Hi Gotham and Everyone,

Prem Uncle's story reminds me of the movie Earth............Earth, by Deepa Mehta is an intelligent and deeply moving personal account of the partition of India.

In August 1947 the departing British colonial rulers announced the division of the subcontinent into a Muslim-controlled Pakistan and a Hindu-Sikh dominated India. The partition was organised by the British Labour government with the support and collaboration of the Muslim League and the Indian Congress Party.

At least 11 million people—Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others—caught on the wrong side of the dividing lines were driven out of their homes. Some reports put the death toll from communalist pogroms and rioting at one million. The greatest numbers were killed in Punjab, which was split in two. Tens of thousands died in weeks of carnage."

Her movies, Earth and Water...very moving, very informative...as is Prem Uncle's....and your's....

have a great evening, ruth

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THE GREAT PARTITION: The Making of India and Pakistan, by Yasmin Khan. Yale University Press, London, 2007. ISBN-13: 9780300120783. 288 pages. £19.99.

Sixty years ago this August, one of the greatest and most violent upheavals of the 20th century took place on the Indian subcontinent.

It was an event whose consequences were entirely unexpected and whose meaning was never fully spelled out or understood either by the politicians who took the decision or the millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs who were to become its victims. In 1947, faced with irreconcilable differences over the demand for a separate state for India's Muslims, Britain decided, with the consent of a majority of India's political leaders, to partition the country and give each bit its independence.

Tragedy followed.

The break-up of Britain's Indian empire involved the movement of some twelve million people: uprooted, ordered out, or fleeing their homes and seeking safety. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, thousands of children disappeared, thousands of women were raped or abducted, forced conversions were commonplace.

The violence polarised communities on the subcontinent as never before. The pogroms and killings were organised by gangs, vigilantes and militias across northern, western and eastern India. They were often backed by local leaders, politicians from Congress and the Muslim League, maharajahs and princes, and abetted by willing or frightened civil servants.

Yasmin Khan, a British historian, has written a riveting book on this terrible story. It is unusual for two reasons. It is composed with flair, quite unlike the dense, academic plodding that modern Indian history usually delivers. Second, it turns the spotlight away from the self-posturing in the British viceroy's palace and the well-documented political wrangling between Congress and the Muslim League leaders.

Instead, it focuses on a broader canvas that leads the reader through the confusion, the uncertainties, the fear and eventually the horror faced by those who were soon to become citizens of the two new states, India and Pakistan.

Today, the upheaval on both sides of the partition line would be described as ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. It left two traumatised, injured nations—suspicious and fearful of one another even to this day—where once there had been a single country of loosely interwoven peoples.

Pakistan's present military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, himself a child of partition, calls India “the arch-enemy”. Such thinking has become instilled on both sides—an outcome unimaginable to all those involved in the independence movement.

The decision to divide India on religious lines was taken with regret, but little foreboding and carried out with outrageous haste and unconcern by the British government and its viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten. Asked by a journalist if he foresaw any mass transfer of population, Mountbatten said, “Personally I don't see it...Some measure of transfer will come about in a natural way...perhaps governments will transfer populations".

No preparation or consideration was given to the central issues of citizenship, security and property rights in the division of the country. On the other hand, India's civil servants, the babus of empire, were busy itemising every fixture in their offices down to ink pots and paperweights that were to be divided between Pakistan and the new India. Lack of planning, hubris, confused thinking and a complete void as to the consequences were the fatal flaws in the partition plan, writes Ms Khan.

The announcement that India was to be partitioned and independence would follow not less than a year later was made in the House of Commons on June 3, 1947. By August 15th, the British were gone. They accepted no responsibility for the carnage that was taking place and they refused to allow the British troops still in India to keep order or protect people.

The movement of people and the privations they suffered were extraordinary. Muslims made their way west to Pakistan; Sikhs and Hindus moved east to India in “foot convoys” that involved 30,000-40,000 people, wagons, carts and animals spread out over 45 miles (70 km.).

In one month, 849,000 refugees entered India by foot. Trains that were impossibly overloaded, and dangerously targeted by the killers, ran across Punjab from Rawalpindi and Lahore to Amritsar and Delhi and back again as soon as they had refuelled and watered. Many families left for reasons of safety, taking only a few belongings because they expected to return. Not everyone imagined the journey across the partition line would be final.

