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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:22]
William Dalrymple
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com Running hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan and me, William Durimple. Now we are on the third of our five partition stories with Sam Darrymple. We are really sort of exploiting him for the knowledge that exists in this wonderful new book of his shattered lands, Five Partitions, Child labor, and the Making of Modern Asia. Hardly a Child. He's the number one bestseller in India, where I believe you're at number five. When I last looked. So in this episode. The last episode was utterly fascinating and was a terrain that is so little extreme explored and that is the way in which the Gulf states in the Arab peninsula are subsumed in this idea of a Greater India. This East India Company thing that doesn't even appear on maps that shows that, you know, some of these states that Sam talked about in the last episode were deemed to be like princely states.
- [01:52]
Anita Anand
In India itself, not deemed to be like princely states. They were princely states.
- [01:56]
William Dalrymple
They were with no gun salutes sometimes, but they were. But this time, right now, we are going to talk about something we have spoken about on this podcast before the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. And you might remember we did this very good episode with Kavita Puri about this. It was way back in episode 16 of this podcast, Reduce Me to Tears. I remember you did cry. And look, the thing is, though, there is so much to this subject that we think it merits a revisit because what we didn't talk about in that wonderful episode with Kavita was what happened to Bengal, east and West Bengal and Bangladesh. So that's what we're going to be sort of concentrating on now. But we are also going to go over some of the terrain and some of the characters that you have probably come to know. Well, the first episode that we spoke to you, Sam, I was intrigued by why you started with the British trying to make contact with aliens. And in this, you know, let's start with the Great Wall of China, because you go to space again to point out something that Is not true. Not going from here to there. This is sort of looking from up to down. And tell me, what is your myth busting on this episode?
- [03:07]
Sam Darrymple
So it's just to highlight that, you know, partition of India and Pakistan is one of the most important events of the 20th century. They're both nuclear armed states. Now just last month when we were recording this, there was very, almost a war between the two nuclear armed states. And the border between them is an extraordinary one. You can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space. It's a complete myth. Even if you were to sit on the International Space Station and squint your eyes as hard as you could, you wouldn't be able to see a thing. And there's only one wall that you can see from the International Space Station and that is the border between India and Pakistan. It stretches 3,000 km from the Arabian Sea to the ice caps of the Himalayas, just, just near K2, the second tallest mountain in the world. And this is a line intended to divide Hindus from Muslims, visibly etched into the surface of the globe. There's three layers of fencing, three and a half meters high, accompanied by 150,000 floodlights, thermal sensors, landmines, and it's rendered Indians and Pakistanis almost completely inaccessible to one another. One of the ironies is that it's now easier for Indians and Pakistanis to meet in Britain, the country that colonized them, than it is for them to meet each other in the subcontinent itself. And yet just 100 years ago, this border was not just did not exist, but it was entirely unforeseen. No one could have imagined that it would have ruptured through the subcontinent in the way that it has.
- [04:40]
William Dalrymple
I mean, just tell me. The one place that you could sort of glimpse a view of each other or even indeed cross over was the Wagga border. And there was this extraordinary ceremony that would go on between the soldiers of both sides where they would walk up to each other in the most ornamental marches, you know, sort of trying to out macho each other like the sort.
- [04:58]
Anita Anand
Of John Cleese Ministry of Silly Walks at times.
- [05:01]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. And you know, just trying to out manly each other. And you know, crowds gather on both sides to watch this as they walk. I suppose it's the subcontinent version of the hacker, almost nose to nose, intimidating each other and then withdrawing. But that used to be open. I don't know at the moment. Is Wagga open after the recent events?
- [05:18]
Anita Anand
No, it's closed I think.
- [05:19]
William Dalrymple
Completely closed. Right.
- [05:20]
Sam Darrymple
I think it's closed. But there's talk about potentially, you know, the border might be reopened for some stuff, but I don't think that the ceremony's back on.
- [05:28]
William Dalrymple
Okay. One of the things you said in a previous episode was that particularly Burma, which is number one in this miniseries, that one of the people watching events very, very closely was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. And I think since we're talking about the partition of India and Pakistan, we should delve into that a little bit more, tell us where his ideas came from, that actually there is no way that this can exist as one country and this floodlit long wall that you can see from space is inevitable.
