as cloth, sugar and wheat – tended to be abundant there. It was swifter, cheaper and more effective than under the British dispensation. As a result, crime was rarer and the roads safer. The classic case was Swat, a long sub-Himalayan valley that debouched into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and which Darling had skirted in the first week of his ride. In Swat’s alpine setting, holidaymakers pitched their tents and anglers cast their lines without a care for the notoriously unruly Pathan clans of the valley. It was all thanks, explained one of Darling’s informants, to the Wali (or ruler) of Swat rigidly enforcing ‘the Shariat, the Law of God’. ‘[In Swat] a man commits a murder and in twelve hours he will be arrested, tried and shot. Here [i.e. in the British-run NWFP] it may take a year or two and as likely as not, when tried, he will get off, and then a blood feud starts.’ On the whole, Darling thought this ‘a sad reflexion on our [i.e. British] rule’.16
Sixty-three years later, when sharia law was reintroduced into Swat by Taliban zealots, it would receive no such endorsement. The government in Islamabad at first prevaricated, then panicked. Mobile-phone footage of a convicted adulteress being publicly flogged brought howls of protest from Benazir Bhutto’s Western backers and prompted a massive military intervention by the Pakistan army. Thousands died; and in scenes reminiscent of Partition’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands streamed out of the valley to avoid the carnage. Almost no one recalled that sharia law had a long pedigree in Swat and might not be entirely distasteful to the Swatis. Though rough and gender-biased, it slashed the crime rate, ensured the security of property and persons, and was a more effective deterrent than the slow, corrupt and painfully overloaded judicial system operating in the rest of Pakistan.
In 1947, along the sandy trails south of Delhi, Darling found justice less of an issue than religion. Mewat – it simply means ‘the Meo country’ – extended from British-administered Gurgaon deep into the territories of three princely states, two of which (Bharatpur and Dholpur) had Hindu Jat Maharajahs. Entering Bharatpur, Darling noted how the traffic tailed off and the wayside murmurings became a veritable ‘cataract of complaints’. Here the export of grain was forbidden, that of cattle taxed, the land revenue was higher, the corruption worse, ‘and of course no one had any sugar or cloth’. The Meos were reduced to rags, with not a garment that was free of holes. (Darling suggested darning, then remembered the state of his socks.)
For these woes, Meos and Jats were united in blaming the Maharajah of Bharatpur’s administration; but they did so for different reasons. ‘There is a good deal of political agitation going on in the State,’ explained Darling, ‘sponsored, if not engineered, by supporters of Congress, and doubtless this [cataract of complaints] was an echo of it.’17 But while the Meos blamed the Congress agitators for turning the administration against them as Muslims, the Jats took exception to the Congress agitators as godless secularists who were indifferent to Hindu rights and were anti-monarchist republicans to boot. Their Maharajah Brijendra Singh was himself in no way to blame. On the contrary, the Jats looked to him as their saviour. They saw no contradiction between nationalism and princely absolutism because the nation to which by preference they subscribed was Jat, not Indian, and their Maharajah epitomised it.
A ‘Jatistan’ along the lines of the Muslim ‘Pakistan’ or the Sikh ‘Khalistan’ was already being bandied about. Just six weeks after Darling passed through the Jat country, it would surface in a pithy slogan: ‘With biri in hand and pan in mouth we are busy making Jatistan.’ Biri, the peasant’s smoke, and pan, his betel-leaf digestif, were markers of Hindu identity. The Jat’s sub-nationalism thus announced its Hindu credentials. In this it had the full backing of the Maharajah. As a patron of the ultra-Hindu Mahasabha, His Highness’s Hindu supremacism was as far to the right in terms of India’s religious spectrum as his monarchist convictions were in terms of its constitutional spectrum.
Fatally, if rather desperately, in the spring of 1947 the Meos met this Jat challenge with calls for their own ‘Meoistan’. While accommodating their unorthodox beliefs, Meoistan was to be an agrarian republic informed by both the Communist class struggle and consensual village custom. It was thus ‘both a radical and a traditional [alternative] based on a vision of intercommunal solidarity and a decentring of power’. But come the summer, continues Shail Mayaram, ‘what it elicited was a mass extermination campaign’ – one in which the campaigning was done mainly by the Bharatpur Jats and the extermination was suffered mainly by the luckless Meos.18 Many thousands would be massacred, many thousands more ‘converted’, and many hundreds of thousands would swell the flood of refugees. Within the context of Partition all of them would be seen, and counted, simply as casualties of the great Hindu–Muslim conflagration. As elsewhere, their sub-national agrarian, economic and governmental anxieties went largely unrecorded.
Those know-alls in the newsrooms and the corridors of power who simply counterposed Hindu and Muslim when agonising over the partition of a ‘united India’ ignored a host of other identities and relevant factors. In reality the rising tide of communalism was obliterating existing communities as readily as it fashioned new ones. The polarisation of Muslim and Hindu, while providing the impetus for the Pakistan movement, was also the product of that movement.
*
Although the Cabinet Mission Plan took no account of all these sub-national identities, its failure to clarify the future status of the princely states themselves was surprising. By leaving open the question of what was to become of the states, the Plan not only generated unrealistic expectations (like that for ‘Jatistan’) but also ensured that the princely issue would loom large in the final run-up to Independence. Thereafter it would dog Indo–Pakistan relations, and in the case of Kashmir rankle to this day. All of which was also somewhat ironic, in fact doubly so. For while the existence of the princely states belied the notion of pre-Independence India being a single entity, it was the terms of their accession that would ensure that post-Independence India was not a single entity either. Indeed, the new ‘India’ would remain pretty much the same size as the old, since ‘the combined area and population [of the princely states] nearly matched that of the districts claimed by the [Muslim] League for Pakistan’.19
In total, the princely states accounted for about 40 per cent of India’s territory and 25 per cent of its population. Their number is usually put at around six hundred, though most were quite insignificant, being little more than fragmented landholdings, perhaps embracing a village or two. In Saurashtra (now in Gujarat but then an intricate tapestry of mini states), the nicely named principality of Veja-no-ness extended to under an acre ‘and had a population, in 1921, of 184’.20 Another was apparently little more than a well. Once traded as jagirs – revenue-yielding fiefs – among rulers and their allies, such holdings had been frozen in time at the moment of British conquest. Their incumbents, assuming they had either assisted the British or not opposed them, had been recognised as rightful rulers in return for their own recognition of the British Crown as the paramount power. This involved surrendering the right to conduct their external relations and accepting a degree of British supervision in respect of their internal affairs.
But in practice such arrangements involved all manner of different relationships. Smaller states like Veja-no-ness had no jurisdictional powers and could scarcely claim even a residual sovereignty; the larger ones were effectively self-governing, maintained their own forces and jealously clung to all the trappings of a sovereignty that was freely acknowledged by the paramount power.
Of these larger princely states, over a hundred were accounted ‘salute states’, their rulers being entitled to proclaim their sovereignty on ceremonial occasions with a gun salute of up to twenty-one salvos. About a dozen of them were vast, their territories, populations or both exceeding those of most member states in the newly founded United Nations. The composite state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Himalayan spin-off of the former Sikh ‘empire’, claimed a land area bigger than France; Hyderabad in the south had a population equivalent to that of Italy. Nor were they all cesspits of reaction and feudal privilege. Travancore on the Kerala coast boasted a literacy rate far above that of directly ruled India; others had developed an industrial capacity or were richly endowed with mineral resources; and several had endorsed some form of popular representation and set up consultative or legislative bodies.