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Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day
John Keay
If British India had not been partitioned in 1947, its population would today be comfortably the world’s largest. At c1.5 billion, Midnight’s Descendants (the offspring of those affected by ‘the midnight hour’ Partition) already outnumber Europeans and Chinese; and they are growing faster than either. By 2020 they will constitute a quarter of the world’s entire population. As well as comprising the peoples of what is now called ‘South Asia’ (the preferred term for the partitioned subcontinent of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Nepal and Sri Lanka) they are widely established across the globe.Midnight’s Descendants is the first general history ever published to treat the region as a whole. Correlating and contrasting the fortunes of all the constituent nations over the last six decades affords unique insights into the tensions and conflicts that divide what is being hailed as one of the world’s most dynamic regions.Written by a widely respected expert on the region, the book will be the first account to incorporate the rich story of South Asia’s transnational, or ‘diasporic’, peoples. It will examine attitudes towards their homeland of the 22 million overseas South Asians, and will assess their contributions to the self-image of the parent states, to economic survival in the case of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to India’s globalised achievement.Like Midnight’s Children, Midnight’s Descendants will be expansive and tumultuous in the great tradition of India’s narrative epics.
Copyright (#ulink_53d2a7e1-5abc-5d79-98ee-84de75e06534)
William Collins
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2014
Copyright © John Keay 2014
John Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover photograph © Naringer NANU/AFP/Getty Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780007326570 (HB), 9780007480036 (TPB)
Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007468775
Version: 2015-07-20
In Memory of Julia Keay
Contents
Cover (#u8756aeff-3a81-5681-bc59-38916ee16008)
Title Page (#u7e5217d1-da36-5e1c-9e10-cd3890fef13a)
Copyright (#ud5885586-b85d-52fd-90c7-e53ef99016b2)
Dedication (#ubb27f043-0d67-5c4b-9c89-b2ef328f7924)
List of Illustrations (#ua268f851-4d05-5ebc-a021-c6f22d74396e)
List of Maps and Charts (#uf6744e70-65be-5b96-aeee-eed32856b432)
Author’s Note (#u2e7300d7-1ebf-5b59-93c5-068824c27508)
Introduction (#u885bf16d-e107-59e1-b257-5a81cef494fe)
1. Casting the Die (#u1c6816f4-9b30-5bfb-af6d-a0094570cb11)
2. Counting the Cost (#uad13e501-77bc-5377-a1dc-7bc2b7d55db8)
3. Who Has Not Heard of the Vale of Cashmere? (#u593d90fc-3186-5b91-ab9d-285f57728e94)
4. Past Conditional (#u530390af-f842-5bf7-8ab2-64555b600771)
5. Reality Check (#u738956e4-1347-5892-a017-b53e6d4fc0c0)
6. Power to the People (#u1f271140-6df8-5c21-b26d-681aae65ba9e)
7. An Ill-Starred Conjunction (#u93061b8e-1420-5c1a-be42-acdb23a1ddf5)
8. Two-Way Tickets, Double Standards (#uf455bc9a-f0e8-50b3-9bff-c936c669322f)
9. Things Fall Apart (#ueab80f3b-bc16-51cf-8cf4-2ee1bdd57e80)
10. Outside the Gates (#u61ff3291-fad9-5c8b-a3d1-7a7172a272fd)
11. India Astir (#u2ec8dbc6-3f62-584d-9a00-dfb1ea0a931e)
Epilogue (#ua64bd4ef-58c1-5712-ae58-af34260c569d)
Postscript (#u2ba3776b-392c-566d-93a1-0661022688c4)
Picture Section (#ua433e9ee-ec3f-5649-b170-4c4beb877f66)
Notes (#u6be6f4f0-dfcd-5022-bfde-d6af5fb8cf48)
Bibliography (#ufa11f784-de72-51a8-bbde-f7fa78299b82)
Index (#uc15652da-3297-5e8a-87fc-c371028fdbb0)
By the same author (#uf22481dd-a8bf-54b6-b4f7-ea399efaf652)
About the Publisher (#ub272f7c4-e781-53f8-bee5-e1910ce457dc)
Illustrations (#ulink_7c56140f-8562-5660-8f75-9591d4c17ce0)
1. Wavell greets Jinnah prior to the 1946 Cabinet Mission talks. (Press Information Bureau/British Library)