- [06:01]
Sam Darrymple
So one of the more unusual revelations of the book is that the idea of creating Pakistan, the idea of creating a partition, dividing one region from another, is directly a response to, to the separation of Burma and Arabia in 1937, one decade earlier. A sense of a separate Muslim identity had been around in India for centuries. And I think you often chat to Pakistani nationalists and they'll say, oh, you know, the idea for Pakistan first arrived when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered Sindh in the seventh century. But, you know, as late as the 1930s, there's very much a joint sense of Indianness. And you chat to someone in Lahore and they think of themselves as Indian, as, you know, someone in modern day Tamil Nadu, as someone in Delhi, as someone in Bombay. But there is an increasing sense of hostility between Hindus and Muslims that the Brits definitely play into when it suits them. But it's this sense of a separate identity isn't created by the British. The British play on pre existing divisions. But crucially, in the aftermath of the announcement that Burma and Arabia are going to be separated from India and that a partition will be carved through the subcontinent, a Cambridge student called Ramathali Choudhary says while Burma is being separated from Hindustan, it remains a mystery to us why Pakistan is to be forced into the Indian Federation. Pakistan is a term that he invents to basically as shorthand for the Muslims of the regions of northwestern India. P for Punjab, A for Afghans, K for Kashmiris, and then Stan as a summary of Baluchistan.
- [07:41]
William Dalrymple
I mean, that in itself is interesting because, you know, the other story is it's Bhag for purity, the land of the pure. And that it comes from a, you know, sort of a religious perspective that this is going to be a theocracy.
- [07:50]
Sam Darrymple
It's both at the same time. So he invents this anagram that spells something else. So it spells out land of the pure. Using the letters of the different ethnicities that exist in this region. But crucially, Jinnah, who will later create a country called Pakistan out of kind of thin air, had early regarded. This ide is, as we said in episode one, is some sort of Walt Disney dreamland, if not a Wellsian nightmare. I think Jinnah the man is a very different one from the one that both Indians, Pakistanis and Brits tend to imagine, and Bangladeshis. Everything about him in the 1930s or the 1920s belied the fact that he would soon create the world's first Islamic republic. He's this kind of reserved Gujarati barrister. Again, Indians are often surprised to learn that he's Gujarati, he's not from the land that we now call Pakistan. He's a Gujarati barrister who the New York Times describes in the 20s as undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire. And this is a man who drinks whiskey, he eats pork, he does all sorts of things that Muslims aren't meant to do and he's renowned for chain smoking cigarettes in his open top limousine.
- [08:56]
William Dalrymple
One of the other things that you reminded me of in your book, and I think I knew it ages ago, is that Jinnah, you know, these parallel sliding doors, lives that people could have led, he originally wanted to be a Shakespearean actor. That's what was in his heart. You know, he wanted to tread the border.
- [09:11]
Anita Anand
It could have been the Laurence Olivier of Karachi.
- [09:14]
Sam Darrymple
What if that had worked out for him? Who knows? But he decides to become a lawyer and he's soon one of the best paid lawyers in the country. And Sarojini Naidu, who I'd say is probably the most important woman in the Indian independence movement and who somehow hasn't had a biography in 50 years. And if anyone out there is looking.
- [09:32]
William Dalrymple
For a topic, don't t that too far because I'm desperately in love with this woman. She was known as the Nightingale of, because she was also a singer with this most extraordinary voice. She had the most close association with Gandhi and the letters that they wrote to each other over some of, you know, the most. First of all, mundane things like I'm really hungry and I haven't eaten and the food here is rubbish to, you know, really thorny issues of what the future of India might look like. So she's utterly fascinating and she's a.
- [09:59]
Anita Anand
Brilliant writer, isn't she? Yeah, absolutely brilliant writer. She talks about having to wear a fur coat at one point when she goes into Jinnah's company right at the end.
- [10:08]
Sam Darrymple
Honestly, I think my favourite bit of research in the entire book was reading her letters and I was literally in the British Library just laughing out loud because she's just so kind of pointed. But she writes about Jinnah in the 20s that his accustomed reserve but masks for those who know him, a naive and eager humanity, an intuition as quick and tender as a woman's, a humour gay and winning as a child's, preeminently rational and practical. His worldly wisdom effectively disguises a shy and splendid idealism which is the very essence of the man.
- [10:39]
William Dalrymple
And funny, the funny never comes across in any of the portrayals or most of the other writings. She knew funny. She knew funny. So, you know, she says he's funny. I believe her. Good. Okay, so he's an unconventional figure, he is a complicated figure. At what point does he turn from somebody who is really very much idealistically, passionately involved in the Quit India movement to somebody who starts saying, actually, you know what, this is not going to work. One nation is not the future, we're not going to have it. And Pakistan is a thing I'm going to fight for.
