on a comparable scale elsewhere. Those, therefore, who professed to hold the unity of India so dear, like Nehru, might reasonably have challenged a deadline which, while making Partition virtually inevitable, allowed almost no time to prepare for it. That they did not object was significant. Gandhi had famously declared, ‘You shall have to divide my body before you divide India.’ But Gandhi, now seventy-seven and sidelined by Congress, was devoting his remaining energies to dousing the embers of communal violence wherever they smouldered. Jinnah continued adamant for a Pakistan of some sort; and Nehru did nothing. Persuaded by the realisation that India would be stronger without Pakistan, and mindful of that viceregal promise to stampede the princely states into accession, he let it stand. Thus the responsibility for Partition may be said to have itself been partitioned – not perhaps ‘equally or in full measure but very substantially’.
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Dividing the assets of an empire between two deeply suspicious heritors called for wisdom and an ongoing spirit of compromise. Neither was much in evidence. Nehru had brains and breadth of vision, Jinnah tenacity and stature, and Mountbatten bravado plus breeding. But none had the time, the inclination or the skills needed to apportion sundry budgets, deconstruct entire ministries, allocate all manner of weaponry and aircraft, number-crunch everything from pipe bands to pencil sharpeners, manage the logistics of cross-border transfer, and delineate the actual frontier. Carving up the turkey was down to the attributes of their lieutenants – the hard-nosed pragmatism of the burly Sardar Patel plus the mandarin-mind of V.P. Menon (for India), and the resourcefulness of the dependable Liaquat Ali Khan (for Pakistan).
In this exercise India had a head start. Not least, this was because it was still ‘India’. The new Union of India, which was celebrating its independence in 1947, would become the Republic of India after the adoption of the Constituent Assembly’s new Constitution in 1950; but either way, India stayed ‘India’. The term ‘Hindustan’ (‘Hindu-land’), as hitherto applied to an India minus the Muslim-majority provinces, and as preferred by many Pakistanis to this day, was allowed to lapse. ‘It is nevertheless significant that until the bitter end the [Muslim] League continued to protest against Hindustan adopting the title “Union of India”,’ reports Ayesha Jalal.8 Jinnah objected to both the ‘Union’ and the ‘India’, and is said to have seen the rebuff of his protest as further evidence of collusion between Mountbatten and the Congress leadership.
Etymologically, the ‘India’ word might actually have suited Pakistan better: it derives from ‘Indus’, and originally indicated just those lands beside the Indus river that today constitute Pakistan. But ‘Pakistan’ had been preferred by the Muslim League ever since the 1930s, when the term had been coined in Cambridge as an undergraduate acronym for the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west: thus ‘P’ for the Punjab, ‘A’ for Afghania (a contentious name for the North-West Frontier), ‘K’ for Kashmir, ‘S’ for Sind, and an unconvincing ‘TAN’ for Balochistan. (There was no ‘B’ for Bengal, a telling omission at the time and one fraught with the potential for further partition, notably in 1971.) By a happy coincidence, another reading of ‘Pak-istan’ had it to mean the ‘Land of the Pure’. Either reading would do. Jinnah relished it, and had no designs on the ‘India’ word himself. But he had sound reasons for objecting to New Delhi’s coopting it. On the strength of it, the new India would claim the old India’s seat at the United Nations. It also arrogated to the new India what Jinnah regarded as a spurious continuity and a provocative precedence.
Others objected on the grounds that the ‘India’ word did not convey enough continuity and precedence – indeed, that it was tainted as being of foreign origin. Ceylon, a British colony but never a part of British India, would gain its independence in 1948 and redesignate itself as Sri Lanka in 1972, so reviving an ancient indigenous name, shedding a Graeco-Roman and colonial one, and appeasing nationalist sentiment. India nearly did the same. The term ‘Bharata-varsha’, or simply ‘Bharat’, figured in the Sanskrit epics and was strongly urged by those who thought a primordial name hallowed by Hindu tradition more appropriate. Although Nehru, the arch secularist, would have none of it, ‘Bharat’ still features in the writings of Sanskrit-minded apologists for Hindu nationalism. It appears on numerous maps, occasionally resurfaces in national debate and could yet be officially preferred.
