Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day

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‘It’s a darker version of the one in peninsular India.’

The bird is rooted to its perch and motionless. It could be stuffed, its taloned feet nailed to the branch, except that every now and then it moves its head ever so slightly, as if troubled by indecision. Choosing the behaviour appropriate to its species is problematic for a changeable hawk-eagle. Should it quarter low over India’s chunk of the Sundarbans or soar high above Bangladesh’s? Is this a hawk day or an eagle day? Or just another changeable day? The options make for great uncertainty.

‘So is that bit over there India or Bangladesh?’ I’m asking. Nothing seems one thing or another in this gooey wilderness.

‘Oh, that’s India. Bangladesh is over there. See? But it should be India. Khulna, that whole district, should have come to India at Partition. It had a Hindu majority.’

Khulna was not awarded to India because Murshidabad, a Muslim district to the north of Calcutta that straddles the Hooghly river, was preferred by Delhi on the grounds of strategic contiguity and economic convenience. Eastern Pakistan, as Bangladesh then was, got Khulna by way of exchange. Hence mainly Muslim Murshidabad went to mainly Hindu India, and mainly Hindu Khulna went to mainly Muslim Pakistan. So much for the fundamental principle on which British India was divided by 1947’s Great Partition – that contiguous areas where Indian Muslims were in a majority were to constitute Pakistan, and that areas where they were not in a majority were to constitute the new India.

Dividing the subcontinent had itself been a compromise, and proved a heavy price to pay for independence. Flying in the face of fifty years’ struggle for a single India and of a shared cultural and historical awareness that stretched back centuries, it had been dictated by three recent developments: most Indian Muslims had come round to the idea of a Muslim homeland of their own; most Indian nationalists were insisting on a successor state that was strong enough to resist such demands; and the British were desperate for a fast-track exit. Adopted only as a last-minute expedient, Partition was widely regretted at the time. And by all who hold life, livelihood and peace to be dear, it has been rued ever since.

‘These people here must be Indian then,’ I venture. Fishing boats and a gaggle of schoolchildren hint at a nearby village, but there is no mains electricity, no road and no phone line – and all this despite being within 150 kilometres of downtown Calcutta.

‘Well yes, now they’re mostly Indian. But many of them are actually from Bangladesh, some Hindu, some Muslim.’

In the Sundarbans the rivers and raptors are not the only changeable things. Decades after British-ruled India was partitioned into the republics of India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh, national identities in this part of the subcontinent remain as fluid as the wind-ruffled soup that passes for water. So, too, do patterns of migration and the terminology applied to them. Immediately after the Great Partition of 1947, people who crossed the border were known as ‘refugees’. In the 1960s they became ‘evacuees’, in the 1970s either ‘optees’ or ‘oustees’, in the 1980s ‘illegal immigrants’, and now ‘potential terrorists’. Like the reception afforded them in their chosen destination, their status has been declining. Not, though, their numbers. The exodus into India from that part of Pakistan which in 1971 became Bangladesh has always been difficult to quantify. Some say hundreds of thousands have crossed the border, some say millions. Urban India’s twenty-first-century construction boom draws heavily on Bangladeshi labour, much of it illegal. Locally there are migrants who traipse back and forth for seasonal work or even a daily wage. No one is sure who is a migrant worker and who a cross-border commuter. Throughout the delta, people still come and go largely undetected, like the tides and the tigers.

A thousand kilometres to the north, where the Bangladesh border squeezes the Indian state of West Bengal up against the Himalayas, the situation is further complicated by what must be the most eccentric frontier conformation on earth. Here territorial logic veers to the opposite extreme, that of over-definition. Communities lie trapped in time-warped pockets, their national identity determined by arcane landholding patterns and the inflexible notions of sovereignty so jealously entertained by modern nation states. With little regard to the religious affinities of the inhabitants, Partition here simply appropriated the piecemeal patterns of cultivation and proprietorship found in the extant land registers and then upgraded them into international borders.

Outside his house a man poses for the camera. His back is to the wall in the photo and his legs apart. He looks rather pleased with himself. The caption explains that he is standing with one foot in Bangladesh and the other in India, and that the wall behind him is part of an extension tacked onto his house so that it too straddles the international border. With a spare room in India he qualifies as an Indian resident and can avail himself of a connection to the Indian electricity grid. No one else in this bit of Bangladesh has electricity. Providing any social amenities here is problematic because the village is in fact a sovereign ‘enclave’.