- [11:12]
Sam Darrymple
So it's a very gradual shift, but it's one of the great fascinating things because it challenged so many of my preconceptions. So I think it begins with his marriage to Rati Petit. So she's an 18 year old, he's in his 40s. It's very much a kind of, you know, he's marrying virtually a child and it scandalizes society. And crucially, she is excommunicated by her Parsi community. And Jinnah, once having dreamed a modern India would be able to move past divisions of religion and caste, begins to become disillusioned. And it's also in this marriage that he definitely hardens. He's a very neglectful husband. He's so obsessed with gaining India her freedom that he basically leaves Rati alone for months on end and she soon becomes addicted to morphine. It scandalizes friends who come to her house for leaving kind of needles around the house and experimenting with drugs and to try and get Jinnah's attention, starts going out scantily dressed to jazz cafes and constantly creating scandal for a politician who's very much a Muslim politician, as well as, you know, being secular. And then one day she's found dead in her room and she commits suicide. And this very much changes him and hardens him.
- [12:26]
Anita Anand
Sam, is that definite? Because there is some discussion on whether she committed suicide. No.
- [12:30]
Sam Darrymple
So I think it's Sheila Reddy who found all of the letters that basically confirm that she committed suicide. Firstly, there's a suicide note that survives. She writes to her husband, try and remember me, beloved, as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread upon. Darling, I love you. I love you. And had I loved you just a little less, I might have remained with you. The higher you set your ideal, the lower it falls. I have loved you, my darling. So Sarojini Naidu writes to her daughter Padmaja, and this is what basically confirms that she committed suicide. Poor little Rutty has taken an overdraft or overdose of Veronal. But, darling, you realize, of course, that this is not the official version. Poor mad, little suffering child. Maybe now she'll find the peace that she was denied or denied herself on earth. So that's the letter that seems to kind of suggest the most that she definitely did commit suicide. And whatever the case, Jinnah kind of snaps his friend at her funeral, writes that never have I found a man so sad and bitter. He screamed his heart out and something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event nor something to be grieved over. But he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life. So Jinnah changes after this, and you can see it in his letters, too. And the particular focus of his animosity becomes this new upstart lawyer called Mahatma Gandhi. And Gandhi is campaigning for India, as we mentioned in episode one of this miniseries, to resemble the Hindu holy land of Bharat, this land of the ancient Hindu epics that stretches from Kashmir to the tip of India and roughly includes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But he was campaigning for the separation. And crucially, whilst Gandhi's doing this, Jinnah is saying, no, we shouldn't separate Burma and the Arabian States. We are all sons of the land and we have to live together. And Jinnah begins to see Gandhi, interestingly, as the communal one. He sees Gandhi as this politician who's bringing religion into politics and he finds it abhorrent. And when people begin referring to Gandhi as the Mahatma or Great Soul, Jinnah refuses to use the title.
- [14:42]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, he hates it. I mean, undoubtedly we talked to Ram Gua about this. You know, Gandhi is using Sanskritized, you know, sort of Vedic allusions when he talks about this. But when he's asked, what about the Muslims? He goes, well, there's no problem, you know, we'll all live together. He sort of like, sort of flicks it off, like, what are they worried about? Of course it's going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine. But that does not assuage any of Jinnah's fears, does it? Because he just doesn't buy into the fact that Muslims and Hindus will work together.
- [15:09]
Anita Anand
And more to the point, he introduces a Hindu hymn as the national anthem and he has prayer meetings at political rallies, all of which in Jinnah's view, brings religion into politics.
- [15:23]
Sam Darrymple
So, yeah, I mean, it's very interesting and different from, I think, the narrative that I grew up in Delhi with, where Jinn is the communal politician who wants to separation and Gandhi wants unity. And that's definitely the case in the 1940s. But again, the key thing to remember is that all of these politicians changed their stance over the decades and that what Gandhi's position in the 20s is and what Jinnah's position in the 20s is basically reverses. So Gandhi in the 40s is the person that we know from the kind of, you know, Attenborough film, but he's not that in the 20s. The fact that he changes is important.
