The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, New Edition

Feels like a comprehensive account of how things played out, most interestingly we get insight from various people on all levels on the matter. It gives you a real sense of what was going through the ordinary man's mind at that time.

The Great partition is a good account of the causes of the partition of India. It does however completely ignore the the role of Kashmir and Hyderabad in partition. The massacres of the Punjab are well documented but the 90-400k dead in Hyderabad are ignored. Khan also plays down Bangladesh and it's 1971 partition from Pakistan. Partition has never ended, it is played out in Kashmir to this day. I only give the book 4 stars as it is a must read for anyone who wants to try and Understand India or Pakistan. (And to a lesser extent Bangladesh)

Events, in particular in 1946 and 1947, are described, culminating in British withdrawal and establishment of the new states of India and Pakistan. The book runs to 210 pages, plus maps, a list of abbreviations, a glossary, monochrome photographs, notes, a bibliography and index. For £12 it is good value. The book records both the negotiation of regime change and those affected by the resulting mess. It is a work of narrative history, from which important lessons should have been learnt. First the actors didn’t know what they were seeking to achieve. The Second World War and Partition bled into one another. The Moslem League had grown in influence amongst Muslims. However League supporters did not think of their call for Pakistan primarily as for a territorial unit. If they did, they hoped it would include large tracts of what had been Mogul India, larger and without the separation between what became East and West Pakistan. Jinnah, leader of the League and now thought of as father of Pakistan, sought a federal solution in which the Moslems would have regional and communal checks on majority power. He accepted Partition and the creation of Pakistan only as second best. Second, bringing about regime change was always going to be difficult, attempting to effect it within an unrealistic time frame, meant it failed. The Radcliffe Commission was given a quite inadequate time to establish and document the land border between India and Pakistan. On Independence some 48% of the land area and 28% of the population remained within princely states, which had not yet been integrated into the new states of India and Pakistan. This further complicated the process. The Moslem ruler of Hyderabad sought a separate independence. In 1948 Hyderabad was forcibly annexed to India. In the North of Bengal the princely state of Cooch Behar included a checkerboard of territory reflecting historic land holdings between it and Mogul territory. This had not been sorted out by 1949 when Cooch Behar, bordering East Pakistan, joined India, As a result there were 123 tiny enclaves of East Pakistan, now Bangla Desh, in India and 74 enclaves, legally Indian territory, in Bangla Desh. Third violence portrayed as random thuggery was not. It was routine, timetabled ethnic cleansing. It wasn’t disruptive background noise to constitutional decision making, but intended to influence the process, preventing reconciliation. There was no longer the appetite for Gandhian non-violence, instead an increasingly violent nationalism on both sides. Rape was used on both sides as a weapon, encouraging the "other" to flee. The British were shipping troops out, India and Pakistan dividing the Indian Army up between them, just when a disciplined military could have assisted in overseeing Independence and Partition. All this, and the uncertainty about where a border would be and what it would mean, created a perfect storm of ethnic violence. The leadership of both new states whilst washing their hands of the violence, to various extents, were complicit in it. Fourth the actual outcome was very different from that intended. A functioning Raj was fraying. The British, exhausted by their war effort, sought a quick withdrawal, and a successor, with whom to negotiate and to whom to hand over power. If Congress and the Moslem League wouldn’t work together, Partition was intended by the British so power could be handed to Congress in India and the Moslem League in Pakistan. In 1946 there were serious intercommunal riots in Calcutta followed by the massacre of Hindus, largely the landlords, by tenant Moslems in East Bengal. Partition was seen as preventing further violence. In fact it became the source of new calamities, with some 80,000 women abducted and up to a million people killed. No one expected, or planned for, the scale of population movement. Both new governments intended to protect minorities in their new states. If Pakistan protected minority Hindu and Sikh populations in Pakistan, this would help guarantee the rights of Moslems in India and vice versa. It was considered inconceivable that some 12m people would move between the new states. However with mass movement of population underway, both new governments reversed their plans, so population exchange became official policy and cover for further ethnic cleansing. The refugee crisis became a tragedy both for the refugees themselves and for the new states. Finally, Partition is an example of application of the founder principle from biology and linguistics to history. What happened at the beginning, however unintentionally, disproportionately influenced what followed. A temporary solution became a permanent division, a border, thrown up in haste, fixed and impermeable. The two new states, which in many ways are very similar, created in violence, continued to view each other through a prism of violence. Both the Pakistan and India they ended up with were very different from those they had hoped for. Pakistan’s fragility when created means it became a largely militarised state, which, after further tragedies, split between Pakistan and Bangla Desh. Writing this review now, it is hard not to see lessons which have not been learnt. In Myanmar ethnic cleansing of the Moslem Rohingyas has been followed by their flight to Bangla Desh, which lacks the space or resources to accommodate them. Brexit, whose meaning and implications were barely understood by those voting for it, is being implemented by parties who never intended, nor planned for, it over a quite impractical timetable. Brexit, like Partition, may well lead to permanent acrimonious rift.

A clear reflection on how a decision taken without due consideration can negatively affect so many people to this day. This should be compulsory reading for not just students of history or politics but for politicians with the power to make decisions that can be so devastating. It is a great read for anyone with an interest in the Indian Subcontinent

I bought this book as I have an interest in history and had heard a lot about the terrible atrocities that occurred during this dreadful time in India's history. The book came across somewhat biased in that it sometimes appeared to point the finger of blame for this human catastrophe squarely with the British and yes the British rule in India is just another example of how western countries get it badly wrong interfering in other countries politics, cultures and religions and sadly lessons are still not being learned today. However it is my understanding from that the minority muslim population at the time pushed relentlessly for the separate state of Pakistan not the British.

A very interesting book that brings home to one the terrible suffering that occurred when partition took place.