An enclave is any atoll of territory wholly surrounded by the territory of another sovereign state, in this case India. Elsewhere there are bits of India stranded in Bangladesh. The border picks its way between these enclaves, and such is their complexity that most maps despair of showing them at all. But on the ground the formalities of international transfer are faithfully observed. Checkpoints bar the tiniest roads; flags are raised and lowered; papers are stamped, currency changed, sim cards traded and bribes disbursed. Cultivators setting off for their fields clutch passports; cross-border shopping trips may be construed as smuggling operations.

Willem van Schendel, Professor of Modern Asian History in the Netherlands (a country which has enclaves of its own in Belgian territory), estimates that there are 197 such sovereign pockets along this short section of the Indo–Bangladesh border west of the Tista river. Perhaps 100,000 people live in the enclaves, which cover a total area of about 120 square kilometres. It’s hard to be more precise, because enclaves may themselves have enclaves. The latter are known as ‘counter-enclaves’ and are, in effect, bits of India that lie within bits of Bangladesh that are themselves within India – or vice versa. In the Bhalapura Khagrabari complex of enclaves, the largest archipelago of Indian territory in Bangladesh, one such Bangladeshi counter-enclave contains a smaller counter-enclave of Indian territory. This is Dahala Khagrabari, which van Schendel calls ‘the world’s only counter-counter-enclave’. From here an Indian citizen wishing to reach India proper, a distance of around ten kilometres, has to cross the frontier four times – from India to Bangladesh, Bangladesh to India, India to Bangladesh and finally Bangladesh to the Indian ‘mainland’. Luckily Dahala Khagrabari comprises just 6.9 hectares and is currently uninhabited, being mostly jute fields. But envy not its farmer.

With their promise of sanctuary, enclaves have attracted unsavoury elements. Criminal gangs have tended to take up residence, and smuggling has become a way of life. Under cover of darkness or along paths tunnelled through the three-metre-high jute crop, everything from armaments to cattle, pharmaceuticals and people is channelled through the enclaves. In recent years criminal activity has reportedly been on the decline; life, though, remains ‘insecure’ and social amenities non-existent. The only obvious advantage of being an enclave-dweller is said to be ‘the absence of tax’.

Something similar could be said of another anomaly of the Indo–Bangladesh border, namely the chars. These are mid-river mudbanks deposited principally by the flood-prone waters of the wide Brahmaputra. A quarter of a million people live on chars; the riverine soil can be very fertile and the river itself is rich in fish. But they do so at the risk not only of inundation but of involuntary migration; for such is the landscaping power of the monsoon-swollen flood that chars may shift. If the centre of the current happens to be the recognised border – as it is for several hundred kilometres – a char that was in Bangladesh one year may well end up in India the next (or vice versa).

‘[M]ost of the islands vehemently either move forward or backward across the international riverine border,’ complains an observer concerned with the problems of policing these errant landmasses.

Though still at the same address, several thousand people may suddenly find themselves unaccredited immigrants in a different country. Border markers get washed away, rivers change course. In some areas the painful business of border negotiation and demarcation, a process that was supposedly concluded soon after Partition in the late 1940s, is still being repeated every year.

In 2006 the Indian authorities, spurred on by the prospect of cross-border infiltrators bent on terrorism, began ring-fencing Bangladesh (not forgetting its enclaves). The new fence has steel stanchions and razor wire and is actually two fences, so creating a caged corridor along which laundry can be hung out to dry. The fence stands three metres high, and when completed will be around 2,500 kilometres long. But its march is halted by every river and, as per a previous agreement not to construct contentious facilities on the border itself, it runs a hundred to a thousand metres behind the actual line of demarcation. Thus ‘a huge quantum of precious Indian land is becoming a no-man’s land’, complains one politician. Within this strip lie villages, farmland and uncounted residents. One quite short stretch of the fence is reported as having alienated, or ‘practically disowned’, 149 villages and 90,000 people. Indian citizens are being rendered stateless and their property worthless. The issue has been raised in the Indian Parliament and aired in the press, but without eliciting any promise of compensation or resettlement.