- [15:57]
William Dalrymple
They're on a journey, as they would say in today's parlance. Okay, they're on a journey. Let's talk about the Lahore Resolution because that is decisive. It's such an important chapter in the history of partition. What happens?
- [16:09]
Sam Darrymple
So in 1937, Burma and Aden are severed from the Indian empire and the Congress Party adopts Vande Mataram as India's national song and begin equating the new map of India with the Hindu goddess Durga, which alienates Muslims.
- [16:24]
William Dalrymple
So Vandamaturam is an interesting thing because, you know, it literally translates the first few lines as I bow to thee, my mother. And mother is taken to mean mother Goddess, which is the Hindu deity Durga Ma, she is the mother goddess and.
- [16:37]
Anita Anand
That alienates Muslims who would regard this as a pagan goddess.
- [16:41]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, and it is, you know, if you were in any doubt and you say, well look, you know, this is all just imagery, you know, relax. The later verses of Vande Matram mention Durga by name. And so that really does, you know, sort of put backs up that why is our national anthem containing a goddess that is not part of our pantheon? So, you know, you're right, this kind of stuff is irksome, mildly putting it, and is one of the catalysts for partition, if you want to take it to the other extreme. So this has happened. What happens then in response to this? Because there is a coming together and this, this thing happens in Lahore which is really pivotal. So tell us what happens there.
- [17:18]
Sam Darrymple
Sure. So Jinnah basically announces in Lahore that Independent states for Muslims should be created. States, plural, interestingly. And it's unclear whether these states mean nation states or states within some greater India, whether it's a kind of, you know, states like the United States of America or whether it's a nation state entirely separate from India. Crucially, he has just witnessed this massacre of Muslims and Indians in Burma and has come to the conclusion that without legal protections, India's Muslim minority will be overwhelmed and politically destroyed by an even larger Hindu majority. We've got to remember that at this time, even after the first partitions of Arabia and Burma, this united India still has the largest Muslim population on the planet, larger than the entire population of Muslim Arabs, larger than the Muslim population of Indonesia. It is enormous. It's the united Muslim population of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And he's worried that even despite its size, they're still going to be screwed over by an even larger Hindu majority. So he calls for independent states to be created. And it's very interesting how all of the discussion about this is in relation to what happened in Burma. So you get, for example, Ambedkar, the Dalit leader, asking why there is so much uproar about Jinnah's suggestions, given that basically the unity between India and Burma was not less fundamental. If the Hindus did not object to the severance of Burma from India, it is difficult to understand how the Hindus can object to the severance of an area like Pakistan. I think it's very interesting how these debates play into one another, how each partition sets off the next like a set of dominoes.
- [19:10]
William Dalrymple
It becomes more than just a discussion in. In Lahore, it becomes a resolution. So you actually start having sort of documentation that is produced saying, this is now what we want, this is now official. And it's very hard to row that back once you have a resolution that has been put out to the world. And also then, I mean, around about this time as well, it's the Bengal famine. And that too has a connection with the impetus to have an independent Pakistan. Tell me what happens and how that feeds in.
- [19:39]
Sam Darrymple
So this is something that, again, new research that's come out. I think Janam Mukherjee's book, Hungary Bengal, was the first to bring this up. And it was all these previously unreleased files that show that during World War II, after Japan conquers Burma, Bengal is cut off from all the ricin in Burma. And in order to create a front line, they burn all the ships that are able to get rice from rice farms to shops. And when a cyclone hits and basically devastates a bunch of farms. Famine hits, you've already destroyed half the crop, you've cut off all the transport systems, and now there's a cyclone on top of it. And what begins is the Bengal famine.
- [20:19]
Anita Anand
Which we should say there is a whole episode we've done again with Cavita Puri, if you want to know more about this.
- [20:25]
Sam Darrymple
And Bengal is one of India's easternmost provinces. It's where Kolkata was. It corresponds to modern Bangladesh and India's West Bengal province. And it had for centuries been one of the most religiously syncretic regions of India. It was often difficult to differentiate between Hindus and Muslims there at all. Devotees spoke the same language, shared the same script, ate the same food, and in many cases even worshipped the same gods. The very first Bengali language biography of the Prophet Muhammad, for example, describes Muhammad as an avatar of Niranjana, the Immaculate One, who had previously come down to earth as the Hindu deity Ram. Crucially, after the famine breaks out, most of the people actually starving are Muslims, because the majority of the kind of peasantry of Bengal were Muslims, whereas the upper class were mostly Hindu landowners. And the founder of modern Hindutva, Vinayak Savarkar, calls for Hindus to boycott government efforts to buy up their rice, because he blames the local provincial government, which is under the Muslim League, and so says not to give rice to Muslims. And he says that every Hindu should send all help to rescue, clothe and shelter Hindu sufferers alone. And most of Bengal's rural poor, the people actually suffering from the famine, are Muslim at this time. And so Savarkar's boycott effectively condemns millions to starvation and in the process helps make Muslim freedom from Hindu economic domination an attractive idea in Bengal for the very first time.