When Jawaharlal Nehru made his famous speech on August 15th, declaring that at the midnight hour, when the world slept, India would awake to life and freedom, massacres were taking place almost daily on both sides of the line. Nehru later wondered if his fellow countrymen knew how close India had come to imploding. The violence was simply uncontrollable.

Despite the pledges of equality for all communities in the new India and Pakistan, the driving force behind the violence was to eliminate or devour the other community, writes Ms Khan. It took the shock of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination on January 30, 1948—by a Hindu extremist opposed to Gandhi's conciliatory policy towards Muslims and his peace overtures to Pakistan—to stem the violence and bring India, especially, to its senses.

The illusions of partition are not overlooked by Ms Khan, including the premise that a common religion is strong enough glue to hold different and suppressed ethnic groups together in a nation state. Bangladesh, once East Pakistan, is the prime example of how wrong that theory can be.

Above all, she nails the propaganda lie that the transfer of power in India was an example of peaceful decolonisation that the rest of the world could follow. The unruly end of empire in South Asia was “a shock of epic proportions”, she writes. It was ill-conceived, unplanned and only just escaped from spiralling into an even more devastating civil war.

[Courtesy: The Economist]

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India's Survivors of Partition Begin to Break Long Silence
Projects Document Anguish of 1947 Split

By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 12, 2008; A01

...By the time the British left in 1947, they had divided the colony

into a predominantly Hindu India and a Muslim East and West Pakistan. The borders were drawn hurriedly -- in a way that critics say ignored social realities -- and the result was bloody. According to conservative estimates, about half a million Hindus

and Muslims were slaughtered and 14 million displaced, and

about 70,000 women were abducted and raped, leaving both

countries with deep psychological and political scars. Riots

convulsed the newly independent nations for months as

centuries-old communities split apart.

Government documents unearthed by researchers provide

chilling details of what happened during partition....

Historians and witnesses have said that trains crossing the new

border were filled with corpses from either side. People were

"cut down like carrots and radishes," an expression heard in

many Indian family stories.

"Partition is the unwritten epic of our times," said Ashis Nandy,

a social psychologist at India's Center for the Study of

Developing Societies. "Now there is an urgency to capture the

stories of a generation whose voices will fade away soon."

... Discussion of partition is not completely new. Ten years ago,

Urvashi Butalia, an Indian author, said she began listening to her

parents' partition stories once more. She recorded them and

eventually produced a book called "The Other Side of Silence."

She now speaks to schoolchildren about the importance of such

stories and is managing "The Long Shadow." "Partition is a difficult subject to talk about because you do not

have clear categories of victims and aggressors. The lines are

blurred," said Butalia, who is popularly known as "the partition

lady." "Everybody was implicated in the violence. In order to

forget, you have to remember."

Som Datta Mohan, an 84-year-old retiree who took part in the

research study, recalled in an interview how he had once

thrown a bomb at a Muslim village to guard his Hindu

neighborhood, which is located in what is now Pakistan. His

father was stabbed in reprisal killings, and Mohan had to make

the perilous journey across the newly drawn border to the

Indian side. "Those pictures are still very, very vivid in my eyes," Mohan said. "Such events should never happen again. It has taken a

long time, but the wounds are healing now. India is prospering. I

am no longer a refugee, I am home. And I would like to tell my

story to the young."

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it seems that certain as-yet undefined interests in the world
are seeking to exploit the terrible and heart-rending tragedy

of India's and Pakistan's separation and near-civil-war

and of their continuing (but healing) unease about each other

and does not want the two countries to continue to try to reach peaceful coexistence
.
.
.
.
.
any ideas as to who that might be?

.
.
.

.
.
.
it seems that certain as-yet undefined interests in the world
are seeking to exploit the terrible and heart-rending tragedy

of India's and Pakistan's 1947 Partition and near-civil-war

and of their continuing (but healing) unease about each other

and does not want the two countries to continue to try to reach peaceful coexistence
.
.
.
.
.
any ideas as to who that might be?

.
.
.