All this is in striking contrast to the nearby border between India and Nepal. Here there are no fences, no patrols and minimal formalities. It is an ‘open border’. Although Nepal never came under direct British rule – and was therefore unaffected by Partition – an agreement had been reached whereby people and goods might cross at will. This still stands, albeit often amended. Immigrants from India already make up a substantial percentage of Nepal’s population, while Nepalis settled in India constitute an overall majority in parts of the Indian state of West Bengal. A Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) represents the latter’s interests. Demanding the recognition of Gorkhali, Nepal’s main language, as one of India’s official languages – and so qualifying its speakers for the educational and job opportunities that go with recognition – the GNLF strives, not without occasional violence, for an autonomous enclave within West Bengal or even a separate Nepali state within the Republic of India. Migration, in other words, is here an accepted phenomenon. National identity (‘Nepali-ness’) is being officially downgraded to a linguistic identity (‘Gorkhali-ness’), which is something that can be accommodated within the accepted limits of protest and concession afforded to India’s other language groups.

Language remains a contentious issue throughout polyglot South Asia, but in modern India its explosive potential has been steadily tamed by concessions and circumstance. It plays no part in the plight of the enclave-dwellers and the migrants along the Indo–Bangladesh border; all of them speak Bengali, whether Indians, Bangladeshis or not exactly either. The same goes for Tamil-speakers flitting between Sri Lanka and south India. In both cases a shared language in fact serves as a camouflage, making the detection of illegal or undesirable incomers that much more difficult.

Other markers of identity prove less amenable. Beyond the Nepali concentrations in northern West Bengal, and beyond the enclaves and chars along the Indo–Bangladesh border, a tendon of Indian territory tugs at a knotted fist of mainly ethnic discontent in the remote hills along the Burmese border. By one reckoning India’s cluster of states in the far ‘north-east’ is plagued by over a hundred insurgency groups, most of them pressing their grievances on the grounds of disadvantaged ethnicity: ‘Manipur tops the list [for the number] of militias with 35, Assam is second with 34 and Tripura has 30; Nagaland has four and Meghalaya checks in with three militias.’

At any given moment these groups vary greatly in terms of support, objectives and militancy. But with India, Bangladesh, Burma (now Myanmar) and China all interested parties in the political jigsaw of South Asia’s north-eastern extremity, ethnic grievances invariably involve territorial disputes, and these readily translate into war-worthy issues involving international sovereignty.

National identities cannot here be taken for granted. Even where the borders are not themselves in dispute, the loyalties of those living on either side of them may be. Like the fickle ‘distributaries’ of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the very idea of the nation state is dissipated and frayed into complex strands of competing allegiances. A Naga, for instance, may subscribe to half a dozen identities.

I am from Khonoma village of the Angami tribe … Now within the village I belong to the Iralu clan. The Iralu clan belongs in turn to the Meyasetsu clan. The Meyasetsu clan in turn belongs to the still wider and larger clan called the Merhuma Khel. The Merhuma Khel is in turn one of three major Khels that make up Khonoma village. The Khonoma village in turn belongs to the Angami tribe and the Angami tribe belongs in turn to the Naga nation … [T]hese ethnic and national identities are precious to me. They in fact define my political existence as a man with a country to call his own. As such, I can never surrender this birthright to India or any other nation on earth.

Statements like this from a Naga nationalist are dismissed by the Indian authorities as secessionist and totally unacceptable. The Bangladeshi authorities take exactly the same line with their own disaffected Chakma peoples. Both governments classify such communities as ‘tribal’ and attribute their recalcitrance to poor education, misguided leadership, discriminatory policies and foreign interference. Yet Mahatma Gandhi himself once assured the Nagas that if they did not wish to be part of India they would not be compelled to integrate with it; India would recognise their independence. To the apostle of non-violence, forcibly incorporating any disaffected group contradicted the whole idea of free association on which the modern Indian nation was founded.

This all raises a more fundamental question about whether the correlation between a nation and a state is not itself the problem. In South Asia as a whole, and particularly in the chaotic circumstances of the north-east, other cherished affiliations – of kinship, creed, locality, language, tribe, clan, profession and caste – may need to be factored into considerations of identity. The twinning of sovereignty with territory may need to be ‘unbundled’, and the very notions of political authority and territorial integrity may need re-examination.

By dividing British-ruled South Asia into a mainly Muslim Pakistan and a mainly Hindu India, the Great Partition of 1947 severed – and sometimes pocked – not just the landmass of South Asia but its society, economy and infrastructure, and above all its two main religious communities. Religion was indeed the mentor of Partition. It provided the motivation for division, dictated the criteria for realising it and underwrote the zealotry that accompanied it. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Partition was principally about separating two competing belief systems. Doctrinal differences rarely entered into the debate at the time: religious parties, like the Jamaat-e-Islami of many orthodox Muslims or the Mahasabha of many nationalistic Hindus, in fact opposed territorial division. Even the prophets of Pakistan, like the pragmatists of a truncated India, anticipated the presence of religious minorities within the partitioned states. Indeed they competed in offering guarantees of citizenship and fair treatment to all such ‘confessional enclaves’.