- [21:56]
Anita Anand
Is that something which Hindutva people would deny today? Or how would they? If one was speaking to a Savarkar enthusiast, of which there are many, as we know, all over modern India, how would they explain those words?
- [22:07]
Sam Darrymple
They basically see it as him trying to punish the Muslim League government that was very much also responsible for the famine, just like Churchill is to some extent needs to be held accountable for this. The local provincial government was run by the Muslim League, and they also need to be held accountable for not having set up food kitchens in Kolkata, etc. And so he's trying to punish them.
- [22:29]
Anita Anand
Are they commonly oriented too? Are they trying to feed Muslims and not Hindus or anything like that?
- [22:34]
Sam Darrymple
No, but there is a sense that they are definitely sometimes giving preferential treatment to Muslims and that there is a growing religious divide here. So that's what Savarkar enthusiasts would say is that this was a kind of necessary evil to show political opposition to the Muslim League government.
- [22:51]
William Dalrymple
Listen, we're going to take a break in a moment, but what we have here is, and it's a story that is as old as time, that you've got desperation, human misery, and then you have the desire to blame somebody. And that is incredibly fertile ground for radical thought to prosper. Join us after the break where we look at how the radical thought turns into radical deed.
- [23:19]
Sarah Churchwell
I'm Sarah Churchwell.
- [23:20]
David Olusoga
And I'm David Ulusoga. And together we're the hosts of Journey Through Time, where we tell history from the ground up.
- [23:27]
Sarah Churchwell
This week we're discussing the surprising history of the National Rifle association in the U.S. the NRA, which is really the story of how guns became so tangled with American identity.
- [23:37]
David Olusoga
The NRA was set up to improve gun safety and regulation after the Civil war because despite what we're told today, America was a society that favored strong gun control for most of its history.
- [23:49]
Sarah Churchwell
It was actually only in the late 20th century, while the NRA was being run, in fact, by a convicted killer, that the NRA transformed into a for profit group that was against gun control. And that position has reshaped American life in the most profound possible ways.
- [24:07]
David Olusoga
This history is essential to understanding the thinking behind some of the militias who took part in the storming of the capitol building in 2021 and how these ideas are bleeding into law enforcement and who is propping up Trump in 2025.
- [24:23]
Sarah Churchwell
Ultimately, this is a strange story of national myth making. And it's also a story about really effective marketing.
- [24:29]
David Olusoga
Now, as a treat for our listeners, we've got a short clip at the end of this episode.
- [24:41]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back. You know, we, we talked in the last half about Jinnah and the impact of death upon him, somebody that he loved and how it changed his personality and how he was on this sort of a journey. Gandhi, too goes on a very it's so weird about these two men. They live almost symmetrical lives, both Gujarati, both lawyers, both from sort of similar backgrounds, and both who suffer the death of a wife that ultimately does reshape them in some way. Tell us about Kasturbabai because she's a big part of his life but almost invisible until really fairly recently. And it's her death that has a huge impact on him.
- [25:21]
Sam Darrymple
So During World War II, most of the congressmen are arrested after they announce the Quit India movement basically that no one should cooperate with the British government. And this is a movement that really kind of begins to break down the fabric of the British Raj and is one of the main reasons I think why the Brits finally leave. You know, there's so much protest to British governance that the Brits have to start legalizing machine gunning from the air at protests and that kind of thing. So it's a really big thing. Gandhi's imprisoned and he's imprisoned with his wife. But when she gets ill he refuses to let her have penicillin because he opposes a lot of modern medicine and she passes away. And in the wake of this he becomes much more emotionally unstable. And when this grief stricken Mahatma approaches Jinnah after his release to negotiate a power sharing agreement for India's future, it's becoming clear that the Brits are on their way out. We now need to start thinking about who's going to take over the reins. Maybe we can share power. He finds that Jinnah is now known as Qaidi Azim, the great leader. And he takes this failure in negotiations with Jinnah personally. He begins these controversial Brahmacharya experiments that I think a lot of people have recently begun to talk about where he sleeps next to naked women, including his 16 year old grandniece Abad to test his vow of celibacy. And there's no indication that he ever makes sexual advances on these women but he does cause them emotional turmoil. And there's an interesting quote that he apparently says if I can master this, I can still beat Jinnah.