2. Gandhi with Pethick-Lawrence during the talks. (akg-images/Archiv Peter Rühe)
3. Police use teargas to disperse a crowd in Calcutta. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
4. The aftermath of the Calcutta killings of August 1946. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
5. Lord and Lady Mountbatten’s carriage swamped by the crowd during India’s Independence Day celebrations. (Topham Picturepoint)
6. Nehru addresses a crowd of over a million on Independence Day. (Topham Picturepoint)
7. Trains packed with fleeing refugees at Amritsar. (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)
8. The refugee caravans were easy prey. Hundreds of thousands were massacred. (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)
9. Female students protest against the adoption of Urdu as Pakistan’s official language in Dhaka in 1953. (Rafiqul Islam)
10. Demonstrators in Bombay burn an effigy of Nehru in January 1956. (AP/Press Association Images)
11. Tenzing Norgay at the summit of Everest. (Getty Images)
12. Indian patrol in eastern Ladakh in 1960. (Topfoto)
13. Indian women preparing to defend the nation during the 1962 Sino–Indian war. (Topfoto)
14. A village in Jammu and Kashmir during the 1965 Indo–Pakistan war. (©Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS)
15. A Pakistani liaison officer shakes the hand of an Indian army officer after the announcement of a ceasefire in the Indo–Pakistan war. (Topfoto)
16. Indian troops advancing into East Pakistan in December 1971. (Getty Images)
17. Pakistan’s General Niazi signs the document of surrender at the end of the Bangladesh Independence War. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)
18. The Indian Herald’s supplement on Mrs Gandhi’s declaration of the Emergency. (Courtesy of the Indian Herald)
19. Indira Gandhi campaigning in Calcutta for the 1977 elections. (EE/AP/Press Association Images)
20. Sri Lankan Tamils training in southern India in 1986. (Topfoto/AP)
21. Young recruits undergoing training by the Tamil Tigers. (Topfoto/AP)
22. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. (AP/Sondeep Shankar/AP/Press Association Images)
23. The Golden Temple of Amritsar during ‘Operation Bluestar’. (Topfoto/AP)
24. Kashmiris burn the Indian flag in March 1990. (Ajit Kumar/AP/Press Association Images)
25. Protesters against the Indian army’s presence in Srinagar. (Barbara Walton/AP/Press Association Images)
26. Militant VHP kar sevaks attack the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. (AFP/Getty Images)
27. Hindu youths clamber onto the domes of the Babri mosque. (AFP/Getty Images)
28. Mumbai under attack by jihadist gunmen in November 2008. (Punit Paranjpe/Reuters/Corbis)
29. The Golden Quadrilateral highway under construction near Kanpur. (Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis)
30. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. (Mary Evans/SZ Photo/Scherl)
31. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. (AP/Topfoto)
32. General Ziaul Haq. (AP/Topham)
33. Benazir Bhutto. (PA/Topfoto)
34. Atul Behari Vajpayee. (Topham Picturepoint)
Maps and Charts (#ulink_cab9a923-2db8-50a0-ba98-d1b4e84980d4)
1 (#ulink_2a2b6c63-5054-578f-bfd2-e3fc9b8ab8b9). South Asia – physical
2 (#ulink_3440c91a-f2bf-5c8b-8e94-6bf8dbf184c0). South Asia today
3. British India and the Princely States in 1947
4. North-East India and Bangladesh
5. Kashmir and Punjab
6. Political succession in South Asia, 1947–2014
Author’s Note (#ulink_a0f9b66c-c1ef-5bf8-9f2c-9377955c5d6b)
I was six years old in 1947 when what was then British India won its independence. I vaguely recall the pomp and ceremony of the Delhi celebrations as filmed for Pathé News but have no recollection of seeing any coverage of the horrors of the Great Partition that followed. Pakistan I came across only in the classroom; it was not till nineteen years after Independence that I first visited what is now called South Asia.
