well spent and entirely pleasurable. The diary of his 3,000-kilometre ride from the Indus to the Narmada during what would be north India’s last winter as an undivided land affords the most comprehensive investigation on record of rural opinion at this critical moment. Ministers in limousines might be deciding the subcontinent’s future, but it was the threadbare figures aboard the oxcarts, whether in the boulevards of New Delhi or in the back of beyond, who would have to live with the consequences – or die because of them.
Oddly, Partition and Pakistan, though hotly debated and now only a matter of months away, were not yet, according to Darling, at the top of the villager’s agenda. Mention of azadi did occasion excitement – and more especially so after February 1947, when the British finally announced a deadline for their departure. At the time Darling was trotting through a yellow sea of oil-seed rape between Gwalior and Jhansi. He approved the deadline. He had in fact been urging commitment to a cut-off date for years, if only to concentrate the minds of the constitution-makers. Now, though, the announcement hinted as much at necessity as tactics. Despairing of the Congress–League negotiations – or the lack of them – desperate to depart ahead of any communal bloodbath and highly doubtful of Wavell’s step-by-step ‘Breakdown Plan’, the London government had decreed that, agreement or not, it would pull out of India by June 1948.
Yet however imminent, even azadi was seen by the toiling masses less as a national triumph than as an economic panacea; for with self-government there would surely come the ‘oil, cloth, sugar, wheat and justice’ that were everywhere in such desperately short supply. Oil for lamps and cooking, cotton cloth for clothing (a single outfit of turban, trousers, shirt and shawl took twenty yards, ‘and women require considerably more’), sugar for sweets and treacly tea, and wheat (or rice) as the staple of subsistence – without these things life was barely supportable. Yet rationing, a wartime necessity in India as in Britain, had slashed their availability, while the combination of inflation and distributive corruption had pushed the prices of the little that was available way beyond the set rates. Incomes had roughly doubled in the previous five years, but ‘even the controlled price [of wheat] – Rs 10 a maund – is four times what it was before the war, and “in the black” [i.e. on the black market] it is Rs 14 to 16’, reported Darling.
As we rode, we were waylaid again and again by officers, other ranks, headmen and peasants, drawn up by the roadside in long lines headed by some medalled veteran. They all had the same complaint – the complaint that has run like a telegraph wire all along our road for the last sixty or seventy miles. ‘We have nothing to eat, we are dying of hunger, there is no sugar, no cloth, no matches. Look at our children, how ragged they are! Our lot is unbearable!’ No one of course was dying of hunger, and many were tolerably well dressed. But … in ten to fifteen days 80 per cent of the people … [will] have to buy their food and most of them will have to do this ‘in the black’ … All agree that, if sufficient grain is not imported in the course of the next fortnight, there will be sheer starvation.9
This was the situation in the extreme west of the Punjab, a province which was generally reckoned the most productive in the country. Darling found the same in what is now Haryana, and the refrain, echoed by those Qureshi contractors, continued right down into Madhya Pradesh. Even in the cities, where the fixed-rate allowances of cloth and foodstuffs were on a more generous scale, the poor were feeling the bite. The widespread protests – the endless strikes, shut-ins, shut-outs and often bloody confrontations – were more about the cost of living than the iniquities of foreign rule. ‘It was a time,’ notes the editor of a recent collection of contemporary reports, ‘of remarkable, indeed unprecedented, labour unrest and it saw the beginnings of several powerful peasant movements.’ If Calcutta’s ‘working class belt’ had really resisted the frenzy of the August killings, it may have been because, while celebrating solidarity with the striking postal workers, the labouring classes were readying themselves for upcoming strikes in the docks and on the tramways. ‘The range of participation [in the unrest] … extend[ed] from sweepers through miners and railwaymen to white collar employees in post offices, banks and military establishments. Even policemen [were] affected, and that across several provinces … Taken together these [outbreaks] illuminate certain alternative possibilities that have been almost forgotten today.’10
Rather more than a ‘possibility’ is the inference that sectarian bigotry was by no means the only cause of civil strife in 1946–47. The Communists were as active as the ‘communalists’ (India-speak for religious zealots). The waves of protest that had until lately buffeted British imperialism now pounded the ramparts of capitalism just as much as they undermined the breakwaters of secularism. A strike in a railway workshop in far-off Madras province had turned violent almost as readily, and at about the same time, as had ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta. Nehru and Jinnah might paint glossy word-pictures of ‘the great future that beckons us’, but their roseate visions were often lost on a hungry and fearful public. In rural areas, starvation was no idle threat. Only three years earlier millions had died in the great Bengal famine of 1943. Though blamed primarily on the British and their World War, it was common knowledge that the famine had been exacerbated by the inadequate relief effort of Bengal’s government and by the hoarding and profiteering of Bengal’s grain contractors. The Bengal government had been that of the Muslim League, giving Congress a ready scapegoat; and the contractors were mostly Hindus, giving the Muslim League a ready scapegoat. All too easily distress of any sort could be translated into the confrontational rhetoric of Congress–League rivalry and so, by extension, into the incendiary terms of sectarian hatred.
Darling found the same thing happening along the line of his epic ride across north-west India. Power and responsibility in the provinces had been handed over to elected governments back in 1937. It was they – Congress-run in most provinces, League-run in a few – who had imposed the rationing, who had lately tightened it, and who were responsible for administering it. Hence, just as the incumbent League ministry in Bengal bore the brunt of the blame for the Calcutta Killings, so the Congress ministries in three of the five provinces through which Darling rode were being blamed for the economic hardship. The accolade of ‘most corrupt [department] in a very corrupt province … is now universally accorded to the Food Supply [Civil Supplies] Department and its satellite traders who, controlling the very basis of life, exploit their neighbours to the full, as they once did with their money-lending’.11 This was à propos the North-West Frontier Province, where a Congress ministry presided over a largely Muslim population; but it applied equally to the Punjab and the United Provinces (UP). Congress governments stood accused of rewarding their supporters with lucrative posts in the Food Supply Department, from where, abetted by Hindu contractors and moneylenders, their largesse was channelled exclusively to Hindu recipients and Congress voters. According to one of Darling’s informants, it was this situation rather than the prospect of Pakistan that accounted for the growing popularity of the League among Punjabi Muslims.
The chief spur is the fear of Hindu domination, deriving from the domination of the Hindu money-lender and trader which … has taken a new lease of life with the control of supplies. The fear is widespread and the bloody doings in Bengal [the killings in Calcutta and Noakhali] and Bihar have created, to quote the Assistant Registrar, some hatred in their hearts …12
As yet the hatred was only a presentiment, continued Darling’s informant; the relationship between the different communities in this particular Punjabi village was ‘still a happy one’. But by March, when Darling was reaching the end of his ride, it was not at all happy. From Calcutta and Bihar the inter-communal killing had spread to Garhmukteshwar in UP, then to the villages of western Punjab. As Darling closed his diary on the Narmada, his first informants back beside the Indus were already succumbing to the madness. As victims, perpetrators or both, many more would follow them before his diary was published in 1949.
*
When traversing the north-west, including its several princely states, it was impossible for the wayfarer not to be reminded of the complexity of the subcontinent. Preserving the unity that both British administrators and Indian nationalists so cherished was all very well on government-headed paper; but on the ground, amid the heat and the dust, an undivided India (bharat akhand) could look to be wishful thinking. The four hundred millions now hammering