When a community is under stress, its sense of itself frequently transcends its attachment to specific tenets. Diversity in matters of faith is trumped by an insistence on communal solidarity that may ignore lesser doctrinal and devotional distinctions. Thus the different traditions of Islam represented by Sunni, Shi’ite and Sufi practice were no more evident in the rhetoric of Partition than was the rivalry among those cults, disciplines and doctrines that go to make up ‘Hinduism’.

Rather was it – and is it – conduct, culture and kinship that comprise the markers of confessional identity and constitute the bonds that bind a community together. These may include things like where and to whom one was born; how one washes and dresses; what one eats and when one fasts; what work one does; when, where and how (not to mention whom) one worships; who one consorts with and marries; to what or to whom one looks for justice and redress; whom one idolises and whom one demonises; and what songs, verses and aphorisms one carries around in one’s head. Like that tribal layering of Naga identity, all these things define one’s existence as a member of a community – though not necessarily of a community with a country to call its own.

In the 1940s the desire to protect these markers from the perceived threat of Hindu rule on the part of Muslims, and of a privileged Muslim separatism on the part of Hindus, buoyed demands for communal autonomy. The hope was that autonomy would reassure all parties by ‘ring-fencing’ their interests and preserving their integrity. But in line with the contemporary partition in Palestine, and with almost no debate on the matter, the objective soon underwent a sea-change. Areas, not individuals, became the currency of partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange. As per the last British Viceroy’s June 1947 partition plan, ‘the parties appear to have accepted that communal autonomy was to be realized by the creation of separate territorial sovereignties’, writes Joya Chatterji.

There are subtle but significant differences between the notions of communal autonomy and territorial sovereignty. The first emphasizes the rights of the people of a community to self-determination, rights which could in theory be achieved within a single state. The second stresses the bounded space within which a community is sovereign and could be realized only by a territorial separation.

In the last hectic months of British rule, when parts of the country were already beset by sectarian massacres, sovereignty alone seemed to safeguard communal autonomy, with fixed frontiers being its surest guarantee. Yet sixty-five years later, communal discord within and between the post-Partition states of South Asia is more acute than ever. ‘Whenever there is a riot in India, we suffer here,’ says a spokesperson for the Hindu minority in Bangladesh.

Whenever a Pakistan-trained terrorist opens fire in India, India’s Muslims come under suspicion; and whenever India’s Hindu nationalists vent their spleen on the internet, more Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims sign up for jihad. Just as the tides, the migrants and the hawk-eagles come and go unchecked across the Sundarbans, so the tit-for-tat of outrage and retaliation ricochets along the 7,000-kilometre length of those brave new frontiers ordained by Partition’s insistence on a territorial separation.

Over the last half-century the shadows of Partition’s brutal dislocation have grown ever longer. They slant across the whole course of events in post-Independence South Asia. Some observers liken Partition to a nuclear explosion whose lethal fallout will go on being felt for generations to come. Others see it as a recurring natural phenomenon that, having severed the subcontinent, then (de facto)the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then the two-part Pakistan, is ever-ready to strike again. Nearly all see it as unfinished business. Every war, near-war and insurgency fought in the subcontinent since the end of British rule owes something to the legacy of Partition. And so long as this sore festers, any ‘normalising’ of relations between the partitioned states proves elusive.

Elsewhere in the world various political unions, defence pacts, free-trade associations and hegemonic doctrines (Monroe, Brezhnev, etc.) have lent some coherence to the conduct of international relations. In South Asia, a region where geography, history, economics and culture all argue strongly in favour of the closest possible association, even modest attempts at regional cooperation flounder. The subcontinent continues to be defined not in terms of shared interests but of past traumas, contested loyalties and irreconcilable ambitions. Encouraged by governments of every hue, national identity still owes much to an obsessive awareness of the hostile ‘other’ just across the border. Antagonism reigns, officially.