Midnight’s Descendants is nevertheless a contemporary history. It spans my lifetime and has revived as many memories as questions. Since that first visit in 1966 I have been returning almost annually – as a journalist, documentary-maker, lecturer, writer of many books and taker of many holidays. In the process I have learned enough to know just how presumptuous this book is.
Contemporary history is itself fraught with pitfalls. It is, of course, a contradiction in terms: by definition, what is contemporary can’t be history. No record of the current can aspire to the detachment expected when writing of the past. Memory proves dangerously unreliable; impressions muddy the facts. A ready-made consensus does not exist in respect of many crucial developments, and access to the documentation on which later histories may be based is still embargoed. This book will probably be challenged and will certainly be superseded.
So why write it? The answer is simply that – both despite Partition and because of it – South Asia remains as distinct and crisis-prone a global entity as the Middle East (or ‘West Asia’, to South Asians). With a population greater than China’s, it is already the world’s largest market, and it may well host the world’s next superpower. In the past sixty-five years it has also staged at least five nasty wars and has more than once taken the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration. Yet its problems remain poorly understood, and its influence easily underrated. Studies of the region as a whole are surprisingly few. Visa restrictions limit travel and inhibit mutual exchange, much as prejudice limits mutual understanding. The outsider has a slight advantage here, which is my excuse for undertaking the book.
Over the years literally hundreds of friends and contacts have contributed to what follows. It would be invidious to attempt to list them; but one and all, I thank them. Sam Miller in Delhi and Philip Bowring in Hong Kong kindly read an early draft of the book. For their comments and encouragement I am enormously grateful, and I have enjoyed returning the compliment in respect of their own books. More immediately I want to record my debt to editors Lara Heimert and Sue Warga at Basic Books and Robert Lacey and Martin Redfern at William Collins. This is not by way of an authorial convention. Creative editors are a rare breed; so are patient ones. I have been blessed with four of the finest and most forbearing, and I thank them all most sincerely. For her still greater patience and unstinting support, and for her love, I am indebted to Amanda. But in her case thanks would be inappropriate and hopelessly inadequate. So I say no more.
John Keay
Argyll, 2013
Introduction (#ulink_093f8a62-02dc-5d23-b567-26e53d365fe7)
Approaching Bengal from opposite directions, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra shy away from a head-on collision and veer south, their braided channels fraying and criss-crossing in a tangle of waterways that rob the parent rivers of their identities. Long before reaching the sea the Ganges has split into the Hooghly and the Pabna, among others, and the Brahmaputra into the Padma and the Meghna. Known as ‘distributaries’, these sub-rivers then fork some more, creating a maze of broad brown bayous whose combined seaward meanderings define the area known as the Sundarbans. Here, in the world’s largest estuarine wilderness, expanses of glossy mangrove and thick muddy water cover an area as big as Belgium. Islands are indistinguishable from mainland; promising channels expire in stagnant creeks. In the several designated wildlife sanctuaries, amphibious adaptation proves the key to survival. Crocodiles loll along the tideline close-packed like sunbathers. Mudhoppers gawp and glisten in the slime and the local tigers swim as readily as they prowl.
With roads a rarity, the best way to get around the Sundarbans is by boat, perhaps with a bike aboard for excursions on terra firma. A guide is essential, the trails being few and the landmarks fewer. The rivers tug one way, the incoming tide another. Neither is consistent: salt water comes down on the ebb, fresh water is backed up by the flow. The logic of the currents is as hard to fathom as that of the international border which here separates India and Bangladesh. Maps show the border as a confident line bisecting islands and slicing through peninsulas as it ricochets from side to side down the broad Raimangal waterway. Its trajectory provides the region with its one feature of human geography. But on the ground – where there is ground – the border is scarcely to be seen. Shifting mudbanks and encroaching mangroves are no more conducive to frontier formalities than they are to cartographic precision. Apportioning the Sundarbans between India and what was then part of Pakistan must have been like trying to carve the gravy.
A game warden announces a sighting: ‘Changeable hawk-eagle.’ He points to a large raptor lodged in a dead tree.
