Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“How did you feel about Partition?” I ask, after the recitation.

“In the initial stages I felt very bitter. I mean, we were hoping for independence and what did we get? A country cut in half.”

And he elaborates with a domestic metaphor that will return again and again.

“Two brothers ended up fighting and dividing the plot.”

His bitterness finds its target in the politicians who oversaw the division of British India.

“We in the services had a code of behaviour. The welfare of the people and the country comes first, your own, last. This oath was emblazoned on the walls of our military academy. But politicians did not live like that. They thought of their own interests, and hang the country.”

“Did you feel bitter towards Muslims?”

“Why would I? I had grown up with those people, and they were caught in the same situation that we were. The younger generation was taught to hate Muslims. That kinship we had is not there now: they grew up hearing horror stories. But we love those people.”

He strokes his bushy white moustache and says, “Can I offer you some tea?”

The car honks merrily as it approaches the main intersection, as if there were only ten other cars on the streets, as if such signals were not entirely drowned in the hubbub. Having broadcast its alert, it then drives serenely, and without looking, into the furious path of 16 million people and their traffic.

There is nothing urban about this place, I think. No metropolitan ethos emerges from all these multitudes who live together. So many of the people who created the modern city came as refugees from small towns and villages, and even after decades in Delhi, that is where they still live.

The Dominion of India came into being on 15 August 1947. Perforated by hundreds of principalities, which as yet retained their independence from it, the new territory looked like a moth-eaten remnant, torn away as it had been from a much larger swathe called the British Indian Empire, which, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, gave rise progressively to four new nations: Burma (1938), India and Pakistan (1947) and, with the rupture of this last, Bangladesh (1971).

The British Indian Empire was so called not because it was part of the British empire — though it was that — but because it was itself a super-territory, comprising an enormous array of nationalities and cultures. With a population roughly equivalent to Europe’s, and a similar range of languages, it could easily, in other circumstances, have given rise to as many countries as that western flank of the landmass — or many more. In this sense, the old empire presented fewer conceptual challenges than the issuing nations. Empires do not need to conceal the fact that they are the artificial result of transnational might. A ‘nation’, by contrast, must rest on some natural logic, which is its perennial problem. Like most of the hundred or so other new nations of the twentieth century, the nascent states of south Asia had no historical basis except in imperial conquest, nor did they possess any single language, culture or ethnicity that could give them coherence. They were both too big and too small to match any category of experience — and their new administrators were greatly preoccupied by the search for symbols and slogans that would redefine their lumpy agglomerations as self-evident homelands.

The name ‘Pakistan’ was one such attempt to conjure coherence out of variance. It was an acronym of disparate territories, coined by a Cambridge student named Choudhary Rahmat Ali, who wrote in 1933 of the dream of providing a separate nation for the “thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN — by which we mean the five Northern units of India, viz: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province ( Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchis tan.” Having settled on this neologism, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan’s first head of state, was furious when he discovered that the other new country across the border was going to call itself ‘India’. He had imagined that his neighbours would throw out the British word and all its colonial associations, and, like Pakistan, bring in an untouched name for the era to come. By calling themselves ‘India’, they passed off their infant state as an antique and pretended that all the history associated with that name was theirs, that all the millennia of competition for the lands beyond the Indus river — Pakistan’s river! — all the region’s great civilisations, whether they had existed within the territory of this new India or not, were the inheritance, solely, of their shrunken land.

India not only took the name; India got Delhi. Delhi was the city to which both of the last two empires had moved their capital, and these empires, great builders both, had fashioned the kind of monumental buildings and vistas that provided instant national dignity. While the government of Pakistan camped for over a decade in Karachi, waiting for a new capital to be constructed, Indian officials could use the impressive parliamentary infrastructure built to symbolise British authority in India, to which the British empire had devoted several of its best architects and millions of pounds. As British administrators packed their bags and boarded ships, India’s new ministers moved into the bougainvillea-bedecked bungalows they left behind.

But the city would never again resemble the administrative cantonment the British had known. For, as the flags of independent India were hoisted over their garden city, it was immediately overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the terrors of the empire’s partition. And it is out of this, more than anything else, that the contemporary city was born.

• • •

The partition of the British sub-continental territory into a new ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ caused what has been called “one of the great human convulsions of history”. 24Within the space of a few months, 14 million people moved one way or the other across the new borders in the north-west and the east. As many as 12 million of those refugees crossed the north-western border, which came within 400 kilometres of Delhi and divided into two the state of Punjab: Hindus and Sikhs, mainly, moving to the Indian side, Muslims to the Pakistani. Many of them moved for fear of the violent treatment they would receive as religious minorities in whichever of the two new states was walling up around them, and indeed the unscrambling of these conjoined religious populations was accompanied by staggering violence. Some 1 million people died in the partition of British India — some of hunger and disease, but most in the mass killings whose astringent memory still lurks in Punjabi households — not only in India and Pakistan, but all over the world. Muslims in what became India, and Hindus and Sikhs in what became Pakistan, were cut down in their houses and in the streets; they were pulled out of departing cars and buses and murdered. In what was to become a cliché of Partition storytelling, trains of refugees attempting to escape were stormed and everyone aboard slaughtered: the trains still ran, arriving at the other end like omens from hell. Seventy-five thousand women were raped or abducted in this monumental mêlée, a fact that still plays its part in structuring relationships between the sexes in this part of the sub-continent. The partition was, in brief, a massive catastrophe, one of the several instances in the twentieth century when suffering and death on an inconceivable scale were caused by bureaucratic pen strokes — pen strokes, in this case, of the British government and the governments-in-waiting of India and Pakistan, none of which has ever taken responsibility for its part in uprooting and killing so many.