- [26:54]
William Dalrymple
We should say what the this is because, you know, the Brahmachari experiment for those who aren't from the subcontinent, they may not know what it is, but it is basically celibacy. And he would test his resolve to celibacy and Brahmachari which is, you know, being purer and nearer to God by lying with his nieces in this instance. And that he should not have any kind of omission, can I put it that way? An omission during the night would show that he had mastered his feelings. And I did put this to Ram Gur, the ick Ram Guru, who is an exceptional historian of Gandhi, that there's a major problem with this which, you know, he accepts. And as you say, nobody's ever dared sort of really to look at this in any great detail until recently. And I wonder if the ability or the space to look into it now is because Gandhi's position in India is slightly dipping and people like Savarkar, who you mentioned before, who had such uncompromising things to say about Muslims is on the up. So now you know where you couldn't talk about the great soul at all. Now you can. And you can talk about some of the seediest aspects of undoubtedly, a great life and a man who achieved great things. But putting that to one side, all of the ick that we may feel about that. Let's just talk about some of the moments that change the subcontinent forever. And there is a particularly important election, a general election, that takes place in 1946.
- [28:18]
Sam Darrymple
Yeah. So in 1946, after World War II, the Brits have basically announced already that they're going to leave. And this election is essentially perceived by the public as figuring out how much sway the Pakistan demand actually has. And in 1946, the Muslim League wins 27% in the election, including 87% of the Muslim vote. Pakistani narratives tend to portray this as the moment that Muslims of India finally united and put forth their demand for Pakistan. But what's interesting is that the Pakistan that I think most people were voting for that day was not necessarily the Pakistan that we're familiar with today. The only province where they received an unequivocal majority was Bengal, which is later the only province to successfully secede from Pakistan. There is a whole series of negotiations that emerge in the aftermath of this election to figure out, okay, if Pakistan needs to be addressed, what will Pakistan look like? And I think, as I mentioned earlier, it was still not necessarily certain that.
- [29:26]
William Dalrymple
It would be division. I mean, because one of the things that they do think about is a federation. And federations exist elsewhere in the world. You know, they exist quite successfully where you have an identity and you have a characteristic for a certain, if not state or nation, but something akin to that. I mean, the British Isles is one example. You have England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. I mean, that, you know, sort of confederation in the United States.
- [29:49]
Anita Anand
And in a slightly different way, the Swiss solution, where you have all these different languages and different identities.
- [29:55]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there are lots of examples. So I thought that Jinnah was kind of seduced by that idea for a while, that, you know, actually we could string something together like that and we could make it work.
- [30:08]
Sam Darrymple
Yeah. I think the biggest hint that that's the case is the Cabinet mission plan, which is in 1946, where the Brits basically suggest, okay, how about we create a federation, a bit like the United Kingdom, where there's five different nations within one nation state. Just like Britain has England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. This United India would have West Pakistan, East Pakistan, North India, South India and Deccan. The central region And Jinnah accepts. Jinnah says yes. This man who's built the last few years of his career on the unyielding demand for a separate Muslim homeland says yes. And yet at the last moment, I mean it's very complex why. But Nehru and Gandhi pull out basically for there's a variety of regions, there's the possibility of secession. They want the Northwest Frontier Province, modern day Peshawar had a congress government at the time and so they wanted that to remain part of North India. So there's a variety of reasons why Gandhi and Nehru pull out of the Cabinet mission plan. But whatever the case, it's when they pull out that I think Jinnah finally goes past the point of no return. And when, when they do, he says that one India is now an impossible realization. It will inevitably mean that the Muslim will be transferred from the domination of the British to caste Hindu rule. Freedom must mean freedom. Hundreds of millions of Muslims will never agree merely to a change of masters.
- [31:39]
William Dalrymple
So I mean, that's really interesting. So I mean this is the end of any idea that partition won't happen, that, you know, there is some, some possibility apart from a division down the middle of the country. And then I think we really ought to talk about this man Hussein Siroadi, who is absolutely central in giving everybody the flesh and blood reason to have their, their greatest fears realized.