This ‘othering’ extends even to ideology. Each successor nation presents a political profile that seems to challenge that of its neighbour. The Republic of India is secular, democratic, internationally respected and increasingly regarded as an economic success. Pakistan and Bangladesh, on the other hand, are determinedly Islamic, susceptible to military rule, internationally disparaged and economically struggling. (Nepal and Sri Lanka, the other sizeable components of what scholars now prefer to call ‘South Asia’ rather than ‘the Indian subcontinent’, are currently too traumatised by recent civil wars to be easily categorised.) Partition did not just divide most of the region: it launched the successor states on such diametrically opposed trajectories that to this day South Asians commonly prioritise ‘Partition’ over ‘Independence’. The second half of the twentieth century is not the ‘post-Independence era’; it is the ‘post-Partition era’. The euphoria of freedom has been silenced by the shock of division.

The consequences of this division are critical, and not just for South Asia. By 2020 India will have the largest population in the world, and South Asians as a whole will comprise a quarter of the people on the planet. Nor, on the grounds of negligible disposable income, can these numbers any longer be discounted as a statistical irrelevance. Already India’s middle class is one of the world’s most numerous, and its corporate sector includes more multinationals and generates more billionaires than anywhere else in Asia except China. The world’s largest market and its largest pool of unskilled labour is rapidly becoming its largest reservoir of innovation and expertise. South Asian excellence now extends to everything from pharmaceuticals and telecoms to finance, info-technology and prize-winning literature.

It also includes rocketry and a terrifying military capability. With both India and Pakistan in possession of nuclear weapons, with neither eager to submit to international controls and with China’s nearby arsenal dwarfing both, the potential for a nuclear conflagration is here all too real. What may be the most promising zone in terms of the world economy is located in what US analysts have dubbed the most dangerous arena on earth.

Worldwide, South Asians account for two out of every five Muslims; and of these nearly as many have their roots in India as in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Through them, Islam’s international grievances (over Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else within range of a drone) get internalised in South Asia; and through them and other disaffected parties, South Asian grievances (over Balochistan, Nagaland, numerous other hotspots and above all Kashmir) get externalised in the West. The blood-letting occasioned by a dispute about a mosque in Uttar Pradesh can surface in the British House of Commons. Confrontations in the high Himalayas can bring the world to the brink of armageddon.

Yet to the outside observer South Asia’s peoples seem to have a lot more in common than not. In the world’s departure lounges they are as ubiquitous and just as hard to allocate to a particular part of the subcontinent as the Chinese. Regardless of nationality, they look not unalike, they often wear loose, baggy attire, and they travel with too much luggage. They are also rather particular about their dietary preferences. They converse in languages (including English) some of which are mutually comprehensible. They enjoy the same movies and opt for the same music channels. Nearly all admit to regularly engaging in some form of devotional activity, nearly all marry within approved circles, and nearly all take pride in their familial, communal and regional identities.

Down on the ground, were it not for the border fence, you could still pass from India’s West Bengal into Bangladesh without realising you had changed countries; likewise from the Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab to the Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab (each country has a Punjab, because the British province of that name was itself partitioned). The differences between one country and another are much less obvious than those between most adjacent European states. Non-Islamic India is still home to nearly as many Muslims as either Pakistan or Bangladesh. Hindu women may cover their faces like their Muslim sisters; and Pakistani men may wear pyjamas like their Indian brothers. Despite its newly trumpeted affluence, India still has more of the malnourished, the unlettered and the socially deprived than Pakistan and Bangladesh combined. Even the excitement over its growth rate may be deceptive. Only twenty years ago it was Pakistan that was slated to join the Asian periphery’s ‘tiger economies’. Thirty years ago it was Sri Lanka. What one economist has called ‘persistent orderly hunger’ is one of the region’s shared and all-too-enduring characteristics.

So too is the confidence born of a deep and incredibly rich matrix of tradition and devotion. Here globalisation comes wreathed in garlands and incense. A podgy Ganesh presides in the boardroom; temple and waqf are quoted on the Mumbai stock exchange. In Muslim areas night turns to day during Ramadan. Everywhere matrimonial expenditure chomps into GDP. Pride in the past, an unshakeable sense of one’s community and a dazzling array of cultural references are not peculiar to the region. But in South Asia their resilience and centrality is second to none.

Even the constitutional tags are not quite as irreconcilable as they seem. Once in power, democratically chosen leaders have frequently displayed authoritarian tendencies, while autocrats invariably pine for popular endorsement. Military coups have often proved less bloody than elections; and avowedly secular regimes may harbour as much fanaticism and discrimination as avowedly sectarian ones.

