Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

What caused such an orgy of violence? These are events whose core is difficult to access in any entirely satisfying way. Even the perpetrators find them unintelligible in retrospect, for they were somehow, in that moment, the instruments rather than the authors of the fury; since then, it has released them from its grip and left them as bewildered as anyone else. Certainly, no utilitarian explanation — self-defence, for instance, or struggles over property — can do justice to the extraordinary fervour of Partition violence. For what took over such previously contented, peaceful cities as Amritsar and Lahore was a spontaneous mass fantasy of the sort that eludes such everyday causation. The object of this fantasy, it would seem, was the total annihilation of other religious communities — communities with whom social life had always been intimately shared, but who suddenly seemed, now everything was being shaken out by a border, hideous (the German word ‘unheimlich’, usually translated as ‘uncanny’ but literally ‘un-home-like’, would fit well here). This is what one must conclude from the sterilising bent of the violence — for, as in the similar rampages that have erupted over the political separation of other almost indistinguishable communities, such as in the former Yugoslavia, this was not simply a formless frenzy. It had a specific structure that was targeted not only against a community but also, terribly, against its reproductive potential: not only indiscriminate slaughter, but also the repeated exposure of unborn foetuses, the ceremonial display of castrated penises — and rape on a colossal scale, whose purpose was genetic subjugation: their children will not be their own .

Did these communities simply hate each other? Did the suspension of civility simply allow the emergence of murderous passions that had always existed? Of course, there had always been conflicts and tensions. People understood themselves through their membership of distinct communities of religion and caste, and the resulting divisions and suspicions were exploited by every ruling regime — not only the Mughals and the British but also, later, the various state and federal governments of independent India — with predictably corrosive results. It is perhaps not surprising that the word ‘communal’, which in every other part of the English-speaking world speaks of things harmonious and shared, is in India used to talk of social break-down: because the ‘community’ is thought of as necessarily partial and chauvinistic, its interests always at odds with those of society at large.

But many of these everyday conflicts were just as intense within religious groups as they were between them — Hindus of different castes, for instance, were often embattled. And curiously the overwhelming memory of pre-Partition culture in north India is not one of enmity. It is one rather of inter-religious respect and harmony: people like Colonel Oberoi — and my own father — lived with a sense of expansiveness and plenitude in the mixed religious environment of British India and think back on it with fondness and regret. The culture that existed there had been created by all the religions together, over many centuries, and, whatever the historical conflicts between them, their shared world was richer than the divided one which followed. And that is the point.

It is difficult to express to people who have not known it how shattering is the death of a culture — which is to say the annihilation of everything through which a society comes into being, and therefore of its members’ very selves. The Partition of 1947 killed a culture — an old, shared culture — and the physical-life violence was part of a mad frenzy to survive this psychic death. The new regime of independent nations was narrower than the old culture, and in order for people to squeeze in, a great sacrifice was required: a process of purification and eradication that was essentially infinite because its true theatre was not external but in the self. It was not only Muslims who were afraid of having no place in the new India: Hindus, also, were too Muslim to live there. In their rampages, they killed not Muslims but Islam : the Islam of which they had always been part, the Islam they carried within themselves, the Islam they had to annihilate if they were ever to belong.

Even hatred is not such a powerful cause for violence as is commonly supposed. Love and survival are far more potent forces. The violence of Partition was the violence of people trying to survive — not only physically, but spiritually and politically. And their survival depended on the sacrifice of a love which had become, in the modern world, forbidden.

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For the general mass of people, fear and violence broke out with little warning and there was no time to plan an escape: they locked their houses and set out in cars, buses and trains — but most of all on foot, in great columns hundreds of thousands strong, Muslims one way, Hindus and Sikhs the other, with no idea of what the future would bring, or if they would ever return. With some exceptions, the survivors of this terrible exodus lost everything they could not carry — houses, effects, land, businesses — and their lives after 1947 were begun again from zero.

On the Indian side of the border, refugees settled where they could. Some stayed with members of their extended family. Many were housed in refugee camps, some for as long as five years. A rapidly assembled camp at Kurukshetra in Punjab accommodated 200,000 people, who quickly turned it into a temporary city, bustling with schools, hospitals, markets and religious festivals — festivals, some of them, which commemorated events in the Mahabharata , the ancient epic that described a devastating war fought in that very place, Kurukshetra, between two branches of a single family; the contemporary resonances must have been clear to all.

Over time the greatest number of these refugees settled in Delhi. It was easier to force a way into Delhi than anywhere else: as the capital of the new nation, Delhi displayed the greatest resolve in providing shelter, welfare and business loans to Partition refugees; as a recent city built in the middle of great stretches of open land, it also had the most flexibility to offer permanent housing. During the first half of the twentieth century, which saw the building of the British capital, Delhi’s population had crept up from about 150,000 to just under a million; after Partition, a million new residents were added overnight, and more Partition refugees continued to arrive for many years. The great work of the city after 1947 was the carving up of plots for these new arrivals on land acquired by the state from previous landowners — often the 1911 aristocracy — for the purpose.

As in all moments of great chaos and rupture, there were not only losers. Properties vacated by fleeing Muslims, especially in Old Delhi, were commandeered by Hindu neighbours who had prepared themselves for just such an operation; there are many landowning families in Delhi who cannot cogently explain the origin of their wealth. The state, too, seized a great amount of property from departing refugees, including assets of immense value belonging to the old Muslim aristocracy. In general, however, elites had a better time than everyone else, and not only because they had the money to get out. More than anything else, they had access to information. Most people had no idea what was going to happen and could only follow rumours, but those with access to the political establishment could ascertain much more concretely what the future held and how they might come out on top. People who owned major estates and businesses were particularly motivated to obtain up-to-date intelligence about the gathering Partition rhetoric, and many of them sold early on just to be safe. Such elites were also able to appropriate state resources for their private purposes: it was the army, often, that helped them to move their family members and assets southwards and eastwards into territories that would lie in ‘India’, were a partition to happen. Many of them bought property in Delhi and established a business position before the onslaught, and their descendants are still among the richest people in the city.