If antiquity was ambivalent about India’s identity, recent history offered ample compensation. New Delhi’s Congress government had the advantage of stepping into the capacious shoes of the British Raj. The ruddy imperial edifices that reared above the capital’s leafy canopy needed only to be renamed. The rotunda that had been the Legislative Assembly building became the Parliament building, and the monumental Government House (the residence of the Viceroys) became Rashtrapati Bhawan (the residence of the Presidents). Kingsway was renamed Rajpath (Government’s Way), and Queensway Janpath (People’s Way). Within the colonnades of the central government’s sandstone secretariat buildings the peons and the pigeons were joined by flocks of khadi-clad freedom fighters, now with ministerial portfolios. What with inheriting the lion’s share of the erstwhile Indian Civil Service (soon renamed the Indian Administrative Service) along with the archives, the high court, various other national institutions and surveys, and an abundance of both state offices and office stationery – including the pins used as paperclips – India’s new government took possession of a capital already equipped with all the paraphernalia of power.
Pakistan came off less well. Entire ministries had to be improvised in tin sheds, and quite senior clerks took up residence in a railway station. Packing cases were converted into desks, meals were often served in alfresco canteens, and long thorns were gathered from the roadside shrubbery because the supply of paper pins had failed to arrive. Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Punjab province, would have been the obvious choice as the home of the new government, but it was ruled out on the grounds that it was too close for strategic comfort to the new border with India. A safer haven might have been afforded by Dhaka (then spelled ‘Dacca’) in East Bengal. As the one-time capital of Bengal’s Nawabs it had some fine buildings and lay at the heart of what was now Pakistan’s most populous province. Yet such was the bias – social, linguistic, cultural, military and strategic – in favour of Pakistan’s western provinces that Dhaka’s claims were barely entertained. Instead Karachi, a foetid port-city near the mouth of the Indus that doubled as the administrative headquarters of the lately formed province of Sind, had been chosen.
Karachi was declared merely the interim capital. Like much else in Pakistan, it was a makeshift arrangement. For while the new India inherited a functioning state, plus its majestic capital, the new Pakistan was having to improvise everything from scratch – and to do so under the direst national emergency imaginable. Already thousands, rising to millions, were on the move. Already the chain reaction of atrocities had resumed. Ahead loomed a crescendo of killing unlike anything ever witnessed elsewhere in so-called peacetime. Pakistan, which was itself in Jinnah’s words the product of an ‘unprecedented cyclonic revolution’, was about to occasion a second ‘titanic’ convulsion ‘with no parallel in the history of the world’.
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War, even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan in the latter half of 1947. It had begun in early August in the Amritsar district of east Punjab, when gangs of armed Sikhs started exacting revenge for the atrocities of the previous March in west Punjab. Muslims were massacred and their villages set on fire. The pogrom then spread to Lahore, as Muslims retaliated against both Hindus and Sikhs. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) were trashed, Hindu temples desecrated, infidels butchered. And the mayhem continued, fiercer than ever, even as, far away in Delhi and Karachi, the high-flown rhetoric poured forth and the two nations deliriously hailed their independence. ‘Rejoicings; Happy Augury for the Future’ read a headline in the Times of India on 18 August. ‘The Jeremiahs who foresaw trouble’ had been utterly confounded, it reported. In doing so, the newspaper not only belied the idea that ‘trouble’ of some sort was wholly unexpected, but lulled its readership into a dangerously blinkered complacency about the conflagration in the neighbouring Punjab.
There, dawn on 15 August – Independence Day in Delhi, but the day after in Pakistan – found a memorably named British official,