Despite Partition and all that followed, South Asians have more in common than they may care to acknowledge. Indeed, Partition itself needs to be seen as a shared experience. By devastating whole provinces, displacing perhaps fifteen million people and leaving as many again feeling unwelcome in the land of their birth, it everywhere loosened some of those non-doctrinal bonds of community and encouraged a new mobility.

In 1947 the majority of refugees headed for the nearest of the new borders. If they made it to the other side – a big ‘if’ in the Punjab – they settled down among their co-religionists in India or Pakistan. Some were allocated land that had been vacated by refugees moving in the opposite direction; others swelled the populations of the cities and thereby transformed the parent state’s demography. Karachi, the interim capital of Pakistan, attracted so many displaced Muslims from India that these muhajirs soon outnumbered the city’s native Sindhis. Delhi, if judged by its taxi-drivers, became a city of Sikhs, mostly refugees from Lahore; Lahore became a city of Muslims with scarcely a beturbanned Sikh to be seen; and Calcutta lost its public spaces when parks, gardens, railway stations and even cricket pitches were turned into makeshift dormitories by the displaced from all over eastern Bengal.

A few migrants quickly changed their minds and went back, some doing so several times. Others had their minds changed for them. When in 1971 East Pakistan became Bangladesh, refugees from India who had been welcomed into East Pakistan as Muslims in 1947 found themselves interned as non-Bengalis in a now proudly Bengali Bangladesh. Perhaps 100,000 of these so-called ‘Biharis’ are still there, eking out a pitiful existence in Bangladesh’s refugee camps; others have been shunted across India to Pakistan; and a lucky few have since obtained visas to reside overseas.

In this they are not alone. Emigration was as much a by-product of Partition as urbanisation. Over the three decades immediately after 1947 an estimated two million South Asians, many of them already displaced by Partition, exited the subcontinent altogether. Better prospects and wages undoubtedly tempted them, but it was the push-factor of dislocation and enforced mobility that proved crucial. Thanks to Partition, what might have been a modest trickle of economic migrants turned into that flood of expatriates, now over twenty million strong, known as ‘the South Asian diaspora’.

Applying the term ‘diaspora’ to the South Asian exodus remains controversial, although reasonable enough. South Asia’s Partition and the Nazi Holocaust have also been bracketed together, with comparisons being drawn between the apparently chaotic and unpremeditated nature of the one and the systematic, state-directed nature of the other. But more to the point, just as in some unspeakable way the Holocaust made the need for a Jewish homeland manifest and thus reversed one diaspora, just so did Partition yank at those bonds of kinship, locality and community, and unleash another great exodus of peoples.

At the time, the 1950s and ’60s, few In India or Pakistan considered the spectacle of mass emigration as grounds for congratulation. Plucked from villages in unfancied districts like Sylhet (east Pakistan), Mirpur (Azad Kashmir) and Jalandhar (India), then penned, tagged and bussed to an international airport, the huddles of all-male migrants hunkered down beside the check-in desks seemed a sad commentary on the lofty hopes of Independence. Their minders brandished wads of tickets and newly minted documentation. For the passport-holders themselves, holding their passports was seldom an option; most could barely sign their name or pronounce their destination; their identities, like their paycheques, were in hock to their gang-masters.

In the 1960s these emigrants were destined principally for low-paid jobs in the UK and North America, thereafter and more substantially for the Gulf states. Others followed well-trodden trails to east and south Africa, the Caribbean, South-East Asia and the Pacific. These were the destinations to which bonded workers recruited for labouring elsewhere in the British Empire had traditionally been despatched. The new migrants looked no more go-getting or better prepared than their nineteenth-century antecedents. A hookah might be passed among them in the airport forecourt; betel-stained saliva betrayed their sojourn in the departure lounge. The white-shirted businessmen and briefcase-clutching bureaucrats brushed past with eyes averted.

Yet in retrospect this unpromising stream of exiles heralded a new respect for the region’s international profile and added an important new dimension to the fraught relationships between its post-Partition states. By the 1980s cash remittances sent home from places as far apart as Dubai and British Columbia were critical in sustaining the economies of all the South Asian states. They also transformed the built landscape in the emigrants’ Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani areas of origin. At about the same time, second-generation South Asians in the West were being joined by a second wave of emigrants from the subcontinent. Young and ambitious, both were more interested in professional qualifications and internships than hourly rates. History sanctioned their quest for advancement. Without exception, all the architects of Independence, from Gandhi to Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar and Patel, had acquired their lawyers’ training in Britain. Political freedom had come courtesy of diasporic passport-holders; economic betterment would follow suit.