- [32:02]
Anita Anand
Give us a little pen portrait, Sam, if you would, of, of Sir Wadi.
- [32:06]
Sam Darrymple
Sure. So he's this aristocrat who's not communal at all but is very much a kind of Bengali nationalist. And again, like Jinnah, he drinks scotch and hangs out, unlike Jinnah, with a bunch of kind of Russian actresses. And when the Lahore Resolution was said, it promised independent Muslim states, plural. And around this time when Direct Action Day is announced, Jinnah changes the wording to say, no, no, no, I meant one state. There's not going to be a Muslim state in the east and a state in the West. Suhrawardi kind of thought that he'd get an independent Bengal that would be entirely separate Muslim majority and he'd be able to rule over it himself. So it's rather interesting, until this point there has been no violence over the Pakistan demand. It's a very peaceful demand and it's on Direct Action Day that the first violence breaks out.
- [33:01]
William Dalrymple
So Direct Action Day is meant to be sort of in the mold of a Gandhian protest of just a strike. It's like basically we're not going to do anything and we're going to show you our numbers and we're going to show you how strong we are. That is what Direct Action Day was proposed to be. What it morphs into is a dreadful bloodlet. And just talk us through how the one thing becomes the other, and with such alarming pace and with the British unable to do anything about it.
- [33:28]
Sam Darrymple
So we are, in August 1946, Jinnah, having decided that he's pulling out, is organizing this massive thing, and Suhrawardy in Kolkata wants to organise it on a bigger scale than anyone else. Not just to show Nehru the support for the Pakistan demand, but also to show Jinnah how much support there is for an independent East Pakistan that's not necessarily run as part of any centralised Pakistan. And it's much more militarized than everywhere else. There's all these guys carrying sticks and latis. And what's remarkable is how much the violence that breaks out feels eerily similar to the kind of January 6th Capitol attack when, you know, did Trump tell his followers to take over the White House after Biden's election was announced? Suhrawardy basically goes on stage in front of this enormous crowd in Kolkata's Central Medan, and no one explicitly writes down what he says. And so it's quite unclear what he says. A lot of Muslims say that he kind of, you know, told everyone to peacefully protest and show their strength, but then go home in time for Ramadan. But a lot of Hindus seem to suggest that basically he told people to show us your strength. And the wording and the emphasis is different in different accounts. But whatever the case, that evening there is widespread looting and violence across Kolkata. And then it sort of goes back to normal. That evening that the army's almost called in, but then isn't last moment, it rains, everyone goes back home, it rains.
- [34:54]
William Dalrymple
But even before that, I mean, there are British sources that describe hearing the screams from inside, you know, the fort. They can hear what's going on outside, but they've been ordered not to intervene. And so they don't go out and they don't separate these groups on Direct Action Day, when they can clearly hear, you know, people being killed, they're not involved in it at all. They just say, nope, just let it play out. This is not us. We're on our way out, we're leaving. We're not going to get dragged into this.
- [35:19]
Sam Darrymple
The crucial thing that happens, though, is at night, they almost send the army in, but then they don't because it all seems to go back to normal. But then at night, as the sun goes down and the rain stops suddenly, Thugs go out into the street and begin massacring each other. And you get horrible accounts of kind of, you know, soldiers. The next day, discovering a boy tied to the tram lines discovering, you know, someone's held underwater with bamboo sticks. As a Cambridge educated person checks the time, he takes a die on his Rolex wristwatch.
- [35:52]
Anita Anand
This is Niraj Choudhury's reminiscences, aren't they? He saw this.
- [35:56]
Sam Darrymple
Yeah. And in the course of Direct Action Day, which is later known as the Week of the Long Knives or the great Kolkata killings, 4,000 people are confirmed dead. But this is just considered a underestimate because of how many people were stuffed in drain pipes or whose bodies had been burnt. I think it's Margaret Bourke Wright arrives and describes it as a scene that looked like Buchenwald.
- [36:17]
William Dalrymple
She's the great photographer who's one of the first people there into the concentration camps to document the horror. And even she is horrified by what she sees.