This book is fantastic as its one of those rare one that includes the storied of ordinary citizens in the partition of India. The book focuses primarily on the partition of Punjab and Bengal but also covers a lot of the violence in places such as Delhi, Bombay, Nagpur, UP, etc. A very balanced opinion is given where Hindu's Muslims and Sikhs are blamed for the violence. Not even in their wildest nightmares could the British have imagined what was to come when date for British withdrawal was announced. As you would expect there are many stories of savagery and acts that can only be classed as evil. But in amonst those are also stories of people who protected and saved communities from another religion. The interesting thing to come out quite clearly in this book was that muslims were glad the partition had been agreed but those who lived on the wrong side of the border never imagined for a moment that their area wouldn't be in the newly create Pakistan. Up until that point the border was imagined by most to include vast expanses of land which never materialised. The distrust of Congress and the Muslim League comes through very clearly and goes to show that partition was inevitable once the trust had vanished.

Really interesting look at the apartheid, very interesting!

a must read book for every Indian to know how the India was partitioned due to folly and ego and selfishness of our leaders of that times.

The book is great. It resonates with me personally because my family migrated from India to Pakistan.

I was born and brought up in India and I have a keen interest in South Asian history. Out of the 15 or so books on partition that I read (sometimes just skimmed through!), this book is undoubtedly the best. (Patrick French's book 'Liberty or Death' is also VERY good, but it covers lot of other issues- not just Partition and is quite long!). If you have an appreciation for good English writing, this book will be a pleasure to read- but don't expect something that panders to popular stereotypes about India/South Asia or interesting anecdotes about eccentric Indian kings or leaders- this is a serious work of scholarship suitable only for the deeply interested casual reader. The author appears to be a first rate scholar who has a very impressive command over the subject matter- she sometimes manages to convey more in a couple of paragraphs than some other historians will do in entire chapters. I needed all my prior knowledge of Indian history to begin to understand how good this book really is! In the interest of brevity, I will mention only two major strengths of this book relative to other general accounts of the Partition of India. 1.This is history from the bottom up- instead of focusing on the discussions between leaders of the Indian National Congress, Muslim League and high ranking British officials leading up to the partition, the author concentrates on how the politics related to the partition played out on the streets of India- the fears, insecurities and expectations of the common people and how politicians sought to engage them. The majority of studies on Partition concentrate only on the 'elite politics' aspect- what Nehru, Jinnah or Mountbatten did or didn't do or say etc. Not that this is not important - but to really understand the positions taken by Nehru/Jinnah/Gandhi/Mountbatten and others- it is not enough to understand their personalities and their relationships- we also have to understand the broader social/political environment in which these positions were formed. The political decisions and actions of the major players cannot be understood in isolation- they become much more intelligible if you have a better understanding of the popular expectations, pressures and fears to which these leaders were compelled to respond. (This is probably particularly true of the Partition which became a highly emotive issue for many Hindus and Muslims/Sikhs during those times). In Yasmin Khan's book - this broader context, the evolving political situation in India in the late 1930's and early to mid 1940's is discussed with a richness and detail that is not equaled by any other book that I have read or heard about on the Partition of India- and this is a particular merit of this book. 2.Both Hindu and Muslim nationalists (who have a particular stake in distorting the history of partition for their own purposes) will find a lot to be angry about in this book- and this is a very good thing! I think this is a highly judicious account which is not biased towards the official Indian or Pakistani version of the history of partition (although- of course, many will disagree- which again is unsurprising!). Overall, this is a relatively brief and exceedingly well written general history of the partition. (The overall tone of the writing is analytical - but there is little unnecessary academic jargon and it is not very dry either).

Yasmin Khan, a British of South Asian origin, teaches history at the University of Oxford. Like millions of people of this subcontinent, her life was also touched by the cataclysmic events that took place more than seventy years ago. “Both my grandfathers were bit-players in the story of Partition as it unfolded in the subcontinent and both had their own lives profoundly shaped by the ending of the British empire”. In The Great Partition, Khan has attempted to put together the events that led to the division of the Britain’s Indian empire and creation of Pakistan. There are people (and I confess I am one of them) who, looking around the subcontinent seven decades after Independence, wonder: was Partition really inevitable? After all, Mountbatten is reported to have said that if he knew the health condition of Jinnah in early 1947, he would have probably thought differently about the Transfer of Power. Khan, in this masterly narrative, has shown how, in 1946 - 47, partition of the country did become inevitable. After the grueling Second World War, the once-mighty British Empire was tottering, economically and emotionally. They were more eager to leave India than the Indians were eager to throw them out. While Punjab was burning, the British Army – officers and men – was leaving the country. The Great Calcutta Killings were followed by the horrendous Noakhali riots which in turn were echoed in Bihar and other parts of the subcontinent. The bond of neighbourly trust between Hindus and Muslims was being snapped beyond repair. When the Partition Plan was announced on the All India Radio by Mountbatten, Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh, no one was sure what that partition actually meant. In many villages across Punjab people first became aware that they had become citizens of another country when marauding mobs of the “other” community came on a murderous raid. People did not know if their town, village, mohalla, locality would be in India or Pakistan tomorrow. Just to imagine such uncertainty even today, seventy years later, is dizzying. Khan has masterfully brought to life all the drama and tension, excitement and heartbreak, sense of loss and euphoria of those tumultuous months. And she has done it with the detached objectivity of the historian, citing her sources at every turn. Every reading of the Partition is shrouded by a thin veil of unspeakable sense of sadness, of suppressed sobs and unfathomable loss. Yasmin Khan has succeeded in conveying that sense of loss and agony in her impeccable prose. The Great Partition will go a long way in enhancing our understanding of those history-shaping months and years. It is a signal achievement.