For now it was US degrees, corporate experience, entrepreneurial skills and silicon technology that were the attractions. And unlike bus-conducting, curry-cookery or courtroom rhetoric, these were qualifications in high demand back in South Asia. The massive back-transfer of skills, and then investment, that resulted would dramatically empower the Republic of India and to a lesser extent its neighbours. From it sprang that great transnational community of South Asian origin that would be so ideally placed to prosper in a globalised century. The despised diaspora was metamorphosing itself into the most desirable of elites. In short, and by some delicious quirk of fate, peoples so keen to equate community with nation, nation with state, and to identify with a ‘bounded territory’, were proving the most adept at transcending such obstacles.

Regrettably, this also has a downside. Ensconced nowadays in the airport’s premium business lounges, the Asian knights of the global economy are not encouraged to transcend the febrile frontiers of South Asia itself. Once reviled as deserters by patriotic nationalists, those emigrants who return are now embraced and fêted. ‘Non-Resident Indian’ (NRI), from being a term of contempt, has become an accolade. New Delhi – and Islamabad and Dhaka in respect of their Pakistani and Bangladeshi equivalents – not only woos its NRIs but most emphatically claims them. Their US, Canadian and EU passports carry Delhi’s endorsement of their status as ‘Persons of Indian Origin’ (PIOs) or ‘Overseas Citizens of India’ (OCIs). Residential options, fiscal breaks and investment incentives await the prodigals; receptions and conferences are organised specifically for them; whole government ministries pander to their needs; homegrown CEOs and rupee billionaires flock to join them.

The diaspora’s inward investment has powered up domestic economies throughout South Asia. But the start-ups and the statistics are not the only things to benefit from diasporic largesse. Numerous non-governmental agencies and charities, among them organisations commonly blamed for the abiding level of communal strife, are also handsomely supported by this overseas citizenry. A classic example was provided by Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), otherwise known as the ‘Tamil Tigers’. For thirty years the LTTE obtained arms and training in India and found sanctuary there while being heavily bankrolled by the donations of Tamils and Tamil sympathisers resident in the West. Kashmiris, principally in Britain, funded the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front; Sikhs, many in Canada, helped sustain the Khalistan movement for an independent Sikh state. Likewise, Saudi dinars are channelled through diasporic Muslims to the Islamist madrassahs of Pakistan; and US dollars raised by diasporic Hindus finance the temple-building and the social and educational programmes of extremist outfits like the Shiv Sena and the RSS. For longer than anyone can remember, Naga nationalists have been funding their open insurgency from overseas.

Where funds can be transferred, often undeclared and undetected, so can ideas. Through social networks, blogs and SMS, and through the distribution of CDs, DVDs and print, the diaspora exerts an influence on opinion in South Asia that is commensurate with its hefty financial donations. For the bonds of kinship and community, however attenuated, still apply. The status of diasporic families in the land of their settlement often depends on the approval of their caste or community back home; so do their chances of extending their family landholdings in South Asia and of securing suitable brides. By supporting communal interests and disseminating exclusionist views, the diaspora validates both itself and its affiliates in South Asia. Diasporic endorsement of, say, the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque emboldened the zealots responsible and lent a veneer of international respectability to the interminable debate that followed.

Activists sustained by diasporic support are carried along on the ebb and flow of migration. A.Z. Phizo, for many years the charismatic leader of the Naga National Council, directed operations almost entirely from the safety of a UK residence. So did, and do, the leaderships of the MQM (representing the voluble muhajir community in southern Pakistan), of the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement, the Kashmir ‘government-in-exile’ and the Baloch separatists of Pakistan’s western extremity. They are in good company. At one time or another sanctuary in the West has been the choice of many of Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s political leaders, including several Bhuttos. A host of lesser dissidents at odds with the regimes of South Asia also avails itself of the immunity of exile. And in the opposite direction come diasporic ‘tourists’, sometimes with misguided convictions and terrorist assignments.

The globalisation of protest is not a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon. Worldwide, the first to blow up a jumbo jet in mid-flight were not Palestinian activists but members of a Sikh separatist group; they then took the life of an Indian prime minister. Tamils took the life of the next prime minister, and made suicide bombing their speciality. Earlier it had been a Hindu supremacist who gunned down Mahatma Gandhi. More recently Indian Maoist (‘Naxalite’) revolutionaries have blown up nearly as many policemen as the Pakistan Taliban.