- [36:25]
Sam Darrymple
This is the point, I think, that everything between the Congress and the Muslim League fractures beyond the point of no return. I think until this point, Partition was not inevitable. There still could be some compromise. But, for example, Sarojini Naidu, who described Jinnah as eager and naive 20 years earlier, suddenly, in the wake of Direct Action Day, describes him as Lucifer, the fallen angel. One who had once promised to be a great leader of Indian freedom, but who had cast himself outside of the Congress. Heaven, I think it's Gandhi slams his fist on a table and says, if India wants her bloodbath, she shall have it. And it's in the wake of basically half of the population of the Raja's capital spreads into the countryside, spreading tales of violence on a kind of genocidal scale and Hindus and Muslims going to different bits of the country and each considering themselves the victims. Muslims are convinced that Muslims have been unfairly targeted by Hindus who are out to kind of squash their demands. Muslims are convinced that Suhrawardi was out to punish them. But as they spread across the country and spread these tales, you suddenly begin to have anti Hindu, anti Muslim violence elsewhere in the country. And this is the first Partition riot. There was none before, but in the coming months you'll see hundreds. And often these are done by kind of politicians. You get a politician actively trying to attack the neighbourhood that's lived in by his political opponents, et cetera. And so often we think of Partition violence as mindless violence, when neighbour turns on neighbour, so rarely in the early months. Is that actually the case? People, by and large looked after their neighbours in the early months. And it's far more local politicians or local thugs trying to enact revenge for peasants.
- [38:12]
William Dalrymple
Crime laws. Crime laws, exactly. But what you also have is, you know, you have a sort of an identity, a cohesive identity, because you have all these people around Calcutta who start thinking of themselves as one people, one people separate from the Hindus that used to be their neighbors. And one could argue that this is where the idea of an East Pakistan separate, different. And that's what I promised at the beginning of this, that we would be looking more into how Bangladesh comes into being. And arguably the seeds of what then becomes Bangladesh today is Direct Action Day itself. I mean, that's not over exaggerating, would you say, Sam?
- [38:49]
Sam Darrymple
I think many people had imagined a Pakistan that was rather different from the Pakistan that emerged. So many Bengalis assumed that they would have a separate Muslim homeland in the east and the west, just like many people in Delhi assumed that Delhi would be part of Pakistan. What's interesting is how in Jinnah's early letters about Pakistan, he envisages Kolkata being the capital of Pakistan because it's the capital of the largest Muslim majority province and the province that the Muslim League was born in. And so he says that imagining Pakistan without Kolkata is like imagining a man without his heart. It's completely impossible. I think everyone who was demanding Pakistan left it until remarkably late the question of where Pakistan would actually be.
- [39:35]
Anita Anand
So this episode leaves us with violence spreading like a cancer through India. It's about to erupt in the Punjab and this is also the moment that we get the arrival of Lord Mountbatten and the swan song of the British in India. Sam Dalrymple will be back with his book Shattered Lands. But you don't have to wait for a whole week if you subscribe to our wonderful club. As you well know, this is something we are very keen to encourage you to do. If you are enjoying Empire, this is what keeps us on the road. Join our club and not only will you keep Empire going, but you will also be able to hear all our episodes without ads immediately and binge your way through the whole of Shattered Lands and this miniseries about Partition.
- [40:26]
William Dalrymple
Yes, not only that, but you'll also get access to a really vibrant chat community that we have. You'll get early access to tickets, you get our fabulous newsletter, which I can really commend to you with sort of further reading and reading lists and the place to go to get all of these goodies. As always, empirepod uk.com there's EmpirePod. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [40:49]
Anita Anand
And goodbye from me, William Durand.
- [40:57]
Sarah Churchwell
I'm Sarah Churchwell from Journey Through Time. And here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. So this is the thing that will amaze anybody who knows what the NRA is today is that it began as a gun safety organization. What they discovered was that the soldiers in the Civil War were not good at gun safety. They were actually hopeless. They kept kind of shooting themselves and each other, and they kept missing all their targets. As the Civil War was breaking out, there are these Americans in England who see the National Rifle association and think.
- [41:27]
William Dalrymple
Well, that's a good idea.
- [41:27]
Sarah Churchwell
We should have training in gun safety and in marksmanship. You know, people should be just, you know, better at it. And so that's the idea. But it takes them 10 years to get there because the Civil War is keeping Americans a little bit busy. But at the same time, the gun industry is growing. It's growing because of the Civil War. And so the gun industry starts to pivot to see themselves as marketing to individual US Consumers, and they start to market them as status symbols, as symbols of personal power.
- [41:56]
David Olusoga
If you want to hear more, listen to Journey Through Time. Wherever you get your podcasts.