlight in studies of the transfer of power. This paper approaches the local perspective through the memories of British civil servants during their last few months in Punjab, assessing what these reflections suggest about the mentality of the departing ruling elite. The similarities between these recorded experiences suggest a process of coming to terms with grief and guilt for what they had witnessed through the creation of a narrative of transition from total power to total loss; a simplified imagery of a fully operational and peaceful pre-1947 Punjab descending with shocking suddenness into the violence of partition. This process of shaping memories not only offers an insight into the British civil servant's need for self-affirmation and a reaffirming of their sense of personal as well as professional value, but also has a broader importance in understanding the mentality of a group of people at the heart of pre-partition Punjab, who were instrumental in defining the emerging independent nation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1: From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 , January 2011 , pp. 201 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 For example, Basu, Aparna, ‘Uprooted Women: Partition of Punjab 1947’ in Pierson, Ruth Roach and Chaudhuri, Nupur (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicising Gender and Race, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 270–286Google Scholar; Butalia, Urvashi, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: C. Hurst, 2000), pp. 285–288Google Scholar; Khan, Yasmin, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, Connecticut, London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 9Google Scholar.

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4 This piece of research uses a core of eight written memoirs from the India Office Collection in the British Library. These were collected in the 1960s and vary in length depending upon how many surviving diaries and papers the writers had to hand, from eight to over 100 pages. I have supplemented this group with several memoirs held in the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) at Cambridge, as well as two collections of letters held in the British Library, but all are written by ICS men who joined the service in the 1920s and 1930s, and whose Indian careers were ended in the mid-1940s. Only R. H. Belcher (IOL: MSS Eur F180/64) offers the waiver that his memoir is written entirely from memory due to his having no surviving diaries or letters.

5 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, pp. 285–288.

6 Ibid., p. 285.

7 Ibid., p. 288.

8 Ibid., p. 288.

9 Ahmed, Ishtiaq, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts’ in Talbot, Ian and Thandi, Shinder (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial, and Post-Colonial Migration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 96–141Google Scholar.

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15 The term Anglo-Indian is used here in its nineteenth-century sense, to indicate the British community in India.

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17 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, p. 3.

18 The reference to episodes of ‘communalism’ in this paper indicate incidents that were labelled or considered as such by the civil servants involved, using their characterization as part of the analysis of their representation rather than engaging with the communalism debate specifically.

19 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 113–117.

20 Ellinwood Junior, Dewitt C., ‘An Historical Study of the Punjabi Soldier in World War I’ in Singh, Harbans and Barner, N. Gerald (eds), Punjab Past and Present: Essays in Honour of Dr Ganda Singh (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976), p. 340Google Scholar.

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22 Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, pp. 1–8.

23 Ibid., p. 201.

24 For more detail, see: Talbot, Ian, Freedom's Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). pp. 3–5Google Scholar; Talbot, Ian, Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988), pp. 18–34Google Scholar; Ballard, Roger, ‘Panth Kismet Dharm te Kaum: Continuity and Change in Four Dimensions of Punjabi Religion’ in Singh, Pritam and Thandi, Shinder S. (eds), Globalisation and the Region: Explorations in Punjabi Identity (Coventry: Association for Punjab Studies (UK), 1996), p. 15Google Scholar.

25 The investment in canal colonies in early twentieth-century Punjab perpetuated the British ability to hand out political favours in the form of fertile land. The importance of Punjab as India's bread-basket both enforced the necessity of political stability and perpetuated the power of landowning, thus retaining the political status quo. Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, p. 106: ‘the Unionist leaders certainly believed that they need not engage in electioneering in the same way as their rivals. The natural leadership of the landlords and Pirs in the countryside would ensure the party's success. They would act as brokers in the localities, mobilising their kinsmen, murids and clients to vote for the Unionist Party in return for its promise of access to Government patronage’.

26 Ahmed, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947’, p. 111; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, pp. 285–288.

27 Ibid.,

28 Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon Collection, Memoir ‘Disaster in Gurgaon’, Small Collections Box 5, p. 51.

29 Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 4.

30 That is to say, the hierarchical structure of Anglo-Indian society, in which professional and social status were intertwined, enforced behavioural norms which reflected both an Anglo-Indian conception of ‘Britishness’ and an Indian pressure in terms of how they expected a ruler to act.

31 London, British Library, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, ‘Memoirs of John Martin Fearn, C.B., Indian Civil Service (Punjab) 1940–1947’, MSS Eur F180/67, p. 2.

32 Allen, Plain Tales, p. 45.

33 Hansen, Thomas Blom and Stepputat, Finn, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’ in Hansen, Thomas Blom and Stepputat, Finn (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Orwell, George, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ in his Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.

35 Cambridge, C SAS, Corfield Papers, Box I, p. 16.

36 Ibid., p. 16.

37 Ibid., p. 16.

38 Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 24.

39 London, BL, APAC, ‘Recollections of the Indian Civil Service: Punjab 1939–1947’, by R. H. Belcher, MSS Eur F180/64, p. 89.

40 Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 22.

41 Ibid., p. 30.

42 London, BL, APAC, Williams, p. 21.

43 In introducing his memoir, Belcher quite frankly states that the account is written from memory due to his having no surviving diary or letter material. Thus the memories he records are those that stayed with him as striking, and are not firmly attached to the date they occurred.

44 London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 74–75.

45 Cambridge, CSAS, Penny Papers, Box I, pp. 185–190.

46 Ibid., pp. 190–192.

47 Ibid., p. 192.

48 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 285.

49 London, BL, APAC, Belcher, p. 79.

50 Ibid., p. 81.

51 Thus there was lasting doubt expressed in these men's later reflections about the long-term potential of India and Pakistan as independent states, despite the extent to which ICS practices and structure were retained by the Indian Administrative Service.

52 London, BL, APAC, Williams, pp. 19–20.

53 Ibid., p. 20.

54 London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 81–89.

55 London, British Library, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, ‘District Officer's Memoirs: R. M. K. Slater, Punjab Commission 1939–1947’, MSS Eur F180/69, p. 32.

56 Cambridge, CSAS, Corfield, p. 162.

57 Ibid., p. 167.

58 London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 101–103.