In what follows, the notice taken of the influence and agency of the diaspora may seem disproportionate. It can, for instance, hardly compare with the death and dislocation that were directly occasioned by Partition, nor with the decades of mutual hostility and misery inflicted by the unending strife over Kashmir. The story of post-colonial South Asia is seldom inspirational. Among Midnight’s Descendants the body count of those who have succumbed to wars, civil strife, natural disasters and unalleviated poverty has yet to be exceeded by the number of those so enriched as to qualify as ‘middle-class’.

Other regional commonalities are more striking. For the first decade and a half after Partition, both India and Pakistan concentrated on nation-building. Constitutions were drafted, dissent confronted and sovereignty asserted. India absorbed its princely states, snapped up the colonial enclaves of Pondicherry and Goa, ‘smashed and grabbed’ the kingdom of Sikkim and received a bloody nose from the Chinese in the Himalayas. In like manner Pakistan cowed its separatists in Balochistan, wrestled with dissent in East Bengal and in the North-West Frontier Province’s Tribal Areas, and snapped up what it could of Jammu and Kashmir state.

This nation-building phase was followed in the 1970s by a wave of rank populism. Indira Gandhi in India, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan and Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh chalked up massive electoral victories. With the exception of Nepal, all of South Asia basked under democratic rule. But it was short-lived. Economic woes and popular adulation tempted all three leaders into autocratic ways, which were then emphatically rejected. Mrs Gandhi was toppled by the electorate that had empowered her, Bhutto and Mujib were overthrown and eliminated by the military. A people-powered era subsided into one of edgy accommodation in which confessional values thrived.

The 1980s marked the rise of the religious right. Pakistan and Bangladesh, each under a General Zia, warmed to their Islamic brethren in the Gulf and conciliated Islamic opinion at home. For Pakistan, ‘liberating’ Kashmir still topped the agenda, but the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ensured sympathy, support and a steady militarisation of Islamic sentiment. In India, on the other hand, it was among ‘right-wing’ Hindu and Sikh parties that zealotry prospered. A series of devotional spectaculars saw the ‘Hindu nationalist’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) garnering ever more support. To meet this long-term challenge, the Nehru–Gandhi Congress tarnished its own secular credentials and paid a heavy price. Sikhs, Assamese, Sri Lankans and Kashmiris were fatally antagonised. Two Gandhis were assassinated.

On this fraught scenario dawned the era of globalisation in the 1990s. India, and to a lesser extent all the other countries of South Asia, have undoubtedly benefited. Democracy has been given a second chance in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Pluralist politics and coalition governments have become the norm in India. Despite glaring examples of neglect in educational and health provision, living standards are rising. But these economic and political dividends have been offset by a challenging level of expectation, appalling examples of corruption and little in the way of normalised state-to-state relations. The globalisation of protest, militancy and criminality has yet to be successfully addressed by any South Asian state.

There are, of course, other ways of periodising the post-Partition era. It could, for instance, be characterised in international terms. The first generation of Midnight’s Descendants were born in awe of British rule. The second looked to Moscow or Washington (or both), and the third looks increasingly to Beijing. In varying degrees Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh now see China as their best safeguard against India’s perceived ‘bullying’, otherwise its regional hegemonism. India is more ambivalent. Respect for the post-Mao achievements of the People’s Republic is there tempered with suspicion of China’s authoritarianism and apprehension over its intentions along the Himalayan frontier and in the Indian Ocean.

To many Indians, China is the superpower that India might have become but for Partition. When in the late 1940s South Asians were opting for the division of their subcontinent, China’s leadership brusquely demolished the divisions within its own subcontinent. Manchuria and Tibet were reclaimed, central Asian borders reaffirmed, Hong Kong put on notice and Taiwan’s defection vigorously contested. The indivisible nature of the People’s Republic has since come to be seen as one of its strengths, while the fissiparous nature of South Asia’s republics remains their greatest weakness. Yet Partition, by sundering the region and dictating so much of what followed, lends to their story an essential cohesion of its own. United in ferment, Midnight’s Descendants have no difficulty with such contradictions. And of all these paradoxes, not the least – and a good place to begin – is surely the most easily forgotten: that given cooler heads and a bit more time, Partition might well have been avoided altogether.